by Thomas Green
The beast snarled. ‘You are screwing this up. Let me back in!’
She knew he was right. She steeled herself and raised her eyes to meet Miranda’s emerald gaze. “Look, I feel so bad about what happened to you because of me that I can’t let it be. I will stay here and do what I can until you are fine. If you want to have me eaten alive by bears once you do, I won’t care and won’t defend myself. But not until you have recovered… please.”
Miranda sighed. “Why do you insist on it so much?”
“Nobody had ever done something like that for me... and you almost died for it. Plus, there is no way you won’t have the backlash from hell from bleeding out that much of your strength. I know how it feels, to be so cold you think you are freezing to death. You know it too, which is why you hide in your room, knowing nothing can help you. I understand that, believe me, I do, because I have been through this dozens of times.
“And all of those times, all I wanted was to have someone warm to hold me as I go through the backlash. You don’t deserve to suffer alone. You shouldn’t suffer alone… it’s not right.”
Miranda shook her head. “You have no idea what I had done in my life.”
“I don’t care. I know what you did today, and that’s more than enough for me.” Luna finished undressing.
Miranda measured her scar-covered form with an impassive stare. “You look like shit.”
Luna’s heart sunk into her stomach. “I get that a lot.” She snuck into the furs, wrapping herself around Miranda, feeling her entire body melt as she did. Luna was cold, but Miranda was akin to ice. Yet despite the freezing touch, Luna’s soul filled with warmth, as if being here was the sole purpose of her existence.
Miranda sneered. “If you try anything funny, I will blast the black flame into your face. And trust me, there is no being my fire cannot kill.”
Luna said nothing, holding tight onto her.
Reluctantly, Miranda wrapped her arms and legs around Luna to get as much of the heat as she could. They both fell asleep.
***
A shout from the door woke Luna from her slumber. “Breakfast!”
Miranda sneered. “I refuse!”
“My orders are to stand here and keep shouting until you let me put the meal next to your bed, General.”
“I order you to leave!”
“With all due respect, madam, I answer to General Methot and am here on her direct order.”
Miranda looked at Luna. “Hide.” She dug herself into the furs, disappearing from sight. Miranda forced herself to smile. “Come in!”
The soldier entered, pushing a sizeable food-laden table on wheels.
Miranda stared at the sheer amount of things he brought. “That’s enough to feed ten men.”
“General’s orders,” he said with an impassive face.
“With what comment did the general give that order? Hmm?”
“She remarked that the recipient is, in her own words, pickier than a princess, so we should put some of everything.”
Miranda shook her head. “Dismissed.”
The soldier bowed and left. Miranda tried to get up once the door closed. Luna held her down with her hand and moved on top of her.
Miranda pierced Luna with a stare. “What do you think you are doing? Hmm?”
“Your lips are blue, and your body is colder than ice. You are not getting up unless that changes.”
“Should I call the guards? Well?”
“Should I go to Merewen and tell her you sabotaged your treatment?”
Miranda snarled. “Why would that change anything? Hmm?”
“She had a queen-size breakfast delivered straight to your bed and feels guilty about shooting a hole into me yesterday.”
“Are you threatening me? Well?”
Luna smiled. “No, of course not. I am stating the facts.”
“What do you want? Hmm?”
“What would you like for breakfast?”
Miranda gave up, anger flaring in her eyes. “Meat.”
“With the freshly reattached jaw tendons?”
Miranda pierced her with a glare.
“As you wish.” Luna went to the table and found that half of its content was meat. She picked the best-looking beef sirloin, put it on a plate and cut the steak into tiny pieces.
“Are you cutting up my food? Seriously?”
“Yes, and I will grind it into a paste afterward.”
Miranda’s expression hardened. “Not a chance I’m ever eating that!”
Luna smiled. “Okay, sure.” She stabbed a small piece of meat onto a fork and aimed at Miranda’s mouth. “Open wide.”
