Chapter 38
Aeclari…we love you.
—Legion to their Aeclari (War of the Death Cascade)
Seeing their perfection of form, Elena had the feeling that the Legion that had returned would be the ones they’d first met—not the ones who had gained color and begun to gain personalities.
It didn’t matter. Her heart soared at seeing them.
Unable to keep her joy hidden, she waved at them.
The entire Legion dipped to the left, then right, in reply.
Laughing, she was more than ready to turn and face them when they started to come in to land line by line until the roof was full and the others hovered around the Tower on their batlike wings.
At the front of the massive force knelt the Primary.
His body was gray, his clothing gray, his hair gray…but his eyes—when he lifted them to meet her own—were a pale gray ringed by an unmistakable, intense blue. “Aeclari.”
Throwing decorum to the wind, she ran to the Primary and, tugging him up, enclosed him in a hug. The Primary’s arms were hesitant as they came around her, but in the back of her mind whispered seven hundred and seventy-seven excited voices.
They’re ours, Archangel. They came back like they were!
“I’m so happy to see you,” she said aloud, her words hitching. “We’ve missed you so much.”
“We have…missed you, too.” The Primary released her when she released him, but only to turn to Raphael. “We have come as called, sire.”
Raphael gripped the other man’s forearm. “You are welcome. You have been missed. How long can you stay?”
A tilt of the Primary’s head. “Until you are not afraid any longer…and perhaps longer.” His words were directed at both of them.
Not many people would dare tell an archangel that he felt fear, but the Primary wasn’t exactly an ordinary being.
And Raphael was no longer the cold and remote archangel Elena had first met.
“Our babe will be very vulnerable after it is born,” he said. “That babe is more precious to us than our own lives.”
“We will protect the child.” The Primary looked at Elena’s abdomen. “We will…love the child of our aeclari.”
Eyes hot, Elena just beamed. “Welcome home.”
* * *
Less than a half hour after their triumphant return, Elena stood with the Primary at the foot of the enormous central tree that had grown where the Legion building had once stood, its roots generally mirroring the foundation of that long-ago construction, though with no harsh angles or lines.
“You kept your promise,” the Primary said, his eyes focused on the soaring central tree. “You protected our home.”
“We managed to keep the building functional for over a hundred years,” Elena told him, her mind a green field of memory.
“By then the trees had begun to push out the walls, and the roots to literally lift the foundations, so we decided it was better to pull out the remnants with care while protecting the plants.”
She put her hands on her hips and continued, “I hand-transplanted the more delicate plants with a team of trained helpers.” It had been a long, painstaking task, but they’d managed to save pretty much everything. “I’m sorry we couldn’t keep the building.”
The Primary gave her an intrinsically Legion look, as if he was having trouble comprehending her strangeness.
“It was not the building that was our home,” he said in that voice that echoed with seven hundred and seventy-six others.
“Our home has survived.” He touched his palm to the trunk of the nearest tree.
Elena thought of the perfect microclimate within the interconnected and—thanks to the massive tree at the center that supported all the climbing plants—vertical forest. “I’ve been trying to figure out how you did it, but I’ve never quite succeeded.
A lot of it has to do with the plantings, and how you organized those plants within the whole, but there’s something else, isn’t there? ”
The Primary had always had the ability to be inscrutable, apparently without intent, but today, he said, “We had never before had the chance to create a home. We did not know that we could until we were given that chance. It seems that we have within us the ability to be the builders of such homes.”
He paused. “We sensed the first aeclari as we Slept.”
Hearing the question he didn’t ask, Elena said, “Marduk and Tiamat-Neith? Yes, they were with us until recently.” She swallowed. “I miss them.”
“We were glad to speak to them after…a very long time.” The Primary looked once again at the huge tree that centered the forest. “Our maker would know the answer to this home we have built.”
“Yeah, he wasn’t talking.” Elena folded her arms with a scowl. “Every time I asked, he’d say that mysteries are good when you’re immortal.”
It will keep you engaged through time, rather than becoming jaded and of the belief that you know everything. The latter is stupidity, of course. Even I don’t know everything, but immortals have a tendency to tumble into that fallacy far too often.
No matter how much Elena had argued with him on his stance, he’d been resolute. “One day,” he’d said in the last year he and Tiamat had spent in this time, “you’ll figure it out. You have the blood of life in you, hands that understand the earth and plants.”
Then he’d said the most surprising thing of all. “I was like you, Elena. I was known for my great gardens, all of which I tended with my own hands, shedding much of my blood into the soil over the ages as is the case with any gardener.”
That was it, the only clue he’d ever given her. “Does it have to do with blood?” she asked the Primary, since he was being so talkative.
