by Lund, S. E.
“It’s a little bit of manna from heaven.”
I crack my eyes open, for even in that moment, I can’t help but resist the implications of this being heavenly in any way. “It’s heroin.”
“Oh, ye of little faith,” Soren says and shakes his head. “No matter what I do, you’ll never believe, will you? What will it take, Eve, to make you a believer?”
“Why does it matter, if I do your bidding?”
“It matters,” he says and stands up, coming over to where I am slumped, my head lolling back, my eyes almost rolling back into my head. He bends down and looks at me, his face only a few inches from mine. “I want you to believe.”
“I do believe,” I say, enjoying the feeling in my body. “I believe this is some amazing shit.”
I crack my eyelids open and see his frown. “That’s my blood,” he says.
“It has some endorphins in it. Probably mimics morphine.”
“Such a little scientist,” he says and shakes his head. “Why can’t you believe I’m an angel?”
“Because angels are just mutated humans with powers we don’t understand or can’t measure. Maybe aliens,” I say and laugh at myself.
“Nothing is alien in this universe,” he says but I can’t understand what he’s saying and I don’t even want to try.
“So what did you want to talk to me about?” I ask, my eyes still closed.
He says nothing for a moment and so I open my eyes and lift my head with great difficulty. The bliss is starting to wear off, but I still feel energized and peaceful at the same time.
Soren sits across from me, watching me over his steepled hands, which are pressed against his lips. He looks contemplative, his eyes on me but distant, as if he’s somewhere else.
Then he enters my mind, but in the way we do when we share blood as a group, and I feel his mind, and it scares me. I feel like I’ve fallen into an endless chasm, with no bottom in sight. I’m free falling in his mind and all around me are images coming into and out of focus, like I’m taking a tour of his memories.
He’s somewhere in a desert and it’s hot and dry, the ground is rough and red. Overhead, the sun is relentless. I glance around the vista that appears to go on forever. I know what it is. It’s a desert in the Middle East, but it’s mountainous and barren. There’s no real life here except for that which lives underground. I’m walking on the hot dry earth, which cracks and breaks up under my sandaled feet, the crunch loud in my ears. Overhead, a hawk flies, crying out. In the distance, several vultures circle over a fire and I wonder if someone is burning a corpse.
Then the vision changes and I’m on a high cliff overlooking an azure sea. The sky is so blue. I think that I’ve never seen it so blue before. A few white clouds in the distance break up the vastness. The water below is calm, lapping softly against a sandy and rocky beach. Behind me is a circle of stones, megaliths, in a circular formation. In the center is a slab of stone over a base. I see blood on the stone. It’s a makeshift altar and someone’s sacrificed an animal – or human – there.
Where am I? I glance around, and it looks like the Mediterranean Sea. I’m somewhere near Greece or perhaps farther around the coast toward Italy.
The scene changes again and now I’m in the far north, for the sky is a white blue and the air is cold, the ground is covered in snow. I stand on a cliff and see down its banks is an inlet, a fjord, so I take it I’m in some northern land like Norway or Sweden or Denmark. This is where Marguerite came from. Below me is a dead antelope of some species. I don’t know it’s proper name but I see antlers. It’s fallen off the cliff, hitting the rocks below, the snow bloody beneath its head.
Why is he showing me this?
More scenes flash by and I’m in a hilly country that reminds me of images of Provence that I’ve seen in travelogues. A few dozen feet away is a small building made of stone. It’s a temple of some sort. Inside, another altar, with trays and baskets of food, chalices of wine, and a dead goat spread out on the stone, its blood dripping out into a bowl. In another bowl lie its entrails. Someone was reading portents in its entrails, so I suspect I’m back in the days of Rome and this is a temple to a Roman god. I glance around and there is a statue of a god with wings on his feet. Apollo.
Is he giving me clues to what and who he is?
Is that why I’m seeing all this?
