“Stay back.”
Diaz saw Bashan’s lips move with the words, but he recognized the forceful female voice. It had followed him into his nightmares after the Blade had torn off his arm.
A red mist darkened the sky, screams of terror and pain, a warm spatter rained down on Diaz’s face, and when he touched it, his fingers came away bloody.
She was tearing the warriors apart, spear still run through her. But like she had said, the Blade would not let Nora die. It kept her on her feet while inch for inch the spear was pulled through her body until it clattered to the white stone floor. Her face a mask of fury, her mouth a snarling howl.
Diaz moved forward instinctively, and felt a lash of power across his chest, throwing him back, a stinging, searing sensation, then a warm dribble down his stomach. He clutched his arm to the wound, and knew that standing the few extra meters to the back of the crowd had probably saved his life as the ranks in front him were cut into pieces with invisible blows.
Within seconds, Bashan’s force was reduced to the handful of men shielding him.
And Diaz, propped up on one elbow, bleeding profusely now.
He stared at the thing wearing his beloved’s face, but knew it was not her.
She hadn’t even seen him, hadn’t recognized him.
Hadn’t stopped her carnage.
“Nora!” he tried calling out, but his voice was drowned out in the clamor of men weeping, screaming over their severed limbs.
He watched her turn her blood-soaked back on the crimson-spattered marble stones, on the heads staring sightlessly in her direction, on the pile of broken men. She walked away, towards the entrance to the temple.
He tried to get up, but found his legs weak and shaking from the shock.
“Nora!”
He stretched out his arm, but she had crossed the plaza and stood in front of the massive walls of Shinar. She parted the thick walls as though she were pushing apart the beaded curtains of a shepherd’s tent, and slammed them shut behind her.
* * *
Inside the temple courtyard, the wind she had stirred up outside the walls ripped off the leaves of the trees planted there. The boom of stone on stone tore them out of their carefully tended plots to reveal shriveled roots.
Nora walked into the darkness of the inner caverns, not needing any torch or flame. She could find her way by the light of the queen below her, shrouded in golden serpentine coils against the enfolding black.
A handful of other, lesser lights moved along servant passageways, a few chosen servants to wait on their queen’s needs.
No challenge on her way to the obsidian throne room, no guards.
The doors were open.
She walked into the throne room and through the large empty space. Her footsteps echoed in the corners. The throne was deserted.
Down the serpent light led her, down into the innards of the temple, down into its guts. No glamour here, no showy display of wealth, no temptation. The oldest parts of the temple were hewn like a fortress out of the rock itself. Narrow corridors without windows, slitted shafts to let in a meager ray of daylight from the upper levels.
Doors opened on small rooms left hurriedly, shattered crockery no one had had time to clear, some toppled-over furniture, trunks of clothes ransacked—their contents spewed forth.
It brought back images of her home on the Ridge the way she had seen it last, broken and left for the dead—was the Ridge really her home? Did she not live in a hut by the sea?
Nora turned another corner, down another winding staircase, and stepped into a hallway lit by a single sconce near an open door.
A woman was humming a lullaby Nora thought she had heard before, a lifetime ago.
She pressed her hand against the wood of the door to make sure it was real, that she wasn’t trapped in a dreamscape created by the Blade. The wood was smoothed by age and the handle so worn it reflected the flickering torchlight.
The light was interwoven with the writhing, twisting, golden serpents, and for a moment Nora hesitated entranced by the beauty of the light and its swaying movement.
Nora peeked in through the opening and saw a room crammed full of the most mundane things.
An overflowing basket of laundry in the corner by the door, a table that hadn’t been cleared of used dishes, a candle burned down to a stub. She saw a stool fashioned of wood and leather, a pile of books on the seat. A tapestry hanging on the wall was blackened with soot, and the floor was layered with mismatching rugs.
“Come in,” a voice dipped in honey. “I see you dawdling out there.”
