Chapter 72
Sapphire
Twenty-One Years in The Past
Vexamen
It’s that dream again.
I’m hanging off the edge of the cliff, screaming for Krimson, and hearing him call my name over the bangs of thunder and pounding rain launching toward the sopping mud.
“I NEED YOU NOW!” I bellow over the whipping winds of a scourge.
My fingers slip as the mud grows frothy with gray stormwater. The nacreous clouds descend into a cloak of churning charcoal. A tempest with teeth snarls down at my efforts to hold on before I plummet to an unknown black hole of nothingness.
I know this is a nightmare. I know it is.
But there’s a sickness that has taken root in me. A virus. A bacterial infection. Wheezing lungs and a fever with the vengeful heart of a leviathan in combat.
“KRIMSON! PLEASE! IF YOU ARE GOING TO COME FOR ME, IT NEEDS TO BE NOW!” I wail as lightning splits the heavens open.
My fingernails are the last to slice into the wet clay.
Can’t hold on.
The nightmare isn’t strong enough to hold back Vrath’s illnesses. It lets the ache bleed into my mind and boil over into my dreams.
My last hope slips on the sludge, and I let go.
“Krim—”
Air meets my palms.
Then a pair of hands catch my wrists.
Strong, rough, older hands.
Not my brother’s.
I squint, trying to see past the lapidary sheets of rain. The figure hovering over me on the cliff is my father.
“I’ve got you, kid! I won’t let you go.”
“Sapphire! Wake up!”
I can hear Niklaus coughing up a lung beside me.
I try to reach for him, but my hands are bound around something, elongated behind my back.
My eyes peel open, sticky and dry. The storm wasn’t just in my dream.
We’re outside. Voices are scattered a few yards away. Niklaus is hyperventilating. Thrashing.
I turn my head to see him tied to a pike. As am I. Piles of wood at our feet.
Wait…
“Niklaus,” I croak. Sand, debris, and phlegm line and web across my throat. “What’s—happening?”
“Dellilian was right!” he coughs. We choke on the swamp of rain firing down at us.
Not too far from our posts, a stage stands in front of uniform rows of people. Rags and shreds of wool clothing. A dismal display of captives being forced to watch an appalling event. A gallows without rope.
I try to travel, to call upon the Nightlung, to dip my hands into its vast, fulminate energy.
But I stumble upon the same obstacle I was in when Meridei weakened me with electroconvulsive treatments and starvation. That river of power that usually floods my senses is now parched and dead.
“Dellilian!” I gasp against the diseases killing us. “Help—us.”
“Sapphire, to your right.” Niklaus cranks his head to point with his eyes past me.
And I refuse to accept what I see through my feverish gaze. Dellilian is caged, bound, muzzled, and unconscious. That is the only details I let myself linger on.
I search the area frantically, trying to pinpoint the source of our capture.
It’s not the ropes around my wrists and midsection.
It’s not the guards.
It’s him.
Vrath stands oddly on a bird’s nest above the stage, watching the scene below with detached curiosity. A short tower: a watch post with splintered beams for those who try to flee.
Where the fuck are we?!
“It’s okay. We can—we can get out of this,” I tell Niklaus, fighting a strained, raspy voice.
I assess what’s crippling us so outrageously.
Vrath stares down at us without moving, inspecting our current state before being burned at the stake like insects being pinned behind glass.
A psychotic mathematician of time. His coal pinstripes, bowler hat, and pocket watch set him apart from the many Vexamen officials and keepers down on the ground.
And in his twiggy hand lies the branch of that tree Dellilian told us about. The frequencies soaring off its crooked stem is a quiet malfunction of pure evil.
A plague encased in a wooden rod.
And Vrath sets its eyes on us.
“Sapphire!” Niklaus roars over the enraged symphony and treacherous winds. “My dad!”
I rip my eyes away from Vrath and look to the stage.
There’s a wooden block.
A man standing behind it.
An executioner with a black hood and an axe.
I scour the stage for Uncle Niles, but I trail right past him. Because my eyes don’t want to believe the state he’s in. My eyes can’t accept the shape time has carved him into.
My Uncle Niles stands woodenly behind the block. And he is much older than when I last saw him. My Uncle Niles has white hair, wrinkled skin, and is beaten bloody. Swollen cheekbones. Blue smudges over his jaw and right eye.
