by L M Adams
Jaevia’s knives are done in the design of the lioness… of Bastet. “What’s the difference in Sekhmet and Bastet?”
“Only place, yes? Same energies – Sekhmet is the She of the North. Bastet the She of the South.”
“Are they enemies?”
“They are a mother daughter pair. Perhaps, competitive?”
Jae unsheathes one of the knives and turns on Lucien, purple fire in her eyes, “Competing over what?”
“Wench?”
“Malia, the Sekhmet… has anyone asked you to mate with her?”
“What?” Lucien asks shocked.
I clear my throat and step back to get out of the line of fire.
“Well I heard from Nyrobi that the new Raja is supposed to bed Malia, the strongest of the Sekhmet, and give her a daughter – so do you plan on bedding her?”
“Wench… I have not been asked…”
“Did you know about this?”
“Wench, that tradition…”
Jaevia holds the blade to Lucien’s crotch, she presses the sharp edge against his sack, “You won’t be participating in it because you won’t be fucking her, will you?”
Lucien swallows and nods, “I won’t be fucking her.”
Jaevia smiles taking the blade away from his man bits and stands up on her tiptoes kissing his chin, “Thank you for the weapons, I love them.”
“You are… welcome.”
She turns putting the knife away and goes back to the desk and her spell book as if all is normal and she didn’t just threaten to chop off her husband’s dick.
Lucien looks at me, eyes wide, still standing stock still… probably too terrified to move.
Well, I guess that’s that… but then, we always knew she was batshit crazy. And I thought he was the jealous type.
Fuck, Jae.
140
Jack – The Stolen Souls
Getting the weapons was a nice diversion, but soon enough the downtrodden energy returns. Nothing is going to distract Lucien from the fact that his father isn’t coming and sent no word to him for the reason why.
Lucien is now realizing how badly a son needs the love of his father too. And how badly it hurts when that love is withheld. Yes, he grew up without a father, has never met the man before yesterday. His father was an abstract idea, nothing truly real or tangible. But now his father is real, and in the same building and still cannot bother to come and visit his son.
That kind of rejection cuts deeply.
We wait and we wait… I feel that sadness within Lucien slowly turn to anger in the link, the energy prickles along my skin setting my teeth on edge.
Worse, I’m getting hungry. They were right, no connection to Vayrá means I need food more than they do. Thinking about food makes my stomach growl, “Sorry,” I murmur.
The sound of my hunger makes Lucien’s rage finally explode and he stands slamming down his book, “He will not do this to me,” Lucien seethes.
Jae and I glance at one another and stand up as Lucien turns striding for the door.
Fuck. We run after him, he’s walking fast, his long legs stretching as he all but marches to the tower of Apedemak.
“Lucien,” I start, “calm, Lucien.”
“I am calm,” he growls low.
I look to Jae, “Neoma, now.”
Lucien turns on us, “You will not try and stop me!” He roars, bringing us up short.
“Luey, you cannot become unhinged.”
“I am not unhinged, I am angry – for once let me be angry! Let me be hurt if I wish it so!”
I sigh and look at Jaevia, she nods. “No fire, Lucien,” I look back at him, “Not even a little.”
He nods curtly and turns back around taking up the march to Apedemak’s tower.
We reach the tower, again, there is no door to the tower. The wall is solid with wood carvings fitting together perfectly. The golden Eye of Ra is in the center, two gold spear soldiers stand on either side of the eye.
Lucien strides forward and they form an X with their spears across the eye. The intent is clear – you shall not pass.
I guess Lucien isn’t really the Raja after all.
“If he can open the path, let him pass.” A voice sounds out.
We turn and see an older soldier, he’s wearing a black shendyt and black sandals like the gold spears, but he has no helmet or spear… and his body has been badly burned. Dark skin pulls oddly as he moves, walking towards us. The scars run down the side of his face, neck… his chest and stomach, and disappear into his shendyt.
“Jabari,” Lucien whispers.
The man nods, “My Raja.”
Lucien looks to us, “This is Jabari, the strongest of my mother’s soldiers. The man who trained me when I was a young son, until I… left home.” Lucien says putting it delicately.
The serious looking fellow nods his head towards Jaevia and me and then turns those piercing eyes on the gold spears, he’s angry, I’m not sure why. The soldiers withdraw their spears and stand straight, looking forward, impassively.
Jabari nods towards the wall, encouraging Lucien.
Jaevia comes over and takes my hand in hers as Lucien goes to that wall. Her feelings mirror my own – something isn’t right here. Something just isn’t right, and I think I know what it is.
Lucien reaches up to the eye of Ra and presses his palm into the center. Lucien’s hand bursts into red flame as he calls on his power. I watch the writing and pictures on the wall glow with red… and begin clicking, tuning.
He stands back as the eye of Ra folds back into the wall and doorway appears.
Jae squeezes my hand as we walk forward into the tower… into the realm of the dead.
Jabari follows us into the tower and the doorway closes behind us. The tower is dark, only a bit of light filtering in from the small window above the towering statue of Ra with the seal of souls embedded in his chest.
