Jin rolled her eyes. Aria had been making that same threat for the last…well, Jin didn’t know how long they’d been on the bridge. She didn’t understand how time worked here. Jin hadn’t given Aria the answer she was looking for yet and every time that she gave the wrong one, Aria would attack her until Jin was out of breath and out of energy. She couldn’t decide if this or what she’d left in the Dome was worse.
The pain flashed and pulsed again, horribly. The warmth she felt was a spreading splash of vibrant red. The tip dripped rivulets of blood into the lake.
“W-why?” she asked. She blinked at Ahn through the spots as white fogged her mind.
“To find out the truth, Jin.” Ahn stood there, frowning. She didn’t know why and she didn’t care. Her eyes fluttered as she lost her grip on the world. She couldn’t hear anything.
The truth.
Jin remembered Aria staring down at her as if she was some sort of salvation, a path to another world, a guide to the peace she hadn’t experienced since she set foot in Caeli.
Bullshit.
The only thing Aria had given her was the spear that laid discarded at her side and a chance. At what? Who knew? Aria wouldn’t tell her.
“Go to hell,” Jin rasped, her mouth curling in contempt.
“Fine,” Aria spat, and Jin felt her stomach churn. She wiped the sweat from her upper lip and prepared herself for another attack by picking up the spear.
Aria took off, dragging her sword across the ground, leaving a shower of sparks in her wake. Jin felt a pressure crash into her, oppressive and heavy, weighing her down. Jin tried to follow Aria, the sparks zigzagging across the bridge, debris flying left and right like she was a hurricane. Then everything stopped–the scrrrrrrrrrr sound of metal against pavement, the flare and flash of Aria’s sword, the sound of her boots slapping against the ground. It all stopped. Then Aria…disappeared.
Jin felt panic welling up inside of her as her head jerked left and then right. Chancing it, she looked behind her but saw nothing, just the empty road that led to Caeli, a place that would not help her.
“Where are you?” she muttered.
Aria reappeared with a speed too quick to be real in Jin’s head. The woman stormed towards her out of the smoke, her teeth bared like a lioness. Jin jumped back into a defensive stance with an ease that came with experiencing the same thing over and over and over again.
Jin was out of energy, she was in pain, dizzy with it, and she was out of the will to fight, especially considering she didn’t know why she was fighting. “You said you wouldn’t hurt me!” Jin yelled as her ankle gave way and she fell to a knee.
Aria didn’t stop. “I’m not going to if you defend yourself! I am not your enemy!”
“Not my enemy?” Jin snarled. “If you are not going to hurt me, why do I need to defend myself?”
“Because your true enemy will hurt you. They will hurt you, Jin, and I can’t take you with me, I can’t save you. I have to leave you and you will have to find your own way! Raise your weapon. Please!” A look crossed Aria’s face and for a moment, Jin felt Aria’s desperation. Tasted it. Breathed it. Could run her hands across it if she had the energy to. It felt like the smooth edges of a void, dark, bottomless and unafraid to gobble up anything that fell in its gaping ravenous maw.
She didn’t understand how a woman as fearless as Aria could feel something so black and consuming. Jin’s shoulders deflated as she tried to summon the energy. “You’re not making any sense. Please stop,” she begged. “I don’t–I don’t want to fight you anymore.”
Aria’s lips curled into a snarl and the desperation was replaced by a look of frustration and disappointment. “I’m giving you a chance! Why won’t you take it?” she shouted.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“Damn it, Jin! Wrong answer!” Aria raised her sword higher, her face stone with conviction. She took one step, two, before she was leaping through the air, her sword singing. Jin had just enough energy to raise her spear to block Aria’s first swing. Metal collided against metal and the vibration ran up Jin’s arm. She winced. Aria pushed forward, pressing her weapon down.
“Stop being weak! If you live amongst lions, you have to act like a lion!”
Jin’s heartbeat thudded in her neck and her blood boiled. She recognized the emotion–anger.
“This is stupid!” she roared in Aria’s face. “The shortest distance to a destination is a straight line. Not a hop, skip and a goddamn jump around the obvious. It’s a straight line! If you want me to tell you something, asking me a straight question might help, you freak! But I’m not about to die, again, because you want to complicate common damn sense!”