The images are flying by almost too fast for me to catch them all, but they are from everywhere, different landscapes, different climates.
Now I’m in a cave, deep in the back, and there’s a torch throwing a yellow light against the wall, the soot lifting up and blackening the cave’s roof. There are paintings on the wall – a deft image of an antelope, then another of a bird. There are hands on the wall, painted by blowing ochre over the artist’s hand. This is old, and I get the sense we’re far back in time, perhaps to the Stone Age, during the most recent ice age.
Now, I’m in the middle of a vast plain, at night, the sounds of the night all around me, lying on my back and staring up at the stars. A few feet away is a campfire, but it’s burnt down to embers, and my eyes adjust so I can see the vast expanse of the Milky Way above me. It’s so huge and so distant that I have this deep sense of sadness despite how beautiful it is.
I feel so incredibly lonely in what seems like an endless night, and endless universe.
“Yes,” Soren says. “It is lonely. It’s terribly lonely. It was that way for me for thousands of years until I found others of my kind.”
“Your kind?” I say and sit up, the night sky still above. I thought maybe it was just an image in my mind, but now I find I’m really here, in some far distant plain surrounded by hills, which are dark against the night sky. Or at least, I feel as if I’m really here, now. The dirt grits in my hand. I smell smoke from the burnt embers in the fire pit.
“I can’t tell you what my kind are,” he says, wrapping his arms around his bent knees as he sits beside me. “When I woke up, I had no idea who or what I was. All I knew was that I was here, naked, staring up at the sky very much like this and that I was missing something. I was missing the others. Once we were joined together and were one. When I woke up, here, I was alone. Ever since that day, I’ve been searching for others of my kind to join together again. You allow us to be together the way we once were.”
“How long ago was that? It seems that a lot of time passed in the images you showed me.”
“Forty thousand years,” he says with a tired voice. Then he turns and meets my gaze, a smile on his lips. “If you wonder why I’m always surrounded by drama, that’s why. I need it to keep me from going insane.”
“Forty thousand years?” I say with a gasp. I turn away from his too-deep expression, which seems almost pained, and look back up at the night sky. I can see the Milky Way clearly, because there’s no light pollution – no light except for a low moon that is almost sinking behind the far horizon. “Are we in Africa?”
He shakes his head. “No. Norway.”
“But it should be winter…”
“We’re in the past.”
“How…”
He smiles again. “Don’t expect to understand how. Just accept that it is.
“Are we back forty thousand years?”
“No,” he says. “That would take too much energy. We’re back in the summer. If you look in the distance, can you see a long black strip?”
I look in the direction he’s pointing. “Yes,” I say. “I see it.”
“That’s a road. This is one of the most remote places I could find. I come here now and then to escape everything and remember all the years I’ve been alive.”
“How did you get here?” I ask, still in awe. “How come you’re alive forty thousand years later? You’re immortal, obviously but…”
“I’m immortal. The Twelve are immortal.”
“From where? Who put you here?”
“I have no real idea. God? That’s one explanation. Were we in some kind of Heaven before this? I
don’t know for sure. The Twelve and I are all that’s left of about two hundred of our kind who came here, forty thousand years ago. I have no solid memories of who we were before. All I know is that we were united. Our minds were one – the way we are when we join through blood. Then, we were sent here, separated, each of us put in a different land, with different people.”
“But why? Who sent you?”
He shrugs. “We have no idea. We think we were sent here to be your guardians. We became your gods. That can be the only reason. We were put here with no memories, but with powers that few humans possess and that has meant we’ve been your rulers, worshiped as gods ever since.”
I shake my head in wonder. “You’re obviously an alien.”
“You believe that?” he says and turns to me, an expression of surprise on his face. “You’ll happily believe I’m an alien with no evidence but you won’t accept that I’m some kind of angel?”
