Chapter 24 The Blue of Blood #2
It starts fast and ends fast—a blast of pure Dark throws everyone off their feet, Sascia included.
From the floor, she gawks at Nugau. His fingers are splayed, shadows curling at their tips.
With a last, murderous look at the aesin who attacked Sascia, he grabs the back of her collar, lifts her off the ground, and unceremoniously marches her out of the dining area.
With every step, shock settles into terror. His grip is iron-made, his fury swathed in blood. “I didn’t do anything!” Sascia shouts. “I was respectful, just as you told me—”
“And it made no difference. They think you triggered the lights to escape. Do you understand now, why your Claim is futile?”
“I’m not a traitor or a thief or a liar, I am here to convince you that our worlds can be allies instead of enemies, and I won’t stop until—”
“Until you’re dead. Which you will be, soon from the looks of it.”
“Why didn’t you just let them stomp me to death, then? Why protect me?”
“Because my queen ordered me to.”
He brings her to a stop at the end of a corridor, where he drags a sliding door open with one hand and shoves Sascia forward with the other.
She throws her arms out for balance—before her is a plunging drop.
An elevator shaft stretches above and below, snapped cables hanging in midair like torn ligaments.
Neon ink shimmers on the walls; the whole shaft has been painted from top to bottom with scenes depicting aesin life, aesin love, aesin death.
“Our sun,” Nugau snaps, pointing to a black sphere in the middle of one drawing, “is much weaker than yours. Our world is ruled by darkness. To us, light is painful.”
He gestures to another mural: orbs of white strike a valley, leaving rubble and corpses behind.
“We did not understand at first, when your bombs dropped from the sky. They looked like comet showers. But when they crashed into land, their explosion was unnatural. A burst of light, as wide as a city. Your bombs destroyed miles of rare forests, hurt our livestock, tore holes into our underground cities. And they woke the Ul’amoon. The Old Ones.”
He rotates her to another mural that depicts a host of giant creatures tearing through a city, creatures that Sascia recognizes, either from the news or from myths: a dragon, a hydra, an ogre.
Destruction and waste lie in their wake.
Blue dominates the other colors, not the blue of the sky or the sea, Sascia realizes, but the blue of aesin blood.
“You call them Darkbeasts,” Nugau says. “You give them names from your own stories: dragon, griffin, basilisk, kraken. But they are not fairy tales to us. They are our oldest enemies. We have been fighting them for centuries, and struggled to trap them in cages beneath the earth. When your bombs struck, the strongest of the Ul’amoon tore free.
Your light drove them into a violent frenzy.
Entire cities were destroyed. Thousands died.
My other parent, Kilorn, the Queen’s consort, was one of them. ”
But that isn’t right. In human history, the Shanghai Darkdragon, the Rio Darkbasilisk, the Manhattan Darkgriffin, the Darkkraken of the Baltic Sea, they arrived first in the human world, unwelcome and destructive.
Director Shen helped NovaCorp create the nova-light weapons that brought down the Darkdragon and every Darkbeast thereafter.
Ever since, nova-bombs have been routinely thrown into Darkholes to keep them dormant.
Nobody really knows where these bombs go. They just disappear into the Dark.
But now—now, Sascia knows. Those nova-bombs traveled far, through not just space, but time too. They ended up in Itkalin, in a timeline before the aesin even knew about the existence of the human world. Before the Darkbeasts had ever emerged into human cities.
Because of ymneen, because of knotted time, the very weapons that were meant to kill the Darkbeasts ended up waking them in the first place.
Sascia had thought ymneen was a tool she could use to change the future, but maybe Nugau is right—it is a curse.
If the universe is a quilt, then her world and Nugau’s are a knot in the threads.
Time loops and folds, creating endless tangles.
Any action she takes might implode the world, just like Chapter XI’s nova-bombs.
“But you know that wasn’t our intention,” Sascia rasps, and suddenly she’s angry, at the knotted time, at the Darkbeasts, at the aesin, at him.
“You told me so. You said you’ve seen evidence of humans felling creatures that were still alive and well in your world.
You know we didn’t send the nova-bombs to cause destruction.
We only sought to protect ourselves against the very enemy you hate.
So why won’t you tell the rest of the aesin?
Why won’t you convince the Queen that we’re not the villains she thinks we are? ”
“They don’t believe me,” Nugau snaps. “I’m the only one who has traveled to your world and seen the Ul’amoon fall.
The aesin who attacked you back there, the Queen’s closest confidants—they look at you and see the cause of all this destruction.
” He flourishes a hand at the mural of blue blood.
“Intentions don’t matter. Our worlds are doomed to the whims of the ymneen.
An endless circle of violence, loss, and violence again.
We aesin have a saying: Harin ye o’ skish, o’ skish thi haro.
When met with a blade, with a blade you’ll meet. ”
It has a sense of despair, this saying, spilling from his lips like the final notes of a swan song. His chest rises and falls, and he snaps, “Do you understand now, human?”
She doesn’t and it’s plain on her face—Nugau’s lip snarls.
“It doesn’t matter,” he bites out. “I understand enough for the both of us. The aesin have suffered too much to forgive. They will never accept peace. Your Claim is futile.”
“I still need to try!”
It bursts out of her, surprising them both.
He just stands there, and she stands there, the two of them pillars of obstinacy, and Sascia thinks she’ll find her own anger reflected in his face, except what she sees is not anger, not really.
The shape is similar, the outline just as knife-sharp, but instead of all-devouring black, it is hued in bright crimson and blue, the colors of human and aesin blood, shed senselessly by blades that neither meant to raise.
Nugau is desperate, and so is she, and while he may be satisfied to lick his wounds and let them scab over, Sascia never learned how to sit still long enough to heal—she can only march forward, even with bright crimson gushing out, even with an army closing in, even with time itself standing against her.
I will try, she vows, and in that quiet comfort of her own resolve, she finds it: the first inkling of how she’s going to prove herself.