No fire along the edges of the wall, no burning magic of Apedemak – there is nothing here… but memory. It’s even cold here, an unnatural cold… the chill of a corpse on a stone slab.
Lucien turns around, confusion filling his features as he looks to Jabari.
The old soldier walks forward and places a hand on Lucien’s shoulder, “Henenu’s heart was in the right place – he wished for you to see what was, before you bore witness to what is.”
“I do not understand Jabari,” Lucien whispers, “I felt my father’s majic, where is it?! Where is he?!”
“Among the living and the dead,” the old soldier whispers and moves away from Lucien, going to the foot of the large statue of Ra, “Come Hari, it is time.”
Jabari kneels, pressing a stone in the floor. The sound of stone grinding against stone vibrates through the room as a portion of the floor slides back revealing those same stairs down into the depths.
Lucien walks forward slowly, hesitantly. I think part of him wishes to live in the lie that Henenu made for him than face the truth.
But Lucien isn’t a coward, even if in this moment I think he wants to be.
I squeeze Jaevia’s hand as we follow him to the stairs and down into the earth where the dead things live.
141
Jack – The truth of Apedemak
Jabari leads us down another stair, a stair that wasn’t here when we took this path out onto the Walk of Gods and it was filled with red fire.
There are a few torches, but the light is dim, the fire doing little to beat back the darkness or the cold.
I inhale sharply as I feel my skin prickle and my connection to Vayrá lights up with power.
“Your father does not leave these caverns but for the Solstice of each year – for twelve hours.”
There was never going to be any picnic. Lucien doesn’t say anything, he just follows Jabari into the darkness and tries his best to not feel anything.
Jabari grabs a torch from the wall that burns with blue black flame instead of yellow and orange. He leads us from the stairs into a cha
mber as dark as a starless night… the flickering of Jabari’s torch our only light, “Stay here.” He murmurs.
I watch the flame as Jabari walks over to the wall and holds the torch low. A ledge ignites wildly, running down the length of the wall, illuminating a ramp that leads deeper and deeper into the earth.
The wall has more writing, cuneiform, more blocks carved into puzzle pieces – they are stone here instead of wood. To our right is a massive open cavern. The light doesn’t reach into its depths and I cannot see the far wall, but I can hear running water… a might river.
“The hole that was left when we tore her heart in two,” Jabari murmurs.
Jabari turns, “Come.” He leads us down the ramp. “Apedemak, Zahra, and Anubis were the last scion allowed to remain on our earth, charged with one task – to see to the splitting of the worlds completed…”
Jabari tells the tale, the same one told to me by Sepa in Saabir’s night chamber.
After the accord was struck, natural portals grew up from the depths of the heart of Gaia. Massive pillars of black obsidian, or massive slabs of gray stone, and caves that went down, down, down into the earth.
“Like this one?” Lucien asks and Jabari nods.
The mass exodus began, supernaturals were herded under the watchful eyes of the all-powerful therians, forced to go to Ra’suá.
Pictures showing the battles mimic the ones shown in the lion’s den. The mighty Apedemak and his loyal soldiers as they go into the secret places of the fae kings and queens, gathering the high and the low all alike – from redcaps to pixies and everything between. If they had to, they herded them at the tips of their blades… but they would go.
“Dragons,” Jae whispers as we get to a portion of the wall carved and painted with pictures of the mighty beasts.
“They slaughtered them as well,” I whisper.
“How do you know?”
I shake my head no, not wanting to bring up my meeting with Sepa just yet.
Jabari doesn’t go into the relationship between Anubis and Apedemak made in blood and war… instead he tells Lucien of the love between Apedemak and Zahra.
“When the portals closed, the majic in the lands began to fade. Creatures like your mother and father still held much of their old magic, as did others… others like Henenu.”
Hundreds of years passed in the blink of the eye for Apedemak and his love Zahra… they were able to share small bits of their majic still with their people. Yet, soon enough, this changed.
“The people just didn’t worship the old ways like they used to. And without worship, what is a god?”
“Worship?” Jaevia asks and Jabari looks back over his shoulder, “What is the point in being a god with no one to worship you? The scion has no choice… but man… man does, and it makes our worship taste of nectar to your tongues… you know this daughter of Ishtar.”
Jae looks away nodding.
Jabari turns back around and keeps walking, Lucien glances at us before following.
“To keep the people’s love, they began to use forbidden majics.”
He stops at a portion of the wall and holds up the torch, it shows a man and a woman holding disks in their hands…
“The seals,” I whisper stepping closer. “Blood, Time, Spirit, Reason, Death, Life….”
“… and Power,” Jaevia finishes, the seal of Ishtar. “Why was it forbidden?”
“The point in the splitting of the worlds is to have one place without gods, magic or its influence and another where it could be controlled. To use the seals here dishonors the purpose of the splitting.”
“So why did they do it?”
“Because the time for the ascension of the gods had come, but the Kindred had not let those spirits free.”
Jabari explains that Astarte, the last Queen of Ishtar, decided to use her remaining power to bless Apedemak and Zahra’s union… bless them with a child… a new god.
“Lucien,” Jae whispers and Jabari nods.
“But something went wrong,” he keeps walking.
