by B. J. Keeton
It didn’t do well for him to dwell on Ceril, on the Charons. That’s why he had his book. The old, leather-bound book that he cradled on his lap was a point of contention for most of the people in the village. While they were not illiterate, most of their reading was done on tablets or PDAs and dealt with whatever hot topic had taken over the ‘Nets that day. Gramps harrumphed to himself at the thought of it; he would bet good money that half of the people in the village had never owned a real book, and that even fewer had read one cover to cover. At least he couldn’t say that about Ceril.
He had done what he could to shield the boy from technology, and even though he knew that Ceril loved him, Gramps was sure that decision had frustrated Ceril. Especially with the other boys from the town ranting and raving about their new gadgets every few weeks. But Gramps put his foot down; he would have none of it in his house. He had seen firsthand what an obsession with technology could do to someone, and he would do his very best to shield his family from it.
But now…now, the damned Charons had him. Once they got their hands on someone, it was tech or bust. There was no other way for them, and he knew that better than anyone. He hoped that Ceril was a smart enough boy that he didn’t buy into their rhetoric and propaganda without thinking about it. After six years of immersion, anyone would pick up a few habits, become comfortable. A new device here and there may not seem like much at first—in fact, Gramps remembered it being pretty all right indeed—but it became an addiction all too quickly. It stopped being about progress and became complacency, laziness. And the Rites? The nanites? And worst of all, when they started in on your blood…
Gramps shuddered. He couldn’t think about that. Ceril was okay. He knew it. His wrinkled hands stroked the cover of the book in his lap and found the purple ribbon he used to mark his place. He opened the book to a blank page about three quarters of the way through and grabbed a pen off the bookshelf. The storm would give him the perfect opportunity to get some writing done since he obviously could not tend his garden, no matter how much he wanted to.
The book was his love, his legacy really. Gramps knew that he wasn’t going to live forever, even if it sometimes felt like he would. When his time finally came, there was a lot of information and history about the Charons that would be lost—at least to the Erlonian public—if he never completed this book. Gramps knew a great deal more about the Charons than he had told Ceril the summer he had found the Flameblade.
He also knew that there was no public record of the Charons that wasn’t more legend than fact. At least, not in Ternia.
So, since the day that Gilbert Squalt had called to inform him that Ceril had been recruited for training as a Charon, Gramps had spent the last six years writing the history the world was missing. He honestly had no delusions that anyone would ever read it. He had no desire to publish it or push it onto the ‘Nets. It just eased his mind to know that it was there, would be there when he was dead and gone (Whenever that may be, he thought). Maybe someone would stumble across the book in a few centuries, dust it off, crack the spine, and know the truth about how the world became so messed up.
After all, who better to tell the story of the Charons and of their rise and fall, than the one man who had been there through it all?
***
The pen had barely scratched paper when there was a knock at the front door. Gramps thought there was a knock, at least. The storm outside had picked up, and he couldn't very well imagine that anyone would be out in it, much less knocking at his door. The storm probably tossed a limb at the house. There was another sound, talking maybe, and that made his head jerk up. Gramps’s aged muscles were not used to motion that quick, and he groaned involuntarily. The book slid off his lap onto the floor and closed, the purple ribbon barely caught between the pages.
“Who’s there?” he asked as loudly as he could. He wasn't expecting anyone, and he couldn't remember the last time anyone had just stopped by to chat. He couldn't remember the last time anyone had stopped by at all.
Another knock. And voices. There was definitely someone there; it wasn't just something being tossed against the side of the house.
“Who’s there, I said?”
The knocks grew more insistent, slower but harder. Gramps bent to pick up the book off the floor and placed it back in its home on his bookshelf.
More knocking, louder voices, probably yelling. Even though they didn’t socialize, Gramps knew his neighbors in the village. They were not terribly fond of him, definitely not fond enough to come knocking in a storm like this. That meant it was someone else. Gramps muttered to himself and hoped it wasn’t as bad as he expected.
He went toward the bedroom to put some more space between him and whoever was outside. What he needed was a weapon, but he didn't think he had time to get one.
A loud crash came from the front of his house, and the voices were no longer muffled. He heard a man and a woman speaking to one another. They spoke a language that he recognized, that he had once spoken himself, but had not spoken for many years. He had thought it died out centuries ago. It had been so long since he had even heard it; he couldn’t quite understand what the intruders were saying.
It didn’t matter. Gramps knew the kinds of people who had spoken that language once upon a time, and that was enough. One side of his mouth curled upward in a snarl, while a cold rock formed in the center of his stomach. His heart raced.
If he did not act quickly, there was a chance he might not make it through this encounter.
The man was becoming more insistent, yelling faster and louder. Every time he yelled, a crash punctuated his statement. This went on for about thirty seconds, and each crash indicated to Gramps that the burglars were working their way through the house.
They would find him in a minute, which meant there was no time to search for a weapon. There was a crash from the hallway outside the bedroom he was in, and the woman yelled something Gramps could almost understand.
Fear filled him. He wasn’t ready to die, after all. He had thought he was. He had thought his life had been long enough, but no. Not like this. If he was going to die, it was going to be on his own terms, not because someone invaded his home.
