No Turning Back

by Sharon T. Rose

  Chapter 4

  "Silly? Silly, can you hear me? Sylenn, sweetie, come on, wake up now."

  The gentle pleading slunk through the black haze, feebly poking at the temporary peace. Sylenn groaned and fought to stay in the blackness. It was quite, no beast clawing at her mind, forcing her body to move. She didn't want to wake up. Didn't want to go back to the hellish life she couldn't escape.

  With a stifled shriek, Sylenn shot upright, arms flailing. Her right arm smacked Mosin across the jaw, her left hand punched Lyshunda in the neck. Another second of flapping, then she hugged her arms to her chest. Her normal, blouse-covered chest.

  She stared at her body for several breaths before movement at her side caught her attention. The midget stood there, next to Mosin, who sat on the floor looking dazed. A muffled choking came from the other side of the couch.

  "Glad to see you're back with us," the dwarf said wryly. "While we let our brother and sister compose themselves, let me bring you up to speed. You might want something to drink; this is going to be a long explanation."

  He took his own advice, lifting a glass from a tray that one of the women, small and dark-haired, brought around. One of the men, the huge one, brought a padded footstool over, and the midget settled himself on it so that he was almost eye-to-eye with Sylenn.

  "Now, before I begin, I'd like to clear up the confusion about you and Mosin. I take it that you are the long-lost sister he's occasionally mentioned?"

  Sylenn took a swallow from her glass, looking at Mosin from under her lashes. "Yes," she finally replied. "Alright, alright. I'll tell you what happened.

  "I was at natural science conservatory for a summer in Dathon; that's in Ivrithan over by the border with Tautona. I was eleven years old. We were out one night watching the meteor shower and mapping the stars. It-- one of the meteors actually hit near us, and we-- we were all excited to go see it. It was very hot, so we couldn't touch it, but we stayed for almost an hour, watching it glow. The tutors took us back to the cabins, but I couldn't sleep. It was too much, I guess. I was so excited to be at the conservatory, to have seen so much. I kept thinking about the meteor. Since I couldn't sleep, and everyone else was already asleep, I snuck out and went back to the field where it had landed. It was dark, so I thought it would be hard to find, but I knew right where it was.

  "It wasn't very hot anymore, so I picked it up. When I did ..." Sylenn swallowed and lowered her head.

  "We thought she was dead, but we weren't sure," Mosin whispered, reaching out to take his sister's hand. Sylenn flinched, but allowed the touch. "Three days without word, and someone went to the conservatory to check on things. Everyone there was dead. So many of them were unidentifiable, and only some of those were eventually named. No-one really could say what had happened, but ... people had been torn apart, walls knocked in, lots of things destroyed. No-one knew what to make of it. We thought she was dead." He swallowed and leaned forward to grip Sylenn in a fierce hug.

  "So," Satherlin summarized, "the Hunter was in the rock somehow and latched onto you for a host. When It did so, the result was the destruction of the conservatory?"

  Sylenn snorted from within Mosin's embrace. "It made me kill them, tear them apart, and eat them," she said, voice muffled by her brother's arm. She buried her head further into his hold. "I didn't know what was happening. It was months before I remembered my own name, and I had no idea where I was or what I was doing. After that ... I just started wandering. The beast would make me travel, always looking for big cities, always trying to find the things that stank."

  "The Gontozenels?" Lyshunda asked, voice hoarse and raw. The others in the room shuddered.

  "Yes, if that's what they're called. I only know that It could find them because of how they smelled; It doesn't like how they smell."

  "So, the creature finds them by scent, and It hunts them down and eats them?" Clatyn asked, his voice thick with some familiar accent. Tautonan.

  "Yes!" Sylenn snapped weakly. "It made me kill the person so It could kill the ... the Gontozenel." Another shudder flitted around the room.

  "How did It keep the Sukkers from vanishing?" the big man pressed, leaning forward in his chair. "We've never been able to trap the energy once it leaves the Drone."

  Sylenn sighed and leaned back. Mosin shifted so he could sit next to her on the couch, arms still surrounding her. "I don't know; It just ... did something. I could never tell. It made them freeze somehow, made them stay in the marrow until I could get to them." She closed her eyes and leaned against Mosin's shoulder.

  "We'll get details later, Clat," Satherlin interrupted. "So, that's what's been happening to you these past ... eight years?" Sylenn and Mosin both nodded. "So, let me fill you in on what happened in the last half-hour.

  "You're a Descendant, Sylenn; your name is Fulenthen Sonelion. In fact, you and Clatyn are 'cousins' of a sort because his mother was Soneli, too. So, how this works. You know that the touch of a Descendant is what Awakens a new Descendant, right? That's why we're careful to not touch people; they think we might make them into Descendants. That's not entirely true. You have to be a Descendant for our touch to do anything. Normal people don't change just because we touch them. There have never been more than about a dozen to fifteen Descendants at any one time before. And there have never been two Descendants from the same generation of the same family before.

