Chapter 32
One Final Good Deed
Lillian
THE MARRING OF the battle in the main hall is left behind me as I continue to sprint further into the depths of the mountain. There’s no time to let the idea that I’ve made it to the Pico da Neblina linger in my mind. There is only forward.
Leaving Ben behind had taken every bit of courage I had left.
There are just some things I don’t want him to witness.
A clawing ache of loneliness lodges itself in my throat but I press through.
I had not prepared to face this final chapter alone, but it is better to be alone than to not be under my own power.
I’m hearing my name called from far behind me, and in order to stay out of sight, I smother my necklace that has retained a dull glow since I emerged through the arch. My footfalls betray me, because though I can run unseen, the clapping of my boots on stone ushers my pursuers in my direction.
“Conceal me,” I beg the spirits rattling around in my head. The whispers suddenly break through the veil and become all too real. Convoluted chanting fills the empty halls forcing those behind me to pause to reorient themselves.
I keep going; one voice remains with me, guiding the way with gentle commands. The door it leads me to is large but altogether unassuming. I don’t even have to place a hand to the handle before some force from within opens it toward me. It slams shut and locks itself the moment I step fully inside.
The room is cavernous with concave walls to ceiling. It’s just as it was in my visions. The windows with a balcony and the woven tapestries lining the wall and littering the floor. Even the altar with the Corpo Seco laid across it. My eyes fall to the dead. There in his chest, the dagger.
It is everything and nothing. The black blade is sunk deep into the chest of the body, which looks as if it belongs to a sleeping soul, not one belonging to a man killed centuries ago.
Not daring to take my eyes off the peculiar site, I shed the bag from my shoulder. I take with me the only artifact left: the long black needle with a point sharper than any blade I’ve come across. I tighten my hand around the base and approach the altar.
“I knew you would come.” The female voice sends thrums of surprise through me.
It’s not merely a whisper in my ear this time; the voice belongs to someone in the room.
These feelings of shock are only amplified when I turn and see a familiar woman with beautiful long dark hair.
The face of a woman I have seen time and time again across multiple visions in multiple locations. A face so familiar it could be my own.
“How can you be here?” I ask the ghostly white figure in front of me. “I watched you die for your child miles and miles away.” It’s true, for the first vision I had ever experienced was in the pit with my mother and I had watched this woman die there with her people.
She merely cocks her head to the side, completely confused as to how it matters to me. “It is my punishment.” She says it without emotion—400 years would dull the feeling I’m sure. “I am here with you. I am there with my child. I am everywhere all the time at once.”
For the first time, she moves toward me. Though I feel that soothing ancient connection, I take a step back in fear. My anxiety does not thwart her. I feel the coldness of her hand touch my cheek. “You are suffering from my punishment as well.” Her hand retreats. “I am sorry.”
I have to clear my throat in order to get words moving. “Suffering how?”
A loud thump against the door alerts us both. Soon the thing is rattling on its hinges. I pray that it’s Ben, but when I hear the wood start to splinter under force, I quickly understand that somehow, Ivo had gotten away.
“You are your mother, just as she was hers. We are all of the same blood and the same histories.” The woman looks at the man on the altar. “Surely you must understand that a new dawn cannot begin until a sacrifice is made. We've told you enough times to warn you.”
My gaze wanders to the altar where the man she had married and had refused to sacrifice until it was too late lies. “What must you forfeit?” I ask through a deep pain in my gut. M?e had known this truth; I think I had always known deep down.
The sound of a gunshot blasts its way through the door before a panel is swiftly torn away.
Ivo is just visible through the hole. A sudden fear that Ben and the others had been overtaken by Ivo’s dwindling forces causes my grip to tighten on the needle in my hand.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the jagged edges were drawing blood.
“Your Ben lives, Lillian, but you must work fast if you want to keep it that way.”
“Tell me what to do!” I demand, stepping closer to her.
She shakes her head and reshapes the distance between us, all while another panel of the door gives way. Ivo is yelling now. “I cannot tell you how to wield the dagger, dearest daughter. You will know when you take it into your hands.”
