Merryweather's unruly mop of blond hair made for an easy target against the dirt-ridden velvets of his apparel. Dark shadows cast by the toppling mountains combined with volcanic changes to the landscape to mark his exodus as the one flash of gold in purgatory. He was like a phoenix, and true to the legends, Merryweather was reborn. He bolted across the shattering terrain with a total disregard for his own safety, laughing, always laughing. Well he might, too, for although he was fast, very fast, he was not fast enough and it would've served him well at the end to have one last bit of fun before I killed him. My blood boiled, exploded through my veins like molten lava, the red mist of mind more wall of fire.
Yet, Merryweather ran free and unencumbered, whilst I still held Sunyin's deceased form; I would not part with him. The monk's presence hampered my abilities, and the Britannian's coattails remained tantalising in their fluctuating closeness. Every time I reached for him, my burdened self would stumble or skip to avoid some obstruction and the dandy would elude my grasping fingers. Like the proverbial fairy he was, Merryweather proved elusive to the point of ethereal; I could no more secure a grip upon him than I might a dream, or in his case, a nightmare. And, so it went.
If I hadn't known better, I should have said he teased me in his cowardly retreat, sought to further torment me in both word and deed. Merryweather's every trailing giggle antagonised and infuriated, his bellowed apologies stank of falsity. How I hated him, despised his briar patch words twisting and contorting, jabbing and spiking. His former declaration echoed through my every thought and with it questions: why had he lied; why had he manipulated; what reason was there for what he did if ever there was a reason to what he did? Experience said he was nought but a lunatic with lunatic ways, but it still hurt. Even daggers cast by madmen sometimes found their target.
Merryweather did not look back, not once. He did not pause, for he knew I'd be there. He did not tarry, for I'd have set upon him. He was right, I would have. I prayed for it.
We ran our endless race of cat and mouse through a gallery of shadows. Wherever I looked, my parents' faces loomed from the darkness wide-eyed and brimming with contempt. No matter how hard I tried, I could not shed them They teased at my mind like a brush through tangled hair, tugging and pulling at my troubled psyche. Merryweather's words had hinted at unknown truths but implied much more. The thought my parents not only lived, but were as mixed up in affairs as even the Marquis was a dagger to the heart. Everything suggested they lived, but I knew it an untruth. They were dead, weren't they? No parent could hide such a thing from a child. That would've been inhuman if we'd been human.
Merryweather's words meant something, though, and I intended to find out what. He would regret making me remember, it was my least favourite pastime.
* * *
The land disintegrated, the upheaval, unlike anything ever witnessed. I skipped across rivers of burning magma using the selfsame stepping stones as Merryweather, tracing his every footstep for fear of losing my bane. A glimpse of twin, white blurs, shooting stars sent to earth, indicated my Nordic companions flanked me. The two broke the monotony of the ruby and black world in startling fashion. Reluctant to overtake, which I felt sure they could, the two albino royals held back. Whose sake that was for, I was unsure.
For mile after mile of endless burning earth, hour upon hour of turbulent, surging planet, we ran. The planet sought to stop us with huge cracks and bangs, hisses and cataclysmic thundering. Wracked by pain the world contorted and split asunder, and I wondered if indeed we'd reached the end of our time, something that once seemed unthinkable. Worst yet, I tired. I had not fed in the longest time and my body remembered the fact. With each passing mile, I grew more fatigued. With every ticking second, my weakness multiplied. I hoped upon hope that Merryweather tired too. In fact, it was the injustice of him appearing not to which drove me to ever greater exertions. The drain on my body, however, was nothing compared to that on my mind. As the world became a bloodied haze, the bleary lines of definite and disaster stole upon me like a coffined sleep, a necessary eventuality. One moment Merryweather danced and hopped like a fire sprite or antagonistic pixie, the next he had vanished and I pursued a dream.
