Courage

by Angela B. Macala-Guajardo

  That pivotal day left Aerigo feeling confused. He constantly analyzed his emotions, trying to understand what it was he felt. Once Sandra forgave him for turning down her kiss, an awkwardness cropped up between them for a good few years. They greeted each other formally, small-talk was hard to sustain, and they stopped hugging altogether. Even with the war and this awkward phase, Aerigo’s thoughts often drifted to Sandra-what she was doing while he was out fighting, how beautiful she looked, what she really thought of him. Things like that. His feelings for her, he realized, were something more than what one felt for a sibling. The awkwardness between them dissipated. They smiled more and talked endlessly, but Sandra never tried to test her bounds with him.

  It wasn’t until Sandra turned thirty three that the Balvadiers finally agreed on a peace treaty with the Green Province. The Durians celebrated with weeks of feasting, music, storytelling, and wrestling; however, Aerigo felt detached from it all, worn down by all the royal intrigue.

  And then there was Sandra on top of that.

  During one of the feasts in the temple’s entrance hall, Aerigo and Sandra found themselves sitting next to each other on a bench in one corner. Sandra had grown up even more as of late. She was still impish, but it was something alluring about her. The changes made Aerigo’s heart try to beat out of his chest. They chatted away the first few hours of the feast, until they both drifted into a silence, gazing into each other’s eyes while joyful music strummed in the background.

  Before Aerigo realized what happened, they were kissing. This time, he found no reason to resist. He put his arms around Sandra and she did the same. It felt so right to have her in his arms, so right to be kissing her--so right, in fact, that he had to pull her up on his lap so she sat sideways on him, hiding from the rest of the world exactly how much he was enjoying the moment. Once he could get his emotions under control, they departed from the feast.

  Months later, they got married, despite Baku’s protest. The old god posed the same argument Aerigo once had, but the Aigis didn’t care. He was going to enjoy love while it lasted. She was the right woman for him. The next few years proved true to his heart. The only thing that gave them a slight issue was learning to live as a couple, instead of two single individuals. But once they settled in with each other, it felt like they’d always lived that way.

  * * *

  Slightly concerned and wanting to know why anyone had a fire going at this hour, Aerigo sat up and stretched. He tenderly stroked his wife’s hair, then got out of bed and put on some pants. He thought of waking Sandra, but decided against it. He’d come back for her if anything was wrong.

  Aerigo snuck out of the house and into the openness of Drio. Everything lay dark and quiet, even the goats, sheep, and cows. The wind moved so sleepily it made no sound as it caressed Aerigo’s bare torso. After passing several thatch-roofed homes, he thought he was the only one awake, until he gazed beyond the roofs and saw the source of the burning smell.

  Half a mile away the angry glow of fire lit rooftops, and a funnel of black smoke blotted out stars. Aerigo’s stomach sank to his feet. How had Drio caught fire?

  A distant scream unglued his feet from the cool grass. He ran towards the scream but, after several strides, he stopped. A giant fireball appeared overhead and arced straight for him, turning everything shades of flickering reds and oranges. Aerigo tried to calculate the ball’s trajectory, but thought better of catching it once he realized it was the size of a house. It wouldn’t crush him, but it was too big to handle. Besides, he wasn’t fireproof. He ran forward out of its path.

  The flaming ball grazed Aerigo with a blast of heat as it sizzled by, then he heard it crash on wood and stone, and explode. The detonation knocked him off his feet and shattered every nearby window. Shards of glass and debris rained on his unprotected body but his resilient skin kept him whole. Once the debris stopped falling, he uncovered his head and looked up. Ashes, smoke, and flames littered the air. He rose, letting chunks of wood and stone slip off of him, then patted himself down as he glanced at the impact site. He gaped at it and froze.

  Their home had suffered a direct hit.

  “Aerigo!” Sandra’s terrified voice screamed over the roaring blaze. The foundation shifted and the whole roof collapsed.

  “Sandra!” Aerigo bolted for the blazing ruin, jumped over a door lying on its side and into the inferno, heedless of his safety. It felt like he’d jumped into a kiln turned on full-blast. His eyes watered and stung from the smoke and heat, and his tears dried up before they could stream past his nose. He shielded his head with both forearms and choked on the smoke as he waded farther in. He gritted his teeth as the hairs on his arms burned off and the stone floor blistered his bare feet. All this pain was worth rescuing his wife and bringing her to safety.

