Darklight 6: Darkbirth

by Forrest, Bella

  Dorian let out a snort of dark humor and lifted his eyebrows at this. I elbowed him gently, not wanting any interruptions to Ruk's tale.

  "I crossed paths with many, many beings during my time in the Immortal Plane, but I only counted a few as my true friends. For a time, I thought of Irrikus… I thought of that abomination as one of them. And therefore, I felt compelled to introduce the two brightest minds I knew to one another. Another mistake." He hissed at the end. The world around us took on a darker tone, shadows crowding around the edges in the style of a vintage vignette. A filter of light red swathed every image now, as if Ruk's anger couldn't help leaking out onto his own memories. He rages on.

  Past-Ruk stood in his humanoid form, but this time he was throwing a fit. "You fool!" He smashed a fist into the wall beside him, causing the white bricks to shatter. I shuddered as I recognized the stark whiteness of the sanitarium.

  "Calm yourself, Ruk." Irrikus put his hands up in defense. "You're being unreasonable."

  "Reasonable?" Ruk echoed, screaming at the top of his lungs now. "What did you do to her?"

  My entire body went numb with dreadful anticipation as the image flickered with red.

  "I was working with the makers and that genius new advisor, Zeele," Irrikus said, his eyes holding little emotion. His tone was placating, trying to soothe Ruk's anger. "My researchers in the sanitarium had developed a new procedure, you see. I wanted to try it, and she was happy to volunteer. I thought it would make you happy that I'd done something to please her."

  "Why did you let her volunteer?" Ruk cut in. The modern Ruk shook with palpable anger, as if he was reliving this moment again for the umpteenth time.

  "She knew the risks." Irrikus's gaze turned as hard as ice. "She is also a researcher and a seeker of knowledge. Do you think you own her and can dictate what she does with her life?”

  “Of course I don’t,” Ruk seethed. "I’m just not a total imbecile rushing into new procedures. Did you stop to think of what would happen if you failed?"

  "I assumed that if something went wrong, you'd know how to fix it," Irrikus responded smoothly. Anger flared inside me for the younger Ruk. How insidious Irrikus was.

  Modern Ruk added to the tale. "I am unsure how long he planned to betray me. Perhaps from the beginning. He swore to me that she'd done it of her free will, but… who knows, with him? I think this was a test of how much I trusted him, to see how far he could hurt and manipulate me but still have my loyalty. I suspected he wanted to see the extent of my power, and what better way to force it out?"

  Younger Ruk hurried behind Irrikus down a set of white stone steps. They spilled into a test room, laid out in an all-too-familiar style. Dorian, modern Ruk, and I shuddered in unison from the shared horror of our memories involving this place. But the trauma was limited somewhat by the fact that the room looked different and that the rulers had not always been so sleek with their cruelty. It was not nearly as sterile and pristine as the sanitarium I knew. The technology was different, cruder and bunched together haphazardly in the room. It looked more like a mad scientist's lair rather than the clinical lab that I’d suffered in. It was clear the sanitarium had undergone quite a few changes before Dorian and I had arrived.

  Several white-robed figures hovered anxiously around an enormous tank made from almost clear amber glass. Above it, a dozen or so souls sat trapped in lanterns to cast light over the tank. Inside, Aurora's body floated helplessly… or what was left of her body.

  The gill-wings I associated with aquatic wildlings were gone. Several tracks of angry stitches crossed her head. Her eyes were covered, the bandages stained with dark liquid—blood, perhaps? My stomach lurched with nausea. Beneath her waist, the scaly flesh on her hips before her tail had been peeled back, the wounds held open with a series of clamps. Disgusted bile rose in my throat as I saw that her gorgeous tail had been sliced down the middle lengthwise in a carnage-drenched mockery of legs. Gems and wires had been embedded in the flesh of her tail and belly. No blood left her, but the opaque green liquid in the tank appeared scummy to me, like algae on the top of a pond. Was she floating in her own blood? I couldn't recall how an aquatic wildling bled. I didn't want to.

