55. You Cannot Save All
CHAPTER 55
You Cannot Save All
ALIA
K ingpin took a step back as Fenbutt and I stepped forward, together, as if we were one entity.
Something odd flickered in her eyes.
Fear.
Off to the sides, the battle raged. Mom and Dad and my siblings were taking on two mages who were throwing acid at my archers who were picking off rogues with blasted good eye shots.
The hydra and sphinx were working together with my Reds to take down a group of fire-wielding mages. A Red stepped in front of the mother sphinx, taking the flame meant for the mother. The sphinx stared down at the human as the need erupted in my soul and then vanished as if it had never been.
My heart cried even though my eyes could not.
I knew her name. I knew each and every one of their names. I’d grown up with them. I’d trained with them. They were good people. A bit disillusioned from what we’d been taught, but good people.
Graham. Sera. And so many more. Names that would be branded onto my soul for eternity.
Ran, Shen—I need you, I called out to my bonds.
Shen materialized at my side, grabbing an arrow from thin air an inch from my eye. I didn’t flinch. I didn’t know if my nervous system was just that shot or I was just bordering on psychotic.
“What can I do, my Luna?”
“Stop her from murdering my people,” I growled, pointing to Kingpin while another Red dropped from her blade and crumpled on the blood-drenched ground.
Shen bowed his head and then stabbed a mage who materialized behind him using some sort of speed or shadow magic. The mage collapsed as Shen turned, eyeing Kingpin who was harming the people she’d claimed to love.
“Best way?” he asked. The bond was a cold, calculated thing at that moment. As if he wouldn’t allow himself the luxury of emotions. For right then, he was Sicario Hood.
“Ran can take the flames, use her as cover and make my grandmother pay,” I said. “You’ll know when it’s time.”
Shen raised a single brow but nodded. “Do not get killed,” he said, his dark eyes filled with caution.
I grinned. “Me? Never.”
He huffed, but amusement flared over the bond along with a joyous affection that wanted to take me in his arms and squeeze me until I couldn’t breathe. It reminded me of when I see a furry baby animal and want to squeeze it. He found me cute… like some sort of furry rabbit or baby critter? “Hence why I am concerned.”
I am a lion who could kill you! I hissed at the bond.
Sure you can, princess, he whispered back, low and husky.
Ungracious, backward cur! I shouted.
He was gone the next moment, only a puff of air to signal his leaving. He dove into killing, trailing a pathway of blood behind him. Again. Until he made it to Kingpin.
With a single kick, he knocked her back and sent her spinning across the ground like a skipping stone on water. She left a divot of dirt five feet long when she slid to a stop.
That power. Shen looked back at me and grinned. And in his face, I saw darkness that made my soul tremble. Not with fear but anticipation.
He again drove her into the ground, keeping her occupied until she grew angry enough to send a swathe of crackling fire after him. He did his little move again and it barely missed singeing his arm.
Since Shen wasn’t on mage duty, my people and my magical creatures were taking the brunt of the dark mages power. “Hold, just a little longer, please,” I whispered to my people even though they couldn’t hear me.
Ran squashed a rogue under her foot and ripped its head off with her teeth.
I sensed her in a way I never could before. She longed to return to her people but didn’t wish to leave me. She needed to bask in a hoard for a while to completely regain her strength. This was her at less than full strength? I’d never want to be her enemy.
She snorted a laugh in my head.
Am I not terrifying enough now ? came her innocent voice as she roared at Kingpin, taking a hit of flames to protect the injured Red at her feet.
Shen got the Red—was that Brandt?— to safety and sliced the back of Kingpin’s ankles, severing the Achilles tendon and making her stumble. She turned with a snarl on her face, but Shen and the Red were gone. Before she chased another Red, Ran tossed her into a tree with a simple swipe of her claws.
“You ready?” I said to Fenbutt.
He gave a little woof, wagging his tail.
“Do it,” a voice said from behind me.
I turned to see Mom standing there, her eyes bright with tears as she watched her very mother kill, maim, and destroy her friends and family. Mom’s jaw was clenched in determination, and ire bounced behind her calm facade. Behind Mom were my siblings.
Jacob saluted me. “At your service, ma’am,” he said with a jaunty grin.
Anna smacked the back of his head. He rubbed it, shooting her a glare.
Dad finished off a rogue and came to stand beside Mom. “We trust you.”
I nodded. “I won’t be able to fight.”