  "You see, the Descendants were created by the Ancients to fight the Drones, the humans the Sukkers-- the Gontozenels took over and forced to fight the War for them. The Sukkers took hundreds, thousands of humans as Drones, but the Ancients, the Tesselëans, took only a few. Instead of stripping them of their minds and wills, they altered their bodies and gave them the ability to fight back, to protect the people of Alluvia. The Sukkers continue by taking new hosts when their old ones die off; we continue by having children and passing the traits on to them.

  "Which is one reason why we don't let it be known that we can change forms. What we tell the public is true; once Awakened, a Descendant can never go back. Once you've changed, suited up for the first time, everything is different. Your purpose in life is the defense and freedom of Humanity. But we let others think that this means we stay suited up for the rest of our lives. That's what we call the other body, by the by: the suit. Sometimes, we want to be able to walk around in public without being stared at, yelled at--"

  "Or have people falling at our feet, worshipping us," Tad muttered bitterly.

  "Or that," Satherlin agreed. "The Worshippers are as bad as the Contemptors, in their own way. Sometimes, we want to be normal people. So, we let them think that the suit is all there is. But it isn't. We're still able to have families, those of us who want them. And our children inherit the potential to become Descendants, and they pass it on to their children. Descendants are quite rare, as I mentioned; there aren't often many of us at once. And there's never been a case where two children from the same family were both Descendants at the same time. Perhaps it was merely a matter of time, and that has finally come."

  "You even look alike!" Konyetta added cheerfully. "You're both the same kind of green, though Mo's more bluey and Silly's more whitish. But your hair is the same!"

  "Yes," Satherlin interjected, "though that doesn't mean anything. There's no rhyme or reason to who your Ancient parents were or how that heritage will manifest in you. You noticed that you and Mosin have different names? That's because you had different 'parents', yet you're siblings in reality. We haven't been able to figure out how that works, and most of us have decided it isn't worth banging our heads for. We do know that there were twenty-five female and thirty-two male Ancients who created the Descendants because that's how many names have come up over the ages.

  "Most of the names come up fairly regularly; there's not one Ancient or pairing of Ancients who seems to have any precedence in Descendants. And even those Descendants who end up having the same 'parents' aren't necessarily alike in any way. We've had four Alleathon Naichens,
for example (that's my name), and all of us have been different.

  "Each Descendant has the same basic set of abilities and traits, plus a few special ones of our own. All the men look alike, and all the women look alike, except for color. The hair is usually different, too--"

  "When you've got it," Niel snickered.

  Satherlin shot him a sideways glance. "Yes, when you've got it. Our voices are difficult to tell apart, though with practice, you'll manage it. Sometimes, we also have additional body parts. For example, Clatyn has horns. You, Sylenn, have a tail."

  "I do?" Sylenn exclaimed, twisting around. Satherlin chuckled dryly.

  "Yes, but not in your regular form; your suit has the tail. It will improve your balance, and you may be able to use it like another hand. You'll get to practice with it in time. Maybe that will be your particular ability; we don't know yet. Mine is the ability to hear and distinguish between heartbeats for two leagues around me. Mosin can reshape his hands into simple weapons; Lyshunda can run faster than anything; Niel can calm people down; Quiana has fins and webbing and can swim better than most fish. There's no pattern to how anyone gets the specialties they do; everything seems entirely randomized.

  "So, family lines among Descendants aren't the same as among us humans. I think I can speak for most of us that when you came in here, we realized that you looked familiar. That's because you and Mosin resemble each other. It's pure coincidence that your suits resemble each other, and we won't tell anyone outside the Temple that you're related. You might not have noticed, but we're tight-lipped about our pasts." Another wry smile. Sylenn nodded again.

  "Everyone within the Temple is safe; you don't have to worry about anyone prying or pushing at you here. In fact, most of the workers here are related to past Descendants, so they take family pride in helping us. They take good care of us, too. We travel frequently, searching out Sukkers and Drones, and we spend a lot of time dealing with those problems. That doesn't leave us much time to do regular things, such as hold jobs or clean or what have you, so they do all that for us. I know this won't be easy, and I can't imagine what having the Hunter with you will do, but we're all here for you."

  Heads around the room nodded, and Mosin hugged his sister closer. She looked around at all of them solemnly for a few seconds.

  "You're assuming that I'm going to stay," she said quietly. "That I want to fight Sukkers."

  "Yes, we are." Satherlin leaned back on the stool casually. "Most of us didn't want to stay when we first found out that we were Descendants; it's a common response."

