forty-five #2
He took another step forward. “She spoke to me with the lingering knowledge of being your mother. And the selfishness she harbored that ruined your old reality. Mira…”
Here he came closer, still keeping his daughter at staff’s length, but more amiable than he had been in years.
“She raised your soul to this reality so you may keep your happiness. You and I are at odds in this world, but I’m still your father. I am still your mother’s husband. Even if it comes down to you and me at the End of All Things,
know that I do what I do for everyone’s happiness and right to mortality.”
“You still speak in riddles…”
“If I speak even more plainly, you won’t understand me at all.”
“You’re talking as if you still intend on destroying this planet and sacrifice innocent people to the Void.”
“Are they truly innocent, these people? Or do you view them with your mother’s bleeding heart? Or do you view them with your father’s undying love for one woman? Be honest with yourself, Mira. You’re dealing with the only people worse than those who perform crimes of passion and debauchery.
They are hired killers, thieves, and ruiners of lives. Even your beloved has aligned herself with them.”
“In my other life, she was their victim. It does not change my view of her.”
“Victims often become perpetrators of suffering. One does not excuse the other.”
“Says the man who has committed some of the most heinous crimes in history!”
Her hysterical outburst echoed in the sealed Temple, yet Nerilis remained relatively unfazed as he curled his bottom lip and tucked his tongue between both.
“I do what must be done. So do you.”
“Ba…”
Why were there tears in the corners of her eyes?
Because he’s my father. Why did she desire to go to him?
Because he’s my father. Why did the thought of his spiritual betrayal hurt her so?
Because he’s my father. Why did she see Sulim’s face in her mind’s eye when she imagined the End of All Things?
A place she had already been once in her existence?
Because he’s my mother’s husband.
If Joiya trusted this man with her own mortal life, then Mira must, too.
“Why would you kill her, Ba? My own soulmate. Why these people? They are innocent in spiritual warfare. The Void does not judge them aside from how much suffering they themselves experienced.”
“When your mother visited me…” Nerilis lifted the staff, shapes and colors bending around them before he swung it back down.
“She showed me what happens in the reality that anchors us to the Void. The one that will determine if the rest of us, these echoes of our true souls, live to tell the tales of our lives.”
Before Mira could ask what he was on about, the staff swung past her, and the world blended and quaked into a myriad of prismatic colors that nearly blinded her—and while her skin turned translucent and she was suddenly floating in the air, hanging above a parallel copy of her new chiefly apartment,
her father remained stalwart beside her, the staff gone from his grasp.
Beneath, there he was. Another Nerilis from another reality, this one in the midst of a hawkish conversation with someone who looked like Mira but was not Mira.
I don’t know who this is… yet… it’s me… The woman with tanned skin and short brown hair that brushed her shoulders had every marking of a talentless hybrid who had spent most of her life on the Void-forsaken planet of Cerilyn.
It was in her permanent scowl; her rigid stance; her desperate desire to pull a weapon on the man who conversed with her in the middle of the night.
“Ba…” Mira attempted to speak, but her voice had been obliterated with whatever sorcery her father swung with that staff. She could only observe, the man in question gazing at his own self from another reality.
“Cerilyn has outlived its usefulness.” The Nerilis of another world turned toward the woman who was Mira-But-Not.
“I’ve seen this happen with other barely habitable niche planets before. Once the original use halts the economy, the people get desperate. Within two or three more generations, your planet will devolve into civil war. The Federation might get involved. It might not. If it does,
you will have the wonderful privilege of being absorbed into its bullshit. Either way, the population will disappear from here before you know it. The least a planet of murderous rapscallions can do is return to the Void and buy the rest of us some time.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
Mira tried to gasp, but her throat remained empty. Even the voice of the Mira-But-Not sounded just like her. Only more… jaded.
“Silly me for assuming my daughter might like a heads-up.”
“Why? So I can abandon my people? Never mind the people I’d rather not see die?”
“Don’t tell me you actually like this place.”
“It’s my home.”
“Why? Because you have power here? Yahzen is my home, but I wouldn’t cry to see it disappear. Could be good for some of the sods there.”
“Don’t tell me you’re planning on taking out Yahzen next.”
“No, no,” the angrier Nerilis responded, while his other self floated above him, completely undetected.