Nora pushed the door fully open and crossed over the threshold.
Suranna was bustling about the back of the room where a large bed took up most of the space near the fireplace. She wore a loose linen nursing dress that hung like a tent from her normally perfect figure; her dark hair framed her beautiful face in natural waves as she arranged a number of rolled up blankets on the bed.
No crown. No jewelry. No show of power.
Nora narrowed her eyes at this woman in her messy private room.
“Take a seat, if you can find one,” Suranna said with an apologetic smile. “I’ll be with you right away.”
Nora slunk around the room, looking for a place to sit, stepping over colorful building blocks, and away from the laundry basket that stank of feces. She found a leather poof that was mostly free, shoved a crumpled shift to the floor, and sat down.
If she hadn’t been on her guard, if she hadn’t had the sense to feel the thrum of power radiating from this woman, then she might have made the mistake of thinking she had walked in on an imposter who had been given a vague impression of who she was supposed to be impersonating but didn’t know the Queen of the South personally and so made little effort to convince anyone.
Also, what looked like a massive sarcophagus set next to the bed gave it away that this wasn’t a normal room.
It was the Cauldron of Arrun, next to the Living Blade the most powerful artifact left over from the gods of lore. It bestowed eternal youth and health and beauty upon those who bathed in its milky waters. And to Nora it looked like a dark wreathing mass of smoke that made her feel like she was suffocating.
She took a deep breath to calm herself.
Suranna came towards her, holding a copper pitcher and two earthenware cups.
“Wine?” she asked with a smile, placing a cup in Nora’s hand and pouring out the red.
“I’d prefer water,” Nora answered, and with a flick of her finger, the wine changed to clear fresh water.
Suranna smirked, then poured some for herself.
“I know you’re here to kill me,” she said, taking a seat on the Cauldron’s lid, one long slender leg crossed over the other. “We’ll get to that.”
She took a sip from her cup and chuckled at Nora, who was still holding her cup.
“It’s not poison.” Her voice was laced with seduction and for a moment Nora felt the desire to believe her every word, to do whatever the lady told her to do.
She raised the cup to her lips and took a sip.
“It wouldn’t matter if it were,” she responded to the jibe.
“Because you’re the Living Blade now.”
“Yes. I am.”
“Hm.”
“You, of course, foresaw that outcome of Bashan’s quest.”
“Of course. I wouldn’t be much of a seer if I hadn’t. It’s why I set his path in motion. It’s taken me many years and cost me many people to get you here, and now that the time has come, I wonder if I should change into something more suited to the occasion, but I can’t bother to get up and look for something. Strange, isn’t it? How some things just become less important?”
They both took another sip and stared at each other over the clutter in the room.
“So, I’m curious,” Suranna said finally. “How were you imagining this to play out?”
“Well,” Nora discreetly checked the bottom of the cup for dregs of some s
ubstance. Nothing visible. “I thought I’d come here and kill you before you had a chance to talk, but that seems to have failed.”
Suranna laughed and Nora really wished she hadn’t.
“Yes, it has.”
“Because you knew I was coming and prepared accordingly, knocking me off balance with your mothering guise and the presence of that thing.” Nora pointed at the Cauldron.
Suranna set the cup down onto the Cauldron’s lid and slid off of it herself.
“I think I will change after all.”
She pointed at her loose nursing dress. Whenever she moved her arms, Nora could see a flash of her tanned skin, a full breast, and its pink nipple.
“You don’t mind?”
Nora shrugged. “It’s not like anything you wear will save you.”
“Quite right.” Suranna opened a small, ornately carved wooden trunk in the corner of the room and bent over to rake through its contents.
“I ran into some of your people along the way,” Nora said. “They still firmly believe that you’re going to raise Shinar the Fire God himself.”
“What do you believe?” Suranna asked over her shoulder. She had picked out a thin golden headband and had a length of red silk hung over her arm.
