Vassal

by Sterling D'Este

  No.

  In fact, they had rewarded his behavior time and time again. Accolades, public announcements of his various accomplishments, knowing smiles as he argued and debated and pushed and pushed and pushed.

  Because they saw greatness in him and knew that greatness needed extra rein to run.

  If he was expelled and outcast— Alphonse could never do that to him. And even if the healers could discern what was wrong with her, it seemed unlikely they would know how to heal the injury to her psyche induced by some strange, terrible creature summoned by blood magic.

  Etienne was her best chance and her best friend. She’d not get him in trouble just for her own sake.

  Alphonse squeezed his hands back in agreement. He would find the answers and a cure. If there was a cure.

  And if there wasn’t, then she shouldn’t be a healer anyway… It would be dangerous and irresponsible. To lose track of time while tending to an injury. To have sudden, nearly uncontrollable impulses to behave oddly and disobediently…

  No. Her duty as a healer had always been to restore health and body. Not harm more people with her incompetence and strangeness.

  “I am so tired. Do you think I could rest here for a while?” She knew he’d start reading right away. She might as well keep him company while he did that. And in truth… Alphonse didn’t trust herself alone. Not now.

  Etienne nodded and stood, vacating the bed so that she could take it at her leisure. “I think that’s a good idea. You can sleep in my bunk.”

  He kneeled down beside his trunk once more and collected the book from it, then, with an almost frantic determination, Etienne seated himself at the small desk to work. Still, she did not move to take his bed, hesitation gripping her tightly. Despite all that had happened, the Doctrines still held priority in her mind.

  Not many in Dailion were as traditionalist as Alphonse, but she’d been raised on a farm by parents who adhered to Mother Agathi Doctrines. Mother Agathi was a minor Goddess of fertility, serenity, and harmony. She was a patron to many farmers and herdsmen, people who lived off the bounty of the land. Mother Agathi intoned that clean, humble, and virtuous followers would live happy, good lives. Vanity and calling attention to oneself were not encouraged. Letting a boy see her without her veil was frowned upon. Sleeping in his bed...

  Many girls would laugh that such a notion would worry Alphonse, but her worthiness was all that Alphonse had left. If she was getting kicked out of Moxous or being held back a year, if she was going insane, then her status as mage and healer was in question. Could she afford to cast aside her integrity now?

  While Alphonse had lived in Moxous far longer than she had lived on the farm with her parents, those lessons still stuck. She did have friends, many friends, who did not adhere to such things, but Alphonse hadn’t felt the urge to explore more… impulsive routes.

  But Etienne was a brother, her best friend, and his behavior and virtue unquestionable. One nap in his room would not be the end of her. Besides, Alphonse was afraid of what she might do on her own… She needed Etienne to keep an eye on her.

  With a sigh, Alphonse carefully took the veil off of her head, folded it neatly, and placed it on Etienne’s desk. It was a symbol of her maidenhood and devotion to a proper, clean life, and it should be treated as such.

  ✶

  While Alphonse curled up, Etienne turned his attention to the book. It looked so innocent: simple brown cover, yellow pages, tidy script. He had studied hundreds like it, though perhaps none quite so old.

  And yet within those bindings, lay terror.

  He shuddered, stooped by the responsibility he had taken on. He must save Alphonse. There simply was no other possible option.

  She had meant so much to him and for so long.

  And he, with all his intelligence, had hurt her beyond his understanding.

  Etienne read well into the night, his elbow propped on the desk—though carefully avoiding Alphonse’s veil—and his forehead resting in his palm. He scribbled in the notebook on his lap with careless speed until the tips of his fingers were black with ink. Only occasionally did he look up to check on his friend, where she lay sleeping peacefully, curled beneath the quilt she had made him three solstices past.

  At first, the book had seemed to hold no new answers. His second reading was much the same as the first: the Old Gods were bound in their temples to prevent a repeat of the Great War. The author of the tome was dismissive of the people who had banished the Gods, calling them extremists or excessively cautious… the word was difficult to understand, maybe excessively cautious meddlers? The author had, however, managed to preserve a memory of the old world from those who would have seen it completely destroyed.

  As Etienne continued to re-analyze his translation, however, he began to find repeated instances of the word “vassal” spread throughout the text, as though the memory needed some host to live in. In his original interpretation, Etienne had simply assumed that those who would experience the memory would be, in a sense, it’s vassal. It would live in their memories.

  However, if the memory was not a mere memory, but a shadow of the past living again….

  Etienne well remembered the language classes in which his professors had explained the double meaning of the word.

  If that was the case, then the spell had summoned some living relic of the past, an entity who had likely chosen Alphonse as its vassal.

  Etienne’s heart was ice, but he continued reading. The author of the text had gone into some detail about the banishing of the creature in a temple by the name of Thlonandras. It required a relic, a basin.

  If they could get there, Etienne could rebind the creature, releasing Alphonse from its clutches.

  If they could get there.

  The temple was high in the mountain range that lined the north-western border of old Rhosan, now called The Wildlands for its lawless inhabitants. It would mean leaving school and trekking through inhospitable lands populated by innumerable dangers.

