by T. A. Miles
As soon as the thought formed, the Powers that ruled over the mortal world found another game to engage their pawn in. And this pawn, like so many others, was all too willing to be played. Hearing footsteps, Korsten was on his own feet in a heartbeat. Forgetting the bodies and the sword, and his illness, he followed the sound around the nearest corner, down a carpeted hall. He soon lost the individual, but he didn’t stop walking. He moved faster than he would have been inclined to moments before as a sudden, acute feeling of abandonment crashed over him, as if the last living person in the world had just left him for dead.
“Hello?” he dared to call out. And then, almost pleadingly, “Renmyr?”
No one answered him and he did not hear the footsteps again, but he soon heard what he believed to be music coming from someplace ahead of him. He paused just a moment, alarmed that anyone would set him or herself down at a harpsichord and begin playing in the midst of such a morbid, tragic scene, but then he was moving again, quickly. Mad or not, he would take someone over no one.
Korsten tracked the somber melody to Lady Camirey’s solarium, a lovely room of windows with a view of the rose garden below. There were pillows strewn about a pair of ancient, comfortable chairs, where Renmyr’s mother and her ladies would sit and often occupy themselves for most of a day. The harpsichord—left alone in spite of the music Korsten thought he had heard moments before—occupied a space farther away, almost on the opposite side of the wide room while closer to the chairs and pillows there was a bench with a plush cushion. Sometimes Lady Camirey would have a bard or a poet sit upon the bench and entertain her and her ladies with romantic songs or stories. There was no one there or anywhere else in the room now, not living or dead. The place was empty except for the furniture, suggesting that the murders had taken place particularly early in the morning or during the night. Lady Camirey liked to be in here during the hours when she could best take advantage of the sunlight.
The sun was not shining into the solarium now. The sky was cloud-filled, gloomy with the promise of rain. Korsten’s briefly uplifted hopes sank as the room’s emptiness fully settled. Perhaps now was as good a time as any to leave the house himself, but he found himself disinterested in what the world outside had to offer. Haddowyn was finished anyway. What did it need with him? The governor and—from what Korsten had seen—his entire family and staff, including several armed soldiers, had been murdered. The city would run itself for a little while, out of habit if nothing else, and then it would begin to collapse on itself. The people would begin to wonder about the absence of all authority save what of Hedren’s men remained. Maybe they would come up to the manor to find their lord slain, or maybe the Vadryn would go to them and all of Haddowyn would suffer the same fate as everyone here. At least Morenne wouldn’t have it when it finally pushed its borders this far. There wouldn’t be anything left worth claiming. Perhaps someone would be conscientious enough to post a notice to beware the demons … and wandering corpses.
A chill stirred Korsten out of his malaise of depression and sarcasm. He carried himself slowly to the bench and sat down so that he faced the rose garden. He didn’t think to close the door. He wondered how long it would take the bodies to find him once they began to move again. Perhaps he could find a way to be dead himself before then. The solarium was high enough up, if he threw himself out of a window just right, he could die among the roses. If not … it would be a particularly unpleasant wait for one of the Vadryn’s recent numbers to finish him.
He heard slow footsteps at the door. Perhaps he wouldn’t have to wait after all. Don’t look. Just let it come. How long can it possibly hurt before it’s over? Just think about something else. Think about Ren … my love … my life … Wherever you are, let us meet again. Until then…. “Korsten.”
The name was not spoken in surprise, not as a question, but as a statement, a confirmation to suspicion. Maybe Renmyr had heard him moving about the house and been looking for him as well. At the moment, the why of it didn’t matter. All that Korsten knew or cared to know was that Renmyr had come. He all but leapt up off the bench and threw his arms around his lover’s neck. He held him tighter than ever before and held his breath for an instant, relaxing into sobs when he felt Renmyr’s strong arms encircle him. He couldn’t speak and didn’t try. He simply wept and refused to let go of Renmyr, alive and apparently unharmed.
“You should not have had to look upon this,” Renmyr started. His voice was soft, but also somehow toneless, as if he himself was in a mild state of shock after all that had happened. Perhaps Merran had come and discovered that he was wrong. Someone in the manor was possessed, but not Renmyr. Perhaps the mage and the demon had destroyed themselves. But why all the others?