Jabari explains that one night there was a loud argument in the palace between Apedemak and Zahra. She wished to leave him, it was her right, no man and no woman is forced to remain joined.
But Apedemak didn’t understand, why wasn’t she happy with him? He had done all things for her joy.
Zahra would not relent, she must go, she would go to the lands south to the Bastet’s.
He cried on his knees to her as she used the mark upon her neck to force him to swear to never seek out Lucien, and to wait until his son returned to him.
“He gave her his sword… promised she could always come back, always he would wait for her and never love another,” Lucien whisper reading the story on the wall, his voice deep with emotion… lost in the sands of time.
Jabari nods, “She fled with it in the night with you heavy in her belly because of what she saw within the fickle river of time.” Jabari sighs, “She was tempted, wished to know what would become of her son.” He turns to look at us, “Do not think less of Zahra for succumbing to her temptation… she looked too deeply.”
I can’t help but think that if she hadn’t – Lucien wouldn’t have been sent to the future.
He turns back around leading us further into the earth, “Zahra leaving Apedemak was the beginning of the end.”
The power began fading even more rapidly. Even the therians could no longer change, no more could the strongest men of Atum turn to beasts.
“But then who killed…” I start and stop.
“A moment, Prince of Blood,” Jabari asks, and I nod.
There was discourse between the peoples that spread through the lands. For a son and daughter belong to all. Zahra has broken faith… she had stolen a son from a father.
There was a hole in Apedemak’s heart, and the evil began to creep in. That woman should not rule, that we should use the seals to force women to give us more female babies so that all men could have a woman of their own… Apedemak, he began having dark thoughts, he is an ancient thing, his sanity always a hair away from falling apart.
Jabari shakes his head, “I do not know what frame of mind he was in when he decided to use the Seal of Souls to raise the therians once more… but he did it and his heart was dark when he whispered the words. The forked tongue was there waiting in his breast for a chance to strike.”
“He did a dark thing, Hari,” Jabari stops and turns looking at us.
Lucien stands, his hands balled in fists, not a bit of magic coming from him. He’s folded in on himself. I’ve only seen him this way once before – the day we told him the therians killed his mother.
Jabari looks at us with such aching sadness in his eyes, “Your father used the Seal of Souls to resurrect the spirits of the therians. He wished to bring Zahra to heel; terrified if he faced her himself, he would fall sway to the power of the mark on her neck and the love in his heart.”
But what he resurrected using the seal… the seal Anubis gifted him with… those creatures were not of the people, they were of the nightmares of the people – the darkest reflection of their hearts.
“… He’s been paying for that mistake since. After… that night, he lost his majics, they are no more. He has tried to give rise to the majics again. Encouraging the people to pray to the gods of old, to take up the ways of majic – but no child since you, Hari, has been scion. There are no children born with majics any longer. Your return…” he looks at me and Jae, “that all of you returning… is the reward for their faithfulness and a herald to the gods rising once more. But I know the truth…”
“What?” Lucien growls.
“You do not belong here, Hari. Your mother sent you to the future for a reason, and that’s where you should have stayed.”
142
Jack – Ghost
Lucien doesn’t say anything as we continue down the ramp into the depths. I’m not sure he’s capable of saying anything else.
I keep studying the wall, the p
ieces don’t fit together right anymore. Some spots a design starts and stops. Some parts seem like a hammer was taken to it.
“Look,” I whisper to Jae.
“I noticed,” she murmurs.
The pictures start turning darker and darker… nightmarish things. Great monsters eating people, bloody battles with detached limbs as the people fall to the sword of the Nephilim. Pictures of beasts raping women and slaughtering babies… dark, dark stuff…
Yet the deeper we go the more right I begin to feel, I feel the power I’ve always known in my heart stretch beneath my skin… the power of the nosferatu, the power of the cursed ones.
Jabari finally stops and stands to the side, a bit brighter of a light is up ahead, glowing yellow and red.
There’s a man there, on his knees, he’s carving a small square stone, whispering to himself.
“Aye the sun is dark but there are no more apples to spare!” He screams over his shoulder and then turns back to his chiseling of the stone… unaware of our presence… or the presence of the entire world – he is lost in his own mind.
He’s wearing only a black shendyt, long gray locs loose and shielding his face, the ends pooling on floor. I look at this man, a ghost of what he was just yesterday and know a simple truth… the king is mad.
“His power is gone, nothing stronger than being able to light a candle. God powers tear apart mortal flesh, destroys a mortal mind. When I brought news of your mother’s death the god-king’s mind snapped.” Jabari turns around looking at Lucien, “His mind lives outside of time, outside of the confines of life and death – he wishes to search for your mother’s spirits in the sea of the dead, but Anubis closed the gates to him.”
Lucien shakes his head no, “I felt his power yesterday, we all saw it…”
Jabari shakes his head no, “You saw the memory of power, a trick of time and spirit…”
I sigh, “They are using the nosferatu to keep open the gates between this world and the Kindred, they are using them to part the veil so they can draw power from the gods that slumber under the sunstone of Ra’suá. They are using the nosferatu as a conduit…”