She tried to grab the fork, but Luna held her down. Miranda’s cheeks flared red. “If you ever tell anyone about this, I will throw you into an active volcano.”
“Do what you want with me after you recover.”
Miranda sighed and let Luna feed her the piece of meat. She bit into it and had to clench her hands not to shout out in pain.
Luna’s face turned into a mean smile as Miranda dug her nails into her own palms not to scream. To Luna’s surprise, Miranda chewed the meat and swallowed, but her entire body was shaking, and tears filled her eyes. I don’t even want to imagine how much must have this hurt.
Luna picked up a spoon and smashed the beef into a paste. “By my experience, for a wound your mind has yet to experience, it takes it about three days to realize the injury has been healed. I don’t know how many times have your jaw muscles been torn apart, but I would guess that never, so that’s three days of you not chewing anything without an excessive amount of pain.”
Ignoring Miranda’s murderous glare, Luna finished crushing the meat. Once done, she reached for a bottle of wine, pried the cork open and trickled in a few drops to smoothen it out.
Miranda frowned. “I am not eating that.”
The beast took over. Luna grinned, baring her teeth. “There are two ways you are getting the next piece of meat. You either eat this paste from the spoon or I feed you mouth to mouth.” Luna pushed the spirit out, a sentence too late.
Miranda glared at her, murderous intent spilling out of her eyes. Luna knew better than to apologize. After a while, Miranda parted her lips and allowed Luna to feed her. She ate two pounds of beef before she had enough. “I need another bottle of the wine, now.”
“You do realize that drinks will have to go mouth to mouth, right?”
“I can drink by myself.”
Luna smiled. “Since I have extensive experience in having my face torn apart, let me tell you a little secret. Drinking requires a specific movement of the jaw muscles, one which is excessively painful when your mind thinks your cheeks are shredded. For real, there are only a few moves that hurt more than that.”
“I can handle the pain, so pour it into me. Now!”
Luna shook her head. “If I do that, you will spill the wine all over the bed. We are bound to spend the next two to three days in these furs, so I hope we can agree on not getting them soaked by alcohol.”
Miranda snarled. “When I can move, I will skin your mongrel ass alive, dip you in honey and burry you into an anthill! I will—”
“Want the wine or not?” Luna interrupted her.
Miranda fumed, but said nothing, opening her lips.
“Tell me when you have enough.” Luna pried open another bottle, filled her mouth and latched onto Miranda’s lips to drip the wine into her.
Miranda turned to wall side after they finished the bottle, her cheeks flaring up with embarrassment. “More meat.”
“Suuure.”
Miranda’s look sharpened. “Wait for a second. How did you get drunk from this little wine? Well?”
“I did not!”
Miranda’s eyes narrowed. “You may have not backlashed, but your regeneration is getting exhausted by fixing your rattled organs, not leaving enough strength to overcome the alcohol.” She scanned Luna, inquisitive and precise. “Regenerating out poisons takes you a lot of aether, doe
sn’t it? And since you have zero resistance to it, alcohol is poisonous enough for you. How old are you?”
Luna turned red. “Twenty-one.”
“Nice fucking try.” Miranda laughed, twisting by pain, turning her laughter into a cacophony of whimpering and pain. “Now, tell me the truth!”
Luna gazed toward the ground. “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean?”
Luna’s heart sank, knowing how awkward and weird this was. One of the many things she never wanted to talk about, to anyone, ever. “Nobody told me, and James raised me at ice planes of the north, so I couldn’t count the seasons.”
“There’s a man called James commanding the Union army. Rings a bell?”
Luna gaped. “I don’t know… is he winning?”
Miranda sneered, aiming her eyes at the wall. “Sort of.”
Luna’s face twisted into a faint smile while her eyes became glazed. “Yeah, that sounds like him.”
“Back to the topic. When did you start having the monthly bleeding? Hmm?”
“How would you know I have that?”
