Solace Arisen

by Anna Steffl

  The door with the gold knob flew open and Degarius, with sword poised, charged into a chamber walled with mirrors. An elderly cleric holding a metal candlestick stood beside a bed draped with diaphanous gold curtains. For all love, first a boy and now an old man. But it wasn’t the time for scruples. A single thrust of Assaea dispatched the cleric.

  A gasp came from inside the shrouded bed. Degarius threw the curtain aside. A Lily Girl, her blonde, waist-length hair beaded with sapphires, was sitting up in the bed and hiding her face behind her crossed arms. Between sobs she said, “You’re not supposed to see me. Kill me. Please.”

  Degarius shook his head and thought of his grandmother. She must have wept in this room.

  The Lily Girl lowered her arms. Tears ran pink rivers into her white-powdered face. She gave a pleading look to Ari. “Lady, please help me. I’m a chosen one. I don’t want to carry a monster inside of me.”

  The floor rumbled.

  Degarius’s blood went cold. It was as the Solacian superior said. Draeden were born of girls—Lily Girls. The elderly cleric was making sure the girl would perform her wretched duty. Any scruple Degarius had in killing him was relieved. Alenius was going to be next. There was no justice too brutal to compensate for what Alenius had done to his grandmother, her family, to what he would do to this girl.

  In clumsy but intelligible Gherian Ari told the Lily, “I won’t let that happen.”

  “Do you know how to get to the atrium?” Degarius asked the Lily.

  “Go right outside this door. Straight all the way down the hall. Then right...no.” A panicked shadow crossed her face. Her lips trembled. She was going to cry again.

  Ari removed her coat and gave it to the girl. “Put it on.” The Lily looked confused, but did as she was told. Ari then took off her hat. She pressed the hat into the girl’s hands and motioned her to tuck her braided hair under it.

  The girl put on the hat and Ari began shoving braids up into the deep crown. “Tell her she has to show us how to get to the atrium, and then she must leave the palace right away, find our coachman waiting before the Worship Hall, and tell him Lord Degarius said to take care of her.”

  He hesitated. Not because he, or his coachman, wouldn’t take care of the girl, but because Ari had given up her coat and hat. Either it was a noble act of mercy or she didn’t expect to need them.

  “Nan, tell her.”

  It was an act of kindness, he decided as he spoke Ari’s words to the girl. He couldn’t step into the hall thinking otherwise.

  The Lily rubbed her eyes, smudging pink circles into the death-pale powder.

  “Give me your handkerchief, Nan.”

  Ari dabbed his handkerchief to her tongue and wiped the remaining powder from the girl’s face.

  Degarius listened at the door. It was quiet. “Let’s go.” To the Lily he said, “Take me to the atrium, and then remember what I said.”

  The Lily Girl led them through a maze of hallways to a double set of heavy doors guarded by two sentries who, with suspicion, watched them approach.

  “Halt!”

  “Look at us!” Degarius shouted and shook a fist while he eased his other hand inside his coat for his sword. “It’s chaos out there. Look what happened to me—a cabinetman. Look what happened to my wife. To my daughter. Why aren’t you doing something?”

  While the sentries looked at Ari’s filthy ripped dress, the tearful girl in the fur coat, and each other in confusion, Degarius, in one swift move, drew his sword and slashed it across their necks. For a stunned moment, they remained standing, their eyes wide circles of terror. Degarius shoved them out of the way and they collapsed against the wall. The Lily Girl’s hands flew to cover her eyes. Without his bidding, Ari grabbed the Lily’s elbow. Thank the Maker, Ari kept her wits about her.

  Degarius cracked the door. It was nearly sunset so the vestibule outside was crowded to the edges with cabinetmen and their wives who were waiting to enter the atrium for dinner and to hear the declaration of war. They were murmuring anxiously to one another as a regiment of soldiers came thundering through. The soldiers were probably leaving the atrium to help subdue the draeden, but the cabinetmen didn’t seem to know what was happening.

  The three of them couldn’t just walk out into the vestibule. Covered with dirt, they looked like they’d been through hell. Ari had the Blue Eye. She could take them all. Degarius didn’t want that, though, not if he could help it. “Ari,” he whispered, “I’m going to try to create a diversion to get rid of the cabinetmen.”

  She nodded.

  He opened the door, stepped into the vestibule, and shouted, “Countrymen, follow the guards. The Worship Hall is on fire. It was Sarapostans. We need all hands.”

  The cabinetmen poured toward the exit, but some of their wives lingered.

  “You, too,” Degarius shouted at the women. “Because of your fine dresses will you stand here while the hall burns?”

  Shamed, they followed their husbands.

  “Go,” Ari said and nudged the Lily Girl to join the women.