The silence stretched long before them as Aria studied her. Jin’s arms shook with the effort to keep the crazy woman back. Then, without rhyme or reason, the pressure lifted, dissipating like windblown dandelions and the air became light again. Aria eased out of her unrelenting press, shoving off Jin’s spear and bouncing back a step or two before sheathing her sword. Then she smiled and Jin noticed the differences between them. Aria’s smile was more of a smirk, always lifting higher on one end than the other. Her eyes didn’t twinkle–they did something funny, something that made you feel like she knew something you didn’t, that she and the universe had been privy to a joke that you were left out of.
“I hate fighting with swords,” Aria said with a simplicity that did not align with the sheer madness of the situation. “It’s something in the way you have to grip them that annoys me. I’m good with them, don’t get me wrong. Really good, but spears are more my thing. That spear, actually,” she said, pointing to the one in Jin’s hands.
Jin blinked, her chest tight with exertion. “W–what?”
“It was a lesson. You don’t have to take what is given to you. It’s okay to demand and to fight for your right to exist. Remember that.”
The spear fell to Jin’s side as if it weighed a hundred pounds. “You mean me asking you to make sense…is fighting?”
“Questions like that are. ‘Why are you doing this?’ ‘Why can’t it be this way?’ ‘Why is this happening?’ ‘How can I change fate?’ Demanding answers that are connected to your survival will always be considered fighting. I figured you wanted answers because you kept going on and on and on about it and oh,” she squatted low, peering at Jin’s chest. “We should do something about that.”
Jin looked down. “Thanks, I was only dying,” she snapped.
Aria tsked. “Oh, sweet cub. That’s subjective.”
“What is? Dying?”
“Everything,” she stated. “Hold still. Later on, you’ll have to figure this out for yourself. I’m not the best healer nor do I want to bandage you up every time you get a boo-boo.”
“I have no idea who you are or what you do or why you’re so hellbent on stalking me. All I know is that you keep showing up and every time you do,” Jin glanced down, “this happens.”
Aria rolled her eyes–light brown eyes. Jin had darker eyes; a deep brown that Aiden had once said reminded him of the beans on a carob tree. “Holding still means you not talking,” she grumbled. Aria moved closer, placing her hand on Jin’s chest. “Machen path, 2nd disciple,” she muttered. There was a slight glow from the ends of her hands and it reminded her of Key.
“You’re an angel,” Jin pointed out, her tone monotone. Not that it shouldn’t have been very obvious to her from the beginning but there had been a lot of things that short-circuited Jin’s thought process when it came to Aria. Like a sword flying at her face.
Aria’s hands stopped glowing and Jin realized the pain in her chest was gone. She looked down, peeling her blood-stained white shirt back. With stark fascination, she watched as the bloody cut grew smaller and her skin began knitting itself together.
“Wow,” she whispered.
“There would be a bit of disorientation with that, but I’m not a conglo so you should be lucid as a lark,” Aria said, winking and hauli
ng Jin to her feet.
“Conglo?”
Aria canted back and forth from her heels to the balls of her feet. The look on her face suggested she was thinking of…something. “Ah, what word did the kids use? A…halfly?”
The word registered, although the term left an unfamiliar and unsatisfying taste in the back of her mouth. “You mean you’re not a Mutare.”
“Well, would ya look at that? Sometimes I think you’re an idiot and by sometimes I mean most of the time, and then you go and prove me wrong, Jin Amaris! You are correct. I’m full-blooded.” Aria bent low, grabbed the spear and without explanation, chucked it into the air. It fell over the bridge in an arc of red, gold and black. “You won’t need that here. It’ll find you again.”
Jin stared at where the spear once was. “How am I supposed to fight without a weapon?”
“Yeah, because you were doing such a swell job when you had it,” Aria giggle-snorted and Jin was a tad bit disgusted. “Plus, we’ll have visitors soon and I don’t want you to get in the way thinking you can stop what’s going to happen. You can’t. We aren’t in a timeline that’s in play.”
