28 - Iona #3
“The Sun,” Elise says. “An indication of victory, joy, love, and all that. You were contented in your past, having everything you could want in a time of peaceful bliss.”
Elise flips the card in the middle, revealing a tower set ablaze and people falling from it to their deaths. Iona’s heartbeat quickens at the sight, reminded of the blood tower in Japan.
“The Tower,” Elise says. “It seems your victory was short-lived. You’ve been thrown into sudden chaos, forcing you to change and grow through often painful and difficult means.
Your strife shall be plentiful, but it can lead to necessary acceptance of inconvenient truths.
If you allow these revelations to occur, your suffering will not be in vain. ”
Elise flips the final card, depicting a man on the ground with ten swords piercing his corpse.
“The ten of swords,” Elise says, blinking in surprise. “My word… this is grim.”
“What does it mean?” Iona asks, the fervency in her tone drawing Elise’s blue eyes up to hers.
“This card indicates a painful, abrupt, inevitable end. A time of anguish and loss. It can allude to a betrayal in your future, made by someone dear to you. It will leave you at your lowest point,” Elise says.
Iona stares at the card, trying to ignore the sinking feeling in her gut. The only person whose betrayal would leave her at her lowest point would be Ariadne, but that could not be so. It must indicate something else.
“I suppose I shall not take it too much to heart. When last you read my cards, you claimed I would die,” Iona says, willing her words to be flippant.
“You will die,” Elise says. “Eventually.”
Iona rolls her eyes. “You claimed it would happen soon.”
“Did I claim that?” Elise asks.
“You seemed so sure of it,” Iona muses. “You said I was always meant to die. It seems you were wrong.”
Elise shrugs, gathering the three cards to reshuffle her deck. “The cards and my grandmother’s scrying bones showed death in your future. Evidently it will not be immediate, and perhaps it is not your death specifically. With the bones… the future is not always straightforward.”
Death has indeed been an ever-present force orbiting Iona of late, so perhaps Elise’s reading had been accurate after all. She doesn’t know how many more times she can hope to escape it, even with Ariadne’s protection.
“What would you have done,” Iona asks, “if you’d turned me into a wraith as you planned?”
“Burned the world down city by city until there was nothing left,” Elise says. “Rebuild in a way that suited me.”
Iona stares at her incredulously. “Who would have been left to inhabit this new world of yours, if all was burned to ash?”
“Only the strongest,” Elise says. “The weak would have been weeded out, at long last. We have no need of them anyhow.”
“You were once weak.”
“Only until I embraced the darkness and found true power.”
“It took two of us to defeat you at your very strongest,” Iona says, then Elise raises an eyebrow, and she amends. “One of us. Even more pitiful.”
“She cheated,” Elise says. “I am far more impressed by your prowess. It was quite the unexpected surprise.”
“What are you on about?” Iona fumes. “You rendered me unconscious in the meadow.”
“Not the meadow,” Elise says. “That day in the snow.”
“You know well I cannot remember it. Anyhow, I am not a natural fighter. Not like Ariadne.” When Elise gives her a dubious look, Iona asks, “Do you not agree?”
Ariadne rushes down the stairs, and when she finds Iona in the cell with Elise, she exclaims, “What are you doing in there?”
Elise’s lips stretch into a humorless smile. “Ah, how nice of you to grace us with-”
Ariadne makes a portal through the bars, goes right up to Elise, and spits in her face. Iona watches with acute satisfaction as the spittle drips down Elise’s cheek, but the fiend only smirks as she wipes it away on her dirty sleeve.
“How is the blood bond treating you?” Elise glares up at her from beneath her lashes.
“Exceedingly well,” Ariadne says without a moment’s pause, then offers her hand to Iona.
“Wait,” she says, than narrows her eyes at Elise. “Why do you ask?”
Elise’s wheezing chuckle turns into a visceral hacking cough that steals the breath from her lungs. They watch, unconcerned, until Elise spits on the ground, a tiny puddle of black sludge expelling from her lips, the same bile that she had once spewed when she’d cast maleficium spells.
“I hope that tastes like the most bitter of poisons,” Iona says in a low voice.