  Etienne looked at Alphonse, her face calm and gentle in sleep.

  It would be worth it. If it saved her.

  By the time the bell chimed five of the morning, Etienne had ceased his frenetic study. He had turned to look out the window, his pale face dimly lit by the light of the setting moon. It was still quite dark.

  He had worked out, as best he could tell, the path they would need to take to the temple in the mountains, cross-referencing the notes in the books with the locations of known ruins and landmarks. There was nothing he could do now but wait to tell Alphonse what he had learned and hope that she would trust him to rebind the entity they had unwittingly set loose. He knew that he would stop at nothing now. She had to be freed.

  Then, without so much as a warning stir, Alphonse sat up.

  Etienne blinked in surprise. “You’re up early,” he said. “I know what must be done.”

  Her pupils dilated and contracted several times before flickering around the room. There was something carefully calculated in her gaze as she sat up, letting the quilt slither to the floor without trying to catch it, fold it up, and put it back. No. She just let it fall on the wooden boards, collecting dust.

  Alphonse turned to survey his room once more. She looked at him, but it wasn’t Alphonse looking out of her eyes.

  She stood, hands running over her neck and shoulders, then down the length of her torso in an almost… Sensual manner. They stopped at her hips and then brushed over her straight grey skirts, frowning at the sturdy material in distaste.

  Etienne stood up. “Alphonse?” Unease gathered in his chest. Was this the entity in control, the darkness he had unleashed?

  Without a backward glance, Alphonse headed towards the door, pulling it open and striding out. Not a word said.

  When she stepped out the door, he followed her, calling out her name. “Come back! Your veil…”

  He tried to grab her arm, to stop her physically. He’d never before been so grateful for her small stature. �
��Where are you going?”

  Amber eyes darted towards his hand on Alphonse’s arm, then flickered up to his face. While they were Alphonse’s eyes, there was something astoundingly different in how she held them.

  They were opened, wide, almost too wide. And she wasn’t blinking…

  The way those eyes—now more like glinting copper, moved with steady predatory ease up his wrist, forearm, shoulder…

  Throat.

  It lingered there for several heartbeats before slipping up to his face.

  A foreign smile came to her lips, peeling back from her slightly sharper upper canine teeth, then revealing the rest. Not a pure snarl, but it wasn’t Alphonse’s gentle beam.

  Etienne shuddered. Seeing that feral, predatory creature looking out of Alphonse’s eyes… It was utterly wrong, a violation of everything she was.

  And while it did frighten him, it also made him angry.

  “I know you’re not her,” he told the thing looking out of Alphonse’s face. “You don’t deserve that body. You should have stayed in whatever hell you were banished in.”

  Etienne tried to tug Alphonse back towards his room, but she was far stronger than he remembered. He couldn’t seem to get her to budge.

  “Give her back to me!” Real desperation mingled with the anger in his voice now, and though no one had seen them yet, the sounds of sleepers stirring behind their doors were clearly audible.

  She looked down at his hand again, at the tugging there, and her eyes—flames, not flowers— traced the slope to his mouth. Her head tilted, a mountain lion considering an injured deer.

  But just as it seemed it would refuse and resume whatever it had previously been doing, Alphonse sucked in a shaky breath.

  She exhaled and blinked. Looked around.

  Confusion colored her brow, and she looked up at Etienne in bafflement. She didn’t have to say anything to make it clear that she had no idea how she had gotten here…

  All of the tension in Etienne’s frame went out of him at that little, shaky breath. He let his hand slide off of Alphonse’s wrist and sighed in relief, his eyes closing for a moment. “This has got to be confusing. Come back inside, and I’ll explain. You’ll want your veil before anyone sees you anyway.”

  He led the way back to his room and dropped into the chair at his desk so that Alphonse could have the bed, then jumped back up again to drape the blanket she’d made him around her shoulders. “You were only… not yourself for a few minutes,” he told her, trying to sound reassuring. “No one saw you.”

  She was still trembling. Etienne was at a loss for what to do. Even if he could bind this creature once more, Alphonse was going to suffer. There was nothing he could do to protect her from the thing inside her head.

  He had never felt so terribly inept.

  And how did you tell your best friend, the person that was closer to you than your own siblings ever would be, that she was possessed by an ancient shadow you had convinced her to summon.

  For a moment, he just looked at her, then dropped back down in the chair.

  “I… was wrong.” Etienne supposed that the simple truth was all he could give her. “The thing we summoned… It wasn’t a memory. It was a shadow of something from the old world that needed a host to live again.”

  He looked down at his ink-stained hands, weak and useless. “I can rebind it, but not from here. It has to be done in one of the temples left from the old world, high in the mountains of the Wildlands.”

  ❀

  The weight and warmth of the blanket weren’t enough to reassure her as Etienne’s words sunk in. A creature from the old world, living beneath her skin. Sharing her heart, her mind, her body. Like a parasite.

  Alphonse immediately felt herself to be dirty. She cringed and smoothed still-trembling hands over the blankets at her shoulders…

  Etienne hadn’t known. Had acted too rashly. He’d been swept up in the excitement of discovery and too focused on the chance to be apprenticed to a master sorcerer. He hadn’t thought ahead of what might happen with his discovery. Now, she was infected.

