forty-five #3
When Mira blinked, they were back in the Temple, the staff tossed into one of the pews. Nerilis didn’t show a shred of fatigue despite achieving such an incredible sorceric feat.
“What was that?” his daughter asked the moment her voice returned. “Who was that?”
“Your true self,” he said. “Mira, you were never supposed to be born. Don’t you understand? Every road leads to a reality where your mother Ascended before you were born. The creature you saw in my vision is the woman who will maintain the balance of the Void.
For you were born of your mother’s mortal flesh, granting you untold julah benefits… but that means you were not cleaved from her soul. She did not pull you from the Void and cast you into mortality to fulfill her duties. You are a product of selfishness.
Whatever reality ‘Mira’ occupies is tainted to some degree. You are her miracle child… until we see what a true holy miracle is.”
“I don’t understand, Ba.” There were more tears. Am I nothing? Do I not truly exist? “Why would I be cognizant of a world that isn’t meant to be? Why would Ma do that to me? Send me to this reality if it’s also tainted?”
“Because she is a selfish creature. One with the purest heart.”
“So… what does this mean for us?”
For the first time since they reencountered one another, Nerilis bowed his head, fingers twitching as if he desired to reach out to her. “We must fulfill our duties. I must destroy this world, and you must save it.”
“Ba…” Mira blurted the only thing that mattered now. “Do you love me?”
His head perked back up. “What?”
She went to him, keeping her hands to her chest but her tears on display before this man.
As a child, Mira learned that tears got her nowhere with her father.
You can’t manipulate his emotions, even if your virtue is genuine.
Yet she couldn’t help it. In this reality, she was a motherless child whose father proved to be more of a faraway god than a parent; in the other reality, he was happy enough to leave her under the purview of his wife.
Nerilis never held her. Never caressed her.
Never offered kinder words than agreeing about something.
He never slept with her during a nightmare-fueled night or helped her with matters of the heart.
Everyone told Mira how much they loved him, but all she ever felt for him was… Well, he’s there.
“Do you love me?” she asked again. “Have you ever loved your daughter, Ba?”
He stood as still as the statue of his wife behind Mira. She moved forward even more, opening her arms to him.
She did not expect him to grab her and pull her close.
Close enough for her to clench her arms around his willowy frame and inhale the scent of a god who had seen things she would never comprehend.
He smells like the first breath of life.
Mira buried her face in his shoulder and let the tears flow.
She was scared. She was terrified. She was nothing but a child trapped in a nightmare-fueled night.
“I loved you when you were born,” he said directly into her ear.
“I loved you when you first called me your Ba. And I love you more now that I know who you are. Mira.”
He pushed her away, fingers clinging to her shoulders and sharing his ferocious contentment with her eyes.
“In any universe, in any world, in any reality… I love you. Even in that other world I showed you, I spoke to you out of fear of what you were.”
“And what was I? What am I?”
“My daughter,” he said without hesitation. “Wherever you are, whatever planet you’re from, you are of my flesh and blood. You are an unbroken line going all the way back to the first man to breathe life. You are the representation of what we julah hold sacred since the First Epoch.”
“Ba… I’m of the Red Line. Did you know that?”
“Yes. You are even godlier than me.”
“I don’t know what that means!”
“Good. Don’t burden yourself with it. All your mother ever wanted for you was to have what she could not. It’s what every parent wants for their child.”
“What couldn’t she have?”
Nerilis relaxed his grip on her and shamefully looked away. “She yearned for a soulmate of her own. And to pursue her dreams. Those were the opportunities she wanted for you.”
Mira backed away from her father. “I don’t understand. Then why would you… attack me? And those I love?”
Nerilis offered her the same sympathetic look he had when she was much younger, asking other kinds of questions about her parentage, about her mother, and about the relationship her father had with her.
When I realized what set me apart from the others.
Why many treated her like a glass specimen who represented their innermost fears and questions about the universe.
Even they knew that I should not exist. Even in the other reality, where Mira had her mother and saw her father flourish as the High Priest, people didn’t quite know what to do with the child who was both her parents and neither of them at all.
The hope of all. A grand disappointment.
A would-be doll to manipulate. The future spinster Lady Dunsman with dark skin and hair.
Great Dame Dunsman once quipped that her granddaughter had “the appearance of another Master’s bride,” meaning that Mira was to be married out to a family that would not mind her genetics mingling with theirs.
She always resented my mother for not making me look more like a proper Dunsman. Her father, on the other hand…
Nobody looked at him and knew he was anything but a Dunsman, flourishing with power and a narcissistic charm that rivaled actors and dancers alike.
People looked at Mira and beheld her mother’s illustrious line in House Lerenan.
Devout, artistic, and genial. Even Mira’s great-grandmother through House Lerenan had once been a serious priestess who went as far as to take the kind of vows that marked her as a non-contender for marriage.
Yet the Void bade her to marry my great-grandfather and beget several children. It had not been love, but piety.
Those were the two sides of Mira’s lineage, and she saw now, while looking into her father’s sullen countenance, that truly was the representation of everything those lines held dear.
“We both have our roles to play in your mother’s vision.”
Nerilis released his hold on the staff. It clattered to the floor, loud and sharp, but neither he nor Mira reacted.
“You must understand that my love for you is no less now than it was when you were born. If your mother says this is what must be done, then I will follow her word. So must you. If that leads to you and me racing toward the End of All Things… then so be it. Everything has its purpose, Mira.”
“I don’t want to be part of some greater purpose…”
“None of us do. Especially, your mother never did.”
Before Mira could demand that he stay with her a little while longer, he was gone, leaving behind the crumpled mass of his daughter on the floor, where Mira grabbed the staff and cried out in celestial agony.
She had already seen the End of All Things. No mortal should be destined to see it twice.