“Every fertile woman has that. So?”
“About two years ago,” Luna admitted with her face bright red.
“That makes you about sixteen. By the Goddess, I’m corrupting a child. Again! You should be at school!”
“Maybe I work differently.”
Miranda shook her head. “You don’t. You are a regular girl with a spirit latched onto your soul, so you work like any other schoolgirl.”
“So what? You aren’t that much older.”
Miranda stopped herself from laughing, still contorting with pain. “This never gets old. Guess!”
“I haven't seen a skin smoother than yours, and you look young, so I thought you would be about my age.”
Miranda’s resistance to laughter failed, releasing an orchestra of painful grunts. “Fucking broken ribcage! I need to get high. There are three boxes beneath my bed. You pull out the left one.”
Luna reached down, pulled out a box and pried it open. Her face flared red. “Eeehhh…”
“What is it? Hmm?”
“I mean… I don’t know… it’s a little soon…”
“What’s in the box?”
“Ropes, cuffs, whips, harnesses, clamps… sex toys… what’s with all these shapes and sizes?”
Miranda’s expression hardened to stone. “Put. It. Back.”
Luna packed the box and returned it to its place under the bed.
“Can you not tell left from right? Well?”
“It was at my left hand!”
Miranda stared at her with mouth gaping wide. “You tell sides by your hands? Seriously?”
“Yeah… how else?
“By north facing blueprint of the room, obviously.”
Luna’s eyes widened. “What? How do you even do that? And why?”
“So, the left and right don’t change when you turn around. Imagine the room layout and spin the north edge to the top. There’s nothing hard about it.”
“That’s the most complicated way to tell left and right I have ever heard.”
Miranda shook her head. “Whatever! Pull the correct box this time. Take the pipe, and one of the green marked pouches and stuff the leaves into the pipe. Be careful with it because it’s expensive.”
Luna did. The box was full of well-organized pouches and smoking supplies marked by colored symbols. Slowly and carefully, Luna picked up the pipe and stuffed the green leaves into it. “Which tunnel did I come out of yesterday?”
“The middle one.”
Luna’s heart sunk. “Oh.”
“Calm down. I’m used to things getting complicated. But yes, I was at the left one, Nash at the right one, both of which would have been fine. But no, you had to run to Merewen who shot a hole into you.”
“Still… I fucked up. Merewen is crushed by guilt, you are so demolished you can’t even drink by yourself, and it’s all my fault.”
“That doesn’t matter at all.” Miranda smiled. “The mission was a success, and we are all alive. That’s what matters.”
“Why did you do it? Why did you jump into the middle of all the monsters to save me?”
“I do not leave my people behind.”
“Thank you,” Luna whispered.
Miranda shook her head. “Shut up and light the pipe. This should keep us busy for a while. When we sleep, I will talk to Elias through Limbo and have him come and examine you tomorrow by lunch.”
Luna didn’t know what to say, what to do, how to express how happy this made her. She lit up the pipe and inhaled the green smoke.
***
The noon of the next day came, and a confident voice sounded from the door. “I am here.”
Luna twitched in her seat by the table and ran a hand through her mud brown hair. She wished she had better clothes than this ruin of a brigandine.
“Come in,” Miranda shouted. A well-arranged man with short blond hair, a well-trimmed beard, and sapphire blue eyes walked in. “Elias, meet Luna. Luna, meet Admiral Elias la Grace, the highest commander of the naval forces of the Holy Order of Palai. I expect you both to know what this meeting is about.” Miranda dug herself into the furs, disappearing out of sight.
Luna scanned the man. His long coat was undecorated, the armor beneath simple and made of leather, but the wide tricorn on his head carried an army of medals and exotic looking feathers. Luna rose and bowed. “I am honored to meet you, Admiral.”
He smiled and offered her his hand. “Oh please, skip the formalities and call me Elias.”
