by Lucia Ashta
Grand-mère looked up at me. In her eyes I saw my worst fears confirmed. I saw that my fervent prayers as we rode over here hadn’t been answered. I believed I saw death reflected in those green eyes I thought I’d never see again.
The words I knew I’d have to get out eventually froze on my lips. Not even breath seemed to cycle within the suddenly claustrophobic space. The cave grew smaller and darker. It pressed out the light as surely as it seemed to press out the life from the two bodies on the ground.
Gertrude shifted against me in her sleep and roused me from my stupor. “I—Is he dead?” I asked those green eyes so much like Gertrude’s and my own. Ordinarily, courtesy would have persuaded me to inquire about Sylvia’s health as well as Marcelo’s. But in that moment, all I could think of was the pallor of those lips I kissed. I felt as if I could still taste what those lips tasted like and as if I could still feel their full softness. Would those be memories relegated to those the living held of the dead?
Staring at Marcelo’s split on the ground, I completely forgot that another Marcelo stood to my right. It seemed impossible to think that the man on the dirt before me could live on when the Grim Reaper was ready to claim his body. The idea of splitting a person was still novel to me. I kept finding myself surprised to remember that there were two Marcelos now instead of one.
“Non, ma chérie. The split isn’t dead.” A rush of relief whooshed out of me before I realized there was more. “Not yet at least. There’s very little time.”
I half choked on the relief I tried to suck back in and the desperation that fought to rise at the same time. In the end what came out was a very unladylike snort. I didn’t care. I was once again frozen, staring at a sight I hoped never to see. The sobs were stuck in my chest cavity. Like the rest of us, they seemed to wait for the inevitable.
Marcelo approached his other half as if there were no hurry, as if there was nothing left to be done, and one of the sobs within me dislodged. But Marcelo didn’t look up at the sound. Nor did Mordecai. And Grand-mère broke the gaze she shared with me.
“Is that it then? Is there nothing we can do?” Marcelo said.
“There’s always something we can do, my son. The question is whether it is the wise thing to do,” Mordecai said.
“Hmmm,” Marcelo said. “And how is Sylvia? Will she make it?”
“I believe there’s a very good chance that she will. She’s weak and it might be some time still until she’s ready to waken, but I think she’s strong enough to pull out of it. There will be damage, no doubt, and it’s likely that it’ll be permanent. She has taken on a lot of darkness and she’s but one firedrake.”
Marcelo nodded and Grand-mère reached out a hand to smooth across Sylvia’s head. Sylvia didn’t move. Marcelo returned his scrutiny to his devastated split. Without looking at his mentor, he said, “What will happen if I do it?”
“I don’t know, son. I don’t know of anyone who’s done what you propose to do.”
Another beat passed, long enough for me to realize that everyone in that cave probably knew more about what was going on than I did. But then, what was new about that?
“What will happen if I don’t do it?”
“The split will die.”
“And what will happen to me if my split dies? Do we know exactly?”
Mordecai shook his head. “We don’t, not exactly. Splits are undertaken rarely because of their great risks. But you know that already. There aren’t many cases of something like this happening. In fact, there are none that I know of where this precise situation has occurred.”
“Will I be able to continue living?”
Mordecai reached out for the split’s hand and stared into the haunted face. Several moments passed by peacefully, betraying the fact that urgency surrounded us and that death might announce itself at any moment. Finally, Mordecai looked back up at those raven black eyes that I loved. “That depends on what you mean by ‘living.’ I imagine that the physical functioning of your body will continue much as it always has, although you will likely be weaker. You might fall ill more often and take longer to recover. I don’t know what will happen of your life purpose if you are to become only half of who you were meant to be. It’s also possible that your mind won’t work as well as it used to. You may not be as sharp as you once were.”
Marcelo started but concealed it. I wondered if he’d already noticed some of the differences Mordecai mentioned, and they’d only get worse once the life force was completely gone from his split.
Mordecai noticed also. “Whatever you have already experienced will only become more pronounced afterward. And it may also become worse as time passes. There’s no real way to know.”
“And what will happen if I do it?”
Mordecai shrugged. “Again, we can’t be certain. The Magical Council has limited so much of this dark magic. I warned them that it was dangerous to prohibit something in this way. Those that would disobey the laws would become stronger, yet those that obeyed would be at a disadvantage, prey to a magic they wouldn’t know how to defend themselves against,” he said before he realized what he was saying.
“I suspect that you’ll take on the full force of the darkness that infects your split, yet you’ll do so with a strength your split doesn’t possess anymore.”
Marcelo crouched down and reached out a tentative hand as if he were afraid to touch his other half.
“I’ll do it,” Marcelo said and touched the back of his hand to a cold, ashen cheek.
“You could die,” Mordecai whispered.
“I know.”
“But you’ll do it anyway?”
“Wouldn’t you?” Marcelo asked.
Mordecai nodded with the sadness of three-hundred-and-seventeen-years. “I suppose I would.”
“Should I do it now?”
