Chapter 14 #4
The image washes away like smoke swept up in a breeze. Distant yet near, a voice of ages hisses in my ear. “Last one.”
I am dropped out in front of a beautiful white temple that glitters beneath the moonlight. I cock my head and blink at it, feeling as if it’s familiar, somehow. I glance around, taking in my surroundings, and then it hits me square in the face.
I am standing at the foot of the Temple of Rhylia. A quick dip into my memory, and I recall Casimir’s journal entry where he recorded following Magaius here.
I watch the past unfold.
One by one, men, women, and some children dressed in dirty rags with gaunt cheeks stagger out of the temple.
There are enough of them to form a small army.
They scratch at their skin as if plagued by a drug.
Like tiny snakes, their wielder’s marks shift and slither across their flesh, changing in real time as their veins slowly evolve to black lines. Words hum in the air.
Erhé akta maht.
“You’ve corrupted them,” Casimir accuses Magaius, their bodies illuminated by nothing but stray beams of moonlight.
“I’ve unshackled them.”
“You’ve damned them.”
Magaius jerks his chin away. “A decision had to be made, and I chose. I’m sorry, Cas. I am. But I could see no other way.”
Casimir stares at Magaius like he doesn’t recognize him. “You’ve infected these people with generations of corruption. As far along as they already are, it’ll be centuries before their bloodlines are cleansed. You can truly live with that?”
“They knew the price,” he mutters, his eyes never meeting Casimir’s.
“And yet they volunteered anyway. You know why? Because war demands sacrifice. A truth I have tried to help you see. I cannot help it if you chose to ignorantly remain blind. And now? Now we have the edge we need to finally end this accursed conflict.”
“What would Sitara think?”
A chilling quiet fills the air. “Sitara is gone. And a god has already come to claim her soul.”
Magaius opens his mouth to say something else, but rustling in the distance has both of them whipping their heads in the direction of the sound.
A giant wolf with glowing eyes emerges from the shadows, and the moonlight suddenly disappears, taking all the stars with it, leaving nothing but a pit of darkness between them.
“Magaius,” Casimir breathes in horror. “What have you done?”
I am forcefully ripped out of the mirage, soaring away from the world of smoke and fog and mist. I am falling down, down, down—that familiar song humming around me—until I slam into a surface. My eyes jolt open and I gasp in a loud breath, pressing my hands to my chest.
I sit upright, and the world spins. I groan, feeling drunk and horribly disoriented. Pressing my palms into my eyes, I try to shake the feeling away. Yet all that happens is residual images of what I just witnessed surface back to the forefront of my mind, becoming clear like a painting once more.
My body becomes too heavy to move. Like rocks have invaded my bones, weighing me down and threatening to pin me in place.
The weight of my stiff muscles coupled with my swimming head has me falling back to the ground.
Yet I do not land on a hard, cold surface like I’m expecting. I return to the warmth of a lap.
“I’ve got you,” Casimir soothes. “This is the after effects of the elixir—of reading the Veil.”
All I can do is groan; my tongue is lead in my mouth.
“I know,” he agrees, as if replying to intelligible words. “It is quite unpleasant, indeed.” He shifts, gently removing himself from beneath me and resting my head back down. “I am going to open a portal back to your room. Think you can manage until then?”
I squeeze my eyes closed in the world’s longest blink. “I….feel…drunk,” I slur.
While I can’t be certain—my mind too hazy to process anything—I think I hear a quiet laugh whisk into the air. A circle of glittering color appears before me. It is so alluring, calling to me like an insect being lured into a trap. I want to fall into its beauty—drown in its light.
I receive my wish.
I am suspended into the sky, and I travel through the glowing silvers, whites, and blues. When I emerge on the other side, I blink, recognizing the space as mine, though not mine in the slightest. Neilina jerks up from the bed, standing at attention.
Has she always been able to move so quickly?
“Master,” she says.
Casimir makes for my bed, and I only then realize he is carrying me, my arms slung around his neck. He lays me down onto the mattress, pressing his hand to my forehead. His lips thin at whatever he feels.
He glances over his shoulder at Neilina. “Fetch a bucket of cool water and a rag. She needs her body temperature brought down.”
Neilina dips her chin. “Yes, Master.”
She scurries from my chamber, and Casimir turns back to face me.
“Neilina will take good care of you. I will leave her detailed instructions on what to watch for. Though your fever is higher than I’d like it to be, you should recover fine, without the intervention of magic.
” He recedes a step, making to turn away from the bed and exit the room.
“I’ll come check on you in the morning. We can discuss things then. ”
He heads for the door, but I reach my clumsy hand out and catch his wrist before he can leave. “Stay with me,” I whisper.
His brows furrow. “You….want me to stay? Why?”
Why, indeed?
My mind is currently a cloudy maze I can’t navigate, but for whatever reason, it chooses to continue showing me the images of Casimir I just saw in the Veil.
Images of him allowing the penniless to stay in his estate.
Of him fighting for diplomacy and peace.
Of him outstretching his arms, baring it all to his people.
What more can I give you to appease this restlessness? What weight do I need to shoulder?
