by E. S. Bell
The visions came, swirling like eddies of wind catching a pile of rotted leaves. Images fluttered past her in a cyclonic churning of time. Back, back it swirled, shattered, and then the disparate visions came together in a whole, like the shards of Accora’s greenhouse…
Skye lands on Isle Saliz. With her is a hulking female Vai’Ensai. The Vai’Ensai’s skin is a deep green, almost black, and her body is packed in muscle. She wears leggings, boots, and a fur vest that covers a barren chest. Steel rods pierce her ears, and the horns on her head sprout from every part of her skull, like a morning star. She flexes her wings and roars…
The maelstrom turned, the visions swirled and resolved.
Accora lifts a vial of yellowed liquid and Skye takes it. Skye is beautiful in the multi-colored light of the greenhouse. Her black hair gleams with red, as do her dark eyes. She is dressed for battle, though it is early morning and she has been a guest for some time. Skye is always dressed for battle.
She examines the vial of liquid and then shrugs her shoulders and hands it back. Accora looks panicked. “You are Aluren, he is Bazira.” She is begging.
To this, Skye laughs, deep and throaty, and says in her husky voice, “You know as well as I, names mean very little.” She rises to leave but stops to admire the tray of pinned insects posted to a beam. She trails her gauntleted fingers over the stowaway mantis. “So beautiful.”
The maelstrom turned, new visions coalesced to replace the others.
Accora is in the keep, in her chambers. Skye sits beside her. The old woman’s face appears placid but desperation lurks beneath. She hands to Skye a torn piece of parchment. Illuminated manuscript.
“The Ho Sun words,” Accora says. “You can read them?”
Skye holds the parchment reverently. “Aye,” she says, awed. Skye is never awed.
“Names,” Accora says, “mean very little. Unless they mean everything.”
Skye nods. “May I keep this?” She doesn’t wait for a reply, but gently folds the paper and tucks it into a pouch at her waist.
Accora’s hand snakes out and grabs hers. “I have given you…everything. Help me, now.”
Skye removes her hand. “You have given me nothing I wouldn’t have found for myself. I had my own suspicions.” She smiles. “And your vengeance doesn’t interest me.”
Another twist of foul wind, another vision.
Skye is walking to the shore; her immense Vai’Ensai stands close to her side. A skiff waits to take her to her ship, away from Saliz. Accora chases after her.
“I will tell them,” the old woman screeches. “I will tell them what you are.”
The Vai’Ensai turns and snorts hard, her hand on her broadsword. Accora stops short, falls into the sand.
“What I am,” Skye says, bemused. “If you knew what I am, truly, you’d have answered my one question instead of regaling me with tale of his awful perpetrations on you. One question.” Skye raises one gloved finger as Accora’s face breaks open in desperate hope. “Will he stand in my way?”
“Yes. Yes! Powerful beyond reckoning,” the old woman says. “He will choke the seas with his magic and not even you will be spared.”
Skye nods thoughtfully. “Very well. I’ll see what I can do.” And then she is in the skiff, her Vai’Ensai pulling the oars toward her ship, until Saliz and the woman on the beach are distant.
Selena reeled as the visions swirled a final time and then vanished. What she had seen rattled her in some deep core of her being where fear was born. But she could not ponder it now. Not while Bacchus violated her as he did. Dimly, she was aware that she had been screaming but her ragged voice had tapered away to nothing. She peered down to see Bacchus’s hand, buried up to the wrist, in her chest. His head was thrown back, his face a lustful grimace of bliss for surely her wound was as close to touching the Shadow face as he would ever come.
Cold. The word wasn’t strong enough. It was a kind of insanity all its own. A cold so deep she could no longer remember warmth. A line drawn, on one side there was before and the other after, and before was gone. Like the Calindari. Like the Zak’reth. Gone. There was no going back to before the wave, before the wound. Before she had known heat, and after she knew only this…
Selena closed her eyes to the horrid, filthy sight of Bacchus relishing her wound, lost in his own visions. She stood pinned against the wall a few paces from Accora. The pain was excruciating, and then numbing. Frost rimed Selena’s brows, her lashes, hair that fell around her face. Her fingers were clenched into fists, and locked against her chest, as if she could hold onto some sort of warmth. There was none.