“Then it’s time someone protected you for a change, little sis,” Anna said with a gentle, knowing smile. “Let us do for you what you’ve done for us.”
My lips quavered. I turned before they could see what their support brought me. How I needed it.
“I trust you guys,” I said, deciding to let them see my tears.
Mom gathered me to her bosom, as if knowing just how much I needed that.
"Enforcers! Rally around your matriarch!" Dad yelled, and those nearest to us finished their battles and gathered around us, fighting back the hordes of rogues which just kept coming like a massive tsunami.
Not only that, but unicorns gathered around us as well, stabbing anything within reach of their horns with unerring accuracy. The sphinx used her nose-like beak to protect Enforcer Markus as a rogue pushed him to his back. He nodded at the sphinx before diving after another rogue.
The dryad and elf couple were behind us. The elf used force fields to bash mages and then the dryad used his vines to tie them up or kill them. I saw the bald shopkeeper who always wrung his hat in his hands with a plank of wood, his face coated in blood as he swung at a rogue, taking it down with his fellow villagers.
When the heck did the villagers join the fight?
My heart thudded with affection so deep it warmed my soul.
My people and those we saved were coming together… for me. For us. For our freedom.
Determination burned in my soul. I wouldn’t let them down.
“Sometimes strength is knowing when to let others help you, honey bunny. I love you. Now kick your grandmother’s hinny.” Mom kissed my forehead, stepping back as I pulled away.
Dad gave me a nod that was pure respect and pride. Jacob saluted—and called me ma’am— again . And Anna gave me a glowing smile that made my heart leap with joy. She looked radiant.
I sat, my family surrounding me and my enforcers and my magical creatures surrounding them. I laid my hand on Fenbutt’s forehead and he scrambled into my lap, his soul linking with mine. I cuddled him close as I dove into the realm between worlds.
I fell into a well of darkness, surrounded on every side by needs screaming for help. By my side was a snarling puppy who darted off into the fog.
“Fenbutt!” I cried, but he was already gone.
An unfamiliar darkness surged. It was a blackness that darted from person to person, killing, reaping, destroying. It was darker than the darkness itself, a black hole of emptiness instead of a soothing peace.
It was not meant to be here. It felt wrong.
The mages themselves who wielded the emptiness had needs buried beneath their desires, but their choices had left them numb to those needs and vulnerable to manipulation.
Ahhanhi, I whispered. Forgive me, but I do call upon your promise.
A blue-haired, amber-skinned being with hieroglyphs all along her forehead appeared before me in this alternate reality of the real world. Was this the spiritual realm? I would likely never know.
Hello, little human. How may I serve?
Can you set them free? I asked, gesturing to the mages with the black so deep it coiled like a serpent in their souls.
Ahhanhi turned to the enslaved souls who didn’t even realize they were bound, and I could nearly see through her head. She turned back to me with a gentle smile. I knew my promise would not go in vain in you, little human. This will be my pleasure.
She turned. One moment she was floating before me and then she was by souls of differing colors, their very beings surrounded by an emptiness feeding on their needs and whispering to their wants.
The emptiness screamed as she ripped it from the mages. Some reached for it and got it back in the moments before it disappeared, and Ahhanhi frowned in displeasure but let them have it back. Others cowered away from it, their souls free for the first time in many years and clarity making tears roll down their face. Funny how darkness can be so alluring yet so very foggy when bound to it.
If the mage did not want the emptiness back, it had to flee. And it flew to one person. This person had a storm of black emptiness around them, their very essence hidden behind the forces not of this world. The stormy blackness was an inky abyss that crackled with spikes of electricity.
But I wasn’t looking for the emptiness. I was looking for the person beneath it.
The emptiness howled at me as I parted it, diving into the abyss of my grandmother’s soul as Ahhanhi ripped more emptiness away to free mages.
And there, in the very center, beneath years of toil and unmet needs and downright abuse… was a child in chains. A child burdened with weight much too large for her little shoulders to carry. Her head was bowed, unable to lift under the pressure of the chain about her neck.
The chain read ‘Hopelessness.’
The emptiness tugged at me with prying claws, ripping into my soul, but I dug and I pushed and I, at last, fell to my knees before the girl.
She lifted her head just a hair, and I saw bright blue eyes wracked with pain and guilt. Her face was smooth but pale, and blood dribbled from her mouth in a steady tap-tap-tap against the chains binding her feet.
“You are not to be here,” she said, her voice wispy but clear.