I continued in my semi-daylight daze on instinct, the hunt still flowing through my veins. If I still carried Sunyin, I could not have said; he was a weightless feather awaiting the wind. Despite a world running with the colours of fire, ruby and red, tangerine and sulphur yellow, I never imagined my mind able to have faded to a grey fog, but it did. The moment that fog became a veil of night, I fell.
I tumbled for the longest time, head over heels like the rampant waters of the Rhine. I fell without a final grounding, the air tugging at my shirt in turbulent updrafts, my movements easy and unrestricted. In spiralling freedoms, I plummeted, then almost as soon as it'd started, my locomotion ceased in an earth-shattering full stop.
I sensed damage, but did not feel it, heard a cacophony of chaos, but could not place it, until distilling a semblance of the familiar in the ruby-coated mess I was.
“You require blood, Jean.”
“I will not drink of you,” I hissed, as steam escaping the pot. I batted Aurora away but only made contact with air.
“And, I cannot spare it, my friend.”
“If Grella is with you, I shall not partake of him either.” My sight was impaired, hazy, as I twisted towards the sound of Aurora's voice.
“He is, and he cannot spare it either.”
“Then, I pass on from this world,” I said, my breaths ragged in their expulsion. “Just promise me one thing.”
“What?”
“Hurt Merryweather.”
“That is not what the monk would wish.”
The talk of Sunyin made me smile despite the pain. “No, he would not,” I whispered.
“Then drink of him.”
“What!”
“Drink of him.”
“No.”
“You must, Jean.”
“I will not.”
“It is what he would wish and you know it's true. It is destiny that he is here with you now, my friend, in your time of need. The monk would say the same. You are my best friend, my one friend, and I do not want to lose you. I cannot lose you. You have brought colour to a colourless existence, Jean, and I do not wish it to fade.”
There was a desperation to Aurora's voice that did not sit right with my soul, or what suffused my hollow interior.
“He was my friend,” I gasped. “He was my friend.”
“And what is friendship if not to make sacrifices for one another. His sacrifice is to give you life and, in turn, for you to guarantee it for his children. They are out there, Jean. You know this. They are out there, and will be more lost and alone than ever.”
Aurora's plea stalled my departure. The faces of the many who were one floated through my charcoal world. I saw the monks crunching through the gravelled Zen gardens of Shangri-La lost in the mists of some strange place. They knew their father had passed. They did not say it, yet it showed in their every laboured step. Yet even in the face of desolation, of a loss greater than I could've ever imagined, they tried to smile. So many simple smiles assailed my dying thoughts I could not bring myself to see them frown again, their father's memory deserved better.
And so it was that the neck forced to my fangs was that of man, of a true man, a real man, the one man, a human. His throat was soft even in death and I revelled in that tactile moment. Fangs built to kill punctured his skin, Aurora's hand forcing my head down, down, down. I drank with an unquenchable thirst; I could've drained a crimson ocean. And although he was long departed, too long, in truth, I felt Sunyin, he who had changed me, change me further. In those fractions of a misspent lifetime, I knew what the world of the originals, those vampires whose blood we Eternals inherited, was. As my once friend's genetically modified blood flowed into my sluggish veins pumping new breath into decaying lungs, I felt what he'd felt: loneliness, the pain of seclusion, and that which
he always emanated, love. All that Sunyin had been, seen, lived, streamed through me, and all I gave in return was two small holes. His children would receive more befitting recompense that I promised.
* * *
“Is he…”
“No, brother.”
“Good. That is good,” I heard Grella say. “Can he stand?”
“I'm not sure,” Aurora replied. “He looks…”
“He looks what?”
“Different.”
“You think him altered?”
“I believe the answer to that is yes.”
