by Azalea Ellis
“It’s almost over,” Sam called back, the words seeming to be half for his own reassurance.
“Don’t worry,” Zed said. “They have the gene, right? I didn’t, and Sam still kept me alive. It’s going to be okay.”
“You injected yourself with a Seed from a ‘mortal,’ not from an ancient alien goddess,” Blaine said sharply. “Eve was stupid enough to do that willingly, and look where she is. There’s nothing Sam can do for her!” His voice rose, until he was practically shouting.
Kris groaned, and tossed her head in obvious discomfort, distracting Blaine from his anger.
“I took the Seed directly,” I said. “It’s pretty different than getting a Bestowal, which is actually meant for a mortal.”
I’d meant the words to be comforting, but Blaine stood and took a single step toward me. “You are the cause of this,” he whispered scathingly. “We are here because of you. They did not want any of this. They did not do anything to deserve this fate. Why did you not send them away? Why did neither of us keep them safe?” His face crumpled then, and he took off his glasses, pressing thumb and forefinger hard against his eyes. “We failed,” he whispered.
Jacky, who had been watching silently, stomped off and started pounding her fists against a nearby tree trunk, hard enough to splinter the bark and shake the trunk. Hard enough to break the skin of her own knuckles.
“Yes,” I admitted. “But they’re not going to die. I promise.” I spun around, quickly spotting Torliam squatting under one of the small nearby trees. “What do the marks mean?” I snapped, moving to stand over him.
“They are symbols representing our roles in the Lore,” he said.
“The Lore? You mean this whole supposed prophecy thing where I find the god who’s going to save your world? The prophecy that you didn’t mention pertained to anyone else but me? The prophecy that just hooked in a couple kids?” I found myself leaning over him, claws extended, fingers outstretched.
He hesitated for a couple seconds. “The children’s story is known to us all. Most consider it a . . . fabrication? A story only loosely based in truth, and made to teach children, while couching the lesson in fiction. But it usually ends at a different place, before the reappearance of the light. I did not know.” Despite the inherent contrition of his words, the barely-contained energy I could hear behind them wasn’t sad, or sorry. He was excited.
My hand moved almost without my volition, slicing through the air and cracking against his cheek hard enough to rock his head to the side.
He brought up a hand to feel the furrows my claws had dug into his skin. They healed under his fingertips, as easily as that. “They will not die,” he said. “They are needed for you to complete your path.”
I leaned down. “You don’t know that. We could fail,” I croaked.
He stared at me for a moment, and then his eyelids flickered, and the excitement drained away. “If necessary, Samuel can use my body to shift some of the destructive side of his Bestowal. I will be able to withstand the injuries, as the rest of you will not.”
I nodded without gratitude. “Good.”
Chapter 27
It is easy to go down into Hell;
Night and day, the gates of dark death stand wide.
—Virgil
Sam had to kill all but two of the bird-steeds, but he got Kris and Gregor through the assimilation process.
We worried the whole time, Blaine the most out of all of us.
During that time, Jacky asked Torliam to keep training her, and the two of them spent hours sparring, her pushing herself desperately to keep up with him, to get better, to fight back. On the third day, she was throwing up on the ground from a punch in the gut that had literally knocked her off her feet and thrown her a few meters away.
“Rest,” Torliam said. “Your human frame is weak. You cannot push yourself like a real warrior.”
Not the best thing to say to someone so stubborn. Maybe he knew that, and was trying to push her to break her limits.
She spat, and rushed at him in a zig-zagging manner. Rapid changes of direction at high speed, aided by her ability to adjust the way gravity pulled on her body, both in direction, and in strength. As Jacky often did, she looked like a superhero out of a film, moving in ways so blatantly inhuman.
Torliam kept up with her easily, almost blurring as he met and then parried blow after blow, despite how lazy his movements seemed. He had definitely been holding back against me. And Jacky had improved enough that I wondered just how much she’d been training and practicing when I was too occupied with other things to notice. Even seventy-two Seeds wouldn’t cause changes like she displayed.
Still, a lazy kick brought Torliam’s shin to her chest, and she went flying back again, skidding when she hit the ground on her knees and forearms. Her back convulsed upward as she struggled to breathe, and Sam stood up, taking a few uncertain steps toward her.
But Jacky didn’t stay down. She arched again, and got a leg under her. She surged upward, rising taller than she was. Bigger than she was, as if she’d suddenly become part Estreyan.
Torliam’s eyes widened, but he didn’t have a chance to do more than that, as she threw herself at him again, this time moving even faster. Her steps shook the ground, and when she slammed into his guard, he slid back a few feet. He let out a short laugh of surprise, and showed us all a glimpse of how seriously we’d been underestimating him, despite knowing that every accumulated Seed of ours was only a small portion of his own strength.
He punched and slashed and kicked, all Grace and Strength and Agility. His movement whistled in the air from speed, and when he hit Jacky, it sounded like those fake blows from the old western films. Like someone pounding a slab of raw beef.
She went flying for a third time, and when she stood up, she was bigger than him.
He tried to dodge instead of block when she shot back at him, probably wisely, but she turned on a dime, in a move that should not have been possible, not just for a human, but for any object subject to the laws of physics.
