fifty #5
We are barely alive, compared to them. The way Rahara danced through the air, beckoning and taunting Nerilis to attack her, was unlike anything Sulim had seen in her over ten years as a mercenary.
This is why you don’t fuck with them. If Mira had even half the talent on display above them, then she had easily been the most dangerous person on Cerilyn.
She always told me she was more attuned to the destructive side of sorcery…
“You must be tired!” Rahara cried, and only then did Sulim realize that the woman had never been speaking Basic.
She wasn’t even quite speaking Julah, yet no one struggled to understand the feminine entity that had Crossed between realities to follow Mira into another existence.
Like her movements were a dance, her words were a song—one with rhythmic harmony that reverberated through the dense air.
A chorus of angels could have accompanied her, and nobody would be any the wiser as they remained transfixed on how she drew Nerilis into her arms and attempted to cast him down to the center of the triangle.
“Who are you!” he demanded again, evading her expert maneuver. “What are you!”
Rahara dove beneath him, a mischievous smile cracking her demure demeanor.
“Your soulmate.”
They locked arms, Rahara slightly above Nerilis.
Yet no matter how much peace she bestowed upon him, he twisted, his entire countenance trembling in righteous anger.
It wasn’t until Rahara slightly relaxed that the man in her embrace held her close, choking her throat as she reached for the zatbah stone necklace.
It happened so slowly, yet in an instant. Rahara still had the upper hand, since she was lithe and smooth, her body slipping away from his and reengaging their dance. Yet Nerilis was on a timeline he had to follow, wasn’t he? The world must end.
Even Sulim knew it. Rahara, their only hope, was there because of the ley lines that traveled through time, space, and infinity. If Nerilis wanted her gone, he had to eliminate one of the lines.
Sulim was not surprised that he came bearing down upon her. She might have even stood a chance at avoiding his attack if she wasn’t so mesmerized by the beautiful movements of his limbs, of the arch of his golden hair as it obscured his menacing face and sought to strike her.
The only thing that could have surprised her in that instance was somebody else breaking the connection to spare her life for a few more minutes.
Slowly, agonizingly slowly, Sonall barreled into Sulim and knocked her onto the ground. Her shoulder had just made contact with gravity when the last grunt eked from Sonall’s lips, and the lights flickered out of his eyes. Nerilis was atop him, snuffing the soul from his body.
“Doesn’t matter!” As Sulim remained frozen, her legs planted beneath Sonall’s heavy body, Nerilis got up on his feet and craned his head toward the sky. Rahara let out a cry of defeat as the white light reappeared to take her away. “Begone, witch!”
Rahara’s face faded only a few feet away from Sulim. “It’s been a long time since you called me that.”
She was gone.
It was that moment that sealed Sulim’s fate. There she was, nearing the End of All Things, and everyone but Mira was gone. Sonall’s lifeless body was still on top of her legs, but a quick kick freed her, not that she could get up on her own feet without alerting the man who would kill her as well.
But it’s already over for me, isn’t it?
She could have chastised Sonall for sacrificing himself so erroneously.
She could have screamed, cried, or surrendered herself to shock and mourning.
But she had been in situations as terrifying as this one.
I survived all of those. But maybe not this time.
Nerilis was distracted by his moment of triumph, but the necklace was right there in front of Sulim’s face.
She had that one moment to turn her head toward Mira and offer a smile of reassurance.
“No! Sulim!”
“Begone, asshole.” Sulim sprang into her one second of surprise as she lurched up and snatched her necklace off Nerilis’s throat. As she fell backward again, she chucked her arm over her head, hoping that she released the stone at the right moment for the perfect speed and arch.
Why wouldn’t she have? Sulim had trained for this very moment.
The reason I was taken from my home. This moment was oddly peaceful compared to that terrifying time.
The reason I met you, Mira. When she first gazed upon the priestess and realized that there was something beautiful in her depravity, after all. The reason we made it this far.
Somebody had sent Sulim here. The reason she was Mira’s soulmate was for this exact, precise, harmonious moment.
She didn’t feel the pain of Nerilis smashing his sorcery into her abdomen. She didn’t have time to bleed or cry. Before she hit the ground, dead, Sulim saw Mira’s face one last time.
That was a gift in itself.
---
Mira caught the stone, holding it against her heart as her father rounded on her.