Anger laced his fear, and his heart rate spiked. He focused the emotions, envisioning a purple-green ball of fire in his mind. He poured his emotions into the ball, and it grew hotter and brighter in his mind’s eye. He needed a weapon, so he was going to have one. He held out his hand, ready to feel the weight of the Flameblade, but nothing happened. The purple-green fireball in his mind dissipated, and he stood alone in his bedroom.
Lightning struck outside the window. The light illuminated the room for an instant and blinded the old man. Thunder rumbled immediately, as though to indicate the severity of the situation. He had failed.
He could not let himself fail. Ceril’s face flashed before Gramps’s eyes, and for the first time in his life, he knew that he had something worth fighting for, worth living for. Even if the technomages had perverted him, Ceril was still his boy.
That thought in mind, Gramps did something he hadn't done since long before Ceril had been born. He took a deep breath, calmed himself as much as he could under the circumstances, and felt his skin begin to tingle. He smiled involuntarily as he felt a sensation under his skin that he had almost forgotten.
Had anyone been in the room to see Gramps as he began to smile, they would have seen his skin begin to run and ripple as though tiny insects crawled under the topmost layer. They would have seen his smile grow larger, his skin swell in an almost geometric pattern, and his pores open as a thick, black liquid streamed from them. They would have likely assumed that the old man had been cut or stabbed and begun bleeding a black blood that by all rights shouldn't be bled.
But he hadn't been cut, and he hadn’t been stabbed. His pores dilated just enough to allow the black blood to rush through and not tear or irritate his skin. The old man had gone through the Blood Rites long before—had perfected the process
on himself, actually—and learned to control the results in the years following. Quickly after his skin began to ripple and spot with the seeping blackness, the blood ran around his arms. Tendrils moved with a hive-minded purpose, coating his arms, running so close to the skin that his clothing was left untouched and dry. From beneath his gums the blood ran, coating and darkening his coffee-stained teeth. The liquid shimmered in the low light of the bedroom. Its iridescent shade once reminded people of the scales of a snake. Long ago, he had thought the comparison apt—the way it moved out of and over his body did have a kind of serpentine grace. Even after all the years, he still marveled at it.
He marveled more at how much he had missed this.
The blackness poured from his nose and across his mouth. Tendrils met in the space between his lips, interlocked, and formed a mesh web over his mouth that solidified to fuse his upper and lower lips together. The ecstatic smile on his face was frozen in blackness—blackness that bubbled and shimmered with every breath.
He bled from his eyes, and from his ears. His nostrils continued to pour the blackness from them. The blood from his nose worked its way into his mouth and proceeded to fill his throat and lungs, but he didn't choke or gasp. If there had not been intruders, he would have laughed. He had not felt this alive in so long.
When the process began, his hair—what was left of it—had been white with age. However, the blackness coursing over his body revitalized it, providing as much color and richness as it had once possessed when he was a young man.
Black tears streamed from his eyes, and they became bloodshot before dilating into complete blackness.
As he enjoyed his transformation, his resurgence, the old man stripped out of his clothes. Any blood on the cloth slithered its way back to the mass that eventually coated his body. He stood naked in his bedroom and threw his clothes in the small pile that already sat neglected in one corner.
When the cycle was finished, he was completely black, coated in the iridescent blood. It began to harden around him and briefly, almost imperceptibly, the black liquid flashed with a bright, purple-green light, and then Gramps disappeared from sight entirely.
The whole process took maybe fifteen seconds to complete. In that time, the intruders had split up and were ransacking individual rooms of his home. Invisible, Gramps walked around the room. He was perfectly aware of where he was placing his feet and how much sound he made as he did.
As he neared the door, the female intruder sprinted into the bedroom from around the corner to the left, almost barreling directly into Gramps. If he had been three or four inches to his left, his disappearing act would have been for nothing. Instead, though, he remained undetected while the intruder searched his bedroom. Gramps chuckled silently as the woman quickly rummaged through the pile of dirty clothes in the corner and put them back as though they had been undisturbed for weeks.
He left the woman in his bedroom and stalked back through to observe what was going on in the rest of the house. More people had broken in than he originally thought. He had heard two voices, but there were maybe fifteen people in his house. He didn’t want to fight them, and he wasn't sure how much the invisibility Conjuration had weakened him, but he was sure there was going to be a cost. At this point, he just needed to find out what they wanted.
He saw a large man with a beard in his sitting room, perusing the bookshelf as though he were at a library and wanted just the right book to curl up with during the storm. The man stiffened as he came across Gramps’s incomplete history and pulled it from the shelf.
As the man leafed through it, he yelled to his companions again in the dead language. The other burglars gathered in the sitting room, and Gramps found himself a corner away from them. He watched them.
Everyone was silent except for the large man who found the book and the woman who had searched Gramps’ bedroom. They talked animatedly, but Gramps could understand very little about what they said. He thought he heard the woman mention master, and the man responded with what could be translated as reward. The conversation ended with a unified chant. Only one word of the chant meant anything to Gramps. They had all chanted untouchable. He stiffened when he heard it, and it took almost every bit of self-control he had not to break cover and demand to know what they meant.