“Well, there is very little time. If you are to do it, you must do it before the split passes onto death. As you very well know, once a person is dead, we shouldn’t mess with him. Whatever part of the person can come back to us is always dark and the ultimate effect is always terrible, a price too high to pay.”
I remembered that Mordecai, with all his incredible skill, wouldn’t even consider interfering with his brother’s death. There were some things worse than death, and life as an undead was one of them.
Marcelo moved closer to his split.
“Are you certain, son? Have you thought this through?”
“Of course I’m not and of course I haven’t.”
Mordecai and Grand-mère nodded in understanding. Intelligence and experience could prepare you for some things, but they couldn’t prepare you for some of the most important things in life—or death.
Marcelo settled himself on the ground between his split and Sylvia’s body. “Will it hurt?”
“I don’t know, son. I have never split myself. You have.”
“No, that’s not what I mean. Will the darkness hurt me?”
“Oh, of course it will try. But you’re strong enough, my son, you always have been. If you keep true to yourself, you can defeat this darkness. You must remember who you are though, at all times.”
Marcelo nodded and closed his eyes. He didn’t look at me one last time, nor did he look at anyone else with the intention of saying goodbye, just in case. I hoped that was a good sign.
I didn’t have a chance to prepare myself for what witnessing a split merge might look like before it began. Once it started, I couldn’t look away. Even Gertrude woke up in time to take in this rare occurrence of forbidden dark magic that was dark only because of its possible ramifications. Magic could only truly be dark if the magician’s heart was dark as he performed it.
Marcelo’s magic was both beautiful and terrifying at once and I all but forgot to worry about the outcome. Marcelo’s body and that of his split began to vibrate so intensely that they lost their solid form to a blur of what it had once been. One solid body had become two, and now two seemed to become nothing tangible at all, at
least for now.
The bodies started to shake violently, ephemeral images of the fiancé I had promised to share my life with, if there was a life we could still share. The solid forms of two bodies began to disintegrate into particles of light and sound. Every color of the rainbow, beginning with white, traversing the spectrum of light, and ending with black, shimmered and sprang from the bodies as if air or water suddenly burst from a vessel under pressure.
The light and sound tore through the bodies, devastating them, leaving behind nothing of the forms I was used to. And then, in the absence of solid bodies, the light began to coalesce. The rays began to stitch themselves together. At first, the bodies began to reveal themselves like an impressionist painting, free of the constraints of rigid lines.
As the seconds passed, counted out in the shocked silence of the observers, the image left behind all ideas of impressionism and reached for the precision of realism. It didn’t seem possible that it could achieve it, but time proved otherwise. Time proved, as it so often did, that the impossible was possible.
Marcelo started to come into focus, revealing one body where two had just been. The rays of light no longer shot out as far. They wove themselves together more tightly, creating the fabric of a human being.
Eventually, when it seemed impossible that something that held so much movement could ever still, the vibrating of Marcelo’s body slowed. Finally, it quieted entirely.
As soon as complete stillness settled over Marcelo’s body, I wanted desperately for it to be gone.
I rushed toward him with Gertrude in my arms and Sir Lancelot on my shoulder. I reached out a hand to touch him, the one that wore his promise ring.
My hand was cold with dread. Yet when I finally reached out a palm to cup Marcelo’s cheek, it met with ice. I gasped and pulled my hand back as if it had made contact with fire instead of flesh that shouldn’t be this cold if it held life.
I fell back against the ground next to the body of the man I had hoped would one day become my husband. I closed my eyes to the concerned looks and to the thought that I might become a widow before ever becoming a wife.
Chapter 4
I heard movement around me and felt Sir Lancelot and Gertrude nuzzle me in gestures of support. I didn’t open my eyes. I slouched into myself and leaned against a damp, cold wall of stone. Everything was so cold all of a sudden, as if it would never be warm again—as if I’d never be warm again.
Whether Marcelo survived this merge with his injured split or not, that one touch of his frozen skin screamed a truth at me that I couldn’t deny: He’d never be the same.
My fiancé would never be the same man I’d learned to love. The dark bat, a manifestation of the essence of darkness, that had at first infected Marcelo’s split through the one contact point on his left forearm, had now spread to the whole Marcelo. From my touch of a frigid cheek I suspected what neither Marcelo nor Mordecai suggested in their veiled discussions about the dangers of Marcelo merging with his split. Marcelo, now merged to form one person again, might never truly become whole. He might never rid himself of a darkness that dug its roots as deeply as this darkness had.
The darkness spread its tentacles to within an inch of the split’s heart. Had the darkness achieved its goal in reaching the split’s heart, it would have permanently infected the split with darkness instants before it claimed its soul in death. A death of a soul condemned to darkness was far worse than a normal death.
Grand-mère and Mordecai had been right to warn that there was little time to act. There had been so little time in fact that it seemed to be mere luck that encouraged Marcelo to act so rashly—and so quickly. Had he waited any longer to do what he did, it would have been too late, and the only remedies left would have been ones too terrible to consider.
