Chapter Fifty-Three
‘Eira, please,’ my mother sobs, clinging to my ankles, her head dipped to my feet. I just stand there, dumbfounded, stricken by the conflicting realisation that my mother is not heartless, or unfeeling.
She has been burdened by a crime, weighed down by the pressure of keeping it a secret. She has been driven into madness just as I have. Only, by two different men.
Father and son. One guilty of the allegations on his name, one innocent but turned guilty by the circumstances he has been thrust into.
‘Cry all you want, dear Mother,’ Ori laughs from the windowsill. ‘You can’t take back all the ruin you’ve caused. You cannot undo the damage you’ve inflicted on your own children. You have killed more than just the King of Reyhen.’
‘It’s you who has caused the most damage to me, Ori!’ I scream at him, turning to find the air behind me empty.
‘Now, now, Sister. Don’t get it twisted. I’m not the bad guy here. She killed our father.’
He appears next to me and places a hand on my shoulder; his gaze fixed on our mother on the floor as her pleas grow louder and more strained.
I push him off me. ‘You killed me,’ I spit, blood rushing into my face. ‘I waited for you, grieved you, missed you. My sweet, doting brother who I thought would always be my protector. But now I see you have killed him too.’
I push him again, harder and he just takes it, stumbling backwards wide-eyed.
‘He wouldn’t do the things you’ve done to me, making me see things that aren’t there, making me question what is real or non-existent.
You have let the harshness of the world corrupt him, until he became the monster you are now. ’
I give another shove, and he tumbles to the ground with surprising ease, only, when he lands, it is that dark-haired boy looking up at me – trembling with fear.
‘You didn’t protect me,’ he weeps, face flooded with tears. ‘You didn’t fight for me, Sister.’
I fall to my knees. He’s right. I believed exactly as I was told, never questioned or investigated it further. Exactly what I do with everything else.
‘You are just like I, Sister. Corrupted as you say.’ The little boy begins to droop, his features sagging and twisting as his voice deepens into a growl.
‘I will never be like you,’ I cry out to the monster the boy morphs into before me. His hair sprouts into fire, like a dozen candles on his head until his whole body is a bonfire. A man made of flame.
‘That river into hell is not one of water.’ He clamps his scorching fingers onto my arm, an agonising wave of heat washing over my skin.
It is here that I discover that the only flame I can tolerate is my own.
I am ablaze with pain. I scream out, but I am only yanked closer to the man of fire.
He spits sparks into my ears as he speaks.
‘You burn with the rest of us.’
My mother’s body falls into mine as she tries to break me free from him. ‘Let her go!’
The man evaporates into nothing, taking the pain with him.
‘Don’t pretend you care about her, that you’ve ever cared about her,’ Ori’s voice bounces off the walls, striking us from all angles. My mother clutches me closer to her, tears falling from her face onto mine as she hunches over me in protection.
‘Don’t pretend you have ever cared about anything other than yourself.’ He stands above us now in his true form, white hair sheeting over his eyes, panting. Dagger held out in the air over our heads.
‘Don’t do this, Ori. Please,’ I sob up at him. ‘You don’t have to be like this.’
His face twists, a building storm of emotion clouding over his features. He lifts the blade up higher, his chin rising.
Peering down at us, he laughs.
‘I am like this, because of her. I am made from her.’
One flinch of his arm shifts the entire scene. The dagger dips slightly, with the intention to meet flesh. My mother sobs, I scream, jumping from her arms, reaching for Sirnet. ‘Ori, no!’
One flick of his other hand and I am thrown through the air for the second time tonight, colliding with the wall of shelves. My spine feels as though it fractures into a million pieces, books and ornaments clatter over my head.
I don’t see it when it happens.
That is how quick the dagger plunges into my mother’s chest. In the span of a single blink. She doesn’t even scream, or shout, or cry.
The blade is not audible as it pierces though her dress, through her muscle, through her bone.
It’s like she doesn’t feel the need to make a sound at all as her life is stolen from her. Like in the second her son makes contact she decides that she is not worthy of being heard any more. I cannot understand why.
All I know, is that my eyes close to my brother holding our father’s prized weapon over our mother’s head and open to her with a chest full of steel, writhing on the ground, atop the stain her husband left when she did the same to him.
‘Mama!’
I am a child again, at that beautiful point in life when your world is small and shaped like your mother. When there is nothing else that matters more than her. And my world has just come crashing down before me.
I crawl through the rubble of it to her, Ori nowhere to be seen.
I cradle her, as she would have done me at some point, feeling the soft convulsions of her body as her life sputters to a halt.
The sound comes back to her as she turns her back, head in my lap, dagger still imbedded in her chest. She whimpers, her wet eyes pleading with me for reprieve, for it all to finally end.
She brings a trembling hand up to my cheek, a quiet apology in the form of one last motherly touch.
‘I know,’ I cry, stroking the tangles of her hair. ‘I forgive you.’
Her lips quiver, an action I convince myself is a smile.
‘My...Eira.’
She pushes the words out in her last living moment, her last full breath before it shudders out to a rattle. Her hand falls from my face. My tears fall from my cheeks and into her open, lightless eyes.
I take in every last inch of her, as though she might disappear if I look elsewhere.
The relentless beauty of her. The stillness of her. The redness of her.
The visible part of Sirnet sticking from her dilutes my grief with rage.
Cursing the man who made it.
Wishing death upon the man who put it there.
I cannot let them touch her any longer. She only belongs to me now, my question mark of a mother. The woman I thought I knew more than I knew myself. The woman who proved me wrong in her last moments.
I wrap my sweaty fingers around the hilt of the dagger and wrench it free from her lifeless chest. A sudden pulse of energy knocks me off balance, as my mother’s body erupts into a golden sunshine, like an exploding star – hot air and undiluted light pushing forth from her, pulsing outwards until it envelops the room and me.
One final embrace between mother and daughter.
It grows and grows and grows in intensity until I have to force my eyes shut, covering them with protective hands. The sky groans outside. The room quivers. An earthquake of change.
Then it all stops.
I am left kneeling by my dead mother, silver in the moonlight that shines through the window.
I am as empty as the air around me. The atmosphere is thin and quiet and discharged.
I wipe the blood from the dagger on my dress, running my finger over the intricate patterns of the hilt before looking back to the woman it just killed.
The Relic may be destroyed by that which matches it in power. Something made from it, perhaps.
Something made from it. Something born from it.
The Virtuae Relic was never something locked away. Hidden from my sight and knowledge.
It was the woman who I thought weak and feeble. The woman who gave me life. The woman who lies dead on the stone floor.
A goddess, felled by a weapon of her own making.
A woman killed by the hands of her own two children.
Gods humbled by man.
I stroke her hair from her head, leaning down to press a kiss between her brows, hot tears streaming from my eyes. ‘Sweet dreams, Mother.’
I hope the gods are ready to face the consequences.