Exasperated, I whirl back to her from the door. “I do not wish to wield it! I want to destroy it for good.”
Her smile reminds me of the one M?e would give me when she was about to kindly prove me to be wrong. She continues to leave my pointed questions unanswered. “The temptation will be great when it comes time. Hold on to those things you find most good in this world. Hold tight to them.”
The figure approaches me again, her gaze darting between me and her once husband. “You have passed the other tests well enough, but there is one more.” If the dead could cry, I would describe it as the glistening of the cloudy eyes before me.
Feeling the pressure of the enemy knocking on the door to my left and the gnawing power of the dagger to my right, I begin to shake. “Tell me what it is I need to do.”
“You must put a merciful end to my suffering.” She takes a tearful glance at her husband, though those tears are of betrayal, not the same sadness she graced me with seconds before. “When the mirage painted by my punishment is stripped away, only then will the truth be made bare to you.”
“Kill you?” I ask through the disbelief. “But you are…” As soon as I am about to share about the impossibility of it, her being solidifies before me.
Real hands wrap around mine, the needle at the heart of it. “You will be doing a good deed,” she says again, real tears falling from her cheeks. “I have missed my child for hundreds and hundreds of years. My sisters, my mother…” Like me, this woman has lost much. She longs for it to be over.
“Afterwards?” I ask through tears of my own. I never expected I would need to end the life of another woman in order to accomplish the mission. “What do I do afterwards?”
“I told you,” she answers, hands falling away. “The truth will be made known to you. The dagger will be there for you, or anyone else, to do as they please.”
The breaching of the ancient door and the feeling of yet another weapon pointed at me are enough to remind me of what happens should other hands reach the dagger before me.
I freeze in the middle of the room. No decision like this should happen without hesitation, but there is no time for such things.
Somehow in the chaos, I manage to take a deep breath and raise a fisted hand overhead.
With as much mercy as I can find, I bring the needle down hard against flesh.
At the mere contact of it, she collapses to the floor.
Light seeps from the wound where I’ve stabbed her, knocking the men at the threshold to the ground.
As the waves of power wrack her failing body, I hold her tightly to me.
In this moment, I can see the lost time swirling around us.
I can feel the crawling of minutes and every aching second she has suffered in waiting to make it all right.
Whoever was cruel enough to sentence her to this kind of purgatory after the mistake of loving a certain man is not a person I would like to cross.
Turning to the altar as the woman’s final moment slips away, I realize that the person who has condemned her might be the very same man she aimed to save.
Rising on volition not of my own, I float away from my ancestor who now lies dead on the floor and take my place behind the altar. Here the featureless face I’ve seen in many a vision has eyes, a nose, and a mouth. He looks altogether unspectacular, and yet he has caused all of this.
“You stop right there!” I should care that my father is yelling at me from the door.
I should care that Ivo is liable to cut me down.
I should want to yell for Ben and the others to lead them here.
I should, but I don’t. Now that the dagger is an arm’s length away, nothing else seems to matter.
Ignoring the rest of the world, I lean forward, yearning to feel the smoothness of the black amazonite blade for the very first time.
“Stop or I’ll kill you!” I hardly spare the time to glance across the room at my rival. Ivo has a gun raised toward me.
My father takes a step next to him, and for a moment, I think he might make a play for his gun. Instead, he looks at me and is pleased. “Lillian, you’ve done your part. It’s now Ivo’s time to do as he has planned.”
“No,” I say simply, reaching out for the handle of the blade.
A shot rings out and smoke fills the air, but the sting of a bullet never touches me.
Ben
As the body in front of me drops to the floor in a mix of gunsmoke and blood, I fully enter the room. Lillian hovers above a body on an altar; Archibald stands with his hands up while he stares down at his leader. Ivo lies on the ground bleeding out through his neck.
Diederick is the first to move around me to stand over Ivo. “You’re a fool,” he says before stepping over his body and quickly moving on to Lillian.
“You alright?” I call in Lillian’s direction. My gun remains on Ivo. The gurgles coming from the ground make me think that perhaps this goon has finally run out of tricks.