“I believe you never intended to raise your god. You just hoarded the artifacts and spun an illusion. I think you led them on in their belief that you were the spokesperson for a god to make the atrocities you caused them to commit on one another more palatable. I believe you are a murderer and a liar and a callous perverted bitch.”
“And you aren’t?” Suranna raised an eyebrow. “Look at you covered in fresh blood. You just can’t help your nature, Nora.”
“Fuck you,” Nora spat.
It was a bluff. A mind game. She scratched at the dried blood flakes on her arm and tried to recall details of the massacre in front of the temple. But she couldn’t. There was only the pain and the fury and the roar of a thousand voices in a storm cloud, and she thought she had seen Diaz from far away. Near Bashan. But she wasn’t sure.
She pressed her lips together and swallowed the aching lump in her throat.
“Rage on, my child. It’s the only thing you can do in the face of all the injustice in the world. This is the truth. And believe me. I have been around far longer than you have. Is the red too dramatic?” Suranna had slipped out of the nursing shift, and held the red silk dress against her nakedness. “Yes? No? No. I see where you got a number of things wrong but I shan’t hold it against you. You’re young and not quite as smart as your brother was, plus the Blade is tearing apart your mind. By the way, have you found your brother yet among the multitudes in there?”
She paused waiting for an answer.
Nora sighed. “Why don’t I just kill you now?” she offered. “No need to change into something nice.”
“But it’s not time yet.” Suranna smirked again, sticking her wrist through a gold snake bracelet.
“And you’ll tell me when?”
The queen donned her crown, the one with a stylized flame, and laughed in Nora’s face.
“I used to think my gift was a curse. Everywhere I looked I saw death. Everyone I met, I knew how their last seconds would be, and as a girl it frightened me. But then I saw that the foresight was in order to create purpose for those poor, pitiful people, lost children without a parent or guardian. I used what I had at my disposal to forge a path of my own through this bent and twisted world, all the time working and shaping everyday fates to become something more than they would have otherwise. Think on it. Did your stepfather die with a purpose? Did his death mean anything? You call me callous, and yet the whole world goes that way. Round and round, and everyone seeks for their own interest ahead of any other. I began to discern a pattern. I saw the endless cycle of death and rebirth the gods had inflicted upon us by making the Blade. We have been trapped, running in circles for millennia.
“And I knew that one day I’d join the dead. I couldn’t see it clearly—the future is not always set in visions. It shifts and dances like fire. But I knew I wouldn’t live forever, so I planned to make my own death the one with the most purpose. I planned to break the destructive cycle.”
While she spoke she put on more gold jewelry, re-chose her crown only to put the flame one back on her brow.
A seal ring on her thumb. A coiled necklace.
She was weaving a spell by making Nora complicit in her dressing ritual, parading her human flesh in front of Nora as if to say: see me. I too am mortal. The stretch marks around her navel, the puckered skin of her thighs and buttocks. Faint wrinkles showed in the corners of her eyes. She looked quite regular, a woman just passing her prime. A bit flustered, a bit tired. Soft tissue starting to sag.
And yet.
Nora bit her lower lip. She knew that Suranna was a master deceiver and if the queen showed off her imperfection, her blemishes and spots where before she had none, it was because she had chosen to do exactly that—she had chosen not to renew her vitality in the dark vortex of the Cauldron.
Why?
“You see? It’s like I told you nearly a year ago. You and I are not at odds. We want the same thing. We want to change the world, and to change it we realize that we need to nudge it in a new direction. Course correct. You and I know that in order for true change to happen, some things must be, well, destroyed. Isn’t that so, charcoal girl?” Suranna shrugged and ran her long fingers through her hair to straighten it.
“And besides,” she turned to Nora, stark naked, except for her choice insignia of royalty, “who is to say the Fire God has not been reborn?”
She gestured to the bed, and gave Nora a sidelong look.