“You monster,” she whispered, seeing her father for the man he truly was for the first time in either of her existences. “You would kill me too, wouldn’t you?”
He stopped halfway toward her, two slain bodies in his wake. “It shouldn’t have come to this,” Nerilis said.
“But it did. To what end, Ba?”
Her name for him was accidental, but it didn’t stop him from flashing the last bastion of his humanity as he slumped his shoulders and allowed his hair to slip down before his face.
“Your mother. She begged me for my help. I have done what I can.”
“Is this what she meant, though?” Mira’s voice ascended toward the Void, much like her mother had once Ascended to godhood.
“Destruction? Death?” The shrillness in her throat was only mitigated by the choking sensation claiming her chest.
Dead. She’s dead again. Mira had to force her eyes away from a familiar sight: Sulim, dead, crumpled against Sonall, also dead.
Was it poetry? Was it fate? Was Mira doomed to see this over and over for the rest of her many existences?
Why does the Void entwine us like this? Soulmates were between two people.
Yet so often, Mira beheld trinities in every soulmates’ wake.
Was that the real structure of the universe?
Of course it is.
“Your mother created.” Nerilis kept his distance, but his hand was slightly outstretched to her.
Mira jerked back, holding on to the stave.
It reminded her of what this man had done to his own soulmate.
The man who gave me this stave from his family’s treasury.
A treasury founded by Rahara, who had also been banished more times than Mira could count right now.
“She cannot destroy. Not in her current state. It has fallen on me to see that part of the plan through. At least, until we can fathom a different way to save the Void.”
“You would curse the universe with your bloody bandage to save the rest of us?”
“I will do whatever it takes to keep your mother’s creation afloat. If I have to be the villain, then so be it. I dread what it does to you, but so it goes.”
“Do you actually care what this does to me?”
He lifted his head, giving her the same look he did when she first defied him as a child. How dare she be her own person? How dare she have independence? How dare she make him, the holy High Priest, look bad?
“Of course I do. And I’m proud of you for becoming as strong as you have.”
Mira was gobsmacked.
“You tapped into not only your ley line, but other people’s. You summoned a witch from the ancient past. You would attack me right now, if you could bring yourself to do it. You are our daughter, through and through. I will always be proud of you.”
This isn’t happening. Not here. Not like this.
“Everything I do, Mira,” he continued, as soft as a father attempting to soothe his daughter, “is for this world. I consider it a boon that I exist in a reality where you were borne from your mother’s body, so I could know you and, for a short time, be your father.
There are realities where I did not get that opportunity, and I lack for it.”
“Why are you saying this?” Mira’s knuckles turned white as she gripped the stave instead of strangling her father. “When you just murdered my soulmate!”
There it went, her very nerve stretching across the wide expanse of where Cerilyn touched the Void.
The golden stars in the purple sky twinkled out of existence to hear her scream.
The remainder of her red ley line shattered on the ground.
Even Mira’s soul momentarily lifted in its own Ascension before crashing back into her mortal coil.
“You bastard,” she spat. “You bastard!”
Her father’s expression hardly changed at her metaphysical outburst.
Doesn’t he feel anything? Doesn’t he care?
Oh, no, the great Master Nerilis Dunsman, former High Priest of the Void, was beyond emotions and even shit like shame.
He would slaughter millions of innocents in the name of the Void if Mira let him continue like this.
I’ll kill you first. I’m the only one who can!
Unlike Rahara, who required assistance to exist in this plane, Mira could remain stalwart; unlike Ramaron, who was too emotionally close to Nerilis, Mira could look past her relation to him and do what needed to be done.
“They were worth protecting,” she rambled, thinking of the mercenaries who obeyed her orders and sacrificed themselves to ensure the civilians made it off the planet first.
“They were worth experiencing life.” But even Mira could not deny the damnation most mercenaries would suffer in death.
Many would be sent on to true reincarnation, to make up for the suffering they both experienced and caused.
“There was no reason for them to die…” She thought back on the Gardiahs, their employees, and anyone else caught up in the crossfire that ill-fated day.
Even in the other reality… At Graella’s wedding.
The girl whose throat was slit in two different worlds.
She could have survived the other if my mother hadn’t Ascended.
Her mother had sent her here.
“My mother placed me here for a reason,” she said through gritted teeth.
“So I’ve seen.”
As Mira’s hand slid down her stave, so did the necklace with it.