Chapter Ninety-Two. The Real Battle Begins.
Ninety-Two
The Real Battle Begins.
I stay where I am, in the pond, arms wrapped around myself, my eyes glossing over.
I’m dimly aware of the sun sinking down even farther at the horizon, and the darkness prowling around me.
I am immobile, numb, and strangely hot. Even with my clothes soaking up the cool water, I feel a burning deep inside me, and images of my village, smoking and ruined, take over my conscious thoughts.
My unconscious ones are too scattered and traumatic to catalogue.
It’s as though I’m a house burning to the ground, just like the ones I saw inside the wall, my outer layers eaten away, my interior supports gone, my personal articles obliterated.
There are no more chairs or tables for me, no pegs on which to hang my cloak, no bed for me to sleep in or trunks for my storage.
Never again will someone make a meal in this destroyed home of mine, and no footsteps will sound out, for I have no floors or stairs.
What I once was, what my purpose had been, what roof I’d had and windows I’d sported, gone, gone, gone.
And in its place … something I have been denying for so long …
The vengeance, that was always just underneath my consciousness, which I’ve always seen as this odd, foreign part of me, but which was, in reality, my true nature.
I am my father’s daughter.
And in the aftermath of this intractable realization, I discover a weakness within my heart that’s of cataclysmic implication if I’m not careful: Of all the brutal truths that have taken me down, it’s the one about Merc that I find the hardest to bear.
It should be the revelation of who my father is or the sense that my mother, in hiding me, also took things from me …
things that I now recognize as skills I once had, experiences I enjoyed, places I lived.
Things I did … of which some are intimate—because Merc was right.
My first time having sex with him was not that of a virgin, and what does that mean?
Did I have a lover, sometime long ago? A man I had deep feelings for …
a husband? A family? Those headaches I always got if I looked too deeply into a shadowy feeling or passing inclination I now recognize were some kind of mental patch, obscuring whatever is beneath.
My father is evil, but my mother is the thief of me.
Plus I’ve just learned I am dead, which would explain why I’ve never had a cycle as women do.
And all of this informs my current destiny: I am going to face the Dark King this very eve. I am going to the altar on my own, before Julion arrives with his men, and I am going there with no weapons, no army, and no defenses, for a greeting which I may very well not survive.
So surely that, on top of all of my truths, should count most toward my internal devastation.
But no, none of that is the worst.
Merc’s betrayal, and all I did not see when it came to him, is the most painful part of this.
And as if my mind is determined to punish me for the soppy emotions that helped with the eclipsing, I revisit snippets of him: His first arrival in the pub, the copper he tried to give me downstairs and then in the guest room he was given …
him yelling at me in the tunnel and then riding the balas triumphantly out of the moat …
I remember his thunderous ride to me when I was down on the bed of the Lake of Lost Souls, having tangled with the skystalker …
and now he’s in that window seat at the Outpost, sketching in his journal, and glaring at Thale when he walked in on that man and me.
I revisit Merc slumped in that cell in the warrior queen’s dungeon and him washing my hair and making love to me in that luxurious suite …
There’s such a temptation to believe what he said just now, about his feelings being true. But what was it that he said about the Dark King?
The evil gets in you and knows your deepest fears and desires.
Merc is, after all, a demon, and I need to believe the reality of what’s in front of me, not the persuasive words that were just spoken by him. I must face whatever awaits me with my father on my own, and without the blurring of my feelings.
On that note, I focus once more on my reflection in the water. The gloaming has arrived, and so my eyes are barely visible, yet I see them clearly, the pale outer rim and the dark center hole.
That’s as black as my dead soul.
As I rise up from the water, I hear the dripping from my clothing and my body, and feel the cold even more deeply. Staring across the pond, I picture what is not so far away, just a little more north and a little more west than my current position.
The altar. Where the Dark King was supposedly sacrificed.
I thought the compass was sending me to the Sooths. But no, their temple just happens to be between where I am and the ancient seat of the Fulcrum.
That is where I must go.
When I turn to Lavante, his head is up and his alert eyes are on me. I expect him to balk as I walk over. He does not, but perhaps evil is the kind of thing you can become familiar with.
Yes, I know what I must do and where I must go now. And this I must do alone.
No more hiding. Ever.
The stallion’s quiet nicker of welcome, so plaintive and lovely, would have brought tears to my eyes earlier. No more. There will be no tears for me now or in the future.
I take off the saddle, take off the bridle, and dump the tack on the shoreline. “You are a beautiful horse.”
As I pass my palm down his muscular neck, his golden coat gleams in the last rays of the setting sun.
I think of Lalah and Emma, and remember the moment he was given to me, a great asset in return for a bad deed done for all the right reasons.
I recall riding him through so many trials, surging over grass, over decayed marble, through mist. He is more than beautiful.
He is fierce, courageous, loyal, and smart.
“I will miss you,” I say in a low voice.
More than that, I will miss what I knew of the world when he was mine. And I mourn the version of reality I thought I was in.
And then I go still.
Something within me knows what to do, even though I have no idea what is about to happen: I put out both my arms, look down upon the skin revealed as the sleeving rides up, and strip from my eyes all that I was programmed to not see—
There it is.
The shimmer of magic that coats me, hides me, protects me. It’s all over my body, a magic shield put in place, long, long ago.