She thought of her magical light. She hadn’t the strength to call more and the chamber was too dark. The moon had been full that night but the storm blotted it out. The Shining face. Not shining upon her now. In her mind’s eye, she cupped a tiny flickering flame; all that remained to her. Soon it would go out and she would die. Bacchus had won.
Accora will be disappointed, she thought absently. Before she had closed her eyes, she had seen the old woman’s chest rise and fall. She still lived. I failed her. I failed her and Skye and myself.
Something ugly tried to awaken at the thought of Skye now, like some monster twitching in its sleep.
A groan. A terrible grinding of bone and a muffled cry. Ilior. But it was too late.
I’m sorry, my friend, but I take the smallest measure of comfort in knowing that I will die with you.
She opened her eyes to see him a final time, and saw that dawn had come. Faint light suffused the room. But she couldn’t speak the sacred word. Her voice was gone and her jaw clenched shut.
From the recesses of her mind, Accora’s words from her training on Isle Saliz came back to her.
You are not drawing it in. You are calling it from within. Summon it to keep it at the ready. It is already yours.
Selena looked at Bacchus, his hand plunged inside her chest. It’s already mine.
Mine.
She summoned light.
She spoke no sacred word, her hand did not seek the moon in the sky. She merely called what already belonged to her. A fiery light, culled from the dawn’s endless illumination began to grow. Selena closed her eyes and imagined the light emanating, not from the sun but from the hearth of her heart. She watched it grow, watched it brighten until the cold that encased her began to melt away.
Bacchus swung his head from its throes of ecstasy, and peered at her, confused. “What…”
“Mine,” Selena croaked. “Mine.”
She culled more light and the inferno in her heart grew. As it did, the ring of light she’d created over her wound grew brighter. Bacchus screamed in pain and jerked away from her.
All that remained of his hand was a charred stump.
Selena stood straight as Bacchus stared at the smoking, blackened ruin. Her light grew larger. With every inhalation, it grew bigger, brighter, and the paralyzing cold began to ebb away. Bones ground together in her wounded shoulder as she raised her arms, but she pushed past the pain. Twin streams of light erupted from her palms, striking Bacchus in the midsection. The huge priest doubled over and cried out. He stumbled backward…into Ilior.
Ilior swayed on his legs. His skin was a ghastly, ashen color. Pus and blood leaked from numerous rents and bites, and his remaining wing hung broken like a splintered mast. But he held a sword in one hand—the sword Selena had taken from some Bazira—and he staggered to Bacchus. The dragonman found Bacchus’s exposed midsection, and he thrust the blade into his side. A shallow thrust; enough to slow him but not kill him.
“Yes,” came a whimper from behind that grew in strength like a gale wind. “Yes!” Accora’s voice gritty with pain. “Yes! Gods, yes! The time has come!”
“You’re already dead,” Bacchus said, lunging at Ilior, swinging drunkenly at him with his charred stump.
Accora, lying prone on the floor, screeched again. “It has to be you, girl! It has to be you!”
Selena understood an
d so did Ilior. The Vai’Ensai sliced at Bacchus’s burnt limb and then stepped away. The temple shook with the Bazira’s agonized roar. Selena stepped in front of Bacchus and raised her arms again. Two more lances of light struck his chest. He staggered backwards and fell to the ground amid flakes of his own charred skin that fluttered around him like ash from a bonfire.
This is it, Selena thought. The end of my wound. Skye, promised me. She promised!
The ugly thought birthed in the visions Bacchus had shown her writhed again but she would not let it waken.
“Yes! Do it, girl!” Accora was sobbing now, tears of joy and pain. “Do it, ah, you poor thing…”
Selena stood over Bacchus and the exhaustion of all the magic she had wielded was calling to take its due.
“Do it,” Ilior said and pressed his bone dagger into her hands. “You have suffered enough.”
She nodded mutely and fell to her knees beside Bacchus’s enormous head. His remaining eye glared at her, wide with awe.