Despite that which flowed within and my desire to express it in leaps and bounds, I practised restraint. I opened my eyes to a vista of uncertainty. Sunyin's prone body lay across my arms like an unshaken sheet, ruffled and unclean. His milk-white eyes remained covered, a small blessing, his face relaxed in calm repose. He was the same good man, wrinkled and reflective, just with an Eternal's stillness of breath. If ever I'd seen a soul at peace, it was his. Like a sleeping child, I hooked the old monk up in my arms, his head cradled against my chest and got to my feet.
“How do you feel?” Aurora asked concern etched across her face. “That was quite a fall.”
“I feel…”
“Yes.”
“I feel…”
“What?”
“Like a new man,” I grinned. “If even an atom of he who I hold slipped through my system, I would be a better person, but I contain everything.”
“So, you feel good, even after that?” Aurora pointed to our rear.
“Cliffs!” I said dumbfounded at the sheer gigantic scale of the rock wall.
“Yes, new and higher than ever they were,” said Grella, inclining his head in a gesture which made me feel special in a way I did not warrant.
“Are you sure you feel well?” Aurora asked again, as she squinted at me.
“I feel better than well, I feel enlightened. Although, I am less so as regards our bearings.”
“I believe we stand in the basin of what was once the Baltic Sea,” said Grella.
“Shouldn't there be more water, as in us beneath it?”
“Yes.”
“Ah, that's cleared that up then.”
“We stand at world's end, Jean, where anything is possible, though I'll confess even I did not expect a drained sea.”
“What was not drained has steamed away,” Aurora added. “Look at the mist, the molten rivulets.”
Grella nodded his agreement.
“Are you sure?” I said, a touch startled by their assumptions. “The Baltic Sea was so far from Hvit and there was so much of it.”
“I believe it is so, you were moving rather fast. I almost had to sprint to keep up with you.”
“Was that a joke, Aura? Did your brother just make a funny?”
Aurora just shrugged her mind elsewhere.
There was a great hiss then, the ground shaking as though shuddering in a bad dream.
“Aftershock,” said Grella unperturbed.
It only lasted seconds, but once the grumbling settled, the pockets of steam subsided. What they revealed almost bowled me off my feet.
“What is all this?” I gasped looking at the bottom of a littered sea floor.
Anybody that had attained an age of several centuries, more in Grella's case, could ascertain to having seen a few things, but nothing I'd ever witnessed prepared me for the carnage of rusted metal and broken concrete scattered all around. It was as though a pantheon of gods had had a clean out and thrown their toys from the heavens to land in a clatter of tangled junk. The stuff must have laid buried for millennia unseen to Eternal eyes, not that any would've cared to look.
“Is this humanity?” I finally managed
“It is the remains of humanity, Jean. It is the remains of real life, or so I presume,” Grella said.
I took a pace forward careful to not lose balance on the squelching sea floor. Great chasms divided the sea basin over which the artefacts of history teetered in the most precarious fashions. Where the ground was more solid, pools of steaming water stood hinting at shallow depths. Whether they were or were not, I dared not venture to risk.
“Merryweather?” I asked more in hope than expectation.
“Fled,” Aurora replied.
“Where?”
She pointed in a direction I figured south-east.
“Too much to hope the sea collapsed on him.”
“His footprints would suggest otherwise.” Grella stooped to touch Merryweather's imprints.
His passage was marked by pooled footsteps that aimed straight through the heaped past. I followed them like a hawk until the grey fogs condensed around them swallowing his memory.
“Are you still with me?” I asked without turning to my companions.
“We are,” the two said without hesitation.
“Good, because that's the way we're going.”
* * *
The shapes that rose from the cloying mist, where heat had evaporated and rifts had swallowed the sea, looked familiar, yet different in their subtleties. What might have first been a mansion set upon the sea was, in fact, a boat just of extraordinary proportions. I thought it the colours of the things that threw my mind to misrepresentation; forms were so hard to discern when covered with the same silted coats. Some of the misshapen monstrosities rose high above us almost to the height of the newly formed cliffs, others lay sprawled across the seabed.
