Chapter Fifteen The Villainess and the God-Child
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Villainess and the God-Child
The Oracle came uninvited to the Burning Hearts Ball, the air quivering around her as if she were a vision seen in water, a ghost to the feast. All the fine lords and ladies shuddered away, fearing her once-white skirts, now dark with ink and rot, might touch them.
Her voice rang as though the ballroom was her cave of prophecy. “Despair, my Emperor.”
The Emperor smiled his killing smile. “I have no talent for obedience. And my mother’s voice is not welcome here.”
“The truth can go anywhere. And wherever you go, God-Child, rest assured,” declared the Oracle, “the truth will find you. I foretold your coming. I come now to foretell your end. Mourning needs a dirge. Will someone play for me?”
Into a fearful silence, Merel the minstrel, who did not play well with others, struck up a tune. There was no defiance on his face, only a diamond-edged curiosity about what might happen next.
They all heard what happened next.
“Oh I sing the saddest song
What must be, shall be.
Show me a hero, and
I’ll write you a tragedy.
Tell the tale a thousand ways
Truth remains like a bloodstain
You can never change your fate
It has always been too late.
Strive for glory, reign on high
Now as in the past
Emperor, I am your doom.
Believe me at last.
Ruler of the barren waste
Alone beneath a blasted sky
No living soul will love you
And all you love will die.”
“Are you telling me I’m doomed?” the Emperor asked lazily. “Let me return the favour.” His hand moved, a casual sweep of sharp steel. The prophet fell with her throat cut and her tongue silenced forever.
Doom finds us all in the end. Dying words become a death curse. There is no escaping an ending.
The Oracle made her prophecy. The Emperor made it her last.
When the Emperor killed the only soothsayer left in the world, he gained the ability to see all future possibilities. He learned the power of the last word.
In time, he uttered the last word. Life is a story, and the last word ends it.
Once the last prophet died, the world was doomed.
Excerpt from the Once and Forever Emperor series, now revised, ANONYMOUS
A maid rushed into Rae’s tower room as Rae attempted to teach her zombie snake tricks. For a moment, Rae was simply relieved this maid was still among the living.
Relief faded when the maid shrieked, “The Emperor is in the Room of Memory and Bone!”
Rae blinked. “So? Why shouldn’t he be?”
Rulers were always going to the Room of Memory and Bone, to mourn either personal losses or mass deaths via armies and plague. It was a royal tradition to meditate on mortality there. A century ago, King Quintus the Pious slept there sometimes on a stone slab.
She hadn’t thought Key was the meditating type, but the guilt burning in her chest like a hot coal over the heart reminded Rae she didn’t know him. Not really.
“He’s smashing everything to bits!”
Key did seem more the “smashing everything to bits” type.
Rae rose without another word and ran down the tower steps into the palace. Not long ago, she and Key had lost their way trying to find the throne room, and entered the Room of Memory and Bone by mistake.
She knew her way there now.
The Emperor never defiled a sacred space in the books. His good queen Lia would have disapproved. The whole country would disapprove, once they heard. This was another step into villainy. She must stop him.
She threw open the door, only to find herself hesitating, ruby slippers frozen on the threshold.
This room reminded her of how she had walked into this world.
After Rae opened the door to Eyam, she’d looked over her shoulder at the hospital room she was leaving.
She saw colour leached from the world, draining away until everything was the black on white of words on a page.
As if her world were the fiction, not this one.
The Room of Memory and Bone was as white as a blind eye, as white as a sheet drawn over a dead face, as white as a page with nothing written on it yet.
A bone chandelier constructed from spiky vertebrae and rounded femurs, in the shape of ivory canes with polished ivory balls on top, hung from a smooth bone ceiling.
Ivory-panelled walls, with delicately carved bone candleholders.
Bone was used as backdrop and for every piece of scene-setting.
Nothing but bones, closing in, reminding Rae that someday she would be nothing but bones.
Maybe someday soon.
There was an empty space in the room, a scratched vacancy upon the smooth ivory floor, where once stood the winged and gilded bone seat of a corpse queen. The pale, dead twin of the Emperor’s throne. That seat waited in the throne room now, for Rae.