“I saw them,” he whispered. The charred stump of his hand batted at her chest. “I saw them…So magnificent…”
Tears burned Selena’s eyes. The wound in her chest breathed its breath, perhaps for the last time. Bacchus’s remaining hand shot up and gripped her jaw in a sudden, wrenching fury.
“You have no idea…what is on the other side of your…wound,” he breathed. “Weak, stupid girl. It should have been me…It should have been—”
Selena slipped her dagger under his chin; it was visible in his gaping mouth. His body went rigid, his eye fixed. His hand fell away from her; she heard the thud as it fell to the ground, heavy and dead. The ice that encased the temple melted away and it was is if it had begun to rain inside.
She waited. Ilior knelt beside her, held her. She clung to him, neither daring to breathe. But the wound did. Her tunic was open where Bacchus had torn it and she felt the icy draft in chest just as she had every day since that awful morning ten years before.
“No,” she whispered. “Please, he’s dead. He’s dead.”
She stared at the Bacchus’s body, taking in every detail of his lifelessness: his still chest, staring eye, the blood that pooled about him, as if she could convince her wound that it must now do as promised and close.
Nothing happened.
Selena squeezed her eyes shut. The temple was shaking beneath her, shuddering to pieces now that the beast that had inhabited it was gone. It would bury them all if they tarried.
Ilior tried to make her stand. “Accora,” he whispered, reminding her that Skye’s promise was not yet broken.
Accora! she thought, with terrible relief, and rose to her feet with Ilior’s help. The temple roof rained down thatch and the beams and bones rattled. The horror of what she had yet to do.
Selena quickly laid her hands on Ilior’s arm and channeled healing into him. She spoke no word nor needed to.
I can’t think on that now. We must leave here.
“Help her, please.”
Ilior lifted Accora to standing and half-carried her out of the temple and into the night where rain was falling steadily and the moon was hidden. They hurried as fast as they were able, staggering like drunks helping one another out of a tavern at closing, and watched as the temple caved in on itself. When the rumbling stopped, there was only the sound of rainfall and their own labored breathing.
“You know what you have to do,” Accora said after a moment, her voice wracked with pain.
Selena shook her head. “To the beach,” she said. “Away from this dying place.”
Ilior helped Accora through the forest, Selena following behind.
When they emerged onto the beach, Accora’s protests grew loud and Selena called a stop. Ilior laid the old woman in the sand.
“You have to kill me,” Accora pleaded, her lips flecked with blood. “It’s the only way…
Selena looked up at Ilior. “Please. Leave us…for a moment.”
He nodded almost absently and strode away, his gait shaky and slow, his broken wing folded against his back.
I will heal him. I’ll fix everything that is broken.
Accora’s hand clutching her wrist brought her around. “She must be stopped.”
“She,” Selena repeated. “Skye. I saw you, Accora. I saw you with her. Bacchus showed me. What does it mean? Why did you lie to me?”
Accora shook her head. “You know what you must do. That is the only way to make you see.”
Selena shook her head. Tears coursed down her cheeks, pain and weariness conspired to drive her mad, and her wound…that icy black hole that was bored into the very core of her being was still there, and the promise of its closure was growing fainter with every passing moment. “Make me see what?” she asked, her voice hardly a whisper.
“No time!” The old woman cried. “I am nearly gone. If you do not kill me with your own hands, you will never know. You will believe that your wound remains because you didn’t kill me yourself. That Skye was just and wise,” her lips curled in derision, “to set you on this task. Kill Bacchus and Accora. That will close your wound.”
“It will,” Selena said. Begged. “You promised. You swore on the gods…” Tears were coursing down her cheeks but she wiped them away. “No. Skye told me. She told the Moon Temple, Celestine, the Justarch of Parish…She would not lie…”
The anger and ire seeped out of Accora as surely as her blood did. “Bacchus is dead, girl, and I am waiting. Do it, and you will see that Skye has betrayed you. That I betrayed you…”
“Why?” Selena cried. Her voice was raspy and raw. “No! It is you who are lying now though I can’t fathom why.”
