by Scott Beith
Until Arlo had completely recovered from his fatigue, I felt myself in charge of keeping us safe from the wilderness, and for that reason, I made that big bellied beast as big and as hefty as the two-legged brute that had helped me repress the spiders back in the caves.
His monstrous claws were tucked in a more gentle appearance, but were always there at the ready. I was somewhat nostalgic towards keeping the figure of that remnant the way it looked, despite my princess’s possible animosity towards it, finding it too beneficial to us to test my limits by creating anything else less effective.
“Hey, what do you two think happened to me?” I asked backwards towards Arlo and Anara as we walked through a growing highlands, speaking my sporadic thoughts out loud. “The other version of me, that is,” I added, curious as to why I’d seen both their doubles and yet heard nothing of my own. I wondered if the alternate version of me had any role to play in this dark and decrepit hinterland environment, other than being a mother to the child we saw earlier, I was still curious to how strong her own shadow-manipulation must have become out in the darkness.
“Maybe she was a swim teacher,” the prince teased me, all of us laughing over the ridiculousness of his statement while looking around towards the draught-stricken mountainside we were forever approaching. My big brute finally growing a mouth and lips in conjunction with my hand movements, just so it, too, could join in with our chuckle. It wasn’t as funny as Arlo thought it was, but I smiled happily just to see some colour returning to his cheeks, as he was gradually regaining his strength from the anaemic aftermath of Anara’s invasive surgery.
Forever heading west, keeping right to a group of stars that shaped a cross while we migrated much further inland than any of us had ever dared travel before. We were in the land where Radament tackled his most daring feat, arriving over the top of the very clay pits of the deserted village Mudflats where he single-handedly fended off the reptiles until the night’s dawn many years ago.
And although we didn’t know this land at all, we knew we were in a boneyard, which meant we were getting close to the outpost we sought – the spiritual ruins that must have sheltered one of the only working gateway stones for this world’s Camilla to utilise within her broken world.
I glanced back at the princess trailing behind Arlo and me, watching her polish her tiara’s already pristine silver edges with her dress, trying to rub away some non-existent smudges with her fingers and nails quite roughly. She seemed lost in her thoughts, not appearing to be affected by the frosty cold making Arlo shiver as we took turns wearing the only winter coat we had in our possession.
I had been too preoccupied to notice her behaviour at first, but once I did, it became too hard to ignore. I could tell she was really anxious about something. I slowed my pace to walk beside her.
“Milena told me it was strange for this to be on my head,” Anara suddenly said to me before I could ask what might have been wrong, her voice soft and hard to hear over the trampling footsteps of my dark ogre-beast ahead.
“Yeah, I could imagine so,” I said. “It would take some adjustment to see your daughter is a princess in one world when she is a war-slave in another,” I mentioned while we crossed a small bridge that arched over a dried up stream, leaving the Mudflat region for what must have been the final path of woodlands to the monastery.
“Yeah, that would be one hard thing to deal with,” she admitted. “But that wasn’t why she said it was odd for me to be wearing this tiara…” she announced. “She said it was strange for her to see it on me because in this world it’s yours, Kya,” she stated, looking to me with two guilty apologetic eyes. “She called it the tidal stone because the jewels used to make it were brought up from the bottom of the golden reef.”
“You’re kidding. Didn’t Mother say she made that for you?” Arlo remarked, clueing in on our conversation.
“Mother didn’t make it,” Anara responded.
“Kya, don’t you understand what that means?” Anara said, stopping us all from moving as she looked directly at me. “It’s yours, all of it is yours,” she said, offering her crown towards me, bowing with a form of penance for her mother’s alleged thievery of it.
I brushed her hand away in a respectful decline, knowing full well what that tiara meant to her and what little value it had to me. I mean, it was a priceless piece of silver stuffed with so many small moonstones, pearls and tiny aquamarines I could buy a village with it. But sentimentally speaking, that tiara was supposedly hand crafted by Milena upon the birth of our princess – suddenly the last lie to splinter the one treasure that still linked Anara to her mother.
She looked ashamed, like she considered herself a fool for ever believing her mother’s story to be true, personally blaming herself through two utter cowardice eyes as she resiliently tried to pass it off on to me.
“I don’t care how it is out here. In our world that’s yours,” I told her, refusing to accept it.
“Kya, you’re royalty!” she announced, slightly flustered by both Arlo and my combined ignorance to what she was trying to tell us.
“Oh…” Arlo and I muttered upon reflection of her announcement, caught flustered by the absurdity of how long it took her to tell me.
“Cool,” I stated, looking at my prince as he, too, nodded his head in acceptance of the news. “Well, how bout that?” he said under one similar but rather placid tone. “Care to explain?” he then said to his sister, while I remained too lost for words to add anything extra.
“Milena told me you were the Duchess of the Lorelei, the king’s niece,” she started to explain. “Kya, your mother was a countess named Nadir, who was related to either Midas or Camilla,” she elaborated.
“Run that by me again,” I floundered, stuck in a cloud of scepticism and disbelief. A real lack of emphasis upon hearing something I had spent my whole life both wondering about and searching for. Everyone was quiet, as if waiting for me to remember some long lost memories that would confirm her story. But nothing clicked into place, leaving me bewildered and oblivious to any quick revealing truth of my exact heritage.