Today the Emperor had made another change in this ancient and sacred space.
On display behind a precious glass front abided the only thing in the whole room which was not white.
Inside, wired and propped up, stood a child’s skeleton, tiny bones wrapped in black and blue royal regalia.
The only colours in the room were black as the depths of night and dark blue as the depths of the ocean.
Old imperial clothes draped over fleshless bones and preserved in airless splendour, a legend locked away tight – and what was the difference between a glass coffin and a display case?
The Emperor’s soldiers, masked in gold, stood before the display. Broken glass shone like jagged diamonds at their feet. The glass front gaped like the mouth of a sharp-toothed monster to show the victim inside.
The people of Eyam said these bones were all that remained of the God-Child. They kept the skeleton as a holy relic until the God-Child returned, waiting centuries for the coming of the Emperor.
The long-awaited Emperor stood with his arms folded, staring at the dead child’s bones, eyes filled with flame fixed upon sockets that held only darkness. They were dressed exactly alike, though the Emperor was tall and strong, and the child’s bones were so small.
At the sound of the door opening, the Emperor turned and extended a claw in welcome. “My sweet lady nightmare.”
The last time they were in this room, Key knelt on the bone floor at Rae’s feet and swore he would mean the sacred oath. When my name is in your mouth, I will always answer, and your name will be my call to arms. I will ever be a shield for your back, and the story told between us will be true.
What truth had Rae ever given him?
“My handsome harbinger of doom.” She crossed the bone floor to stand by his side. At least she could do that.
“You remember the story.” The Emperor spoke as if reminding her of an amusing anecdote from a party.
“The Great God and the Great Goddess were a happy couple, and the birth of the God-Child made them even happier.
The gods ruled the mortal land in joy, but in time the Great God grew wroth that his power came from the belief of mortals, that he could not walk among them but must hide in the corners of eyes, in the shadows between light, in reflections on water and in the liminal spaces between worlds.
He learned he could gain power that would never be taken away.
Through sacrifice. So the Great God told the God-Child to walk with him up the mountain of truth.
“The Great God said, ‘Come, my calf. Don’t be afraid.’
“‘You are the strongest of all gods. What is there to fear when you are with me?’ asked the child, on the day he died.
“The Great God walked up the mountain with his axe in hand. The god’s son was so small, he had to run to keep up with his father.
“And then…”
The Emperor drew one of his orichal claws a fraction of an inch from the red line on his throat, and made an exaggerated throat-cutting sound. Then he flashed his wild smile. Luminous and lively as flames dancing in hell.
When Key’s throat was cut, the sound was almost silent. Rae kept remembering that soft almost-silence. She knew the legend of the God-Child already, but Key had died in front of her once. Hearing the tale of his death struck differently after that.
“You were so young and helpless,” Rae whispered.
“And now I’m not,” the Emperor whispered back. “Now nobody will ever hurt me again.”
She blinked, the words ringing familiar as a bell tolling in the churchyard near the old house she used to live in, a world away. She knew so many of the Emperor’s lines by heart. When you loved someone made of words, every word they said was dear to you.
The knowledge didn’t help her. Knowledge felt not like power but like helplessness, her whole body cold with fear except the burning pressure of her heart.
The Emperor said the same thing in the books, talking to a different wicked woman. The treacherous lady he murdered at the Burning Hearts Ball. Some parts of the story could be changed. Some parts of the story would always fall back into the place.
Cast in the villain’s role, Rae watched for her chance to escape the trap.
Apparently oblivious to her scrutiny, the Emperor continued, sing-song and sarcastic: “When the divine blood touched the earth, the ground split in flame and smoke to create the dread ravine, and the God-Child’s mother came running.
Too late for the child. Just in time for revenge.
The Great Goddess tore out the Great God’s eyes, leaving her husband and the world, never to return. ”
Rae’s hand flew like a scared bird to toy with the cursed necklace she could not take off.
Her gaze fell to the serpent hilt of the Emperor’s sword, noticing a dark and scarlet change the Emperor had wrought on his legendary blade.
Between the snake’s bared metallic fangs gleamed the other God’s Eye, bright and cold as a flame encased in ice.
Longing for Revenge had never burned so fiercely before.