But he came as close to a shrug as the Legion ever had—and it delighted her to see it so soon after their return. It had taken them a long time to get to that point, and she’d been afraid they’d lost all of that growth and development during their long Sleep in the deep.
“We do not know the how of it, only that we can do it.” He opened out his wings.
“I must go. My brethren have found many surprises and delights.” But before he flew up into the canopy, he said, “We did not expect our home to still be here. We remembered it, but we did not expect to see it again. We are…happy.”
Then he was gone on those silent wings, just one more member of the Legion among the others. The markers that made them unique individuals were subtle, and only detectable from up close—and this time around, Elena had the instinctive understanding that that was how they liked it.
The Legion are never going to be anything but a collective organism, she said to her archangel. To attempt to separate them, to individualize them beyond a certain point, wouldn’t be a gift or a cruelty—it’s a simple impossibility.
His answer was a beat in coming. Marduk intimated much the same to me once, during a passing conversation. He said the Legion are not like angelkind, and that we should not expect them to be—for they are not multiple beings, but the many parts of one single being.
Bees, she murmured as she watched them fly in multiple directions without ever getting in each other’s way. They’re like bees. Each individual able to think and take action on their own, but always in pursuit of the larger goal.
There is no queen.
It’s us—their aeclari, she told him, feeling the truth to her core. We are their queen, the reason for their existence. It was a remarkably odd thing to realize, a thought that Raphael echoed a second later, before he had to drop away to handle an incoming call from Michaela.
That, too, she thought, was an oddness. The former Archangel of Budapest, now Archangel of the Pacific Isles, was not at all who Elena might’ve expected her to be on her rising. Per what little she’d picked up, Michaela was doing far better with Gavriel than Aegaeon ever had with Illium.
“Immortality is full of surprises.” She patted their little spark. “Next thing you know, Michaela will end up giving me wise counsel.”
Another stroke of her belly. “Jokes aside, my sweet parasite, I feel so much for her. I hope she manages to forge a relationship with Gavriel. Because no matter what, she loved him.” Elena would never forget a grievously wounded Michaela’s final request—even as she lay dying, she’d thought only of her son.
Thoughts of her own baby in mind, she walked into the forest, knowing that this was a place where she was always welcome. Using a dwarf orange tree as a brace, she got herself down next to a crouching member of the Legion. “What are we doing?”
A glance from this being who remained colorless in almost every facet but for the merest drift of brown across his irises. “These are intruders and must be removed.” He pointed to a specific weed. “These are not intruders.” Another indication, this time to plants that also looked like weeds.
But one woman’s weed was another woman’s very important plant for the microclimate, so she memorized both and got to work. “I wonder if the baby will like gardening,” she said, almost to herself.
The member of the Legion looked at her abdomen, then back at her. “We did not know until we had a garden.”
“Nice surprise?”
“Nice surprise,” he echoed in that way that was pure Legion.
The two of them worked side by side as the afternoon slipped into early evening, the skies streaked with color.
Looking up, one hand on her abdomen, she smiled.
Their baby would be born in the winter, while snow carpeted the city, and in future years, they’d celebrate their child’s birthday while soft white flakes fell from the sky.
She knew without asking that the child of the aeclari would also always be welcome in this wild forest, would be kept safe while being allowed to play.
A fat little bee buzzed by just then, before landing in the heart of a white daisy in front of her. She smiled, content to just watch the creature do what it had been born to do—as around her, the Legion did what they had been formed to do.
“Ari would’ve loved to photograph this,” she murmured to herself.
But the Legion fighter beside her heard. “Who is Ari?”
“My second-eldest sister,” Elena found herself telling him. “She died a long time ago, when I was a young mortal girl.” Memories of Ari’s generous smile had her own lips curving. “She was organized, too, just like you. The kind of person you could trust to get things done.”
How wonderful, she thought, that she could talk about Ari in a way that didn’t cut her, make her bleed.
So she spoke more, telling her willing listener all about the big sister who’d taken her hand on her first day of school and told her to be brave, the same big sister who’d snuck a chocolate bar into her schoolbag as a treat.
Lucky, she’d been so lucky to have Belle and Ari, Beth and Amy, as her sisters.
Luckier still that she had Eve to this day.
Her life was a tapestry that had begun woven in blood and anguish, but a thousand years had passed since then—the tapestry had grown until that bloody patch was a faded corner, so much hope and life around it that it was no longer the dominant feature.
“Love you, Ari,” Elena said with a smile as she rubbed her belly. “I’ll tell our baby so many stories about you, about all my sisters.”
The baby managed to make themselves felt even in the now-tight confines of her womb, as if excited by her words.
Laughing softly, she ate the fruit placed in her hand by one of the Legion, and continued on in this gentle task that connected her to the earth.