Eighteen #2
That’s what I think as I step back and pull my mask over my head again. For all we know it could be.
Shaking my head, I start heading towards one of the exits that leads to the staircase I took yesterday.
It’s abnormally quiet, but I’m sure that’s because everyone is tucked away with their partner – or partners.
I can still hear music as I take that last few steps before being greeted by the hallway.
The plush carpet silencing my heels and I’m a bit relieved when that sense of déjà vu doesn’t hit again. Nothing happens when I pass that section of the wall hiding the fountain and staircase either.
I intend to hide in plain sight the rest of the night and stay as close to the dance floor as possible. I’ve got about twenty minutes until midnight and technically I was only caught by one of those names I listed. Castiel, Callahan, Thorne, and Darian have yet to catch me.
The silence thickens for a moment right before I step into the ballroom. Then it’s like stepping into the past.
There’s no sense of déjà vu this time, no flash of light, no internal warning. I step into the ballroom and music is playing but I am no longer experiencing my time.
Shadows dance before me. Bodies clocked in darkness as their feet move in practiced steps. The entire room filled, a filter of cool tones over the setting with flakes of snow floating. Even the dance floor that I remember should be gold and red is muted.
I take another step and wait for the whispers. It’s colder in here than it should be, and overhead a presence sits watching.
Dance with me, Edmond.
The voice behind me makes me freeze. I hadn’t heard anyone behind me before and I can’t sense any bodies full of blood.
Glancing around my shoulder, I find the owner of that sultry voice.
She’s dressed like a cobra. A skin-tight black dress with plaiting that mimics scales and what would be the hood on a cobra is flared out and decorates her shoulders and neck.
Her mask curling up from behind her head and covers only the top half of her face.
She’s facing Thorne. At least, a version of Thorne, dressed in an all-white suit and unmasked. Red eyes barely a shade lighter than my own that are purposefully turned away from the female.
She drags her hand up his arm and presses her pushed up breasts against him.
Please, she drags out mockingly. My Moassi, I want to dance. Do not tell me you are still mad at me.
A muscle feathers in his temple but his body stays solidly still. His hands folded behind his back and not giving the female any attention. The same female who had been the one whispering with Thorne’s father yesterday when I had been given a piece of the past.
Shifting my body, I face them entirely and wait, wondering if she’ll notice my presence like she did yesterday. I’m curious about her and what she could be. She has fangs so that limits the races, but not by much.
Her hand creeps up over his chest and a sick feeling in my stomach makes me hope this is not Thorne’s mother. There’s too much. . . sludge around her. An inky film like oil coating around her that makes me want to rip her hands off Thorne’s father who looks like the same age as me.
Edmond, the blood oath is just a precaution because –
He takes a deliberate step away from her but keeps his focus on the dancing. You want to make the past forgotten. You want to make the past forgotten just like he was forgotten. Except you forget that I had seen him, Locklyn.
She lifts her chin an inch. Seen who?
He snaps his body towards her and strangles her wrists as he grabs her and pulls her close so he can whisper to her. His voice dark and deadly but straining with control.
The Forgotten God of Blood Moons.
That presence above shifts. Neither of them notice it, but I can feel it. The weight of time and space and fate tips.
I had seen him who they named Godskiller when that was never meant to be his name. All because one of your goddesses was jealous and now the veil is –
Enough, she hisses. He pushes her away and shakes his head but she wraps her hand around his neck and brings him back in close.
What you had seen, she emphasizes, is Sanivin at the end of her immortal life when she passed your garden and consumed the blue belladon that grows.
Taking her own life as she had when she was nineteen because immortality was stretching too thin before fading to ashes a decade before the end of the War of Gods.
She takes a closer step towards him, pushing him back. Two red lights beginning to glow behind her mask as her hand squeezes his neck.
There was never a God of Blood Moons, only a Goddess over moons, stars, and night.
There is no such thing as a Forgotten God because they are forgotten and we would not be able to remember them, and there is especially none named Godskiller because Sanivin the first vampire created had been named Godskiller.
A thing that goes against the very balances of the universe, but her death triggered the end of the War of Gods and beginning an era of peace with the primordials and those below them.
He grips the back of her neck and brings her so close his lips trace over hers, but an icy chill razes through the room as pure black aura floods.
Says a forgotten goddess. All those keys within me unlock. Trapped within this body that will eventually age and grow old and die.
Oh my god.
She’s a blood witch.
Her glowing red eyes snap over to me and she pushes Mr. Arcturus away.
You do not belong here, she screams. It makes him glance at me and his eyes widen. YOU ARE NOTHING!
I know.
YOU SHOULD HAVE KILLED YOURSELF THAT NIGHT! She heaves. Wretched, worthless abomination. You are a curse!
I know.
I will make you beg for the shadows of the forgotten, she grits. As long as I live, I will make sure you never find peace. I will haunt you and imbue pain into every thread of your soul. I am going to make you regret –
Her last word ends on a choke. Her face trembling before twisting into frozen agony as something below her skin ripples.
Then I scent it. Somehow being able to transpire past the lines of time and realms of the past.
Burning bones on a pyre.
Past the blood witch and Thorne’s father is a little girl with silky straight white hair pulled over her shoulder and sorrowful eyes as she watches the blood witch. She looks like a child, no more than ten, with her left hand clenched.
The blood witch chokes again as her nails claw at her chest and then her knees hit the floor.
Es – daughter, wh-what. Her mouth opens on a silent scream and begins writhing. Ess. . . Esmirra. Stop.
The little girl does not stop.
As long as you live, she whispers, tears beginning to stream down her face. So I will make sure you do not.
Mr. Arcturus glances between the three of us, his bloodred eyes lingering longer on me. He does nothing to stop the little girl as she continues killing her mother. As the bone witch kills the blood witch. As Esmirra of Ebony, my Nana, kills this woman who is a forgotten goddess.
When she’s finished, the little girl looks up at me. Her hand unclenching as she stares at me with milky white iris’s and reverence.
You will face more than you should, my mother does not need to add to it. You will bring our deliverance.
I shake my head. I’m not a god.
An inner light sparks behind her milky gaze. You are not a vampyr.
I shut everything and lock it all as tightly as I can.
I am nothing.
She tilts her chin up and smoke fogs the room disorientating it.
Shadows shift and that presence above weighs heavier.
I feel a haunting urge to rip this costume off of me and scrub my hair until I am myself again.
Until I feel like myself once more, with my familiar scars and my pink eyes and my sapphire blue and rosy colored hair.
Mavyn.
My name is whispered.
Mavyllora.
He’s never said that version of my name before, but it sounds like it always does, nonetheless. A plea. A wish. Begging to be believed, to be remembered.
He says it. My name.
But for all the times he’s whispered it like a prayer, I’ve never been able to remember his name.
Forgotten God of Blood Moons.