Elise grimaces and clears her throat, then says, “Do you wish to remember our duel? I cannot recover your memory, but I can tell you what happened.”
“It would be worthless lies,” Ariadne says.
“Cast a truth spell,” Elise says, leaning back in her chair, entirely undaunted by the prospect.
“Verita,” Iona casts, sparing only one glance Ariadne’s way to mark her disapproval. “Tell me.”
“By then, I had become quite desperate, I must admit. I knew my time was running short and wondered if I might fail after all. I thought I would have killed you by then… so I lured you away and attacked.” Elise winces. “That was a mistake.”
“All of your attacks were mistakes,” Ariadne murmurs.
“It’s a pity you will never remember, but…” Elise loses her words. “I’ve never beheld such unmitigated rage, except in myself. Perhaps it is a familial trait. Our Lysander madness...”
A far-off look fills Elise’s eyes, as if in a trance. Curiosity getting the better of her yet again, Iona peers into Elise’s unprotected aura to behold the memory at the very forefront of her mind, an unsettling image of her own face through Elise’s eyes.
There, in plain view, is the rage Elise had described, Iona’s tears cutting through the dirt and grime splattered across her cheeks. She’s never seen herself this way, not in a mirror, or a portrait, or even in Ariadne’s memories of her.
It’s like looking at an alternate version of herself, one that doesn’t often store her anger away in favor of more practical, palatable emotions. Another glance in Ariadne’s direction indicates her appraisal of the same images, having peered into Elise’s mind as well.
“I made the mistake of boasting what I planned to do to Ariadne when I was victorious,” Elise says, then mutters, “I did not anticipate-”
“That I would defend her to my last breath?” Iona asks. “That was quite stupid of you.”
Ariadne’s heightened emotions slip through the bond, that of gratitude, pride, and that persisting, maddening, overwhelming fear that never seems to leave her, no matter the circumstance. Iona tries to block it out, to ignore it, but it’s proved impossible these many months.
Within Elise’s memory, the forest burns where they spar in the freezing floodwater.
Iona had thrown fire without thought or care, many of the balls of flame hitting their mark and leaving Elise so badly burned that she could barely move her limbs.
She did not have as much power then, before her subsequent rituals in the forest, and her leeching of Iona’s power in the tunnels.
“Anyhow, I’d managed to put you to sleep before you could overpower me,” Elise says. “I took your blood while I was at it, and left you for Ariadne to discover, so she would know I can always find you.”
That had led to many a restless night for them both, but especially Ariadne, who had fought against sleep for days until Iona insisted she take a sleeping potion before she went mad from the deprivation.
“I never did determine how you resisted my blood spell… I choked as Ariadne did, as if your hands were crushing my throat instead of hers, even after I relented and left your mind. It wasn’t until I cast a counter spell that I could breathe again.
So strange…” Elise muses, until her grin returns.
“It was just as well, because I knew then that I’d truly terrified you.
The looks on your faces in class… You hardly spoke to any of our classmates before, too afraid of their potential involvement in my supposed crimes, but from then on you were perpetually swept up by your paranoia, only further isolating yourself from others to my advantage. ”
“This does not matter anymore,” Ariadne interrupts. “You lost in the end. Whether it had been by my hand or Iona’s, your demise was fated.”
“Perhaps,” Elise allows, “but if I faced my demise, then so would you.”
She’s talking in riddles now , Ariadne grumbles.
“Speak plainly,” Iona says with a glare.
“I wondered how you two might attempt to combat my blood magic,” Elise says. “You see, Ariadne has always been quite vocal about her abhorrence for blood bonds, claimed she would never under any circumstances enter into one.”
“Yes, I already know of that,” Iona says, her impatience growing.
“It would seem she exaggerated her disgust.” Elise stares Ariadne down until she shifts uncomfortably.
“Or perhaps not. I knew precisely when you bonded, could see it in your exchanges, in your eyes, and I was admittedly shocked, but not discouraged, because I knew it would be its own revenge. It would never work. Not in any lasting way. It would tear your love apart.”
“You’re wrong,” Ariadne says. “It has only brought us closer.”