Perhaps what I saw is no more than a way to better understand him. A small trail of bread crumbs to piece him together. I can’t be certain what to make of it all yet. But what I do know is—in this delirious version of myself—I want him to stay. Because…because…
“I don’t want to be alone,” I voice aloud, my words tumbling awkwardly from my tongue. My fingers squeeze his wrist tighter. “Stay.”
When I glance up at him, I find him staring at me like some puzzle in need of figuring out.
Finally, after a handful of silent seconds, with his brows still pinched together, Casimir blows out a soft sigh and nods.
“Alright,” he murmurs. “If that is what you wish.” He jerks his chin in the direction of the lounging chair across the room. “I’ll go sit over there.”
“No,” I retort, shaking my head. “Don’t walk away. Just… lay with me.”
“You’re comfortable with that?” He sounds tentative. “You trust me to lay in your bed?”
“I do.”
And fuck I must be some kind of drunk to feel like I mean it.
Yet something about all I witnessed in the Veil has forced a sudden shift within me.
I can’t be certain because of these debilitating side effects, but…
I don’t think I’m as angry with him anymore.
If anything, I feel like I sort of understand him.
Or perhaps I should say I better understand the circumstances which forged him.
“Alright,” he says softly.
I release his wrist, and he walks to the other side of the bed, lying down and propping himself up against the headboard, crossing his feet at the ankles.
There is a few inches of space between us, and I shimmy further down the plush mattress—far more comfortable than anything I ever slept on back in Solaya—and nestle into the pillows and blankets.
Casimir glances over at me and huffs, pulling back the blankets from my body and moving them off to the side. “You have a fever,” he reminds me. “You can’t cover your body with more heat.”
“Oh,” I mutter. “Right.”
We lay in silence, both of us staring up at the silk canopy hovering above our heads.
Time feels odd to me right now; I’m both inhumanly aware of it while simultaneously having no concept of it.
So, I’m not sure how much time has passed when I speak again, voicing the thought running through my swirling mind, brought on by the flashes of images from the Veil where his expression brightens upon seeing ash-colored hair and glowing blue eyes.
“You loved her,” I muse.
His eyes remain on the canopy. “Loved?” he repeats, an air of disbelief coating the word. “I still do.”
His answer makes me smile. “I might love someone, too,” I admit.
He readjusts, lowering himself from the headboard and shimmying down the bed until our heads are both laying flat against soft pillows, our shoulders level with each other. “I know.”
A brief silence, and then—
“Did you mean what you said the day you attacked Bathara? About love?”
This is the fate of humanity. The curse of our existence. You love? You hurt. You do not love? You still hurt.
He doesn’t ask me to elaborate, seeming to know what I mean. “Yes.”
“What happened to her? Sitara?”
He glances at me sidelong. “The Veil didn’t show you?”
“Didn’t you see for yourself what it showed me?”
“No. As I told you, I am able to follow you into the Veil, but I do not have the gift of reading it. Which means, all I can see are unintelligible flashes of color behind the smoke and mist.”
“So you have no idea what it showed me?”
“None whatsoever.” A pause. “Though, based on the shift in your behavior, I have some guesses on the subject matter.”
I huff a laugh, intertwining my fingers and resting them on my chest. “I saw her, too.” I tell him. “Sitara. I saw her, and she was as breathtaking as the stories describe.”
“No,” he disagrees, his voice wistful and his smile sad. “The stories do not do her nearly enough justice.”
My eyes become weighted, and I feel my body being pulled into a heavy sort of sleep. Yet I have one final question I want to ask before I fade. “Casimir?”
“Yes?”
“How can someone once filled with so much good commit so much evil?”
I may have now seen glimpses of him before he deteriorated into the man he currently is, but the fact remains.
He admitted to committing mass genocide.
He plunged a blade through Griff. He ordered Abdites to invade Bathara—to slaughter and take and destroy.
A good beginning does not erase a bad ending.
“Perhaps if you read the entirety of the story from my perspective, you would be asking me that question under different pretenses. But…” He sighs.
“To provide you with some form of an answer, monsters are seldom born, darling. They are forged in the pits of darkness. Their faces are sprung from the masks of vengeance, discovered in the rubbles of peace and sharpened by shadows. I did not wish to become what I am; yet here I am all the same. I will let you decide what to make of that for yourself.”
My blinking slows, and it becomes increasingly difficult to reopen my eyes. “I think,” I say through a yawn. “I would have chosen differently.”
Casimir lets out a quiet laugh, not seeming at all offended. “We all think that. Until the time comes where we are forced to tear off our masks and glimpse the reflections of the ugly monsters lying beneath them.”
Now basically asleep, I curl onto my side, tucking my hands underneath my cheek.
Though still not touching him, I am close enough to Casimir to feel his warmth.
It feels nice, not being in an empty bed for once.
“Impossible,” I drag out, sleep clinging to my words as notably as it does my body.
“I don’t think your face could ever be considered ugly. Not even if you tried.”
Through my final moments of consciousness, I hear Casimir chuckling. “Neither could yours, Lyra Izacalli.”