“Where is she?” Melchior snapped angrily, wondering why the hell Sea Star was not helping Rienna herself.
Sea Star was not happy about being addressed so rudely, but she spun to face Melchior.
“The Dark has her, the shade that took Erised’s place! The waters are so tainted I could hardly find my way out to get her any help! But you, you are the one that has both flame and darkness in you! Maybe you are strong enough to help her,” Sea Star pleaded. Melchior was amazed that Sea Star seemed to care so much.
Before Melchior could ask anymore, Sea Star shrieked, her hands going to her head, her eyes shutting painfully.
“There’s no time to waste! Nuriel can find the way… He’s… he’s hurting her again!” Sea Star wailed, disappearing in a swirl of sea foam. Melchior turned to Nuriel frantically.
“Mind shedding some light on the subject?” Melchior said, unable to resist the jab even as he worried about Rienna.
Nuriel had his arms folded, still not looking amused.
“You won’t find her in that hole, if that’s what you were after. She’s not technically ‘here’ at all. I can find it but it will take some time. I will take you through the dark dimension myself,” Nuriel explained.
It was so quick that neither Dinsch nor Melchior had time to react before they were spirited into a kind of dimensional tunnel, tethered to Nuriel. It was a strangely swirling tunnel of darkness, hues of purple, blue and black like a nasty pulsing bruise.
“How long will this take then?” Melchior asked, strangely noting his voice was a disembodied echo here. Nuriel’s flame cast an odd light in this place wherever it touched and Melchior could swear the walls were devouring it.
“Patience, boy, I don’t know for sure,” Nuriel snapped.
Several minutes passed as Nuriel zipped about the strange place and Melchior’s patience was growing shorter.
“What did the undine mean? Why does she think I could help Rienna specifically?” Melchior asked, trying to shift his thoughts elsewhere, still bothered by that.
Nuriel was quiet for several moments before his rumbling voice came.
“You don’t have any clue why the Suleika were wiped out, do you?” Nuriel asked him now.
Melchior had not expected that to come up so he was too distracted by his own shock to answer right away.
“No,” he finally answered shortly, his throat working around a lump forming there.
“Perhaps I have time to enlighten you,” Nuriel hissed out.
Chapter 3: Going Under
No one seemed to make the correlation between the northern tribes of Vieres and the rare occurrence of double-affinity, but that was unmistakably a link that was their undoing. The symbols they tattooed on their bodies were not mere decoration, not merely a story, not even a tribal brand. Specifically, the Suleika Mark was not just a tribal identifier as so many had thought, but it was a direct link to what they were. The Suleika undoubtedly were children of flame and dark, children that were bonded by a blood pact between Nuriel and Erised and the humans resulting were a living peace treaty between them. All of the tribes of the north were bound this way, tribes created with specific dualaffinities and it was unspoken that tribes of different marks were unexplainably repelled from breeding with any of the others. There could only be dual affinities and even where they would try to break the rules, the bonds of magic and blood would not allow them to produce children. Some elementals did not even bother to erect a treaty between them; fire and water were opposite, as were light and dark or earth and wind and they made no attempts to change that. There were 12 tribes in the beginning and now there were so few of any remaining.
Elemental affinities had been the elementals’ first step to try to endear the humans to them after they had chased off the old gods. It had been one to every human and it made perfect sense why; elementals just weren’t so good at sharing. However, the problems the elementals faced did not just disappear with the old gods’ slumber and the bickering was worse than ever. In some ways, they would not bend, but in the end, the 12 tribes were created to ensure peace among the elementals at least and the tribes held them to their decision. Souls were balanced and the powers of the elementals were on an even playing field.
In any event, the Suleika chief, Melchior and Ashe’s father, did not just take to wife any woman of the tribe but had been drawn to a snowy pale woman of the far north, a girl with only one affinity and that was to wind. The chief had been delighted that his wife had been able to be with child and Melchior had been born of flame and dark like the other Suleika. Ashe however had not been the same and the shaman, one of the few that could see affinities, could see his mother’s wind and an echo of the flame from his father, but the darkness had not touched the boy. The flame/wind tribe had been called the Asheran so his name had come from them.