  One of the roof’s broken support beams shifted. Aerigo flinched at the flurry of sparks that rose to meet his face as bits and pieces of the roof rained on him. He strained to hear Sandra call his name again. The interior was a mess of burning objects and smoke that obscured all the furniture and flooring. He couldn’t tell where he was in his own home. He pressed forward and was soon rewarded with sight of the green rug their bed was centered on.

  The bed was most certainly there. It was on fire with its legs perpendicular to the smoldering mattress. A roof support beam lay down its middle, pinching the mattress under its massive weight. A blackened leg and arm were sticking out from under the burning blankets sandwiched under the two-food-wide beam. Those were her limbs. She was there. He could save her now.

  Aerigo rushed to the bed and heaved off the support beam with a heavy grunt. The beam clanked onto the stone floor, cracked, and spat sparks. He reached out to cradle Sandra in his arms, but stopped and stared. And stared.

  Aerigo swallowed. The right side of his wife’s face had been bashed into her left, and it oozed dark blood. The rest of her body was flattened and bent and at odd angles, with bones sticking out here and there. He had to be just seeing things. The heat made the air shimmer and his eyes water. Sandra had to be knocked out. That’s all it was. She’d just called his name a minute ago.

  He scooped up the woman he loved and ran out of their home. Sandra’s body felt jagged, slick, and too hot. But it had to be the milieu of burns on his skin distorting what he’d become intimately familiar with over the past thirty years.

  Once he ran into the shadow of an intact home, Aerigo dropped to his knees. He doubled over and coughed and spit until the last of the smoke and soot left him.

  Sandra hadn’t joined him in coughing. Why?

  He lay his wife on her back, and tilted her head so her windpipe wouldn’t be obstructed. He thought he heard a bone snap in her neck, causing him to flinch, but he dismissed it as the sound of the nearby fire crackling. He put an ear over her mouth and broken nose and watched for the rise and fall of her chest. Her lopsided breasts didn’t move in the slightest and his ear felt nothing. Aerigo kneeled before Sandra’s sternum, then began pumping her chest with his hands, a technique he’d learned on another world, but recoiled after two pumps. Her lungs felt like a sack of jagged rocks under his hands. That wasn’t right at all. He tentatively touched her sternum and felt broken bones. Oh, gods. He carefully dragged Sandra’s body into the moonlight and fully took in her appearance. The world blurred.

  Somewhere closer to the first fire, an alarm horn sounded. Within seconds, screams filled the air and panicked footsteps beat the grass all around him. More explosions detonated near and far. He wiped his eyes and tried to block it all out. Every sound stole a piece of his focus on his wife. He needed to figure out what just happened.

  He had woken, he had left her behind, their house exploded, he ran in to save her, then came out with a... Aerigo swallowed again, feeling the mess of ribs, even though he was too far away to touch them.

  Overcome with grief, he bent over his wife and touched her burnt hair. He choked on tears he wished would go away. The only woman he’d allowed himsel
f to love was gone. His despair desperately wanted to turn to rage, to kill the ones who had thrown the fiery boulder, and then further punish himself for not waking her. If he gave in to rage, then the despair would have no room in his conscious thoughts. But his wife was gone. Rage and despair roiled inside, but despair was winning hold over him.

  In all his life, he’d gotten attached to people, but never to a degree where their deaths would send him into a bout of depression. If he’d allowed such closeness, then his life would’ve been nothing but funerals and holes in his heart. The distant compassion he felt for the mortal realm helped him cope with his longevity. But, for some reason, with Sandra, the scenario playing out before him had seemed impossible. She was too lovely of a person to die years and years before him, without him. Once he caressed the depression in her face, his throat constricted and he felt sick. He pulled her body to him, pressed her face to gaping hole he felt in his chest and began crying.

  All he had to do was wake her and she would’ve lived. The moment where he passed on shaking her shoulder played in his mind over and over. Flaming boulder or no, her death was his fault.

