Chapter 54 All My Relics
Vrath
The blood has dried on my hands.
I like when it does that. It makes my palms stiff and shiny.
The crimson red stain turns darker, a dull ruddy brown.
And while the soldiers around me are dancing and cheering in glee as Sapphire and Niklaus wave their weapons around, twirling and skipping in a choreographed attempt to put on a show without killing each other—I use my yellow thumbnail to scrape at the blood in the crease lines of my left palm.
It twists and lifts from my skin in flakes.
I smile adoringly as I blow on the dried blood, watching it scatter in the humid air of the stadium, floating like scarlet butterflies.
The Vexamen Breed are much too easy to infiltrate. When they are off duty, here at House of Jester Nights, they are belligerently drunk and stupid. I fit right in with my clothing and painted face. They don’t even notice as I lick my fingers, making the dry blood runny again.
“Why don’t you just move to another era, Sapphire S. Valdawell? Why be imprisoned this far in the past?” I tap my stiff fingers against my paint chipping around my lips. “Are you unintelligent?”
I have watched her move through time. I have studied her patterns, though her methods are shocking to me.
Does she not need the blood of a mother to come and go?
Does she not need relics from their personal belongings?
Time equations and a map? And why aren’t others affected as she interacts with people that she does not belong with?
No one falls ill around her.
Speaking of, the soldiers around me become increasingly snotty and hoarse the longer I’m nearby. Their perspiring skin loses color by the minute. But of course, they do not notice. They are drunk, moronic men who are fixated on shiny toys fighting to the death before their eyes.
Niklaus Demechnef kisses Sapphire Valdawell.
I tilt my head at the psychorrhagic interaction.
I have never understood the peculiar act of intimate touch.
I do not receive the slightest ounce of endorphins or excitement of any kind toward touching another human being gently.
Perhaps I feel something when I hear the wretched cries of a mother as I insert a tear in her skin and collect copious amounts of her blood.
There really is nothing quite like it. Especially if she is a new mother and pleads for me to spare her infant.
Those are the cries that lead to me doing something God-like.
Now, Sapphire Valdawell is not a mother.
But her blood sings to me like a darling sea nymph.
It chants and hums a tune that reaches me when she travels.
It wants me to bleed her. It could be the answers I’ve longed for.
The only way for me to return to where I truly belong.
Perhaps I will no longer be deathly ill?
Perhaps I will be worshiped as a divine deity for my time craft?
I will know for certain once I bleed her.
I do not hate Sapphire Valdawell nor Niklaus Demechnef.
But they run from me, and it is not fair. It is not right. Do they not know that I have watched their ways over and over again? I have seen them interact in alternate paths of what is to come. I have seen all. Why resist me?
The two get directed off stage.
“But how can I reach them?” I ponder.
“You talk to yourself,” the slurring soldier says next to me in Old Alkadonian.
I ignore the brute. I have had enough of my potential interactions with him. His mind is sideways and insides are diseased. I do not like the eyebrow with the scar or that he perspires more from his right underarm than his left.
I want no more interactions with Lotus Bludgeon.
“And he is not of the Breed,” the soldier next to Lotus comments.
“I do not enjoy chasing her. Those splits in time are getting more difficult to slip through,” I continue, assessing my equations. “And that tenebrous creature continues to aid them and taunt me!”
I have upset myself greatly at the thought of the black squalid beast.
“How did he get in here?” another soldier asks.
To acknowledge them is to feed the plague. I will grant no audience to their vermin.
“If I use the World’s Dark Twin tree branch to evade the Nightlung vermicide…”
I use the World Dark Twin tree branch sparingly, only when I come across an exuberant amount of those hellish, noctivagant Short-Haired Windilas that ride my coat tail like the obsessive pestilence they are.
The sacred tree can be found three seas away, in a small quiet country called Morphollow, and is protected by generationally refined and ritualized murderers.
But with my eldritch affliction of moving through time, I may appear right past their walls.
The tree contains elements, minerals, and compounds that are comparable to veins and organs of a living being.
Thousands of years ago, a rare crop of black trees grew from the cinders of a war that killed both armies.
Months later, a village cultivated nearby, casting out the Ashvine Family of scandal to the outskirts—forced to live in solitude among a cornfield, and the black cinder trees.