Jin squinted at her. “A timeline in play?”
“Yep. There is no dependence on conditions here, no chess moves to make, no stars to realign. It’s fixed–this,” she waved around, “is a non-linear system of sorts.”
“Oh.” Jin’s frowned deepened. “Math.” If she never heard that word again it would be much too soon.
Aria shrugged. “Whatever you want to call it.” She walked to the side of the bridge and took a seat on the rail, swinging around until her feet were dangling off the side. “Caeli is a special place. A place that I love, a place that I would die for…have died for. It's flawed, like any society, but it’s worth everything we fight for.”
“So you lived here?” Jin asked, pointing towards the city.
“Here? Jannah, no! I hate Elysian. All of this metal and no.” Her mouth was pinched as she shook her head. “It’s just too cold to me, too impersonal. Aeon Terra is my home.”
Jin didn’t know what an Aeon Terra was. “Are you one of those Root Watcher people?”
“Nope,” Aria said, popping the p, which was sort of amusing for a homicidal maniac. “I was not one of the originals. I came later at the request of my cousin and made the decision to stay. There was something…attractive about the way they did things. You know, the whole obsession with humans. And it is an obsession, almost a fetish but not in a grotesque way. It’s just…clingy?” She scrunched her nose as if she would revisit that thought later. “Don’t get me wrong, I get it. Humans, by design, are decidedly stupid and very emotional and rash and watching you stumble all about is a lot more interesting than sitting around with those pompous, overly self-important, lazy asses up there,” she finished, nodding upwards toward the sky.
Jin’s brows dipped. “I’m sure there is a compliment somewhere in there.”
“It is. I think very highly of humans. Even half ones! I mated one, adopted one–”
Jin held her hand up. “Hold it. You’re still making it sound like we’re…Tamagotchis or Furbies or something.”
“What’s a Tama…Tamagoochi?”
Jin opened her mouth to explain and then decided it wasn’t worth it.
“The point is you guys aren’t so bad once you get to know a few of you. Dad hated the fact I worked down here. He always told me I should be a proper noble, but,” Aria snorted, “nothing about me is a proper noble. I hated when he did that. ‘Come home, Aria. Be the distinguished Eldest Miss of the Eliyah clan, Aria. Join Seraphim, Aria.’ I wish I could tell him to his face how stupid–”
Jin held up her hand again, interrupting. “So do angels have like a…separate heaven they go to or are you like stuck here and can’t get to heaven? Is this…purgatory?”
“Heaven? What are you talking about? I was–oh. Oh! You don’t understand how the realms work! You don’t understand where we aren’t.” Aria laughed. “I’m talking fondly of Caeli, but we aren’t in Caeli. We are in Discord.”
“This isn’t Caeli?” Jin looked around with narrowed eyes. “This…this looks exactly like Caeli. Just how many realms are there?” Jin sputtered.
“Countless but that’s not important. Let’s concentrate on Discord since you’ll be here for a while.”
“A while?” Jin’s eyes widen and she clutched at the collar of her shirt. “Am I in Hell?”
“No, silly girl.” Aria tsked. “That’s Gehanna. You’re in Discord. I just told you that.” Aria patted the concrete rail. “Cop a squat. We are short on time and there are some things you need to know before Glut,” Aria said, thumbing over her shoulder, “reaches us and carries you away.”
Jin turned around and looked at the bay, watching it flow far beyond the bridge and into what Jin guessed was an ocean named Glut. Or maybe it was a boat? Like a ferry to her next destination?
“It looks calm.”
“Everything always looks calm before you drop a pebble in a bucket of water.”
Jin took her time taking a seat along the rough rail, looking out over Glut while Aria’s focus remained inland. She grimaced as the bottom of her thighs and the backs of her knees scraped across the concrete. She wanted something soft, comfortable, safe. A bed. That would be nice.
“A bed you want, a bed you’ll get!”
“What?”
Aria’s eyes flicked to hers then away. “Nothing. As I was saying, Discord is one of three realms we have access to. It is sort of like…Florida.”
Jin tilted her head back to peer at her. “Florida.”