The elders had been unhappy, as most superstitious aged ones had the tendency to be, and they saw it as an omen; Erised had been cheated his heirs and the Shade was certainly going to retaliate. The chief loved his wife and children and would not tolerate any such talk.
The tattoos themselves were also necessary and not just symbolic. It helped the tribes know their own in a practical sense but the mysticism was more important. The first Mark, a combination of the elementals’ symbols, protected the child from the jealousy of elementals and it seemed that the moment a child left their mother’s skirts, they had the tendency to disappear without the protection the mark offered them. The words were oaths and lore in the old language, a dedication to the elementals for the gifts they gave. The Suleika praised the flame for courage and the dark for stealth and cunning.
When it came time for Ashe to receive the Suleika Mark, the chief would take no argument that he would share the mark of his brother and father. The elders trembled, fearing that Erised and Zephyra’s wrath would be upon them for crediting one and denying the other but they dared not brook an argument with the chief, who was fed up with their ramblings.
Zephyra was not one to care; as far as she was concerned, the affinity was due to the contribution of a woman not bound by the pacts and was not to be punished, but Erised was not so breezy about it. Erised seethed, for as much as he hated Lumina, he was as cold about being linked to one that wasn’t his own as she was. The boy was flame and wind and Erised was livid that the boy wore his mark. For so long, Erised and Nuriel had been little more than rivals but this planted a wedge between their pact that grew thorns rather quickly. In time, Erised had decided the pact was not worth holding up and his vengeance was instant and fatal.
Barbarians were the stupidest of all humans in Erised’s eyes, primal disgusting creatures that lived short violent lives and had little purpose but to rut about and die. It did not take much to persuade them that he was an old god with great rewards for doing his bidding. Nuriel had no knowledge of Erised’s deeds until it was too late. It hadn’t been important to Erised to thoroughly wipe them out; at the very least, he knew the chief and his wife and surely their children were killed, which was enough for him. The others would be of little consequence to him and it would be shame enough to belong to a tribe that was reduced to wearing the symbols of a broken pact.
Erised had been wrong however and the children of the chief had not been murdered by the barbarians. He did not care so much that Melchior lived but knowing that Ashe, the defect, was still among the living had filled the shade with such rage that he went after the boy again. This time, he whispered in the ear of the swordsman Malek and drove him to madness, taking out more of the Suleika survivors and finally thinking he had done away with Ashe as well.
It was some time again before Erised had discovered that Ashe had survived that as well, but then he realized there was more joy in tormenting the boy. He had so wanted to take possession of Melchior and maybe convince him to slaughter his own brother, but that plan was dashed away too. Lumina had unknowingly sweetened his torment of Ashe by killing Freesia and driving Night into such grief that Erised had
been able to take control of him. When he had possession of Night, he had taken great care to wound Ashe but not kill him. The cat and mouse was proving to be too sweet a game to pass up.
It was hard to pinpoint exactly why other tribes were similarly wiped out, but there is much speculation that Erised was hardly the only one that took issue with the pacts or found delight in some way to cause trouble. The machines had been polluting magic long before Viper had accelerated the damage so it was entirely possible that the pollution was some form of slow insanity to the elementals.
Ashe did not know any of this and it was a special kind of fate that Shyren, his friend from Guileford, just happened to be from the Asheran tribe himself, another tribe that Erised had thought to torment from time to time. Melchior was the only true remaining Suleika now and Asheran was completely wiped out. Erised had delighted in tearing Shyren apart piece by piece while he lived and screamed, not long after Ashe had left Guileford. He followed Ashe and was led to Melchior, to Night, and now a weakened Erised passed on his malice to Belias. Hurting Rienna was but another piece of the torture. The shade had a great finale planned and made sure that Ashe could find Rienna easily.