“I know. But I’ve come to set you free.”
She bowed her head again. “Freedom is in the eye of the beholder. I chose freedom in power, and it bound me. I chose freedom in love, and it nearly killed me. Freedom is not what it is supposed to be.”
“Then I haven’t come to free you. I’ve come to love you,” I whispered.
I saw the path she took to get to this place. I saw the things that forced her into the bondage of searching for power enough to control the world so it would be peaceful and beautiful for all. Somewhere along the way, she lost her way and made a few decisions which paved a pathway to darkness that made her give up herself in the hopes of never feeling pain again.
But here, at her core, she was bound by those things she thought would bring freedom.
I pulled dark fingers of emptiness from around my neck and leaned forward, wrapping my arms around this broken woman who was once an innocent girl. This woman who perpetuated the cycle, breaking others in a bid for power. On and on, until she was a slave to the very things she’d committed to fight.
In fighting monsters, she had become one.
I wrapped my arms around her, chains and all, and I gave her the love I’d given myself. Some things weren’t about what had broken you, but about what healed you. When I had chosen to be there for myself, to be kind to myself, and to work on myself, it had healed parts of me I didn’t know existed.
People will be people. People will dislike you, blame you, hurt you. But what you think of yourself hurts you the very most—or heals you. And every creature of the five worlds was blessed with a soul, endowed with Gifts from the Creator, and connected to Source by the sacrifice of the son.
They were beautifully imperfect and lovely creatures. Every single one of them. But sometimes in their brokenness, they made choices that led them down a path they never wanted and then felt too stuck to change.
But that was the thing. No one was ever too far gone. No one was ever beyond the ability to recover. No one was ever too broken to heal.
We were all a little—or a lot—broken.
And that was ok.
We never have to be stuck. There was ever a pathway free. And we were never too broken. Never.
The being I was holding reached up a hand and grasped my neck. “You can be loved,” I whispered.
“I do not deserve love. Not anymore. But I can do the one thing we need .” The child morphed. She took on a visage of wrinkles and gray hair. The chains fell away. She rose with my spiritual throat in her hand. “I can take it. To make everything we did right. To make it worth it.”
“Grandmother—don’t,” I choked out, a tear trailing down my cheek as I felt her intent. She was too broken to hold my Gif?—
She smiled at me. It was a gentle thing, tempered by love. “I was ever proud of you, my girl. But you were too altruistic to be used as I needed.”
“Don’t,” I whispered, unable to voice anything further as her hand tightened around my throat.
She set her hand over my soul and pulled. She ripped something precious from me, a part of me I had never realized was even there. The pain wrenched a scream from my lips.
She dropped me and I fell to my knees, clutching my chest. I was trapped. With no Gift and no way out, my soul was at her mercy.
She watched as I slowly withered in her mind, the emptiness clawing and pawing and slicing. The wounds Torem Filius had healed were reopened, my soul bleeding as the darkness of my grandmother swarmed my innermost being. I screamed.
A howl echoed in the dark. A roar of pain and fury. The mark on my wrist glowed. My wrist, which had once borne the Mark of Dishonor, was now a seething mass of swirling darkness. Darkness that even this emptiness couldn’t conquer.
The darkness on my wrist was the purple-blue hue of a night sky. It was shaped like a hemisphere with rain falling from a cloudless night sky over a teeming valley of mountains and rivers. If you looked close enough, you could see a werewolf howling up at the moon. On one side, there was the top of a willow tree and the other where roots branching up into the sky.
“Mate?” Kingpin hissed. “No, you are not his. You are my granddaughter, mine to kill.”
No, a voice boomed into the echoing caverns of Kingpin’s dark soul. A streaming light emerged from the mark at my wrist, coalescing into a werewolf with glowing red eyes and all-white fur—a complete inverse of his physical form. The heart on his hindquarters was black, as was his tail tipped in black.
She is mine , Shen and Lycus growled as one, their voices a promise, a certainty, a declaration.
The werewolf launched at Kingpin, knocking her back to the chains at her feet.
Something tugged at me from within. I touched my glowing wrist where I saw a living tether of black and blue and gold entwined. Shen used it like a rope, tugging me, pulling me, and with a pop, the emptiness lost its hold on me. The last thing I saw was the wolf winking at me before he faded into bright mist and followed me out of the caverns of death.
I was ejected from Kingpin’s being. It felt as if I’d been riding Ran backward in a downward spiral, and we landed hard on a rock. But the metaphorical rock was my physical body, so I didn’t die.