“Ren,” Korsten finally said, his voice steadying as the fear left him, making room for sorrow. “Your family … oh, Ren … are they all….”
“Yes.”
A fresh wave of tears escaped. “I’m so sorry. If I knew of a way to undo this….”
Renmyr lifted his hand to the back of Korsten’s head, stroking his hair gently. “No force in this world can undo what’s been done. It’s gone too far now.”
“Ren,” Korsten said quietly. He didn’t know what else to say. The loss must have been overwhelming him. He sounded so detached. Korsten feared he wasn’t strong enough to support him. He wanted to be. Gods, what I wouldn’t give to be the strong one now. To be able to shelter him and take his hurt away, as he’s done for me so many times … as he’s trying to do even now. Even now, while his family lay dead all around him, he thinks of me first.
Renmyr drew back a little and his lips brushed Korsten’s cheek. Without saying a word he proceeded to kiss the tears away. Korsten closed his eyes and let him. He knew it was foolish to waste any more time. They were both going to die here if they didn’t leave, but Renmyr was hurting so badly. Korsten could feel it in each soft caress. It wasn’t something he recognized. Renmyr had never been one to seek comfort or shelter. He’d never been in need like he evidently was now, every touch seeming an entreaty, a pleading for contact. As if Korsten had ever pushed him away. He hadn’t and wouldn’t, even now, though it occurred to him that Renmyr was probably suffering too greatly to be rational.
“Ren….” the words were stolen off his lips before they could form. Perhaps now there was a justified cause to pushing Renmyr away, but how could he? Maybe there was no point to leaving anyway. What could they do against the Vadryn? Merran had failed. No one in Haddowyn understood magic and they wouldn’t believe what Korsten and Renmyr would have to tell them, until the reawakened victims of the demon were at their doorstep and it was too late.
Renmyr drew away just long enough to look into Korsten’s eyes and to say, “Don’t be afraid, my love.” He kissed him again, so softly. “No one nor anything can harm us.”
Korsten knew better, but he accepted Renmyr’s resuming of his role as protector to his lover, who had never been as strong. Through denial or seeking shelter, even if only in isolation, Korsten had always hidden from what was greater than he was or beyond his control. He had never confronted his cousins or his father. He was given the chance to escape and he took it. And now Renmyr offered comfort in their last moments together and he took that as well, greedily … foolishly.
“We will be together now,” Renmyr continued, working at Korsten’s collar. His fingers soon slid over his neck, traveling slowly downward, pushing away fabric.
“Ren,” Korsten sighed, tilting his head irresistibly as his lover began kissing the skin he’d exposed. He slipped his arms back toward himself, so that his hands were only resting on Renmyr’s shoulders. Lingering traces of sensibility formed his next words. “We shouldn’t. Not….”
Still kissing him, Renmyr pushed Korsten gently backward and guided him down to the bench. He slipped his sufficiently loose shirt off his shoulders and sat beside him, taking him in his arms again, crushing their mouths togeth
er now. Korsten felt his skin flush as desire rose within him too strongly. He wanted Renmyr, badly. Circumstances were suddenly forgotten, enabling him to kiss his lover with equal fervor. He did so for several moments, until Renmyr broke away and started again on his neck.
Dazed by Renmyr’s passion and his own desire, Korsten wrapped his arms loosely around Renmyr and gazed over his shoulder through half-lidded eyes. He saw nothing and lost all ability to think coherently, though images were suddenly playing in his mind … memories of red, of blood and of roses. His body felt warmer. His heart slipped into an even faster rhythm than that which Renmyr had inspired with his sudden, insistent affection.