They traded blows that sounded more like the cracks of close lightning, as the rest of us watched in awe. Twenty seconds, then thirty, passed.
Then Torliam blurred, disappearing for a moment.
There was a muffled bang, and then Torliam stood where she’d been, and she was flying forward, bent backward from where he’d slammed into her from behind.
The rush of displaced wind blew past me, making the loose strands of my hair flutter.
Jacky didn’t get up a fourth time, and when she shrank back down to her normal size and stayed there, Sam rushed over to make sure she was okay.
“You did well,” Torliam said, when she waved Sam off and stood, limping back toward the group.
She laughed aloud, gleeful and snorting. “It’s my new Skill! Struggle. I’ve been trying to figure out how to make it work, ‘cause my VR chip wouldn’t give me any info.”
Sam pressed a hand on her shoulder, encouraging her to sit down on one of the big logs we’d placed around the campsite. Her clothes hung half off her, torn at the seams. He very carefully looked away, and handed her a blanket to wrap around herself.
“This is going to make a difference,” she said, practically glowing with joy. “I’ve been working so hard, and it was just like . . . every time something happened, I was useless.” She turned to me. “I can help, Eve.”
I grinned back at her, doing my best not to let any of my dismay show. I’d picked Jacky to be on my team because of her fighting prowess, it was true. And a lot of the things we’d been going up against lately had been ridiculously stronger than us, or something you couldn’t fight directly. Looking at her in this moment, it was easy to see how strained Jacky had been acting lately. For a while, actually. She’d been quiet, no longer the first to crack a joke or roughhouse playfully. And I hadn’t noticed.
When the kids finally broke through the assimilation sickness, they were almost as happy as Jacky to learn that they had
Skills now, too, and just had to learn how to use them.
Blaine tried to convince them to let things lie, and not try and use a power that could potentially harm them, but he had no chance of convincing them.
We traveled toward the capitol, then, taking turns between riding the birds and running along beside them while someone else rode. And I thought. I thought about how smoothly things seemed to be working out. How my lies were becoming truth. And I was deeply suspicious. But by that point, it was too late. I couldn’t turn away from the path I’d set myself on. I felt a cold maggot wiggling in the back of my mind, and clamped down on it, doing my best to crush it with meditation, like I did when Chaos tried to overwhelm me.
Our journey was . . . eventful. In addition to the three different types of deadly terrain we had to traverse, we were attacked by monsters over and over again. I had a feeling it was because of my Skill, which was the only one of the nine the group had gotten that started out with a description even before it was actively used.
I suspected this was because the Skill was always active. However, the description was nothing more than what the goddess had said when she gave it to me.
VOICE: Increases Charisma. Acts as a beacon for beings of power. Allows presence and will to be imposed on surroundings. Skill effects will expand and strengthen with Player improvement.
The monsters seemed drawn to us. We had no chance of sneaking past without notice, as if I were constantly emitting some sort of dog whistle that only they could hear. I hadn’t had any luck turning it off, and I couldn’t figure out how to actively make it do anything.
On the brighter side, Chanelle had started to talk, and was increasingly hungry all the time, which Blaine thought might be a sign that the Seeds were healing her and intensifying her need for fuel, like me.
I took the last of the Seeds I’d been trying to save for her, when Chaos gave me another bloody nose. I didn’t tell anyone. We were already traveling as fast as we could, cognizant of the literal time limit on killing the God of Knowledge, imposed by the Oracle. I could only hope we wouldn’t be too late.
I wasn’t the only one who was having trouble with my new Skill.
Zed couldn’t figure out how his was supposed to work, at all. He was frustrated by this, because whatever the Veil-Piercer Skill was, he was absolutely certain based on the name that it would be “so cool.”
Gregor felt pretty much the same way, though Blaine did his best to discourage both of the kids from even attempting to use their Skills.
Adam was banging his head against the metaphorical brick wall, trying every experiment he could think of that involved ‘giving’ stuff to the rest of us.
Sam hadn’t had any strange phenomena occur, but I don’t think he was trying very hard, due to apprehension. ‘Black Sun’ wasn’t a worrying Skill name, for someone like him.
Torliam, out of all of us, worked out his Skill, Tracker, with frustrating ease. “I can find anything,” he said simply. “If I have a solid idea of exactly what I am looking for, over time I will be compelled toward it.” He smirked at the looks he was receiving. “I am familiar with the power of this world. It was not so difficult a task to discern the function, especially when provided with a name.”
Adam huffed and rolled his eyes.
One night, while we were camping in the midst of a particularly disturbing spot, where the plants whispered and gibbered unintelligibly to each other in a sinister mockery of intelligence, Kris came into her own Skill, Summon. She’d been clutching her moose tightly, eyes squeezed tight and staying as close to the fire as possible, both for the warmth it provided against the frigid night, and for the comforting light.
I’d been on watch, along with Jacky, while the rest of the camp wound down. I was monitoring the surrounding area with my Skill, and we were all very much prepared to be attacked in the middle of the night by that point, since it had happened multiple times.