“There are at least a hundred good candidates before it comes to that. Besides, julah souls are stagnant. Those of us born with the full blood of our ancestors return to the Void when we perish in the mortal world, but we are never reborn.
There are ancestors of ours who have existed in the Void since the dawn of our kind.”
“Thank you for the lesson in metaphysics.”
“You jest, but these are basic things you learn when you are born on Yahzen. It’s like cooking a simple breakfast. Or teleporting.”
“So you’re imparting this wisdom upon me as fair warning to get the hell out of here.”
“It would be a tragedy for a child of mine to go out like that.”
“It’s all right for other people’s children to perish, but not for yours?”
“I didn’t say that, but my own child does get warning.”
The woman Mira recognized but rejected swallowed something down her slender throat. Whatever I feel for my father, she feels a hundred times worse. “What makes you think you’ll even succeed? There are other forces at work when it comes to an inhabited planet.”
“I know what I’m doing. That’s what makes me so dangerous.”
“Do you not question what will happen to your soul when you finally return to the Void?”
“That’s between me and whatever force created me. Besides, there is only one person in this universe who can admonish me, and I’d feel it in my soul. She has yet to condemn me.”
“You mean my mother?”
“I mean the woman who did her damnedest to birth you, yes. Now I know it was never meant to be. You were destined for a different fate than to tether her to the mortal world. Or to tether me to Yahzen, for that matter.”
Mira glanced at her father. He watched with the detached interest of a man watching a play on a stage, as if he had already accepted his fate.
“Tell me one thing,” the woman below Mira said. “On your list of potential targets… is Earth one?”
“It’s a passing interest.”
“Do me a favor. Don’t attack Earth anytime soon. If I leave, that’s where I’m fleeing.”
“For what it’s worth,” the other Nerilis said, standing up with a long stretch of his arms and torso, “I take no pleasure in what I plan to do.”
His arms hung at his side. For a moment, Mira saw how he must have appeared when he was a younger man—one lauded for his unprecedented abilities, beloved in his high-class family, and so thoroughly admired in the Temple that he broke records on his ascent to High Priest.
This was the same man who quickly stole the heart of Joiya Lerenan when she was mortal.
Surely, there was something redeeming about him.
Yet Mira knew her father’s true nature. While men like him charmed people around them before striking like a viper, plenty saw through their sweet veneer too.
“You think you’re destined to do this, don’t you?”
The other woman’s robe fell open when she stood.
Nerilis barely acknowledged her as she fumbled with her clothing.
“Why wouldn’t you be? You’ve always been the best that anyone has ever beheld. Your own fiancée Ascended. I was born from you. Me, a woman who somehow inherited her mother’s body, although she was born from another! So why wouldn’t you be the Void’s chosen? Why wouldn’t you,
a man already born to greatness in a lauded family… honestly, I’m not surprised you’ve ended up on this path.”
A finger wagged between the actors in the play.
“My God. If this is what you think is meant for you, then what the hell do you think is meant for me?”
Nerilis snatched her daughter by the wrist.
He twisted her hand until a ring shined in the light between them.
A zatbah stone? Mira had seen one like it before.
“I don’t know where you got that.” He released her.
“You play with fire. Stones like those aren’t toys. If you’re not careful, a piece of your soul could end up in that thing.”
“Sounds like a chance most of our kind take.”
“You are no ordinary soul. You are the daughter of the High Priestess and the most powerful sorcerer to have ever lived. For all I know, your abilities manifest when you’re least expecting it.”
“Abilities? What are you talking about? I have no sorceric power at all. I’d think we’d know by now!”
“We don’t know that for sure. Besides, stones like that aren’t easily destroyed. I’m not even sure the destruction of your planet—with you on it—could destroy it.”
“I think you should go. My bodyguards might wake up.”
Nerilis scoffed. “Your bodyguards are nothing to me.”
“They should be. I value their lives more than my own.”
Mira knew that look on the woman’s face.
Even when the other Nerilis disappeared, and even when her father swung the staff again, she knew that look.
The Mira-But-Not fretted for more than her own life.
The way she looked back at the bedroom, as if someone she deeply loved slept in there…
Sulim. Sulim is in there. That was the moment Mira confirmed her suspicions—that this pathetic hybrid beneath her shared her soul. They were the same.