Through his mind’s eye he saw a white moth and thought of Merran. He thought of the mage, dead, and the moth changed its color from ivory to deep scarlet, as if it had been stained with Merran’s blood. The moth shrunk a bit and its wings were suddenly speckled with black, tiny blots of shadow against delicate sheets of blood red. The body of the creature in Korsten’s wandering imagination was suddenly thinner. It looked more like a butterfly, one unlike any Korsten had ever seen or imagined before. So red … so very…. Renmyr paused for the span of a breath, his lips scarcely lifting from Korsten’s neck. In that same instant, Korsten blinked and just began to wonder at the vivid image from his imagination, still lingering in his vision, seeming to flutter toward him. An unexplained pang of fear made his heart stutter. Renmyr’s mouth sank against his neck. The butterfly came, alighting just briefly upon the corner of Korsten’s lips.
His eyes shot wide, seeing nothing when a prick of pain just above his shoulder seemed to unstop a tidal flow of agony. He opened his mouth but didn’t scream as his life seemed to drain out of him, burning as it left. The pain blinded him, turning the world white, like a flash of lightning in the room, only it didn’t flicker or fade and the only thunder was inside of Korsten, his heart beating itself vigorously against his ribcage. It hurt as if he’d swallowed the very fires of Hell and tossed them back in the same instant, but he didn’t lose consciousness. He remained mercilessly aware of the agony and then of Renmyr’s scream, which called up a pain far worse.
His heart seemed to shatter, like glass. The fragments shredded him inside, the bleeding overriding the burning. The white blindness subsided and Korsten slumped forward, through empty air and onto the floor. The shock of the fall snatched away what breath remained to him, but still he managed to find his voice when the form in front of him came into focus, sprawled several feet away, motionless. “Ren?”
His lover didn’t respond, not with word or motion. He appeared lifeless … dead. Gods, I killed him! There was no logic behind the thought, it simply came and so strongly that the ensuing sob tore from his throat. “Renmyr!”
There was nothing left in Korsten beyond that. Not voice or tears, or even breath. His vision left him shortly afterward and he lay down in the blackness, praying never to wake.
Light returned to the world. It hurt where it touched him, like thousands of white-hot needles sticking into his flesh. He didn’t have the energy to react to the pain. All he could do was to lie still and burn.
Am I in Hell?
Korsten dared to force his eyelids up against the tremendous weight of exhaustion. With effort he attained a sliver of vision, a view of pale drapes fluttering in the merest breeze. The material was white, but almost transparent in its thinness. A slow glance upward showed him a ceiling overhead and made him suddenly aware of the surface beneath him. It was a bed. Not his own.
Weight or contact of some kind settled lightly upon his shoulder in the next moment, invoking a sensation of coolness, but also of warmth. A warmth that didn’t hurt him, but somehow soothed. The touch drifted across his chest, then slowly downward. The lancing pain over every inch of his skin was slowly alleviated by efforts that felt somehow familiar.
“Sleep,” instructed a deep, calm voice.
Korsten closed his eyes again and returned to a dreamless darkness.
Voices lured Korsten out of the abyss he would have believed to be death. He didn’t feel pain this time, only a terrible exhaustion, as if he’d been bearing an awful weight with no relief for days and nights on end. Every limb, every muscle, felt strained and useless. He didn’t even have the strength to open his eyes. However, it took no effort to hear.
“How?” someone demanded. “Tell me how this underweight, self-admiring, narrow-minded bastard has got—”
“Mind your tongue.” Someone else. Someone frustrated, but still calm. “You know as well as I that there can be no illegitimate bonds. He has the Essence in him, else he wouldn’t be here.”
“Yes, and look at those marks.” A third voice, delicate. “You don’t think he drew them on himself, do you?”
“I think a mistake has been made, somewhere.”
“A choice was made.” The calm one again. Familiar?
“By who?”
“We won’t know until he wakes.”
Korsten deliberately kept still and quiet. Whoever they were, whatever they were talking about, he didn’t want to know. He wanted to die. He wanted to be dead … because Renmyr was.
The thought came too suddenly, spurring memories, awful memories of murder. The murder of people he knew … of the one and only person he would ever love. I did it. Gods … whatever happened to me … somehow it killed Renmyr. Was it the Vadryn? Is one of them … inside me?
Korsten’s sudden despair betrayed him. He felt his features tense, held the tears for less than a second, then let them out on his next breath.