There were a million things I wanted to ask, but I was unable to differentiate any one of them from the cluster of thoughts I had in my head, both my thrills and scepticisms were physically blocking me from verbally spitting anything out.
Arlo leaned against Levi’s large crystal sword as he balanced on it with his arms to rest his feet while stationary. “So stop me if I’m wrong, but if Midas is her uncle and Camilla her aunty, then Akoni would be her cousin,” Arlo said, slowly trying to decipher Anara’s words.
I perked up and gasped in shock. “Anara is that right?! Do I… Are they my family?”
“You’ve always had a family,” Anara responded insecurely.
“Yeah, but now she has a better one,” Arlo blurted out happily, childishly unaware he was mocking his own family as he smiled and leaned in from his sword to say something to me. “Well I guess congratulations are in order,” he then proceeded to say. “But can I please be the one to tell Akoni when we’re back home? We could make this a very grand and shocking reveal,” he quipped and laughed.
“Wait…” I then announced abruptly. “So what exact side of Akoni’s family am I on?” I asked. “And why doesn’t Akoni know anything about this? And why didn’t Camilla ever tell me?” I asked rapidly.
“I don’t know… I guess maybe she doesn’t know either,” Anara replied.
“Anara, how do you not know?” I sharply responded. My shadow turning to come onto the bridge, looking as if it were ready to shake the truth out of her.
“I was busy, Kya. I didn’t have time to ask any more questions,” she cautiously and timidly mentioned.
“Then we need to go back!” I declared.
“We’re on a timer, Kya. I’m sorry, but you know we can’t do that,” Arlo stated assertively.
“But we have to!” I demanded. The shadow’s hand grabbing Arlo’s hand as he attempted to catch me walki
ng backwards in the way we had just come from.
“Kya, stop!” he called out, held back by a shadow refusing to let him go, as what started out as euphoria and excitement turned to something more dark and hostile as I came back to them.
“How could you not ask any more questions?!” I snapped at Anara. “You know how important this is to me,” I persisted, feeling betrayed and frustrated by her lack of effort in uncovering my heritage.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered back, her head still bowed in shame from earlier. “You interrupted my conversation with Milena when you came into that hut… And then Arlo needed my help… I forgot,” she mentioned defensively before turning away from me.
“Look at me!” I said, vines wrapping around her hands and pulling her to face me as I refused to let the conversation end. Unable to read how much of a bully I was being considering the new strength of my shadows. “So your mother has lied to me all these years then? Because she must have known who my parents were all along, and just chose not to tell me,” I ranted angrily.
“Kya, let her go!” Arlo said, his sword raised up to my ogre’s throat as it held onto his other arm, the light of my eyes and pendant reflecting enough off his sword and singing the ogre’s skin as it forced him to let him go. As upon that conflict, the realisation of the physical line I’d crossed when I’d started threatening them. “We’re all friends here, remember?” he added.
“BUT SHE KNEW!” I shouted defensively. “She had to have known!”
“Maybe it was too protect you,” Anara said, her wrist still held and shackled to mine by chains made from rapidly condensing black clouds.
“Or so she could control me!” I snapped again, my face feeling red hot and stuffy, just as confused as I was aggravated from a sudden lack of actual answers.
“Hey, how about we get home and we ask her ourselves,” Arlo yelled, no stranger to shouting or venting his frustrations when the time called for it.
“There’s more you’re not telling me, isn’t there?” I argued, seeing the guilty look in Anara’s eyes that suggested she was holding out on me.
“Can you hear yourself? If this is the way you act upon hearing good news then maybe you do need to be controlled,” Arlo vented. “Look at yourself. Look at what your anger can construct,” he said, his sword swaying around a bridge of a thousand ghostly serpents underneath us like a river. “Anara’s your best friend. If she knew any more, don’t you think she’d tell you?” he then added, enough of a guilt-trap for me to click my fingers and dismiss it all away. Followed by a second much more determined couple of clicks, that shrunk the ogre down to the size of a voodoo doll that sat on the flimsy dry wood panels of the little river bridge we all stood upon, lifeless and waiting for my prince to bend down and pick him up as a testament of my regained control.
“Kya, I’m only looking out for you,” Anara admitted quietly,
“Then tell me whatever you are still not telling me!?” I pressed. “Anara, please! I know you would have asked more. What more do you know about my parents? Is there any chance they’re still alive?”
A question she answered with the firm slow twist of her head in sad remorse. “You don’t want to know, trust me, ok?” she then said towards me.
“Wait, what? You actually do know more??” Arlo responded “You’re unbelievable!” he then said in scold of his sister as he backed away, in need of some space and fresh cold mountain air.
I already knew the end didn’t justify the means when it came to how I asked her for the truth, just as I instantly felt sick over just how much she didn’t deserve my mad reaction. I had treated her like a criminal because I was too compelled to learn more about my parents.