“Yes,” she answers solemnly. “But, Ben, you should not have come.” When I glance up at her again, her fingers have wrapped around the hilt of the dagger.
“No,” I roar before I’m racing toward her. We have more time now that the others are leveled. There’s time to talk through her choice. “Stop!” I try again, but her hand is already pulling the dagger free.
“Stop, Ben!” Diederick steps in my path but I push past, running him over. He holds on tight and the two of us go falling to the floor. “Ben, you must not interfere. She’ll be taken by the dagger now, she’ll need all her wits to make the right choice.”
“I need to help her!” I scream, twisting to get away from my captor. “Diederick, you can’t let her do this.”
“Ben,” he scolds, arms held tightly around my chest. “Ben, it’s already happening.”
As he says the words, the room begins to glow. Well, not the entire room. The circular platform that holds the altar has been engulfed in a blue flame, and at the center is Lillian and her necklace.
To my left, Ivo bleeds out on the floor.
The moment he ceases his struggling, Archibald has moved to his next play: his daughter.
How a man could let his own blood sacrifice itself, and only after waiting around for a monster to pass to finally lend himself, is preposterous.
Still, his tears are large, and in my own state, I’m hungry for anyone to listen.
“Ben, we need to get her out of there,” Archibald insists, hands up.
Diederick releases me but holds strong on his beliefs. “Don’t listen to him, Ben!”
“Why?” I ask both men. I’m all too aware of what Lillian is going through behind me, but as long as she’s standing, there is something to fight for. I will hear them both out.
“It will kill her!” Archibald hisses, taking a step closer. “Please, you cannot let it take her!” I flinch at the idea of me being able to stop it. I promised her that I would never let anything happen to her, so why am I so conflicted about pulling her free of the hell that holds her?
Diederick has other thoughts and sticks to them. “He will only take that dagger for himself. Let Lillian accomplish what she has set out to do.” He doesn’t scold or demand, only patiently explains.
“You’re stalling, Diederick.” The look I’m met with tells me that it was not his intention.
Archibald lunges forward. “Yes, he means for her to die in there. Ben, please!” Diederick and I both reach for the helpless father and pull him back. This only makes him fight harder, so hard that his true nature comes to light.
“Unhand me!” Archibald screeches. “You don’t understand what you’re doing.” Diederick’s hold tightens as I break free. Staring through to Lillian behind the glowing veil, I’m left with my gut to make a decision.
“Millions will suffer in unthinkable ways in this war if that dagger is destroyed.” Archibald’s next comment has me twisting where I stand. The fact of the matter turned from Lillian far too quickly.
“What did you say?” I ask, feeling torn between a rock and hard place.
“The upcoming war,” Archibald hisses. “So much needless suffering could be avoided by using the dagger. It would all be over in moments.”
“You horrid man,” Diederick gasps. “Even now you do not think of your daughter?”
“I do think of her! I think of her mother and her friends and everything she cares for.” The tears dry up and the bargaining begins.
“Without that dagger, Hitler will roll over everything she’s ever held dear and the world will suffer greatly for it.
The suffering will be unlike any you’ve ever seen.
Truly I just want to save the world from that. ”
“Hypocrite!” Diederick bellows. “You lost your opinion on good and evil the day you sold your soul to the devil who calls himself Führer. There will not even be a chance to combat that suffering if you procure the dagger.”
In Diederick’s rampage, I return my gaze upon Lillian. Whatever fight she’s enduring in her mind, I can do nothing but stand and be ready for her to return. The outcome today will change the course of history and certainly the possible endings of the upcoming war.
Another world war, by the sounds of it.
I remember the last time war rolled through the world.
My time in the trenches had been the worst humanity had to offer, and yet, we lived to fight another day, and then another, and then another until the battle was won.
With the dagger, there would be no next day.
It would all be over at the drop of the hat of one individual.
Peering through that blue flame one more time, I try to find Lillian in the madness. Wherever she is, she does not answer. “I trust you,” I say to the nothingness, before stepping back and returning to Diederick’s side.
We will let it run its course and face what comes next.
God, please let me be able to speak with her again. Let me get the chance to tell her I love her once more and to hear it said back.