  Either an eternity or a second later, an authoritative voice rose over the sounds of fire and slaughter. A pair of heavy feet carrying that voice stopped behind Aerigo and put a hand on his shoulder and gave it a shake, doing the very thing he’d passed on doing.

  “Sir, you’ve got to--Aerigo!”

  Aerigo recognized Rahnjar’s tenor voice but said nothing, couldn’t bring himself to say anything about the fate of his own daughter. All he could do was cry. The feet came around to his side.

  “Beloriah’s whiskers! Is that Sandra?”

  Aerigo turned away from the hand and clenched his wife tighter, and continued crying.

  The Druid spoke in an unsteady voice. “Get up, son. We’ll have to mourn her later. We must flee south.”

  The Druid’s hand grasped his shoulders tighter. Aerigo winced; the touch agitated his burns.

  “Get up,” Rahnjar said, authority returning to his voice. “Now.”

  “No.”

  “That’s an order, Aerigo. Get up.”

  “Go away,” Aerigo said in a hollow voice. After protecting a nation for a whole century, he’d failed to protect one woman. He didn’t deserve Rahnjar’s willingness to save him.

  Suddenly his face was in the grass and his temple throbbed. He sat up, Rahnjar hovering over him with an outstretched fist, his face red.

  “Don’t make me lose a son-in-law, in addition to my daughter. Now get on your damned feet and start moving!”

  Aerigo could do nothing but stare. Why wasn’t Rahnjar furious with him? Why didn’t he hate him? Why didn’t he just leave him to die with Sandra? Maybe he didn’t want him to, for less than merciful reasons.

  “And don’t you dare tell me I allowed my daughter to marry a weakling and a coward, especially one without a drop of noble blood in his veins. It’s the Balvadiers that are attacking us, Aerigo. Now get up or I’ll punch you again!”

  Aerigo stared in disbelief. He’d expected--who else could he have expected? The Malkin kept to themselves in the Wildwood. No one lived in the Black Canyon on the other side of the mountains. The place couldn’t support whole towns. To the north lay Balvar. Any other kingdom that wanted to attack Drio had to march through Balvar. But would the Balvadiers even bother to blockade anyone from attacking the Durians? Would they join arms in hopes of taking the land they always coveted?

  “I saw their scarlet uniforms and banners,” Rahnjar said unhappily.

  Aerigo clenched his wife’s body so hard he snapped her bones. Under his grip, it felt like someone had rolled a bunch of broken sticks into burnt meat. Blood pounded in his ears, the beat pounding slower and harder, and gradually muffling out the rest of the world. With one of those beats, something inside him snapped. Revenge. His rage bubbled over his despair and shock. He stood, and the action felt as if not of his own will, as if his legs had lifted him without waiting to be told to.

  More fiery volleys rained on Drio, followed by more explosions and screaming. Men, women and children ran for the southern wheat fields as more people were killed by projectile debris, or direct hits from fireballs.

  “I’d been hoping for at least a century of peace, but it’s taken them only thirty years. I can’t help but wonder if someone whispered words of poison in--Aerigo? I’ve never seen your eyes glow like that before.”

  Those fools! Aerigo pictured himself marching up the steps to Balvar’s throne and repeatedly bashing the king’s head against it. They’d warred against him and the Green Province for a hundred years, lost millions of lives, and gained nothing, not one acre of land. Then the king had signed the peace treaty with a grateful smile, so grateful that Aerigo had been foolish enough to believe it. Of course a piece of paper wouldn’t protect one nation from another, but he’d let his idealism win out against reason. They had fooled him. They had tricked him into peaceful complacency, and now that mistake had cost Aerigo his wife. They were going to pay.

  “Take her,” he whispered in a deadly calm voice. The Druid hesitated before taking a step closer and accepting his daughter’s body.

  “Are you alright, son?”

  Aerigo was too absorbed with what was stirring within himself to answer. Some sort of... power... had woken in the core of his being, something very powerful that wanted out. It felt just as furious as him. Or maybe it was responding to his mounting rage, feeding it into full-blown wrath. He turned north, towards the fires, and the cowardly army that deserved to die. He felt the power tug him in that direction, like when standing in a receding wave as it tried to pull him out to sea.