  "She still has vital signals, but I'm not sure we can restore her to her previous state after the spells we put into the gems," Irrikus explained. Ruk reeled on him, his form growing several inches in height, swelling as his fury exploded.

  "Give her to me." His bellow reverberated through the room.

  Irrikus narrowed his eyes a fraction but snapped his fingers. “I’m disappointed you won’t work with me on this, Ruk.”

  The next images bled together in a rush of chaos. A flood of light exploded across the screen as Ruk created a portal to the Higher Plane, added wings to his humanoid body, and scooped Aurora into his arms. Her body dripped with green-tinted water and viscous sludge.

  "You'll be safe soon," he promised as they flew through the portal and toward his estate. Her mangled body hung limp in his arms.

  Seeing the estate in all of its former glory showed me just how much it had fallen into disrepair. The towers gleamed, the walls were elaborate colors, and the spiraling structure shifted in sections like an intricate clock. As soon as he was inside his lab, Ruk set Aurora down on a long velvet couch as gently as possible. Around him, his estate exploded with activity. A gust of wind struck my face as Ruk exerted a massive amount of power to frantically alter his lab to accommodate Aurora. His gestures bordered on manic as he ran through the lab chamber, waving his hands, crackling with energy, to rearrange the very matter of the room around him, building a stasis chamber in a mere moment. It was the one Dorian and I had glimpsed in the tower during Ruk's meltdown. At this point, however, he placed it in the center of his lab, immediately moving Aurora into it. The green liquid on her body, which might have been blood, smeared his immaculate robes as he cradled her cheek for a moment, letting out a bitter sob before letting her plunge into stasis liquid.

  "This will keep you safe," he muttered, softly closing the lid of the tank. For a moment, there was stillness and silence, and I could see his body shaking with the emotion and effort he’d just exerted. Then everything inside Ruk appeared to erupt with decisive compulsion all at once: he exploded into motion, moving so fast I could barely keep track of him. Dorian and I watched, tears in our eyes, as Ruk burned through several of his bodies creating the physics-defying passage that led to the tower where we’d seen the tank, the world bending to his whims as he gave all he had for Aurora. Finally, ragged and exhausted, he floated the tank into the tower, now a beautiful, quiet space full of objects and light shows and fabrics. None of it had been there when we’d seen the tower, and my heart broke as I realized he’d probably placed it all there in preparation for when he fixed her, but that it had all faded to nothing by the time we arrived. The final steps were for him to place the tank in the center of the space and to magic a light to hang over Aurora, illuminating her with a majestic, heavenly glow. He put his red hand against the glass, close to her own floating hand.

  "I know you’re awake." His voice shook with grief. "You don’t have to be. Sleep, and I'll fix you, Aurora, I promise. Somehow, someway." He snapped his fingers, and the eye bandages dissolved. Aurora's eyes, pearly and white as Un's now, slid briefly to regard Ruk. What was she thinking? What was going through her mind? She shut them, lapsing into what I prayed was a peaceful slumber in that suspended state. The younger Ruk shook with sobs before ripping himself away from the tank and burying his distraught face into his hands with a scream of fury—at himself, at Irrikus, at the way fate had unfolded.

  A noise came from outside. Ruk picked up his head and hurried down the tower steps. A crowd of arbiters approached. He cursed beneath his breath. This was clearly the last thing he needed. Some of the arbiters had humanoid bodies that looked vaguely familiar. I quickly picked out Un in the front, with his proud stride.

  "Ruk! We sensed you burning immense amounts of energy!" someone
called out.

  The bell-obsessed Bi clasped his hands. "And so close to the Separation, when we need you to seal the barrier? We expected more of you!"