“Angels are a way for humans to explain what you are. An alien is a more logical explanation for what you are. You’re probably an alien race that sent emissaries to Earth to try to guide us, or uplift us or something,” I say and exhale, satisfied that it accounts for what Soren and the Twelve are far better than the whole religious angle.
He doesn’t say anything. “Who sent us, though?”
I laugh out loud at that. “Not God,” I say with derision. “The God that everyone believes in – the God of the Bible as in the All-Knowing and All-Powerful? That god just doesn’t exist. It’s a fairy tale told to placate humans because we fear death. No,” I say, satisfied. “You’re probably aliens who thought we needed guidance and so you were sent here to prevent us from killing each other off by instilling in us morals so we wouldn’t eat our brothers. That I could believe.”
Soren grins and shakes his head. “Such a little skeptic.”
“So which one were you?” I ask, stretching my legs out and leaning back on my hands. “What god did you impersonate?”
“Impersonate?” he says with disgust. “I was a god, Eve. I had worshipers. They gave me powers that allowed me to perform feats of wonder and keep them in line.”
“Which one?”
He shakes his head. “Too many to list. I had all of what is now Western Europe. So, I was Cernunos, and I was Belinos and I was Teutates. I was all of their gods at one time or other. Whichever god was necessary at the time.”
I nod and consider what he’s said. “We’re not really here.”
“You mean, in the past summer in Norway?”
“Yes,” I say. “You and I have joined minds and you’re showing me a memory and you’re able to manipulate my mind so that I see and feel and sense what you want me to sense.”
“My little scientist.”
“I can’t help it. That’s the way my mind works.” We sit in silence for a while and I enjoy the quiet, the sounds of a light breeze through the grasses surrounding the camp, the chirp of insects. It’s so real, I could believe we were really there.
“Why are you showing me this?”
He sighs heavily. “Because I know you want to destroy me. You fear me. You fear what I might become if I get too much power. I want you to understand what I am. What we are. You need us, Eve,” he says and turns to me, frowning. “You still need us. Look around you, at the state of this world. Look at what it was like before the plague. Wars. Massacres on a regular basis. Terrorism. Greed. Poverty. Murder, rape, pillage. It has always been like this, since you stepped out of the savannah and became self-aware. Once you did, you fought each other over territory. Killed each other from neighboring tribes. Ate the heart of your enemy for strength. Raped women, murdered children. Exposed newborns to the wolves.”
“We need something,” I say, unwilling to concede his point. “We don’t need gods. We do need morals. We do need meaning. We do need to have a different view of ourselves and our planet.”
“You needed gods, Eve.”
I sigh. Is he right? Do we need gods to keep us from self-destructing? I fight against the notion. I think we can be moral without gods.
“Science isn’t enough,” he says. “It’s a start, but it’s not nearly enough.”
“Religion hasn’t been very good either.”
Soren stands and wipes off his jeans. “Without religion to instill morals, you would have eaten each other. The weak would have served as food for the strong.”
“What about vampires? Where are they from?”
He shakes his head. “A mistake. An experiment gone wrong.” He extends a hand to help me up, but I stand without taking it.
“But vampirism lets you join with others and so you let it stand.”
“Something like that, but it’s a poor substitute for what we once had. Until you came along. You’ve given that back to us. You allow us to join all together instead of one at a time. You’re the conduit, Eve. I’ve been waiting for decades and decades to create you. Despite all my powers, I had to wait for science to be able to create you. I finally have. You’re not going to escape. Michel and your mother hid you for a decade, but now I have you. I won’t let you go.”
“What about what I want?” I say. “Maybe I don’t want to be your conduit.”
“It’s that or die. Now that I can, I’ll make another you.”
I turn towards him, disgusted. “I thought you were here to instill morals in us barbaric humans.”