Ashe had found it odd that a great big hole was in the middle of the clearing he came upon. He circled around it carefully and almost missed a strange dark door at the bottom. He looked around again and said a few words about seeing through illusions but the door did not disappear. Ashe climbed down into the hole and looked at the heavy black door with apprehension. Darkness was nothing but bad news for him; it was there when he lost his parents and there when he lost his friends and teacher. He didn’t exactly fear the dark but it never held anything but ill omen for him. You learn that the hot pan burns and you just don’t touch it again.
He grabbed the handle and it pulled open easily, greeted with a great echoing creak and the rush of dank cold air around him. He stepped in nervously and let his eyes grow accustomed to the dimness as he took slow steps in. A high-pitched scream of such misery and anguish paralyzed him in his tracks and it was only the sobs after that set him moving again. It was Rienna’s voice, he was positive, and he did not tread carefully now. He sped into the tunnels, crashing into walls trying to get to her as quickly as he could.
“Rienna! I’m coming!” Ashe shouted, trying to sound reassuring, but the echoes that mocked him sounded more fearful than comforting.
This dark cave was a deceptive labyrinth and he would think that he was getting closer to Rienna one moment but then in the next, she would sound so far away. Still, he hurried along the passages with no regard for his own safety and twice he had slipped, one time leaving a nasty cut on his head that bled profusely. However, he had learned long ago that head bleeds were a lot worse than they looked and he did not feel dizzy. Of course, it would have been hard to know if he felt anything with adrenaline coursing through him so rapidly. He offhandedly realized he might have some trouble leaving again since urgency had made him too careless to mark which passages he took.
As he went deeper in, a sense of dread and danger started to fill him and he was confused by it since the cave itself did not frighten him. He told himself he was being silly; Erised had been severely weakened so dark powers weren’t around to affect him so. Several times, he would whisper a mantra for the banishment of illusions but what he saw and felt was nothing of the sort. In his musings, he had been startled upon rounding a corner that opened into a great cavern. Just like that, he could see his beloved Rienna chained to the far wall and fury filled him as he caught the sight of blood drying on her thighs. He started to rush forward and he could scarcely see Rienna’s eyes widen with horror and her lips mouthing the word ‘no’ soundlessly.
Rienna had no concept of how long she had spent in her cold, damp hell. Belias did not just rape her repeatedly; he also seemed to enjoy letting her know what he planned to do to her friends, belittling her naïveté and cruelly destroying her fondness for their past. As much as it hurt, Rienna noticed that as much as the shade looked like Belias and had his memories, every once in a while, something he said had a strange rasping layer behind it that betrayed that the being Erised was a part of him. She wanted to believe that Belias had simply been overtaken by the darkness as Night had, maybe more so since Erised had completely given his essence to Belias, but it was increasingly difficult to separate the two as he/they crawled inside of her mind and tore her down.
What bothered her most was how Belias would speak of the past and it had not made sense to her why he launched into a story about the northern tribes of Vieres. He would talk about the dualaffinities and the pacts and he would speak of the dark pacts; with earth making the Mekusoh, wind-making Sinistral, water making Shadoun and fire was of course Suleika. Rienna did not like how he looked at her as he mentioned the Suleika; they both knew Melchior and Ashe belonged to the Suleika and she was not sure why he seemed so smug about it. She wondered if he was planning to draw them to her, have some power over them to make them hurt her. So intent he seemed on hurting her that she did not put it past him.
It seemed like mostly he just wanted to ramble on about the histories of the old gods and the elementals, some things she knew, some things she didn’t but she did not trust his words and she did not ask no matter how curious. She resisted all temptation to talk to him unless he demanded it and then only answered as shortly as possible. She did not dare give him ammunition to use against her but he seemed to know when she lied and she learned that rape would often follow his extreme displeasure with her lies. Of course, he seemed to need very little incentive there either.