It just hurt.
I plopped back into the physical world with a jolt. My mouth felt dry and my tongue clung to the roof of my mouth. My arms shook as I sat upright.
Shen was beside me, handing me a water canteen. I took it and he helped me ease it to my lips. His concern shone through both the bond and his eyes, but he held back the questions as I recovered, my arms and legs feeling odd. As if they weren’t my own. As if my soul were still left tethered to that monster.
Something felt like it was… missing.
“What did you do?” Mom whispered, staring in front of her.
I peeked around Dad and saw Kingpin. She was glowing with an inner light. One hand was glowing with a ball of starlight, and the other was wreathed in swirling darkness.
She smiled, half her face wreathed in light from my Gift and the other half shadowed like some sort of demon. Her eyes were reversed, one light and one dark, but they swirled with either darkness or light depending on the base. She laughed, her voice two in one.
“I am free at last!” she said, tilting her head back to the skies.
But then her smile dropped.
“What… no, NO !” she screamed, backing away and swatting in front of her as if something were assaulting her. She beat against her chest, tearing at it with her claws. Her eyes met mine and they darkened.
I stood, walking the ten feet to her as she fell to her knees. “What is this?” she whimpered.
“A Gift. And a Curse,” I said, staring down at her. I then glanced around.
The battle was done. Most of the mages Ahhanhi had freed of the darkness had fled, those who remained in darkness had been slain.
The rogues who hadn’t been killed had run off, their appetites for carnage satiated in both friend and foe. I would need to hunt them down and release them in the coming days.
But for now, I stood before the woman who had trained me and betrayed me. How she clung to the empty blackness as if it were her very child. She couldn’t release it to embrace the light.
Then I understood.
Anyone can heal, but they have to choose it for themselves. And you first had to be humble enough to admit you were broken.
Grandmother was trying to cling to the Gift she stole from me while holding to the darkness inside her.
And I finally knew my Gift’s Curse.
It was brokenness.
Seeing other people’s needs left you broken. Aching. Filled with sorrow.
The needs of the people all around her were stabbing into her soul. I knew because I’d felt it. But I’d had years to learn how to put up boundaries around my soul so the needs didn’t shred me to pieces. Many still got through to shred my soul. To make me a scared, broken creature within. A creature I loved. A soul that had borne other people’s pains and helped them through it. That had mourned those we lost, rejoiced with those who healed, and brought justice to those who harmed.
I loved her, that broken, scared, imperfect soul within me.
Shen took my hand and kissed my wrist where his mark lay beneath my bracer. So do I, he whispered in my mind, his eyes intense with the depth of his loyalty and his love.
I peeled my eyes from his and looked back to Kingpin, who was being shredded by the one thing she’d coveted.
It was worse because as a ruler, you knew the needs of everyone in your kingdom. And though my kingdom was small, it still consisted of many thousands of people and creatures. And she didn’t have a Ran who could help bear the load, or a Creator who would heal her, or a family who would bring her food and sit with her, or a werewolf who would make her laugh until she could cry.
Kingpin didn’t have what she needed in order to bear my Gift since it was meant for me and no other. And it was slowly destroying her.
Some people you can’t free because they don ’ t want to be free. Some people you can’t help because they don ’ t want to be helped, Ran said, watching from behind us. She tucked her wings against her sides as she squashed a rogue trying to sneak up on my little ragtag group.
Fenbutt stalked beside us, still in his little goblin form. His low growl shook the ground at our feet.
Kingpin was shriveling. Her face was becoming sunken, her hair falling out, and her fingers becoming bony and thin. Even so, she maintained a death grip on the Gift that was killing her.
Fenbutt launched himself forward and—I looked away. I didn’t wish to see my grandmother slain. Not like this.
Fenbutt nudged my hand. I opened it and something warm and soft fell into my fingers. My Gift. I put it to my chest, and it felt as if a bolt of lightning went through me. I breathed out a sigh of relief. My Gift was returned to me. For a split second, I again felt all the needs of those around and why those needs were there and then Fenbutt pulled back, releasing me from knowing the depth of those needs . They still teased at the corners of my mind and still tried to harm me, but they glanced off my soul.
For the first time in my entire life, feeling needs no longer hurt.
Shen put his arms around my shoulders as my people, my Reds, and my magical creatures stood alongside his werewolves; all of us were bloody, torn, and weary, but victorious over the evil that had come for us all.