“We are, but we also have needs. We need to be united. You’re the way. Now, no more fighting me. I want you to understand who and what we are and why we’re here so you’ll stop fighting me. So you’ll give up this ridiculous quest to destroy me and the Twelve. You can’t. The most you could do was keep us in stasis for a while, but even then, we found a way. We’ve been around for far longer than you can imagine, Eve. We’re not going anywhere and your technology can’t destroy us.”
“What about the other one hundred and eighty-seven of your kind? Where are they?”
“Gone. In stasis somewhere. Hidden. Hiding. Don’t ask me where. I have no idea. We thirteen are all that’s left acting in this world. The others are gone and no matter how far I look, I can’t find them.”
“Are they dead?”
He shakes his head. “We can’t die, Eve. Hide us away in some cave or under the ocean or on the Moon. That’s it. We’ll come back – if we want to. Maybe the rest of my brethren simply got tired of it all and have gone to sleep permanently.” He turns to me and he looks so sad. Almost defeated. “No matter what you do, you can’t kill us. All you can do is steal our powers temporarily.”
Maybe that has to be enough, I think. Of course Soren can hear my thoughts. Then, I blink and find myself back in Soren’s room, slumped back in the sofa, Soren sitting beside me, his chin resting on his hand, his face a few inches from mine.
I sit up, and he remains close to me.
“Now, do you understand?”
I shrug. “If you think this changes things,” I say, but don’t finish. I was going to say, it doesn’t. I still want you stopped, I think, but I don’t say it.
“You can try to destroy me. Destroy us, Eve. We’re far ahead of you. We have forty thousand years on you and Michel and your mother. Think of that before you do anything rash. And don’t tell Michel or anyone what I’ve shown you.”
“Why not?”
He shakes his head. “I want there to be some mystery about us. Humans need the mysterious. If everything is laid out for them, they get discouraged. They need to believe, Eve, even if you don’t. Don’t take that away from them. If you did destroy us, in some way, you’d be alone. That would frighten most of your kind immensely.”
“Michel will ask. Julien will know unless I block him when we…”
“He won’t hear anything you tell him, so you’ll be talking to yourself. Remember that I know everything, Eve. Everything you do and think and say.”
I sigh, frustrated that he has access to me at all times.
“Can I go?” I ask, wanting to leave. I feel i
ncredibly burnt out from the mental journey Soren has taken me on and upset that I can’t talk to anyone about it.
“Feel free,” he says. “But let me warn you. Don’t think you can stop us. This is pre-ordained. We were sent here for a reason and that reason is to be your guardians. To keep you from destroying yourselves. We take that seriously.”
“And yet, you almost destroyed us.”
“Not me,” he says. “Blackstone. I never wanted this. I planned to stop it.”
“You created vampires. You created him, in the end. You’re responsible.”
I leave without saying another word. I don’t like what he’s told me. I’m not sure I believe it. It’s impossible to know if what he showed me was a story or the truth.
“Oh, ye of little faith,” he calls out from the sofa before I can leave. “It must be incredibly lonely to not believe in anything.”
“I believe in the truth. In evidence.”
Then I leave him and close the door behind me.
Chapter 128
I walk back down the hallway and up the stairs to my wing and my room. The guard trails behind me, making sure I arrive back without detour and I go inside. Michel’s seated by the fire, reading. He glances up when I enter the door.
“What happened? You look tired.”
I sit on the chair beside him, exhausted. “That was harrowing.”
“Have some tea,” Michel says. “It’s fresh.”
I nod and let him fix me a cup, glad for something to drink.
“What happened?” he says and hands me the cup.
I take it gladly. “Soren supposedly showed me what he is and what the Twelve are.”
Michel puts his own cup down and frowns. “What did he say? How did he show you?”
I shake my head. “I’m not supposed to kiss and tell,” I say.
He smiles ruefully. “I figured as much. Would I like what he told you?”
I purse my lips and consider. “Maybe. I don’t know what to think of what he told me. It’s like that old saying – turtles all the way down.”
He sits back, eyeing me. “He didn’t tell you everything, in other words.”