When she reached to shake it, he lifted her hand up to kiss its back. The formal greeting turned her face red.
“Let us sit down.” He took a chair. “Lucas told me you have a little issue with your spirit running too wild and would like to have that looked at. Is that correct?”
Luna smiled awkwardly as she sat down. “Somewhat. I don’t understand what’s going on, but Lucas looked like he did and said my bindings could be redone in the way that I wouldn’t have to eat people anymore. That would be nice.”
Elias’ face remained calm and undisturbed. “I will need to do a small spell on you. There will be no pain or harm incurred upon your side, but I must first examine the bindings that hold you and your spirit together.”
She gulped. “Sure.”
He stood up and traced complex symbols into the air, straight in front of Luna’s face.
She didn’t feel a thing, so she waited for him to finish. Fifteen minutes later, he stopped and returned to his seat.
He cleared his throat. “I must admit I expected none of your kind to still exist, much less of this age. Whoever did your bindings was a genius without equal, for he tied an adult wolf soul to the soul of a child in the way that allowed the child to grow without merging with that of the wolf. The issue you are facing now is that your own soul has grown up and is uncomfortable in the body you have because it never grew naturally. That makes your control of yourself harder, affecting everything you do, especially fighting when using aether.”
“That… sort of fits,” Luna whispered. “You said… my kind… what am I?”
“You are what was once called a werewolf. The records of your kind have been long lost, but from what I had found during my travels, werewolves were a race that existed for a less than a century. The oldest record of a werewolf I have ever encountered is dated to the time of The Upheaval while the newest ones date to forty years afterward.”
“That was… over a century ago,” Luna stuttered. She always hoped she wasn’t the only one of her kind. She dreamed of meeting others like her, people who could understand how it feels to live with a beast’s spirit, who had the advice to offer. After all, the Dreadwolf was the most famous warrior of the Old Kingdom while being like her so there may have been a trick on how to deal with being a werewolf. That dream was now over.
“Yes, hence my amazement of your existence. In any case, since I do believe I posses
s the tome containing the necessary knowledge, I will find the ritual to redo your bindings to help you reach a stabilized form. Beware though, this shall take an extended period, and here I am talking about potentially years. I would, therefore, suggest you ask your maker if my idea rings true to his ears.”
Years… Luna narrowed her eyes. “Why would you do this for me?”
“As the Archbishop likes to remind us, the Order stands upon a set of principles, where freedom of will is among the main ones. Lucas violated these principles, especially in your case and this is his way of making amends.”
The cold claws of dread crawled up her spine as the realization of how powerful Lucas was hit her. He was someone who could command the admiral to do his bidding, someone so high positioned Luna nearly fell from the chair. “That’s a little overwhelming. Thank you.”
“I am aware. The optimal path would be to finish the tournament and meet me here in Xona afterward. I will prepare all necessary by then.”
Luna shrugged. “I don’t know what to say.”
“You don’t have to say anything.” He rose. “I will see you at my ship, the Angry Judith, upon your return to Xona. Till then, I wish you favorable winds.”
As he left their room, Luna sat on her chair, petrified. She turned to Miranda when the door shut behind him. “Are all the people from the Order like this or am I lucky?”
Miranda peeked out from among the furs. “Hmm?”
“You, Elias, Merewen, the archbishop… Lucas… you are the nicest people I have ever met.”
Miranda grunted. “If you are done talking to yourself, my bed is getting cold. Get back to work, bed warmer. Now!”
With a cheerful smile, Luna undressed. “As you command.”
***
Luna woke up full of energy, feeling no pain. I don’t think I’ve ever slept this well. She pressed herself onto Miranda, enjoying the gentle heat of her body. Luna’s heart sunk like a rock thrown into the sea. She’s out of backlash… has it already been three days?
Miranda awakened, stretching as she did. “Morning.”
“Morning.”
Miranda arched an eyebrow. “What’s with the low mood? Hmm?”