Belias told her how, as Erised, he had wiped out the other tribes himself—Sinistral, Shadoun, Mekusoh, Suleika, all of them he had enjoyed wiping out. He would speak of the gruesome and deceptive ways he would do so and she did her best to hide her growing anxiety. She had thought he had pride in the children of the pacts, but now she realized that Melchior and Ashe were not protected by the shade at all. In fact, he had asked her with a deceptively conversational tone if she knew why he had attacked the Suleika. She shook her head slowly, dread making it impossible to speak.
That was when he went into great detail to tell her about the error Melchior and Ashe’s father had committed in branding Ashe. Rienna already knew that Ashe was aligned with Zephyra and that fire had been a possibility before Melchior had taken it, but she now she was realizing that she hadn’t made the connection between their differences before this point. Her heart pooled in her stomach at Belias’s unmasked disgust with Ashe taking a false mark.
That had been bad enough but Belias did not stop there; he began to tell her about his hand in pursuing and tormenting Ashe after another failed attempt to kill him. He went on about how he killed Ashe’s adoptive family in Guileford and devised the deaths of the two he had saved, Night and Freesia. Rienna could not be sure now if torturing her had been his aim at all and she realized her anguish was just another step in his plans as Belias elaborated. He told her that even now Ashe was in the cavern looking for her, that Nuriel was being blocked from helping Melchior and Dinsch find her but he would let them come, if only a moment too late.
Rienna had thought she had no strength but she had started to struggle as she lunged at him in desperation and rage, grunting and growling like a feral beast. Belias had laughed and beat her repeatedly before raping her again. She could no longer keep count of how many times this had been, but by the end of it, she had been exhausted and subdued again. He left her again, his laughter lingering even when she could no longer see him.
Before she could pass out, she could see Ashe rounding the corner as if in a dream but seeing him now was no comfort but a nightmare. She could not even manage the strength to scream as he came towards her; so badly she wanted to tell him that he was the one in great danger, that Melchior was too, but she could only mouth the word ‘no’.
Rienna watched in soundless despair as tendrils of darkness shot up from the shadowy floor, plunging into Ashe’s tors
o, a sick wet grunt escaping his lips as he was impaled. A slick tangle of tentacles turned into Belias and he walked around the wounded Ashe as Rienna sobbed with all of the energy she still possessed. Ashe was still alive, limply suspended from descending to the floor, his breathing shallow. She could see the veins beneath his skin blackening, even the tiny capillaries in his cerulean eyes. He coughed and black blood gushed over the front of his body, causing Rienna to whimper miserably as the life in his eyes slowly dimmed. He tried to smile at her but it was grotesque with the black blood dripping from his chin and more of the blood dripping from his eyes like exaggerated trails of mascara.
One of Belias’s hands had become a horrifying claw, the fingers having elongated impossibly, the nails like razors. He looked at Rienna as he tore away Ashe’s left arm without warning. Ashe’s scream was dulled by the gurgles of drowning in his own blackened blood. Two things happened at once then; Melchior and Dinsch had appeared with Nuriel through a freshly made hole in the cave wall and Rienna watched Belias tear off Ashe’s head and crush it into a pulp, pieces of his brain and skull splattering over her body. Her whole body shook violently as if in seizure and the cavern had seemed to become a red-orange hell as Melchior had rushed forward looking like a fire giant, flaming and gargantuan and grabbed Belias. He tore Belias to pieces and the shade had laughed until he no longer could.
Nuriel had tried to get Melchior to stop as what was left of Ashe’s body blackened and turned into an inky puddle, the tattoos themselves seeming to dissolve on their own, but Melchior did not listen and Sea Star had to reappear to protect Rienna from the flames of rage. Dinsch was nowhere to be seen. When the flames and smoke subsided some time later and Rienna could see, Melchior was sitting on the floor Indian-style beside the inky puddle that had been his brother, tears streaming down his deadpan face. The chains that held her crumbled away but she had slumped against the wall bonelessly and watched him, her own face expressionless.
The Truth about Heroes: Complete Trilogy (Heroes Trilogy) Page 55