My heart pounded in a chest cavity that felt as big and as cold as the cave. I had come so close to losing Marcelo to irreversible darkness. And now, would Marcelo’s fate be any better?
I forced my breathing to regulate. I reminded myself that my distress served no one, certainly not Marcelo. I willed the whooshing pulsing in my brain to recede so that I could hear what was being said around me.
When I finally opened my eyes, I almost laughed at myself. I wasn’t in control of my emotions. There had been too many of them in this interminable day. There had been too many instances when death of a loved one hinged on luck or circumstance or a crazy, ill-advised act of rescue, or all of them at the same time.
I wanted to laugh then, an incongruous reaction, because I’d been so fast to recoil into despair. I’d traded logic, patience, and hope for the desire to shut out what was going on around me, if only for a little while. If I could push away the facts for just a bit, then maybe I could be free of any of their devastating consequences.
When I opened my eyes, I found Grand-mère looking at me, and I smiled sheepishly. She smiled back in complete understanding. Just as it happened when I was a child, her smile soothed me. The spark of a small fire lit within me. Its welcome warmth began to spread, dispelling fear and desolation.
Grand-mère spoke, but it took me a moment to realize that her lips were moving to form sounds. “Quoi?” I said, reverting to the French she taught me as a girl without realizing that I was.
Grand-mère smiled again, more warmly this time. “He’s alive, ma chérie.”
My eyebrows shot up and I sat up away from the cavern wall.
“Yes, my darling. He lives.”
I fumbled to my feet and half-walked, half-ducked toward Marcelo’s body. Had I possessed self-awareness then, I would have certainly laughed at the sight of me waddling in a crouch with an owl perched on my shoulder and a cat in my arms. I must have looked very much like the confused witch that I was then.
But I only thought of getting to Marcelo and feeling what must be warm flesh, thrumming with life. As soon as I reached him, I touched his cheek again. And again, the cold touch of his skin startled me.
“Why is he so cold then, if he’s alive?”
“I don’t know, my child,” Mordecai said. “A merging of splits when one is infected with darkness and the other isn’t might have never happened before. I don’t know exactly how things are supposed to turn out.”
In answer to my unspoken question, Mordecai continued. “I know he’s alive because I can feel the pulsing of his blood.” He reached two fingers beneath Marcelo’s ear. “See, he’s alive.” I watched Mordecai’s fingers bounce slightly every few seconds.
“He’s weak because his split was almost dead. Now Marcelo must fight to regain the strength of his split and to reestablish the footing of light within his being. He must fight darkness while he’s at his weakest.”
“Is there anything we can do to help him?” My words were soft with compassion at an internal battle that might be no less awful just because it was inside the man. In many ways, it might be worse than a battle that could be fought through the clashing of swords and spells.
“This is a fight he needs to win on his own, my child.”
“And what if he doesn’t win?”
Mordecai met my eyes. “Then he’ll die and it’s likely that the darkness will claim his soul.” He turned his eyes back to the man that was like a son to him. “Only he can determine his fate now.”
“But that’s terrible! He’s so weak. Is there really nothing we can do to help him? How can he fight the darkness alone when he’s so burdened by the weaknesses of his split?”
“I wish there were more we could do to help, trust me. But there isn’t. He understood the risks. He knew what might happen.”
Marcelo might have understood the risks, but I had not. Marcelo and Mordecai revealed so little in their talk before Marcelo lay on the ground next to his split. And it had all transpired so fast.
“You can support him by loving him,” Mordecai said. I blushed, and the old man smiled with a warmth similar to Grand-mère’s. “Your love possesses a magic of its own. The love you share is powerful magic.”<
br />
I must have looked doubtful because Mordecai continued. “Do you remember when we were at the castle in Irele, before Washur’s dark army invaded?”
I nodded. How could I ever forget any of my time at Irele Castle? It had all been so… eventful.
“Do you remember when were in the study I shared with Albacus, and we were studying the messages of the runes?”
Again, I nodded. It’d been a comical moment, with Albacus teasing Mordecai about the lack of importance of the runes and Mordecai affirming it. I had the impression then that they had teased each other about the same things hundreds of times across the centuries. Now, they would never tease each other again.
“Do you remember what the runes said?” Mordecai didn’t wait for my answer. “They said that there was a power to the connection that you and Marcelo share with each other. The runes said this connection was important.”
I nodded. “So focus on that alone. Focus on your love for him, and on the love he has for you. Not on the fear you have for his well-being. Fear won’t help him, love will.
“It’s strong, you know?”
“What is?”
“The love he holds for you.”
“Oh.” I began to blush again, but stopped. Something grew inside me instead. Unlike past times, it didn’t take me as long to recognize what it was. Because it was growing within me, each time more, I recognized my strength for what it was. And Marcelo’s love for me only made me stronger.
“Love him, and forget about the rest. And he’ll come around, you’ll see. I’ve known Marcelo since he was a boy. He had to endure terrible things at the hand of his father and Washur’s. All those things that could have killed him, but didn’t, have only made him stronger. He’s strong enough to fight the darkness, even as weak as he is. The light has always been strong in him.”