Afterward, the large man and woman stood back to back. He raised his left hand, she her right. Swords appeared in both of their hands. Gramps made note that the man’s sword glowed a dim blue-red and the woman’s a dull yellow-silver. The duo both stretched their empty hands behind them and around their partner’s midsection. They drew semi-circles in the air with their swords, and momentarily, the auras around the blades flared away from the swords. The energy met in midair, swirled together, and then sped from one intruder to the next. When every one of them was encompassed with fire, they all disappeared with a whuff-pop.
Half an hour later, when he was certain that he was alone, Gramps reattached his door to its frame, and then fortified it with as much furniture as he could pile behind it. The black blood that had granted him invisibility was absorbed back into his body, and he sat on the edge of his bed, sobbing into his hands.
When he cried, it was not for the violation of his home or his privacy. Not even for the theft of his book. Though each would have been justified.
No, when he cried, they were tears of anger. Of contempt. Someone had made him break his vow, and he was going to kill them for it.
Chapter Eleven
Ceril stared at his teachers like they were fools. He opened his mouth to speak and closed it. Then he opened it again, ready to talk. Then closed it. He finally managed to stutter “My my my my—” before he was cut off by Roman.
“Yes, Ceril. Your grandfather.”
Ceril blinked. “Here? On...the Sigil?”
Roman nodded curtly. ‘Yes. And his name is Damien Vennar.”
“Vennar?” the young man asked.
“Mmm hmmm.”
“Like from the stories? You can’t be serious…”
“The stories are a bit exaggerated,” Roman said.
“I would hope so,” Ceril said, “if they’re about Gramps. I mean, those are old, Roman. Gramps can’t be that Vennar.”
“I thought you two were close.”
“We were—we are—” Ceril corrected, “but he never told me his name.” It sounded stupid when he said it aloud. It made him question his relationship with Gramps. “When I was younger, I thought it was fun, like a game. I’d yammer for hours, rattling off different combinations of names trying to guess, and he would always respond the same way.”
Ceril cleared his throat and gruffed his voice: “Ceril, I am your Gramps. I have always been your Gramps, and I will always be your Gramps. I've been called other names by other people, but none of them suit me as well or make me as happy as when you call me Gramps. So keep on guessing, but you already know the only name you'll get me to answer to.”
Ceril continued, returning to his normal cadence, “And that's all I would ever get out of him. The older I got, the more I just assumed there was a part of his past he wanted to keep separate from his family. You know, when I was a kid, I even made up a story about him being an assassin for a king.” Bryt and Roman shared a look, and Ceril wondered if that silly little story he had made up as a child was closer to the truth than he was comfortable with. “I just kind of figured that since he was my dad's dad that we had the same last name. If I’m Ceril Bain, he had to be a Bain, too. Guess not.”
Bryt shook his head. “If I recall correctly, your grandfather adopted the surname Bain when he left the Archive. It makes sense he would pass it down as he tried to distance himself from us. Still, though, Ceril, I think we may need your help in getting your Gramps here to fix his mess.”
“His mess? How is any of this his mess?” Ceril asked. “I don't mean to be rude, sir, or sound dumb, but I'm not quite following everything going on right now.”
A new voice came from behind him, “And you shoul
dn't have to, Ceril. Had you done what we asked of you, none of us would be having this conversation. We would still have this problem, certainly, but we would be one hell of a lot closer to fixing it if you had simply shown up on time.”
Ceril whipped around to see Professor Nephil come into the meeting room.
“Meeting’s over, I take it?” Roman asked.
“Quite over. We're going to have a bit of a situation on our hands soon, Roman.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“I was able to pacify them, I think,” Nephil said. “They calmed down considerably when I told them that every so often, the ship has to make a routine maintenance stop. I said that a slight miscalculation had forced us to make this stop early and that the ship would re-establish its connection to Erlon once everything is in order.” At hearing this, Roman cringed, but Nephil continued, “Which is not a lie, my old friend. Once we re-establish, we will be back on our way.”
“Yes, that is true,” Roman said, “but do you have any idea how to do that?”
“I have a few ideas,” Nephil said, though his voice betrayed his confidence.
Ceril raised his hand and looked around at the group of his teachers. They looked frightened. Bryt twirled his hair around a finger like a schoolgirl; Roman still shook, but it was more obviously nervous apprehension rather than the anger Ceril had mistaken it for earlier. Nephil slowly bobbed from his heels to the balls of his feet. The other teachers he only halfway recognized, but they remained seated around the table, sometimes tapping their fingers on the table, or crossing one leg and then the other, never being quite able to get comfortable.
“I think we're a bit beyond you raising your hand to speak,” Roman said.
Ceril put his hand down and said, “Yes, sir. Well, sir, I just wanted to ask if you all could tell me what exactly is going on here. I mean, you yell at me for missing my briefing—which I deserve, I think—but you're acting like I caused the end of the world for oversleeping. What's wrong with the Sigil?”