“Florida! Like a retirement home for spiritualist. It’s a foil realm to Antris. Discord is for super-powered spiritualist and Antris is–”
Jin held her hand up. “Oh! I know! It’s where those super-powered psycho trolls live under the bridge,” she deadpanned.
“Ah, you’ve met them!” Aria clapped her hands together as if the trip had been a pleasurable one. “Then you’ve met my mate! White hair, hard glare, doesn’t smile a lot? Tall, dark, and handsome?” she finished, smiling like a teenage girl who’d just opened her locker to a love note from her crush. “He’s there and I’m here. It sucks. Anywho, the difference here is displaced timelines are the power source of Discord, and Discord is the power source for all of the other realms. People in them serve as…snacks, while Discord is the main meal. You’re in a displaced timeline right now.”
“Displaced?”
“Anomalous. This did happen in the middle of a revolt except the city wasn’t nearly as old, the war horns were blaring, and there was mass panic. Caeli was destroyed. Caeli is a child of the Caustum itself. This timeline of peace is an anomaly.”
Jin frowned. “Aren’t those destroyed?”
Aria brought her knee up on the rail and placed her chin on it. “Nothing in this world is destroyed. Everything that is and will ever be, whether it was created in seven days, seven hundred days, seven thousand years, is always there. When a timeline is anomalous, it doesn’t cease to exist. It is simply moved away from where it doesn’t belong and stored here.”
“What or whose timeline are we in now?”
“You know of him, vaguely, but you’ve never met him," Aria answered, and a look crossed her face, disappearing when a breeze swept across the bridge. “However, that’s another irrelevant issue. Here are the things you need to remember.” She paused to hold up a finger and again Jin’s eyes darted to the tattoos running along the entire length of her right arm. “One, Ahn may seem like the enemy but he isn’t. I know you want to rip his face off when or if you see him but don’t. I, this Aria specifically, haven’t been outside of this timeline but I’ve had visitors and while I don’t have the knowledge to tell you who, I can tell you it isn’t who you think. Some think that they are your enemy and have targeted you but they are not the ones you need to watch out for.”
Jin blinked slowly in her confusion. “What?’
“I’ll let Onyu
expound on that. She and The Old Goat are the smartest and strongest things in this realm. Ha. Figure that, The Old Goat finally stronger than me,” Aria grumbled. “Alright!” she announced, her voice pitching high in sudden excitement as she spun and hopped down from the bridge barrier. “It’s been fun.”
“Wait!” Jin’s eyes widened. “Where are you going?”
One of Aria’s brows lifted. “I’m going over there.” Aria pointed to the end of the bridge. Amassed like some kind of society of secret scary people– because who the hell wears capes and cloaks in this weather but secret scary people–stood a group of figures shrouded in black.
Where in the hell did they come from?
“Shit, I’ve already started to bleed, too.” Jin noticed the color of Aria’s eyes had shifted, shining with an eerie purplish tint. “Spent too much cutting the breeze with you, love.”
Jin looked down to where Aria was pressing. When she pulled her hand back from her side, there was blood, and lots of it but the tips of her fingers shined as if it were iridescent.
“You’re…you’re bleeding. You have blood…inside of you,” Jin gasped, horrified. “And it’s…sparkly…”
She held her hand out. “Qeres poisoning. My son–he was…tricked by whoever it is down there to do this and now they’ve come to finish the job,” Aria huffed.
“What do you mean finish the job?” Jin asked, slow and careful.
“I die, remember?”
“No,” Jin bit out, her hands curling into fists. “You don’t get to die and leave me here, okay? Just…stay on this side of the bridge and everything will be fine.”
“I wish I could. So many things would be different if I could but everything is set. Inevitability cannot be stopped. A butterfly’s flutter cannot cause chaos here.” Aria wiped her hand on her pants leg before pulling her weapon out of its sheath. “Having my real spear would be helpful right about now,” she huffed. “I fought with my spear in this timeline originally, remember, you old goat?” she yelled at the sky. “But you won’t let me out of this damn timeline to get it! I hate this place!”
A Third of the Moon and the Stars Struck Page 2