“This seems a strange way to store things.”
“They are not stored, but lost, Aura.”
“How could you misplace such behemoths?”
“I know not, but their haphazard dispersal hints at an uncaring eye.”
“That is true. Unless they became bored and discarded them.”
“Why build such things to go to waste? It's such a waste,” Grella scowled.
“Ah, succinct as ever,” I said.
“One tries,” Grella replied.
I watched as he strode off across the pooled basin never once casting so much as a splash of mud upon his garments, so light of foot was he. Not that it would have disturbed his crimson and white apparel more than they already were.
Aurora followed her brother, head casting from side to side. She puzzled over everything from the smallest sludge-covered twig to the largest tree trunk upturned in false life. She gave the same detailed attention to minutiae, as she did to the largest of objects, nothing escaped her hawklike eyes.
I trudged after the pair reluctant to make haste, for the direction we headed in, Gorgon's realm, was bottom of all my places of disinterest. However, if Merryweather thought his chosen destination to deter me, he was wrong. I seethed at the mere thought of the fleeing dandy, though, I tried to hide it. Even the old monk's presence laid across my arms as he was did little to appease my hunger to exact vengeance.
In truth, I'd sworn retaliation on so many that Merryweather just replaced another atop my list. Saying that, he topped it more often than all the others put together. I seemed to have accumulated a whole fraternity of people to get even with and wondered if they reciprocated my thoughts: Raphael, for his sister's demise; Serena, for the death and humiliation of her children; Chantelle, for almost killing her, an unfortunate oversight on my behalf, but of all of them Merryweather had the least. In fact, he had no reason at all other than my stringing him up for the sun to toast, and even that ended up in his favour. He was a conundrum, an enigma, but one I would solve.
“Ooh,” I heard Aurora gasp. “Is it not wondrous?”
I rounded a large sheet of rusted steel to see the two Nordic royals gazing up at a most unusual object. The thing, two tree trunks conjoined at three-quarter height, stuck out of the ground where it appeared to have become embedded.
“What is it, do you think?”
“A cross of some gigantic proportions,” I replied.
“I wonder what it was for?”
“Who can say!” I regarded some rotting bindings at the end of the cros
sbeam but remained unenlightened.
“It is better that you both not know,” spoke Grella. He turned his back on the thing and mumbled, “At times, I forget how young the two of you are.”
“Your point being?” I grumbled.
“Some things are best forgotten.”
“But if we do not understand our past, we can never plan for our future,” Aurora said in her dispassionate way.
“We have no future.”
“We all have futures, they just end at some point,” I replied.
The faintest twitch of humour played at the edge of Grella's lips, his head spinning back our way. The Nordic king sighed for no apparent reason, his mighty chest heaving like an inflated balloon, and pointed to the gigantic cross. “That was used to kill our kind.”
“How?” Aurora and I blurted.
Grella shook his head, scooped up some water to rub on his clothes, realised them beyond cleaning, and sighed again. “The balance of life was much different in bygone times. Humans were once the dominant force, not Eternals. They would hunt, catch, and then string our kind up to those damned crosses. They would affix us in place with iron pins hammered through wrist and ankle and then drive a stake through our hearts. The crosses were weighted and dropped into the middle of the closest sea. In truth, I am surprised there are not more. The humans believed the cold, watery grave of eternity a suitable burial for their nemeses.”
“That is barbaric!” Aurora wrinkled her nose as though having eaten something sour.
I agreed but remained silent. I'd never heard Grella string so many words together and yearned for more.
“It was barbaric, mostly pointless, too. No shackle could hold an Eternal lord. However, it succeeded in milking out the weak and the careless.”
“Why a stake?” Aurora asked.
“The humans believed it the sole way to kill an Eternal.”
“But that is ridiculous.”
“Better them to think it than realise we could be massacred with almost the same ease as they.”
Into Eternity (The Eternals Book 3) Page 6