Elise scrutinizes Iona’s carefully composed expression, then grins. “Too close. More of a curse than a bond, if you ask me.”
“No one did ask you,” Ariadne spits, practically vibrating with irritation.
“She did it to save me,” Iona says softly.
“At what cost?” Elise asks. “You’ve turned yourselves into twin parasites, eating each other alive, and with one so broken as Ariadne it is only a matter of time before-”
“She is not broken!” Iona recoils in disgust. “How dare you say such a thing!”
“Iona, please,” Ariadne says. If I stay here much longer, I might hurt her.
“You know as well as I how damaged, insecure, pathetic she truly is,” Elise spits, watching Ariadne intently, delighting in the effect of her cruel words. “Her beauty only compensates for part of it. If only she’d allowed me to cure her flaws as I’d intended, she would have-”
It happens so fast, Iona isn’t sure at first if it is her magic or Ariadne’s that hurls the wooden table across the room where it shatters to splinters against the stone wall. Elise rises off the floor, suspended in air, grasping for her neck, her face turning bright red.
“Iona,” Ariadne reaches for her hesitantly.
She doesn’t take Ariadne’s outstretched hand. Not yet. Instead, she stands and takes measured steps closer to Elise to watch her struggle.
“I once thought there was good in all of us,” Iona says in a level voice.
“That we are all like… clay. Those who we encounter, the trials we face, the adversity of our world molds us in ways we cannot fully anticipate or prevent. I’ve tried…
Truly tried to employ empathy when I can, to afford people grace, and reserve judgement, because fate is kinder to some than others.
I see now how foolish that was in your case. How truly wasted my sympathy was.”
Elise’s color turns from red to cyanotic blue, her legs kicking through the air beneath her.
“You are a monster. You will die a monster. The world will be all the better for it,” Iona says.
Elise scratches at her throat, her nails cutting thin lines of blood, and her eyes bugling from their sockets. A moment longer…
You’ll regret it, Ariadne warns.
It takes great effort for Iona to drag her eyes away from Elise’s face to Ariadne’s, and she is surprised to see a lack of judgement conveyed in her expression. There is only wary concern.
When she regards Elise again, nearly unconscious from the lack of air, Iona wonders whether she truly would regret it, or if she should heed Moira’s advice and take her first life to make the others easier to commit.
“You are the broken one,” Iona says. “You are.”
Elise falls to the floor, coughing violently and taking horrible, heaving gasps, but Iona does not give her a second glance. She takes Ariadne’s hand, utter relief in her red eyes as she leads Iona through a portal back to Rome.
You did not recant the truth spell, Ariadne reminds her.
“I know,” Iona says.
An incredulous chuckle escapes her before she shrugs and closes the portal. “I forgot how ruthless you can be.”
Lowering her eyes, Iona’s anger fades and leaves her feeling numb again. She decides that yes, she would have regretted killing Elise, but for the first time she can admit to herself that she is capable of it, despite what she may have claimed to Moira or Ariadne.
“She did not speak truth anyhow. Only her twisted version of it,” Ariadne says, her eyes searching for reassurance.
“She only meant to hurt us,” Iona says. “We should put it out of our minds.”
Ariadne’s gaze remains locked with hers, still waiting for a reprieve of her doubts. “And the bond is not a curse, as she claimed.”
Averting her gaze, Iona moderates her expression and says, “No.”
Ariadne will sense her lie, but there’s no helping that.
She stares at the front steps of the villa and recalls the moment she’d first considered breaking the blood bond, and Ariadne’s fervent plea to keep it.
She doesn’t know how to broach the subject again without inciting Ariadne’s panic, her deeply rooted fear of abandonment, her chronic wound of betrayal.
Iona’s love for her has never, could never change, but Elise is right.
The bond is a poison, and if they keep it much longer, it will ruin them.
Despite finally admitting this to herself, she cannot do anything about it now.
The Crone would only benefit from the separation of their minds.
So long as their connection protects them, Iona will hold her tongue, but the very moment the Crone is defeated and they find some semblance of normalcy again, she will speak to Ariadne with total honesty, come what may.