Leaving Niklaus’s dad here, in the same timeline as his past self, has taken a toll on his health, and sped up the aging of his body.
“We can fix this…” I whisper. Numbness pulsing through my bones.
My focus flicks back to the block at his feet.
No…
“Dad!” Niklaus’s deep voice booms through the apocalyptic chaos around us. “Dad, we’re here!”
Uncle Niles, though staring death in the face, doesn’t seem afraid. His aged cheeks pull back into a somber smile as he sees us across the courtyard.
“We can get you out!” I yell.
But my plans of escape are burned to a crisp, just as we are about to be. A few guards below us, prepare torches of fire.
How can I get my uncle out of this if I am executed right along with him?
Krimson! Mom! Dad! Please, help us!!!
I avert my eyes and find Vrath staring down at me again.
“Vrath! You can have me! You can fucking have me! But please, spare my uncle! I swear to God, I will give you all of my blood! Please, don’t take him from us!” I scream past my swollen, battered throat, through the fever and clogged lungs.
It’s Uncle Niles. He wasn’t even supposed to be here. He has never had the combat training of Uncle Warrose or Aunt Marilynn. He dove in to protect me even though it was almost certain death. He was cast into this awful decade of Vexamen brutality, held captive, and aged prematurely
“Don’t take my father, Vrath. Please. We will work with you! Please, God, don’t let him die!” Niklaus shouts, bucking and thrashing against his pike.
A guard kicks Uncle Niles to his knees, hovering his upper body over the chopping block. But he doesn’t take his eyes off his son.
I cry out, not saying any known words. My cries are weak and guttural all at once.
“You take care of your mother, okay, son?!” Uncle Niles hollers.
“Spitfire!” Niklaus begs.
I nod and concentrate, mentally shoving past that insurmountable barrier of the boundless, godless, mephitic relic in Vrath’s hands. As I shove harder at its primordial barricade, my power streams up my spine, ready to ignite—only to collapse in on itself like a dying star.
A sound of frustration and helplessness slashes out of me that doesn’t feel quite human.
Niklaus gapes at me in unwilling defeat and denial.
“I can’t get us out!” I cry.
I try again and again until my skull cracks apart into a migraine.
“Dellilian!” I try to wake our friend, but that sinister instrument of Vrath’s is keeping her down too.
The executioner’s footsteps are sonorous tremors beating like a war drum into the stage.
Boots splashing through the massive puddles.
A mountainous human being positioning himself in front of my uncle and measuring the accuracy of where to place his precise swing to align with the neck on display for him to cut.
Niklaus shouts for Vrath.
I beg Dellilian to wake up.
My thoughts lock onto Krimson’s, finding him through the grand stretch of time between us.
As the axe anchors high to prepare for the swing, the official in charge asks, “Any final words, citizen of Demechnef?”
I strain against my ropes until my limbs turn purple.
Niklaus bellows profanities, begging and pleading.
And just as Uncle Niles lifts his gaze to the crowd, to his son yards away…something to our left gives him pause. I follow his focal point to a black rift spilling into this world, gashing through the merciless storm.
A deafening silence.
Then an iron pulse of an almighty.
A gulf of creation opening, where only angels may tread.
The same fissure of time undone by the Nightlung, and out of the cosmic ink seeping from the torn seam—Krimson steps forward, then to the side, unveiling my parents and DaiSzek.
“Impossible…” Niklaus mutters.
My chest throbs at the incredible, majestic sight. I exhale a sob and whisper, “Dad.”
“Any final words?!” the Vexamen Official repeats.
Uncle Niles locks eyes with my father, grinning with tears spiling over the dimples in his cheeks.
That watery gaze shoots to me in astonishment.
He lets out a small airy laugh of delighted disbelief, then back to my dad.
He parts his lips, as if there are a million words he wants to release so that his old friend may hear all he’s had to say over the years.
My uncle smiles, not an ounce of sadness in that golden look he gives my parents. A knowing glint in his eyes, because he told us this would happen. They’ll come for me.
“Yes,” Uncle Niles announces. “Long live my family. And long live DaiSzek, the one true king.” And then he shifts his focus to Niklaus, tears emerging as he mouths, “I love you, my son.”
