Chapter 7 #2
“I do,” Lesya breathed frantically, still caught up in sensual passion.
“Then do as I do,” Cassian grinned, mischief glinting in his eyes. “Follow me.”
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“That would ruin the fun, Rosefield,” Cassian said, and before she had a chance to ask him to clarify, he broke into a run toward the cliff’s edge.
“Cass! Don’t go where I can’t follow!”
“I trust you’ll follow me anywhere!” Cassian called from ahead, laughing.
And then the man leapt in the air like an assassin of old, arms stretched like a wingspan.
“Cassian!” Lesya shrieked and broke into a terrified run. Was this his way of getting back at her for all the times she’d jumped off their secret roof? If so, it was a horrible thing to do. There was nothing but rocks and waves slamming into them.
She looked below and saw that he was still plummeting, his suit fluttering, his body in free fall, headed toward the rocks.
Leaning only on trust and nothing else, not knowing what was going to come next, Lesya leaped into the air after the man she loved.
As her feet left the cliff’s edge, she was thrown, and not down toward the rocks as Cass had been.
She fell into a vortex, and came out on the other side in a cosmic graveyard with Aeterna presiding over the dead on her tall throne.
Aeterna’s face was livid. She held Lesya on her palm, bringing her up to her glaring eyes.
“So recklessly you would throw your life, all caution to the wind,” Aeterna seethed. “I had higher hopes for you, aspirations I sought you fit for.”
“Where am I?!” Lesya shrieked, flailing her arms and legs, suspended in the air like an insect caught in the wind.
“You are in my domain, the center of all black holes, the graveyard and birthplace of universes old and new,” Aeterna spoke.
“Let me go!” Lesya said. She was still in her dress, and still very much awake. The sweat from moments ago still clung to her skin, her heart still beating fast from watching Cass fall.
“I demand an audience with you,” Aeterna said, letting Lesya fall to the ground. Lesya floated to her feet and stood in front of the towering death goddess. “Think ye I have made it my business going door to door in people’s dreams like some paltry merchant of frivols?”
“I don’t know what you want from me! Why can’t you leave me be?!”
“The old blood within you beckons to me,” Aeterna spoke. “You are of my people. The temples of your faith razed. Your books burned. You have forgotten the face of your mother, for it is my face.”
“My mother is a crazy hag who wishes for my father’s corpse to come back to life!
” Lesya said, stomping her foot on the ground.
Under her foot, old bones snapped and turned to dust. She could taste that graveyard dust on her tongue, where a few minutes ago she had tasted Cassian’s beery tongue.
She suppressed the urge to vomit. Not in front of the goddess.
“Not your blood mother, dear child,” Aeterna said, a slight smirk appearing on her pale blue face.
“The mother of your faith. It flows in your blood, the power of Aeternum, if only you will accept me as your patron. Become my cleric, harken your destiny as a shepherd of death. I ordain you by your consent, and by your consent you devote yourself to me. I cannot force you, Lesya Rosefield. Nor can I stop you as you make terrible life choices.”
“Terrible?”
“You did just jump off a cliff after a man.”
“He’s the man I love.”
“A man whose death is written imminent.”
Lesya’s stomach dropped and a painful knot twisted in her throat. She looked up at Aeterna with tears in her eyes, struggling to speak.
“What?”
“I hold the ledger of all life and death,” Aeterna said, nodding toward a massive volume suspended in the air. Up until now, Lesya had not seen it. It hung in the distance, in the midst of swirling galaxies, far away from the cosmic graveyard. “And upon it is writ his death.”
“You’re lying.”
“Child, what reason would I have to lie?”
Lesya wept, collapsing to her knees, her dress sprawled around her. A red figure amongst drab tombstones, sobbing.
“Should you heed the call of the old blood, the pale blood, and accept me as your patroness, I shall grant you, Lesya Rosefield, power unimaginable. Power to bring your lover back to life. Power over life, over death. Power that Mortandagh himself coveted, power that I never granted him.”
“Why?” Lesya asked, amidst all the grief and confusion.
“There is something to be said about a person who covets power to the point of obsession. He was obsessed with Aeternumancy. I never actively prevented him from attaining Aeternumancy. That was all Sol’s followers, who had destroyed the Old Religion.
Mortandagh is a politician. No matter how sincere a politician is, they are, at the end of the day, a politician.
Aeternumancy in the hands of a politician…
In your hands, it would rectify Mortandagh’s mistakes. ”
“But Mortandagh is already dead,” Lesya said, wiping her tears.
“They are one and the same, the Grath Nomad and Mortandagh, and every death that he reanimates is an error in my ledger that needs fixing,” Aeterna said, leaning forward in her chair till her enormous face was towering over Lesya.
“The Solignis Covenant is not who you think they are. They were the ones who wiped the Old Religion, missionaries spreading their dogma by the sword.”
“And what if I refuse?”
“Then those closest to you, when they die, they shall know no solace. Soulless their husks shall walk the earth as thralls of the Grath Nomad, their spirits trapped in some maddening hell from which there is no escape. And there shall be nothing you will be able to do to stop that, or bring them back.”
“Why me?” Lesya asked, wiping the tears clear from her face. “It doesn’t make sense that you’d choose me because I’m of the old blood. There are other families as well.”
“Child, you underestimate yourself. You are the most gifted mage this age has seen, and what bitter irony that you do not see it yourself. Have you never once questioned why it comes to you so easily, how magic heeds your call more keenly than it does others’?
In you, I see not just my cleric, but my champion.
Someone to raise the Old Religion from the dead and find for it followers.
I shall grant you miracles and powers that you have not even dreamed of,” Aeterna said, a smile beginning to break upon her face.
Her face, like her form, was not frightening to Lesya. She had a pale blue skin, as if rendered that shade by dying many times over, and yet she retained all the attributes of youth. Underneath her garbs, she had a skin unblemished and unwrinkled. Her face was beautiful, even by godly standards.
A far sight better than the Sol-Father.
“And suppose I do this, it is not a binding contract between us, am I right? I am not going to be anyone’s warlock,” Lesya said, standing up.
“It is only devotion I ask from you, Lesya. Such little in return for so much that I shall bestow. And should you need more swaying, know this. I am the only one who shall never lie to you.”
“Cass doesn’t lie to me,” Lesya said defiantly.
“That remains to be seen, dear one,” Aeterna said. “Now what shall it be?”
Lesya’s breath quivered from the cold of the cemetery. She stood there thinking, weighing her options, and then finally, after all had been quiet in this cosmic dimension for what seemed like an eternity, she gave her answer.