The Ashvine Family had six children, four boys and two girls.
The youngest sisters were not allowed to tend to the crop as they were girls, so they found purpose in caring for the strange crop of black trees.
Watering them daily. Singing to their crisp, oily leaves, and praying at the base of their roots.
The village eventually hunted down the Ashvine family, slaughtering them in their sleep on a moonless evening.
The Ashvine sisters hid in one of the trees as the surrounding trees were burned to the ground.
They were devastated and took their own lives in front of the only tree that survived.
They prayed that their sacrifice would manifest ruin and plague on the village for generations until their disgruntled spirits were satisfied.
Following their death, the roots absorbed their decay and blood—a cellular event occurred.
Perhaps it was the iron from their blood that reacted with the irradiated soil, hardening the trunk in a vascular mass.
Either way, the tree is said to have grown veins and disfigured organs.
The bark breathes and pulses in the Nightlung, syphoning very bad people to that village. Serial killers. Rapists. Aristocrats.
It picked each villager off one by one until there was no one left.
And I have stolen a branch.
A beautiful, exquisite, glorious branch.
It summons me to the slender rift Sapphire S Valdawell leaves when she tumbles through time.
It acts as a compass, a guide, a lantern in the abysmally dark Nightlung.
I have prayed to it just as the Ashvine sisters have, caring and tending for it as if it is a delicate extension of myself.
It has brought me joyous feelings that the branch rewards me for such devotion.
The black cinder branch sends phantom sounds through the Nightlung when those Short-Haired Windilas are near, mimicking their natural predators, and other beings they fear, such as RottWeilens.
I’ve seen it infect their weaker counterparts, runts of the litter.
“And I still have yet to discover all of its peculiar aptitudes!” I announce.
“We burn trespassers,” the soldier, Lotus, warns me.
“He speaks to himself. His condition of insanity might be contagious.”
I have every intent to let their existence rot within the hollow corners of my disinterest. But Lotus touches me. He touches me. His smarmy, cimicidic hand latches onto my inner elbow. That rancid breath humidifies the air I breathe, so I stop inhaling to prevent it from contaminating my lungs.
The world reacts much faster than I can.
It spits on the interaction, spreads a miasmic disease that leaks from my pores, through the thin fabric of my shirt, into this flesh.
The sickness is highly corrosive, drying up his veins, and carving its way into his lungs.
Blood sprays from his sudden coughing fit to my face.
I waste a perfectly good handkerchief to dab at the mess.
“I now appreciate the memory of watching you asphyxiate on your own vomit seventeen years from now,” I whisper to Lotus.
The others drop to their knees from the predictable effects of my presence, defiling this timeline with my execrable wrongness.
“Now if you will excuse me, I must tend to a troublesome girl, a Valdawell—a mordacious, notorious bloodline. I saw her face many times in the vicious time loop I was trapped in as a child. And now, I am failing to obtain an audience with her.”
Even mentioning the time loop gives me pause.
When I traveled out of my mother’s womb a week before she was due, I moved to an isolated beginning with a congregation that lingered in the swamps of Vexamen.
They called themselves caretakers of the “unbound.” They tolerated the sickness I brought with me.
The fevers. The seizures. The hours where time would stutter around my crib.
They did not fear it. They documented it.
Measured it. Studied me like proof of prophecy.
They listened when I spoke of the Valdawell family and agreed they were necessary to stabilizing my ability.
But at the age of five, I was caught in that time loop.
A side effect of attempting to return to the same moment of my mother’s pregnancy too many times.
It stuttered through my like a seizure. It lasted ages.
I stopped reacting like a child because reactions slowed the cycle.
I learned to stay still. To observe. To wait.
I watched the same people die dozens of ways.
Disease. Drowning. Murder. And the loop was drawn to the Valdawell family.
Variations of their time stamps on the world.
They were a perfected product of what I am.
Their blood was my only hope to end these cycles and rid myself of internal plagues. To never be trapped in that loop again.
I shake off the fog of memories.
I draw my equations on their foreheads with the iridescent vial of mother’s blood I’ve accumulated from my last crusade. And the Nightlung takes my hand, granting my momentary asylum in its haunting darkness as I wait for Sapphire S Valdawell to travel again.
And she will…
I can sense her itching to leave abruptly, even now.
Her powers are begging to implode.