A particularly loud jabbering of word-like sounds from the surrounding bushes spewed out, in a voice suspiciously similar to some of our teammates.
Kris whimpered, and her moose wiggled. She jumped, letting out a small scream and thrusting the stuffed animal away from her.
It climbed to its feet and walked over to her, circling her and facing outward in a mockery of aggression as she stared at it.
A couple of the others had been woken by her exclamation, and we all pretty much just goggled at the plush toy.
Gregor scowled. “What did you do?”
Kris shook her head. “I . . . I’m not totally sure. I was scared, and I felt something that felt . . . warm, like . . . safe, you know? So, I connected it and Moose in my mind. And then Moose started walking around.”
“You made your imaginary friend come to life,” he said flatly.
“No! Well, not really.” She fidgeted, and Moose turned to Gregor and gave a warning toss of its plush antlers. “I think I put a ghost inside Moose.”
“A spirit, which does not necessarily correspond to the shade of one who was once living,” Torliam corrected. “That is your Skill, is it not, Summoner?” He smiled at her encouragingly.
She smiled tentatively back.
Jacky whooped, and went over to give Kris a congratulatory ride around the camp on her shoulders, while Moose ran along at her feet.
Blaine woke up then, and gave Jacky a good chewing out after the shock and initial rapid-fire questioning were over, for encouraging Kris to experiment with spirit-summoning, when none of us had any idea what dangers could be associated with it.
The rest of us very carefully didn’t mention that we might have done a teeny bit of encouraging, too, before he woke up.
As we drew closer to the capitol, Torliam began to teach me how his people interacted in a formal setting, and coach me on how to navigate their politics. “The line of Aethezriel rules, now, but the decision has never been based solely on bloodlines, though often the daughter follows the mother. Who rules is a combination of favors traded and merit.”
I frowned. “Wait. Daughter follows the mother? Do only women rule?”
“Not only. A few generations ago, we had a male ruler. This was before my time. But it is customary that the females lead, in the household as well as in the nation.” His jaw tightened. “Over time, and as our population has dwindled, it is becoming more widely accepted that a man may be . . . whatever he wants. In the village, for example, a man could take any position that a female could. Of course, there is still a small percentage who feel that it is shameful for a man such as I to be an explorer and historian.”
“I’m pretty sure this is the first time you’ve ever admitted that Estreyer might have something wrong with it, besides the Sickness,” I said. “You know, Earth had the civil rights movements long ago.”
“Your people die so quickly, it is no wonder change can be enacted in shorter spans of time,” he said, seeming affronted. He proceeded to drill me on the different types of bows I might need to use, nitpicking every little mistake.
Zed thought this was funny, and came over to learn how to bow with me.
Unfortunately, when I collapsed to the ground, cradling my head in my hands, it meant he and Torliam both saw.
I pressed down on temples, trying to stop myself from releasing my claws, resisting the urge to smash my head against the ground. “It’s the maggots.” I gasped as, stars floated around my eyes from the combination of pressure on my skull and the fact that I’d been holding my breath.
“Sam!” Zed screamed.
“No, no,” I said, groaning. “I don’t need him. There’s nothing he can do.”
Torliam knelt beside me, grabbing my hands, and pulling them away from my head. “It is the God of Knowledge.”
The others were running toward us. I realized suddenly that the high-pitched keening sound was coming from my own throat, and stopped. This was not the way. I needed to keep it together. At first, I’d thought the flashbacks were just some PTSD. If anyone had earned some, I had. B
ut as it continued, I became increasingly certain that something was very wrong.
"Were you singing?" Zed asked. "You have a horrible voice, Eve. Please refrain from making our ears bleed." He laughed at his own joke, absolutely no real humor in his voice.
I giggled. Once I started, it seemed I couldn't stop, till my laughs sounded more like sobs. My cheeks felt frozen and stiff, and when I reached up to touch them, I realized that behind the concealing rim of the coat around my eyes, I was crying.
I choked down the laughter, and stiffly scrubbed at my cheeks, letting the ice flake away inconspicuously.
Torliam spoke. “I, too, have been experiencing some . . . mental ‘flashbacks.’ His influence lingers. It is apparent that you have even less defense against him than I.”
“How do I stop it?” I gritted out. “What do I do?”
“You will have to attack his connection directly. There is a . . . Trial, of sorts, in the capitol. It is unpleasant. My people only use it in the most extreme of circumstances. But it will allow you to leave your body and enter your mind, to find the pieces of his power that he has left behind.”
“Why didn’t you mention this earlier?” I glared at him as the feeling receded and I regained some of my faculties.
“It is very unpleasant. Enough to drive someone mad. Only a few have completed it successfully, and there are no Bestowals. Surviving it intact is considered a gift enough on its own.”
I looked at him and saw what he wasn’t saying. He did not want to attempt this pseudo-Trial. “Is there no other way?”
“None that I know of. Not to remove a mental infestation directly from a god.”
“Well then we’d better hurry up,” I said. “Knowledge could be watching everything that we do with his little maggots.”
Torliam paled.
Chapter 28
Do I fear the sleepless nights?
You have no idea how long the dark lasts when you cannot close your eyes to it.