CHAPTER FIVE #3
“And yet,” Davina said, taking a step toward me, “it has been mostly your fellow man that you’ve slaughtered.” Her onyx eyes twinkled in the dim light. “Or shall I say fellow humans, as they have hardly all been men.”
“How dare you,” I snarled. “Everything I have done has been to avenge those that you and your kind slaughtered on the winter solstice fifteen years ago!”
“Ah, yes. An untenable lie, that one, yet accepted by humans without so much as one pitiful challenge.”
I narrowed my eyes on her. This was why I had come. “Then what is the truth?”
But she only smiled, a sadness lurking beneath the deep midnight of her eyes. “Your response to my answer would be to vehemently brand me a liar without a second thought. Perhaps someday I will tell it to you. But not today.”
My teeth clenched hard enough to grind them to dust. “Then why am I here?”
She considered me, her gaze still clinical as all hell. Belonged to Stone, my ass. “What do you know of humanity’s origin?” she finally asked.
My brows shot up at the absurdity of the question, then crinkled.
They settled in a skewed position over my forehead as I mulled over why she could be asking such a thing.
“We were created by Etain, Spring Goddess of the Quartet and Bringer of Life. The gods blessed us with this land and everything we needed to prosper.” I snorted.
“Only a few managed that, of course. Everyone else suffers. And if you ask me, they just don’t care.
They grew bored with us the second we were no longer a shiny new idea. ”
But the Archon’s head was shaking, the tips of her fingers kneading into her brow. She sighed. “Your religious leaders have always refused the truth of your origins, despite us explaining it many times.”
My cocked brows shot to attention. “You have a different version? Why should I believe it any more than the one I just gave?”
Davina shot me a withering glare. “Because humans have very, very poor memories and an even more pathetic ability to accurately record their own history. We, on the other hand, have meticulous records dating back ten thousand years. Back to a time when neither humans nor the da’kai existed. Only gargoyles.”
My sharp laugh echoed through the chamber. “Cue narcissistic bullshit.”
Davina’s lips tipped upward. “Perhaps, but it doesn’t make it any less true.
This world was once populated by millions of gargoyles, spread across the continents in grand cities that have long since crumbled to dust. The two greatest empires, both in Alarin, fought a devastating war with unintended consequences that still echo through the world today. ”
Davina began to pace in front of me, her hands tucked behind her back and eyes pinned on me.
“Tens of thousands were dying. Hundreds of thousands had already perished. One side grew desperate enough to risk a kind of magic they didn’t truly understand.
Its purpose was to force their enemy to shift into and remain trapped in Flesh—where they would be easy to defeat. But it went horribly wrong.
“They instead trapped every living gargoyle in whichever form they were inhabiting at the time.
Those gifted with magic were protected enough to retain their ability to shift, but even they did not escape completely unscathed.
You cannot understand what the gargoyle mind is like, but as I have mentioned, it is rigid—ruled by logic and instinct.
All but the strongest emotions are muted and can be ignored easier than in Flesh.
We must be careful how much time we spend in Stone, lest we begin to lose that side of us capable of empathy.
Love. Mercy. All the best of human emotion.
“And so perhaps you can understand why those trapped in Stone eventually devolved into little more than violent beasts, with no escape from their more primal minds. Why they eventually became what we call the da’kai.
Those stuck in Flesh lost their edge, both physically and mentally.
They grew soft. They became fully human.
We call this event the Rift, as it caused one species to become three. ”
I stood rooted, my brain gnawing on this rather unbelievable alternative to history.
But through the awe and doubt that crowded my mind, an altogether more powerful concern shouldered its way past both.
“This is fascinating,” I said, my voice pitched higher than normal, “but why did you have me dragged here to tell it?”
The Archon stopped in front of me, depthless eyes boring into mine. “Because it intimately concerns you, Lydia. Rarely, a human’s blood will remember a little of where it came from and a magic channeler is b—”
“Again, fascinating,” I cut in. “But I don’t care why I can channel.”
“Perhaps not, but that is not the recollection that concerns us. What does, is that every few centuries a human’s blood will remember exactly where it came from.”
My arms fell limply to my sides, my stomach plummeting into the stone at my feet. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying you’re a gargoyle, Lydia.”