I look to Lavante.
This horse, this beautiful horse, must survive tonight.
Not because I’ll ever see him again and don’t want his death on my conscience, and not because of all that I owe him for his efforts on my behalf.
No, it’s because the mercy I show in this moment is the last I will give to anyone and anything.
His protection will be the gravestone to mark my humanity.
With a flex of my will, I send the shimmer to him, the magic tugging at my corporeal limbs as if it intends to resist the eviction.
I prevail, however, the energy leaving me through the tips of my fingers, and traveling through the gathering darkness in heat waves that warp the night air.
As the spell reaches the stallion, he jerks and throws his head, then rears up and paws at the distance between us with a whinny of alarm—
There’s a clap of thunder, and a flare of prismatic light. Then the shimmers fall all over him and coat his every nic and length, as if a rainbow has been broken over his head and back.
The light show fades and he throws his head one last time.
Though I have to deny my emotions, I reach out and stroke his muzzle. “You are the very best horse ever to roam Anathos, and now you must go.”
As he nickers softly and nods as if he understands, I’m struck with a fresh loss, and then he’s gone, his snow-white tail swishing, his hooves beating the ground while he trots off into the trees, never to be seen by demons or humans alike, free to roam, no master to dictate his future …
Or the long life he will lead because I have made it so by giving him what has hidden me for millennia—
A lingering tingle makes me pull up my sleeve and I frown.
My skin is a different color, far darker, and as I pull a lock of hair over my shoulder, the waves are no longer white. They’re jet-black, just like Merc’s.
I did not have freckles, after all. The masking magic deposited a pale pattern onto my skin and leached the color of my hair out.
Given that I’m someone other than the person I knew, it seems right that I look like somebody altogether different—and that’s when I see my own marking. The SP on the insides of both my wrists.
Claimed, by the Dark King himself. The whole time.
As this all resonates deep within my soul, I become one with the shadows, just another among the congregation that forms the night and dims the landscape.
Except I am more than shadow. I am demon, the thing all people fear, the soulless undead who roam the forests and mountains under the command of their master—
No, I’m even worse. I am my father’s powerful daughter, his next generation, finally vested with the dark magic into which I was born, from which I have been hidden.
And unto my destiny I must go.
As I walk forward and step off the shore, the pond before me does not give way underfoot.
Now, the water rejects me, that which welcomed me into its sweet, cleansing cradle only moments before becoming as packed dirt.
With the spell released from my skin, my true nature is no longer denied to the elements, and they identify me as unholy and unwanted.
With every stride, I feel myself becoming harder and harder, like molten steel losing its warmth and finding its permanent form.
By the time the opposite shore arrives, I have been birthed in a new way, stripped of the lies and deceit that coated me along with my camouflage.
And as with my truth, and my intrinsic nature, I am fully revealed as I step onto the ground once more, fully vested in my power.
I cast my hand out and split the forest before me, the trees and undergrowth commanded to bend away.
And that’s when I see the demons.
They are threaded throughout the trunks like ticks in a dog’s fur, black beasts that have the form of men, the hide of a balas, and the oblong eyes of a snake. The abrupt disappearance of their forest cover causes them to wheel about toward me.
They do not attack.
Instead, they fall to one knee and bow.
With my will, I freeze them thus, anchoring them to the ground as if I have staked their dead flesh into bedrock. Keeping them here in this location is not to protect Julion and whatever forces he will be bringing here to fight.
It’s to deny my father’s aims simply by thwarting the evil.
Two can play at control, can’t they.
The path I cut through the vast arboreal thicket stitches itself back up in my wake, further locking my father’s forces in, and my anger is such that I laugh at how easy it is to command my environment and subjugate that which I’d regarded with such terror.
It’s not the laugh I used to have, shy and timid.
The sound is aggressive and mean.
The roar of the Fulcrum reaches my ears first, and then I am before the great spinning sand, the contamination not just complete now, but being expelled, the black swirling, spitting barrier degrading to the point where it’s not even a door to be opened. It’s just a curtain to be pushed aside.
The ancient slab altar that marks where my father was supposedly sent into his prison, sits before the twirl like a forgotten relic, its tabletop of granite covered with drifts of sand, its support base all but buried in the detritus from the Fulcrum’s demise.
I’d heard that for generations sacrifices were made here, animal bribes to the Dark King, small souls offered in hopes the human ones would be left alone.
At some point, the practice was discontinued, perhaps because as the weather changed and food became more scarce, there were fewer domesticated meat sources that could be wasted.
The idea the evil would be placated by anything less than the total domination of Anathos is absurd.
Putting out my palm, I stop the swirl, stop it with every remaining sand particle freezing in the air, even the flakes that spin off halting in their descent.
I step through, into a landscape I already know in some deep crevice of my mind—
No, that’s not true. I recognize what’s before me because I’ve recently visited a very similar place.
It’s the red vista on the far side of that maze of spires after the Crystal Gate, the one with the twisted, tortured trees and the fire holes, only here the flames are black.
And here, the bleak panorama goes on for an eternity, the hills rising and falling out to no horizon ever because it does not end.
“Father,” I say in a commanding voice. “Come unto me now.”
In response, I hear the laughter of a sadist.
And then the voice that I have known in my dreams for as long as I have been hidden among the humans.
“Sorrel.”