  Tad made a humorless grin and chuckled darkly. "You should have seen the fit I made. I'm from Berziny." Sylenn nodded; Tad looked Berzinian with his black hair and deeply tanned skin. His accent, too, was telling. Berziny was a nation of Contemptors and Pontifists; finding that he was one of their "daemons" must have been traumatic for the man.

  "We all go through this time of upset, Sylenn. You'll find that you can't run away from this, however. We're born Descendants; we're born to protect our people, to protect Alluvia. Even if you left the Temple and tried to live a normal life, you'd find yourself in the middle of things every single time. The War is everywhere; Sukkers are everywhere. Every time you get near one, it will try to kill you. Take the time you need to get used to it, but you're one of us now. Welcome to the family!" Satherlin smiled and reached out to pat Sylenn's knee.

  She jumped up and dodged behind the couch, putting it between herself and everyone. "NO! I'm not going to do this! I don't care what you say, I'm done!"

  "Silly--" Mosin began, rising from the couch.

  "No, Mosin. Not you, not them! Do you have any idea what this is like? Do you? You can't; you've never been possessed by an alien thing that makes you kill people! You don't know what it's like to have the taste rotting in your mouth for weeks on end. You don't know what it's like to not dare to vomit it all up because you might not get to eat for another week or longer! To hear It screaming in your head, beating at your brain because you can't understand what It's telling you! To not know if it's your thoughts or Its thoughts, or why you just did what you just did.

  "To be driven mad by something that's furious and hateful and forced to destroy and-- and-- and now you're telling me I have to go back out there and give this beast Descendant power to toy with?! Do you have any idea how horrible that will be? This thing, this monster inside me, It kills and kills; It makes me kill and kill! Those people ... most of them, you can barely find enough to bury once I'm done with them; It makes me eat every single bone-- And now you want to turn It loose with all the power of a Descendant? No! No, no, no!"

  "Ah, Sylenn," Konyetta interrupted hesitantly, "since the Hunter is so ... um, vocal to you most of the time, I wondered what It was telling you now? If you can get an idea of what It thinks of all this?"

  Sylenn paused, her gaze suddenly drawn inward. A deep frown creased her thin face. Concentration slowly gave way to fear, and she looked up, troubled.

  "It's quiet," she whispered. "I can't hear It."

  Mosin leaned toward her over the couch. "Is It gone?" he asked eagerly.

  "No, It's still there. But It's ... hiding in the back of my mind. It ..." She frowned, closing her eyes. "I think ... It's afraid of ... the new thing, the ... Descendant me."

  "That may be," Satherlin mused, looking over at Lyshunda.

  "You did say that It called you 'Master' before," Lyshunda replied. "Maybe It realizes that Its host can now command It."

  "That's fantastic!" Clatyn jumped up from his seat at the table. "This thing can sniff out Sukkers, and we can control It! We'll have those bastards beaten in no time now!"

  "Sit down," Lyshunda ordered crossly, her own accent so light that Sylenn only now caught it. Clat obeyed, huge grin firmly fixed.

  "I ..." Sylenn began. After a moment, she tried again. "It's never been quiet like this before. It's always been right there, right in the front of my mind. Now ... I don't know." She wrapped her thin arms around herself tightly.

  Mosin crossed over to her and enfolded her in his arms again. "It's alright, Sylenn. We'll work it all out, don't you worry." Pressing a kiss to her hair, he whispered, "I'm going to make sure it's alright!"

  "We're all here for you, Sylenn," Hae spoke up. Sylenn darted a glance at the white-haired, black-skinned woman with a rolling speech pattern. "Your situation is unique, but so was each of ours. I was a street rat before Hong Awakened me. I know what it's like to be starving and desperate and alone. I never had a ... joyrider like you have, but I had a lot of bigger, stronger toughs pushing me around. It's not the same, but I can imagine something of what you're going through."

  "But-- I'm a murderer," Sylenn whispered, tears spilling onto her cheeks. "I've killed so many people, and I ATE them."

  "I killed people, too," Kylle offered. "I was a rebel against the Akroiti army. Sniper, first class. Usually took assassination jobs."

  "And many former Descendants were of cannibalistic tribes," Satherlin added.

  "Though they gave that up once they Awakened," Lyshunda put in hastily.

  "But you're not the first to have a spotted past, Sylenn," Satherlin told her earnestly. "We're all here to help you through this."

  "And I don't care, Sylenn," Mosin said, pulling back to look her in the face. "You hear me, Silly? I don't care what's happened, what you've done, what that thing made you do. You're my sister, and I thought you were dead. I just got you back, and I'm not letting go!" He wrapped her up again, gently rocking her. "I love you, Silly. I love you."

  With a final glance around at the faces of the Descendants, Sylenn began to shudder, burying her head in her brother's chest.