But in doing so I had become everything everyone seemed to fear about me, and even though she was suddenly willing to tell me the truth, I felt too hollow to want to push her anymore. Too ashamed of the way I went about it that I honestly stopped believing I was worthy of hearing what she was about to tell me.
“Your mother was a very cruel lady,” Anara finally responded.
“She was a countess... But she was removed from these lands because of how she treated her subjects,” Anara explained.
“That… that… that can’t be true,” I stuttered in denial, reacting the way I knew Anara had expected me to. “But is she still… alive?” I tried to ask if she’d been executed for whatever appalling crimes she’d been alleged of committing, but I couldn’t get the words out.
Upon hearing the grim outcome, I was sane enough to understand that everything she was telling me might have only been viable in this world. But, at the same time, anything predating the spire was apparently the exact same as we had in our own world. After all, that was why both Akoni and I retained the same name in both worlds: because, just like me, he’d been born right before the creation of the Sunspire, and, in turn, the divergence of both worlds due to the imbalance and syphoning of daylight.
“She was incarcerated for her crimes long before the Sunspire was ever created.”
“So she is dead now?” I asked, needing to reconfirm what she’d said earlier.
“Yeah... She’s gone, Kya,” she stated sympathetically, putting a hand on my shoulders sympathetically. “She had the exact same talents as you though – a mastery of the shadows... But when the darkness grew she managed to escape her prison, up until she was eventually captured and...”
“Killed?” I then pressed her to say, despite the cold confirming silence.
“In this world, both you and your mother are dead,” she explained. “I’m sorry. But I swear to you that’s all I know,” she promised, hugging me as she lifted the burden of knowing the truth off her chest by passing that burning torch to me instead.
“Thank you for telling me at least,” I responded with defeat, trying to put on a brave face and smile as I attempted to hide the awful feeling of abandonment and alienation I had inside, the feeling of being as cold as death while she went back to hugging me and rubbing my back, unwilling to let me go until I was more spirited and present minded. Her brother standing there, leaning against the wooden rails of that short pond bridge as he waited, unsure of what to do other than wait for us to work it out on our own.
“Now, Kya,” Anara spirited, “there is a chance your mother is still alive in our world. Locked away deep under the earth and disclosed from all public records,” Anara said, trying to be optimistic. “But we have to get home if we have any hope of finding her.”
Despite how many had already speculated it to me throughout my life. I never considered whether my parents were good or bad people. The sad truth was I had always just thought they were poor unfortunate sprites who’d fallen into some form of trouble and had had to leave me as a means of protecting me. Never for a moment did I think that I had been rescued by another family, a family led by someone I’d always secretly considered to be the truest spawn of the devil.
“Is there anything else?” I asked, surprised at just how few tears I had shed until I was resting on Anara’s shoulder and could see them on the coat she took off in turn to give and share with me once again. “Nothing else at all?” she added, speaking as soft and considerately as she could manage.
“I heard nothing of your father, but your mother’s name was Nadir,” she concluded to me again, exhaling as she relieved herself from the burden of her discovery.
“This is all really nice, girls, and I hate to be that guy,” Arlo said, speaking to us from the side of the bridge, “but two worlds depend on us,” he stated,
“And I don’t honestly believe Akoni can stall the new crystal for much longer, considering the leverage our mother has against him,” he said, first to exit off the bridge.
35
Uprising
There was a lot that needed to be processed in such a short amount of time, and being the last to leave the bridge, I had the most time out of everyone to hold back and personally reflect on what a fool I had been. Above all I needed to get my priorities strai
ght and set my sights away from the dried mud pits of a deserted village we passed along and instead attempt to maintain pace with the other two who were lingering in wait for me as they scouted the journey ahead.
I watched the dark woods of a rocky mountainside as it swallowed them up, before I felt the need to catch up, as with a rebirthing forest enclosing around us, we knew at any moment we could have been only one or two short bends from the alleged monastery we were seeking. Quite simply we were running out of distance from the borders to travel down while still conveniently continuing along the very same dirt and small stone path we had literally followed from the west gate of Helios’s crop paddock.
I continued to linger at the back of the pack for the last few minutes of our journey, trying to avoid causing any more fuss than I had already caused, always looking down at the dry dirt, rocks and tiny crunching sticks that made up the path as I shook my head to a recycling embarrassment upon reliving my actions on that bridge again and again inside my mind.
I was unable to justify my volatile attitude in self-reflection, rather just surmise how laughable it was to have hated and silently refuted the very information I had practically begged Anara to tell me in the beginning. It was the irony of having spent much of my own life searching for answers that could give value to my name, only to immediately wish to discredit her news the very second I found out it wasn’t to my liking.
In essence, what hurt me was realising that ignorance didn’t feel much different than the truth and its torment.
In a small way, I did receive the tiniest sense of closure from what I learned, like my mother’s ghost finally had a name to be put on its unmarked grave, and therefore a ceremony that could lay her to rest, and that was better than leaving her to haunt me forever. But once again, like most things in my life, things weren’t ever that black and white. The fact was we were in a different world, and my mother could still be alive back home, merely imprisoned and waiting for me to rescue her so she could seek her own retribution on all those who’d wronged her. Not the family legacy I would like to bring back to life if that was indeed the case.