  Some internal part of Alphonse wailed at the thought, at the realization that her body was not her own. Not anymore.

  But the calm, nurturing side chided her for her anger at Etienne’s hasty mistake. No one had intended this to happen. And Etienne had clearly stayed up all night finding a solution. There was a solution.

  A solution that had them trekking across their land and into a hostile, vile territory that knew no peace and no order!

  The small, terrified part of her that shrieked these thoughts trembled while something laughed in the dark corner of her mind. That something liked the idea of the Wildlands.

  Alphonse shuddered, her voice hollow when she finally spoke.

  “There is no other way?” She was near pleading. She would do anything to not have to go. Anything. To not have to face this.

  He held out his hands, helpless. “I can look, Allee, but in all my research, I have only come across one single book dealing directly with the workings of the old world. It could take years if there’s even another to be found.”

  He rubbed his face with his hands, desolate and exhausted. “I’ll try, Alphonse, if that’s what you want me to do, but this binding ceremony at Thlonandras… I think it's the fastest, surest way to get rid of it.”

  The healer heaved a massive sigh, shaking and trembling with the effort to keep herself together. To keep herself from cracking apart. For this… this… thing to tear her apart.

  If Etienne believed this was the best way. The surest way.

  Her face was void of color or light as she nodded, feeling as if she were condemning herself. But wasn’t she already condemned?

  Darkness was living within her. She was losing little pieces of herself. She was likely going to be held back within Moxous, if not expelled. Waiting for Etienne to find some shred of a clue, to search and search and search the catacombs, all while she woke up places she had no recollection of going to, did things so truly unlike herself, lost minutes, hours, days…

  That wasn’t a life.

  They could skip the summer semester. Take a break, travel to the Wildlands and back, and resume their studies in the fall.

  “Alright. Alright,” she whispered, barely able to force herself to say it. “We’ll go.”

  Chapter IV

  Fifth Moon, Waxing Gibbous: Ingola

  Blood slipped down the padded portion of Alphonse’s thumb, beading and gathering at the base of the digit. Amber eyes flickered as she watched the blood trickle and pool there, forming one large drop that would surely succumb to gravity’s pull, continuing down her forearm.

  Such interesting stuff, blood.

  It made up much of the human body. Of most bodies, human or otherwise. It was thick and hot and set her teeth on edge. The very sight of it made her skin crawl and her mouth moisten.

  It hadn’t always.

  Years of training as a healer had made Alphonse rather immune to the effects of blood. Just another factor of the body, just another facet to study and understand. Command.

  How she had taken blood for granted all these years…

  But now.

  Now she couldn’t help but watch raptly as it started to trickle down her wrist. Something behind her heart stirred at the sight of the flowing droplets of viscera, and impulsively Alphonse pushed back against the feeling. She knew that feeling. It wasn’t a good one.

  The desire surged stronger against her will, reaching for the blood, for the open cut, the slice in her own flesh Alphonse had deliberately caused despite her best efforts… One moment watching as Etienne bartered for a ride on a wagon bound for a small town near the border to the Wildlands, the next pressing her thumb so hard against a rusted nail on the wagon side that she pierced her own flesh.

  Now, in the back of the wagon, swaying gently with the movements of the oxen pulling them, Alphonse neither could heal her bleeding thumb nor allow herself to do more. To taste t
he blood. To rub it over her brow and across her throat as the impulse urged her to do.

  Trapped in her own body, Alphonse only watched its course, mesmerized by the progress the red stuff made.

  The sickness, the impulse, whatever it was housed within her body, had grown bored with the pastoral scenes and slumbered for a time, only to awaken suddenly and viciously. During those times, it was all Alphonse could do to not snap at Etienne’s rambling, if good-natured, observations.

  Or worse.

  At times she nearly felt herself attacking Etienne, slapping him or… biting. Other times she felt the creature fixate on Etienne with such acute attention, Alphonse wondered what precisely she—it— would do to her friend. Devour or bed him?

  That thought deeply disturbed her, as Etienne was a brother to Alphonse.

  She mostly felt in control, but those instances where it slipped or where she was gone entirely… Those were the most terrifying.

  One moment walking down the road that eventually led to the Wildlands, the next bathing in a pool of spring water, clothes sodden and clinging to her form, bronze locks plastered to her veil…

  One moment curling up to sleep in the bed of a small wayside inn, the next standing in the back garden, staring up at the moon, starlight kissing her face and hands, nothing on but her nightgown…

  One moment eating an uninspiring but filling oat bran, the next snapping the neck of a live rabbit…

  That last memory, in particular, made Alphonse shudder. From what she could tell, she had literally caught the poor creature with her bare hands. How she had managed to be swifter than a hare was beyond her.

  She and Etienne had eaten well that night, at least.

  But now, with a ride taking them closer to the Wildlands, Alphonse wondered how much of her would be left when they made it to the temple. Would her symptoms worsen or plateau? Would she continue to have these blackouts and strange urges?

  The blood continued down her arm, starting to drip onto the wagon bed with a steady rhythm, and the sickness inside purred.