The executioner throws his weight into the swing.
No.
The axe comes down on Uncle Niles’s neck.
The sound of his neck snapping.
The instant scarlet fireworks of blood.
Screams.
My own.
Niklaus.
A head with golden-white hair hits the stage.
Shoulders and an open neck still in place.
“NOOOOOOO!”
Chaos.
Blood.
So much blood.
Rainwater dilutes it at the boots of the murderer.
I twist my head to my parents as the rift of time closes behind them. My mother’s eyes turn crimson lacunal—not just pink, but filled with old blood, wide and with a god-eater fury, pupils expanded planetary black.
The world recoils around her as those lips peel back. And her chest heaves upward, arms casting out, erupting in a scream that wakes the heavens and weakens hell.
That scream is a command to the one true king, DaiSzek.
The sky cracks with a tinnitus of gods, as if even the air above recognizes a superior sovereign has been unleashed to be the ruin of cities, the massacre of civilizations.
DaiSzek’s ears and fur stand upright at the death of his old friend.
And he opens his maw, drawing from the abyss of his lungs—a celestial flame that is stronger and unlike what we saw in the battle of the Dralutheran. His draconic shriek destroys the oxygen around him, blasting so ferociously, it turns the courtyard into a womb of annihilation.
A pyroclastic lungful that shoots out of his mouth.
Bodies sublimate to ash mid-scream.
Captives are spared as they scatter, chasing freedom far from here.
The torrent of rain vaporizes in a spectral mist and steam.
Before his fire can reach the stage, my father crosses the distance with a stride fueled of vengeance, moving the way a predator strikes.
And the flames do not outpace him, they follow his lead, covering his six and any other blind spots.
Dad flies over burned corpses, over barriers meant to hold captives in.
Boots rattling the ground, sending gravel flying like shrapnel.
And as he reaches the stage, his right hand unsheathes the sword strapped to his back.
The executioner does not see him coming. The inferno tidal wave stuns the man in place.
And as he wields the sword, a shockwave pulses the air, shuddering within the marrow of my bones.
The blade whips straight through his stomach, separating the executioner’s upper body from his hips.
And DaiSzek does not stop.
The tendrils of the hot blaze eliminate all life but leave Uncle Niles’s body untouched. And the dragon-like roars can be heard from oceans away.
Among the burned carnage, I find Vrath frenziedly drawing his equations out in blood, checking DaiSzek’s movements with tantalizing doom.
I do not try to contain my fatal, murderous urges.
Vrath will die today.
Krimson cuts down Niklaus’s ropes first. Then releases me from mine and catches me before I can fall.
“I was too late,” he cries, holding me up. “I’m sorry, Sapphire! I was too fucking late!”
My brother never cries. I’ve seen it happen maybe once or twice, so the quivering of his chest against mine has me whimpering against his chest.
“I tried to save him, Krimson! I—I should have gone back further! I got it wrong!”
Niklaus guts me at his position on the ground. One hand on his stomach, the other sinking into the mud as he stares out at the bloodbath. He—he just lost his father.
We all did.
Before we move to the stage, I free Dellilian just as she begins waking up. I kiss her on the head once, leaving her to recuperate on her own.
After the fire dies down a little, we gather on the stage.
Niklaus stares down at his father’s body, for only a moment, before looking up to the bird’s nest. Vrath is gone.
“Niklaus?” I touch his shoulder.
“I can’t look at him,” he mutters.
“Okay.” I hold in my sob.
“I want him.” He directs to where Vrath once stood over the execution. “I want to kill him, Sapphire.”
This part of the village is nothing but embers and unbearable silence and the torrent of rain lightens to a dewy mist.
My mother sits next to Uncle Niles’s arm, gently moving his head back to his shoulders and neck. Her whimpers harbor an excruciating laceration in all of our hearts. She doesn’t push Niklaus to come near his father. Doesn’t pressure him to confront this tragedy.
My mother simply cradles her lifelong friend in her lap, and my father kneels beside them both.
“Krimson?” she calls, voice wounded and bludgeoned like an animal that has just survived a natural disaster.
My brother steps forward, making an effort to lift his head in strength.
“Take us home.” She looks into his eyes with a downfall of new tears. “Take us home so that I may bury my brother.”