“Can you not see?” Accora said. “It’s all a game to Skye. You. Me. The Aluren, the Bazira. She plays games, moving us around like the pawns that we are, on the board that is Lunos.”
Selena shook her head. “No. I don’t understand. That’s not true. She led us in victory. She was my commander… She was my friend.”
Accora laughed and the laugh turned into a spasm of pain. More blood colored her lips and she moaned.
Selena clutched at Accora’s arms. “Tell me, please. Tell me the truth, for the god’s sake. If you…if I kill you…my wound…?”
“It will remain,” Accora said. “Skye sent you here to die…or be turned to the Shadow face. It’s as Bacchus showed you. Kill me, and know the truth of it.”
Selena sat back on her heels in the sand. “No,” she sobbed. “It can’t be true.”
The lines of Accora’s face softened. She took Selena’s young, strong hand in her own gnarled one. “Child, I am suffering. I am old woman whose life was stolen and corrupted by the Bazira. Bacchus is dead. I’d like to think I had a hand in ridding Lunos of such evil. In light of my sins, that is perhaps too selfish, but still.” She smiled wanly. “My death will show you the truth and then you can seek out and rid Lunos of the other evil. Skye. Kill me and then find her. End her, so that you too, may know peace.” She slipped down into the sand, Selena easing her gently. “Hurry, child. It has to be you. It has to be now.”
Selena’s tears blurred her vision.
It’s not true. Skye is not the enemy. She didn’t lie to me. But Accora did…she used me to kill Bacchus for her own vengeance. She is the enemy. I kill her and the wound will close, just as Skye promised.
The words sounded right in her mind but the beast of truth within stirred again, nearly awake.
“Do it.” Accora’s breath was rasping now and her words only a whisper. “End me…and you will see. Your eyes will be open…”
The old woman’s own eyes were starting to close and with a strangled cry, Selena drew her dagger across Accora’s throat.
A line was drawn. Before and after. Accora’s skin split like dried paper and blood washed over Selena’s hand. Accora’s eyes flared open again and she smiled. A gurgling sound emitted from her torn throat. Before and after.
Before she had the wound, and after…and after…
Selena sat for long moments, waiting. She scarcely dared to breathe, but sat beside the old woman whose blood soaked into the sand in a wide swath around Selena’s knees.
She waited. Storm clouds were beginning to gather above, and Selena felt the first patter of rain kiss her cheek as she knelt. And waited.
The wound breathed its icy breath, a draft that never wavered, never ceased. As with Bacchus before, it took no note of Accora’s passing. It persisted. It lived.
Selena let the bloody dagger drop out of her bloodied hand and she screamed, just as An-Lan had seen. The Sacrifice. The truth. And oh how it burned, though much worse than the scalding water of Accora’s imagining. Far worse.
Selena screamed to the sky, to the crescent moon that grinned down on her, until the storm clouds gathered and even that meager light was snuffed out.
Escape
Sebastian turned his head as a chunk of the ceiling fell, streaking his cheek with cold grime. The battle waged above was like to bring the temple down around them. He fought against the ropes that bound his wrists and only succeeded in making them tighter. The three Bazira left in the room to guard them, however, glanced nervously at the ceiling and one spit a curse when Bacchus could be heard to roar in pain.
Good, Sebastian thought. I hope she burns him to ash.
He’d heard the battle first joined, and the fear for Selena had frozen the blood in his veins. She had come, as they all knew she would, to stop Accora’s pain.
No, she came to close her wound. She is strong. Strong enough to lift my ship from a maelstrom. That bastard Bacchus doesn’t know who he’s up against.
But Sebastian was no fool. It was true, Selena was strong, and braver than even she knew. But he kept up the silent litany of Selena’s strength in his mind because the alternative was too horrible to contemplate. He had seen the mountain that was Bacchus, and his heart shivered in fear for Selena.
A frightening sound came from above followed by another shriek, this from Accora. Great clumps of dirt fell from the ceiling now as the temple trembled with some impact from above. The Bazira guards exchanged glances with each other.