Cool fingers touched his face and now he did have the strength to open his eyes, and to look up at an image of holiness. An angel? Korsten had never seen a head so blond in all his years. The white-gold locks fell straight and silky and free down the individual’s back, draping a fine-boned face so fair that it was difficult to tell at first glance whether or not it belonged to a man or a woman. The lack of definition of the chest beneath pale, elaborately embroidered robes defined the stranger as a man. A very beautiful man, neither young nor old. His soft green eyes, almond-shaped, glinted in what appeared to be firelight—perhaps from a hearth somewhere nearby in the strange room—as he smiled gently down at Korsten.
“You are safe here. I promise you.” The delicate voice from before. Seeing who—or what?—it belonged to made Korsten forget to cry.
This couldn’t be Heaven. It must have been a trick of some kind. As much as this individual appeared an emissary of the gods, he couldn’t be. Demons could make themselves appear beautiful as well in order to seduce their victims into believing their lies. Korsten believed it all to be fiction before, but he believed otherwise now. He believed in demons and he believed that the only use angels would have had for him would be to make him into an object example for all the other vain, selfish, and thoughtless mortals in the living world. The Vadryn were attracted to depression. He may as well have invited the beasts to Haddowyn himself, offered Markam straight away like one offers a blanket to a guest on a cold night. Everything that happened … all those deaths … Renmyr’s death … it was all his fault.
There were suddenly tears in the eyes of the stranger hovering over him, whose slim fingers still touched his skin. The pain in his features, that somehow did not mar his beauty, was exquisite. Korsten had never witnessed such suffering, but he believed that he understood it. If this man’s pain amounts to even half of what I’m feeling now … then perhaps he isn’t a demon. But he isn’t human. I must be dreaming. Yes, this is a dream, like before. And when I wake … I’ll have Renmyr again. I’ll save him this time. I’ll…. Korsten failed to convince himself. The hurt was too great, too real.
The exceptionally blond man drew his hand away. “I can’t-speak to him like this,” he said brokenly. “The pain is too much. Excuse me, please.”
The beautiful stranger turned away from Korsten and walked away, refusing the assistance of anoth
er individual who was suddenly walking with him. Someone shorter, slight of build, dark-haired…. Korsten closed his eyes, glad to be alone. The pain started coming back to his body and he welcomed it. Perhaps it would kill him this time.
The mattress he was lying on suddenly sank beside him, letting him know that he was not alone after all. He kept his eyes closed, wishing the individual would go away, especially as the pain started to abandon him again. Leave me alone. Let me die, damn you!
The stranger remained. “Rest,” he said in his deep, steady voice. He repeated the word until Korsten’s efforts to keep his eyes closed and to ignore the man were no longer effort.
Time often held no meaning for Merran. It did now.
The level of Korsten’s Emergence trauma was far greater than normal. His recovery was taking much longer than expected. It shouldn’t have happened. Merran was braced for it, sensing from the start that the Essence, the potential for magic, was in him, but the disgraced nobleman was not a typical choice for magehood. Merran suspected, however, that the individual responsible for choosing him had not been typical themselves. The bright red soul-keeper, as vivid in her display as her bond mate’s nearly crimson hair, was proof enough of unusual circumstances. There were few mages who took red as their medium color.
The soul-keepers always reflected the region of the Spectrum the mage who’d sent them had focused on in life. From time to time the chosen inheritor would in some way reflect that color as well. It seemed obvious that Korsten did. It was evident with the butterfly’s wings and with Korsten’s hair that the source color of the young man’s predecessor was indeed red.
It was always strange to consider that it had been decided since birth, that it could take so long for Emergence to occur. Merran suspected Korsten had been absently repressing it. And why not? For all of his education, he was as open to the idea of magic being a real working element of nature as a farmer was to releasing his livestock into the wilderness. It had taken something strong to spur him toward belief. Not uncommonly the Vadryn turned out to be the catalyst. Entering the nightmare, seeing it as reality, shook his dam of rational thinking to the ground and unleashed an overwhelming flow of stored potential. All at once he’d become inundated by energies he never imagined he was keeping back. It was too much for him. And too much for the other as well.