“Are you not curious to see the divine children that will usher in a new age?”
“Not really.” Nora shook her head.
“They’re such beautiful babies.” A tenderness came over Suranna’s face. “Twins. So precious. Well, you of all people know. You must promise me to take good care of them.”
“You haven’t seen their death?” Nora rose stiffly. “No final grand purpose for your own offspring?”
“My people will rally around them. He will be a new god, a morning star, and she will be his High Priestess.”
Suranna stepped closer to Nora.
“I can tell you what I have seen beyond this fixed point. I shall die by your hand, and by doing so you and I will be writing a brand new story. One day, future generations will look back on us as twin goddesses, one of light and one of death, locked in an eternal struggle. And you might laugh, but I can’t say for sure which one of us they will choose as light and which one as dark. But it is the death of one of us that marks the end of this cyclical nightmare and brings in something new. You see? Purpose.”
She stepped toward Nora and for a moment, Nora felt dizzy by her nearness. Suranna’s old seductive powers at work assailing her senses.
The queen leaned in and brushed her lips against Nora’s forehead, leaving a white hot burn in her wake.
Nora’s breath came on hard. Her palms felt sweaty and the heat flushed from her mind down her throat like liquid gold, as Suranna kissed her collarbone, a palm on her breast, heat in her chest, setting her on fire.
The queen lowered herself onto her knees in front of Nora, watching her reaction with parted lips, as she continued downward, the heat running along the insides of Nora’s thighs like the salty drip of her swollen vulva.
“Take me now.” Suranna’s whispered words were hot and moist against Nora’s mound, her golden eyes on Nora’s trembling body. “I’m ready.”
The whole room seemed to shift with power, a forceful golden current with a treacherous undertow. It would tear Nora’s feet from under her and propel her directly into the suck of the Cauldron.
Light.
Dark.
Life.
Death.
Nora saw herself teetering on the very edge of a precipice, a naked blade sharpened wickedly. The world ground to a halt beneath he
r feet, waiting for her to either regain her balance or take the fall into the dark pit below.
Don’t kill her, a voice whispered in her heart. Don’t give her what she wants.
She’s a liar, another warned. Don’t listen to her forked tongue.
She reached down and brushed the silky black hair out of Suranna’s beautiful face. It was so soft. She was so soft.
Nora wrapped the glorious hair around her hand, and pulled Suranna to her feet. She saw the spark of triumph in the queen’s eyes just before her crown toppled to the floor at Nora’s feet, Suranna’s head bowed low with humility. Nora felt the other woman shudder with expectation as she summoned a long sword into her free hand.
“Yes. I want you to.” Suranna smiled, her seduction thrumming through Nora. “Obey your queen. Make my death grand.”
This was how it was meant to end. How Suranna was meant to end. One clean swipe from the Living Blade, one last outpouring of sacrificial blood. This was what Nora was meant to do. She would redeem herself from the memory of her prison cistern. Obliterate it. She would give Suranan the death she asked. She’d give her everything she’d ask. She clasped Suranna’s head to her chest, filled with the urgent need to protect this beautiful woman from the angry buzz whispering death threats in her mind. Nora would be Suranna’s arm and shield, and Suranna would be served as the goddess she was.
The golden goddess laughed.
“No,” Nora whispered. The blade retracted into her hand, sheathed.
“Oh my perfect child,” Suranna beamed. She bent closer. “Go to the Cauldron and lie in it. The power of the Blade and the power of the Cauldron will cancel each other out. And when you die, the last thing you’ll know is that you have finally freed the world of the relics of the dead gods, and have given it a dynasty of new gods to rever.”
Nora twisted the silky black hair tighter in her left hand, then let it run through her fingers. She could feel the pull of the Cauldron, felt the compulsion to go and die in it. She could give her paltry life to create true change, true greatness. Instead of her feet moving, shuffling towards the Cauldron, her right hand curled into a fist.
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