  As he started moving, he noticed the air around him was swirling. It felt thicker and hotter--not with smoke and fire, but with energy. Raw furious energy. His hands tingled, his limbs throbbed in time with his heartbeat, and his eyes burned as they glowed. This energy was trying to break free of its prison. It had to be a prison to a power so potent, such a small, hidden space for it to exist in. It pushed at his subconscious barriers with force of magma pushing to break free of a planet’s crust. Aerigo stopped walking and waited for the energy to free itself, but somehow it couldn’t. He shut his eyes, reached into his core, and punched a hole in the crust of a prison and the energy erupted forth.

  Every drop of his blood, every single bone in his body, every muscle, tendon and organ filled with the whooshing sensation of a bird skyrocketing. The force of the power pushed his bare feel into the ground as it surged skyward. The energy’s release felt freeing and he lost awareness of where his body stood. He opened his eyes and found himself from high above everything. A tornado of transparent white energy funneled out of his body, which looked no bigger than a mouse. He took in Drio as it burned, the minuscule people and livestock running in every direction, and a vast scarlet army spread out on the plain north of the village, enjoying themselves as they catapulted more fireballs. The raging energy willed him towards the army.

  Before he threw himself upon the Balvadiers, he needed fists to kill them with and a face for the country to fear, if he could control himself enough to leave survivors. Maybe he wouldn’t need to leave survivors. He could wipe out the entire army, leaving Balvar’s king with nothing but his throne to hide behind, and then he could crush the king and his throne. But that could be taken care of later.

  Aerigo forced the energy into a crude human shape. It energy resisted his will and tried to snake in other directions, but he wasn’t in the mood for disobedience. He molded crude arms, fists and a torso, and put more effort into replicating his face. Those who survived were going to remember who decimated them. Tracing the shape of the monstrous energy with his mind’s eye, he nodded in approval. The tail end of the energy picked up his physical body and carried it along like a tornado lifting off the ground. The power carved a destructive path, blowing through Drio and towards the Balvadiers.

  Aerigo halted before the fire hurlers and raised a gia
nt fist, and at the same time four of the war machines loosed a fiery volley. The flaming boulders exploded on impact with the energy and Aerigo felt them burn his physical body, making him pause. This newfound power hadn’t made him invincible.

  It pushed against its form, causing it to bubble and deform. This breach killed his mounting fear, and instead he used the pain to fuel his rage. He pulled the power back into the shape he wanted, then turned his attention on the Balvadiers.

  Another volley arced towards Aerigo. He caught a boulder in each fist and squeezed, filling the air with a loud sizzle, as if someone had just splashed oil onto a heated pan. The stone cracked. His corporeal hands seared with the pain of melting and blistering skin, but he didn’t care. He opened his giant fists, loosing the crushed rock on the front ranks.

  The soldiers broke and fled like the cowards they were, trampling one another. The sight brought a smile to his astral face and a need for more destruction. Nearby archer and cavalry units fled and got tangled in the units behind them. Within seconds the whole army began rolling in a unified direction: away from the giant.

  Aerigo bombarded the nearest soldiers with strike after strike, knocking bodies on comrades and the point of spears hundreds of yards away. It was as if Aerigo were punching a scarlet sand dune and each spray was dozens of bodies. The Balvadiers’ cries, death wails, and their blood fueled Aerigo’s destructive hunger all the more.

  His mind’s eye drew his attention to the nearest mountain. Three projectiles, three six-foot arrows were headed straight for him. Two of the massive arrows were knocked off their trajectory by the swirling air and fell out of sight. The third one buried itself deep in the astral giant’s side.

  Aerigo’s corporeal body seared with fresh pain. He clutched at his ribs and the giant mimicked his actions. Even though there was nothing sticking out of his side, no gaping wound, no blood, each breath hurt. Why? Why did it hurt so much? Nothing had hit his actual body. How was this supposed to make sense? As his confusion compounded, his power fought against its maintained shape. Aerigo submitted to his rage, fixed his form, then lashed out at the mountainside. Dirt, trees, and a half a dozen bodies flew out in a spray of debris. He turned back to the fleeing army and began seizing giant fistfuls of soldiers, horses, and war machines. He pelted the cowards with their own army over and over, each blow not seeming like enough. The Balvadiers hadn’t suffered enough, even though he was running out of targets.