  Un caught sight of the green gunk on Ruk’s robes, and his white eyes narrowed. “You have blood from a lower plane being on you. Fresh blood.” His eyes flickered, catching on several matching drips leading into Ruk’s estate. “You’ve disobeyed the rules. You’ve taken the final step into rebellion and have brought a lower plane being here, I know it!" Un, his merciless stare boring into Ruk, stepped forward. “I warned you what would happen if you disrupted the plan for the Separation."

  Ruk shook his head. His emotions tumbled off him with flitting bits of red and blue in the air around him. The grief was written clearly on his face. Some of the arbiters reeled back, unused to such blatant displays of emotion.

  Someone muttered, "What's happened to him?"

  "Please," Ruk begged. "I've done nothing."

  The modern Ruk added, "I didn't want them to find her. This was all my fault for trusting Irrikus, after all. I wanted to protect her. I couldn't let her be taken from me."

  Un squared his shoulders and crossed his arms tightly. "It was only a matter of time until your attitude turned into open rebellion. Shall we see what you were doing in your tower with all that energy?" Un pushed past Ruk to dart up the steps into the tower. Ruk followed behind him, protesting at the invasion. Un threw open the door at the top of the stairs to reveal… an empty room. He dropped his hands to his sides and peered around.

  "What?" he muttered to himself. Ruk and the other arbiters caught up to him.

  How had Ruk managed to glamor the room so quickly? Then I remembered his skill in the cave system beneath the Restless Desert. Even then, half mad and with barely any power, he had been able to hide traps and passages that led Dorian, me, and a group of trained hunters in circles for hours.

  "I know that you have a lower plane being in here somewhere!" Un snapped and turned to glare at Ruk with angry white eyes. "This obvious deception is asinine."

  Younger Ruk met him with a hard gaze. "Get out of my estate, Un."

  Un seethed for a moment. "Whether or not this is true, your close contact with lower-plane beings will not be tolerated any longer. This close to the Separation, everything must go according to plan." The other arbiters bobbed their heads or glared in agreement.

  "Yes."

  "Of course."

  "Absolutely. We're so close."

  Un lifted his chin victoriously at this chorus of support. Ruk, for the moment, was trapped against his peers.

  The modern Ruk cut in. "This is when they levied the debt on me, using the consequences it would unleash to ensure that I would go along with the Separation. But even then, I wasn't overly concerned. I'd gotten Aurora to safety, and in the back of my mind I knew they still needed me to seal the Higher Plane away from the lower planes. So when the Separation finally happened, which occurred not long after I brought Aurora to my estate, I had a larger plan ready to put into action. None of those fools knew how to manipulate the barrier like I did. They threw their weight around, but it was I who ultimately had the power. They wrongly thought that I would just continue to work for them, afraid of their debt. They were even more naïve than I was, at the time. Once the final changes had been made, and we had all gathered in the Immortal Plane so they could congratulate themselves on a job well done, they all returned to the Higher Plane before the fated moment. But I simply stayed behind in the Immortal Plane, sealing the barrier leading to the Higher Plane before any of them could do anything. They were helpless to stop me, and no one could return to drag me back. I considered myself a genius. Aurora was safe and hidden in my estate, in a suspended state of consciousness where she could feel no pain, could rest, and her wounds would not worsen or heal badly. I reasoned that in a few hundred lower-plane years, when the rage of my fellow arbiters had dampened, I could simply sneak back through one of the small loopholes I had left in the barrier. By then, I would have conserved enough energy to fully fix her in the Higher Plane before we both left for good." He sighed. "That was the plan, but as you know, most plans don't work out as we think they will."

  Dorian and I exchanged a sympathetic look. How many times had our own plans gone sideways? Too many to count.

  I studied Ruk. His rage was intermingled with grief, weariness, and even a small dose of resigned acceptance. It was a similar set of emotions to those that Dorian and I had shared at times during our journey. I realized all this now because we'd been given time to process while in the Higher Plane. I could finally see those raw feelings for myself after some time and reflection, just as I saw these honest memories flowing from Ruk's own head.

  In the past, Ruk was back in the Immortal Plane in the humanoid form I knew so well by now. He slept in the wild underbrush of an eerie forest with a relieved smile on his face, believing that he'd found a way to ensure everything turned out the best it could for both him and Aurora. He was sleeping peacefully when he suddenly awoke with a cry of pain. Past-Ruk was shaking as if from a terrible nightmare, but we were close enough to see a black spiderweb of energy pulse as it crisscrossed all over his form and then faded. He stared in horror at the world around him. Genuine fear sank into those lavender eyes for the first time. He knew what had happened to him, even though the magical net had disappeared. It had caught him.

  The arbiters had gotten him.

  "I didn't think they would have the power to retaliate against me after the portal was closed, but I was mistaken," the current Ruk relayed, his voice quiet as he watched his past self sitting alone in the darkness, shaking. "Altering me would have required such immense energy that they would all have been forced to work together to do it. I’d figured that would never happen, but… collective rage was apparently a unifying factor, even for almost all-powerful beings. They drew together and made their mark on me. It was the same thing we'd done to the ancestors of vampires, rulers, makers, wildlings, harvesters—they changed me, just as I had helped to change the lower beings. When I woke that night, I'd been drained of my energy, leaving me weak and helpless, unable to use most of my abilities. I didn't have the resources to restore my energy, let alone create a portal to the Higher Plane. Unless I had help, there was nothing I could do but wait to slowly, painfully regain enough energy to proceed with my plans, but I was foolish and impatient. A crisis makes you stupid."

  His weary eyes met mine.

  "When I had regained enough of my dignity to return to my old haunts, I sent a message to Irrikus."

  Chapter Eighteen

  Irrikus stood at the bottom of a long set of steps carved into the cliffside that led to the sanitarium. The cliffs butted up against the gelatinous, angry sea with a mist forming above it. By this point, Irrikus’s style had evolved. He wore grand clothes of gold and black and green—a long coat reached the ground, and his sleeves were an elaborate crisscross of different fabrics and jewels. A small crown rested on his head, not quite as impressive as the one I’d seen him wear in person, so I doubted he was the head of the Immortal Council just yet. But he was on his way up the ladder, and it wouldn’t take long.

  He stared out at a platform jutting into the ocean that I'd never seen in my time there. In his hands, he held a soul lamp tightly packed with amber lights. In the pool of light cast by the souls, he squinted as a seal-shaped creature struggled out of the ocean onto the platform and tumbled into humanoid form. Ruk’s face was weary, sunken now without his usual energy, and he cast an ashamed, vulnerable look up at Irrikus. He looked like a bedraggled piece of seaweed brought up from the water. Irrikus loomed over him.

  "You've returned," Irrikus said. His neutral expression melted into concern, but there was something constructed about the emotion that hadn’t been present in the earlier version of him we’d seen. He dropped to his knees, pulling off his coat to place it around Ruk’s shoulders. Ruk tensed, guarded. Had he not expected this response from Irrikus? I watched closely as pin
s and needles of anticipation pricked me all over.

  The ruler helped Ruk up, almost tender in his movements. Ruk let out a raspy sigh. His travels had exhausted him. He looked even gaunter than he had back in the caverns of the Restless Desert.

  Present-Ruk told us, "I hoped he could help me regain my energy, even though I'd left in a rage about Aurora. And he said he would, promising to help me get back to her as quickly as possible so that she could be returned to her natural form. He claimed it was a form of apology for what he now realized had been recklessness and hubris on his part. But as you know, that is not what occurred, and he certainly wasn’t sorry for his actions. Irrikus saw an opportunity in my weakness. And my poor Aurora… I haven’t been able to speak with her since it all happened… my only true friend."

  The next part was painful to watch. Irrikus and Ruk locked themselves deep within the laboratories of the sanitarium to work feverishly on crystals, energy, wires, and spells. The nonstop work strained the younger Ruk. He worked long and hard, but the arbiters had weakened him significantly by stripping his energy away. He worked on pure determination and the last dregs of his power.