  The thought flashed to Degarius that if someone had been so kind to his grandmother, none of this would have happened. He held his hand to Ari. She took it. Together they waited for the vestibule to clear. How thin and soft her hand was. It was the farthest thing on earth from a warrior’s hand. She wasn’t going to fight The Scyon with her hands, though. It would be soul-to-soul combat. Her spirit was deep and good, enduring of trials, and steadfast. After everything that had happened, she still loved the Maker, still loved him. Some might call that foolishness. But he understood it. In any battle, against any odds, he’d keep swinging his sword. She held onto her love as tightly as he held his cause. Perhaps there was no one better to have the Blue Eye. Perhaps The Scyon feared no one more than a Maker’s woman.

  A line of guards remained before the atrium door.

  “I can’t take them all,” Degarius whispered. “They’re soldiers. They accepted their fate. Understand?”

  “What do you want?” an atrium guard asked.

  Ari squeezed his hand, then let go.

  JOLE, YEAR 0

  Arvana pressed the latch, the Blue Eye sprang open, and she gazed into it. Her spirit compressed to cross through the relic into Hell, but it was a discomfort instead of agony. Hell’s bitter smell was so familiar she didn’t flinch at it. She looked up. Nan’s spirit burned bright, and Assaea gleamed even brighter. Lina’s soul drifted from the sword’s protective glow.

  “I remember this dress.” Lina’s ghostly hands passed through the rent and soiled fabric of Arvana’s dress. “But you’ve ruined it.”

  “We don’t have time.” Arvana checked the locket. The Scyon was glaring at her through the eye slits in his black head covering. In the background was a sapphire-encrusted throne.

  Lina, who was looking into the locket from over Arvana’s shoulder, said, “That throne is in the atrium. I remember it. Are you close?”

  On the other side of the door. They just had to get through it. Holding the open Blue Eye in her palm, Arvana willed the soldiers’ souls to her. Their life threads spun through the Blue Eye. The guards collapsed. The Blue Eye grew warm in her hand with the number of spirits crowding through it. Having passed through, they reappeared before her as shades, the light of their lives ebbing from them.

  The body of a guard writhed before her. As she stepped around him, a sick feeling crept up her throat. Even if she returned his soul to life, he’d be damaged, never himself again.

  Nan wedged his shoulder to the atrium door and pushed. It opened freely.

  She held the locket ready as she entered a vast room lit by a hundred candles, hung with blue Gherian flags, and set with dozens of tables laid with gold plate for the cabinetmen. The aroma of roasted meat filled the air. Four stories up, an astounding metal-and-glass roof, grayed by snow and dusk, capped the space. Together, Nan and she walked through the tables to the far end of the room toward a gold-and-blue curtained pavilion with a polishe
d metal roof.

  The curtain parted and a man, wearing white gloves and the finest blue robes trimmed in white fur and beaded with sapphires, stepped out. An immense aura of otherworldly glittering, silvery light surrounded him. His life aura was different than any Arvana had ever seen. A silky, dark blue hood covered his face. Arvana had seen the hood in the Blue Eye. “Nan, he’s—” She began to say he was The Scyon, but the hooded man began to speak in an oddly beautiful, warm and soothing voice.

  “So, you’re alive...the Sarapostan who took my little one from the lake and the Maker’s woman who bears the Blue Eye. It is fitting that you shall both be the first to behold the Lord of the Hants, the Divine Sovereign.” He walked to edge of the dais. No, he didn’t walk. He was so graceful he seemed to glide.

  The Scyon hooked his thumbs beneath the bottom of the hood. Fear pricked Arvana. What kind of monster would he be?

  The fabric rose from the face of a young Gherian with fine, clear skin and thick blond hair that fell in waves around his high cheeks. There was a feminine beauty about him. His eyes, the same blue as Nan’s, set their sight on her. They were mesmerizing.

  “It is a beautiful form, isn’t it?” The young Gherian caressed his own cheek. “Even the Maker has not created such perfection, for time has no toll upon the living flesh we have wrought. We are a god. We will never grow old or infirm. We will never die. Our offspring will bring peace to the ends of the world. There will be no hunger or need. Is not peace what you want? But peace never comes without sacrifice. Isn’t that right, Maker’s woman? Oh, there will be days of war, but this time it will be different. Give me the Blue Eye. Give me Paulus’s sword. Lukis and Paulus did not bring peace, only more war as men scrabbled for power and wealth. They were not saviors.”

  Arvana shook her head. “You aren’t a god or a savior. In the Maker is the possibility of all things. We are free to love the Maker, or be indifferent. You will send the draeden after all who won’t worship you. You only offer peace for the glory it brings you. You aren’t a savior.”

  What in the hell was going on? Who was this imposter who’d worn the hood? Alenius was a bald old man, at least seventy-five, and this boy was no supernatural monster. “Tell me where Alenius is, where The Scyon is, or I’ll kill you,” Degarius said.

  “We are Alenius and Breena. We are the divine sovereign, the saviors. There is no Scyon.”

  “Like hell you’re Alenius.” Degarius hurtled to the dais and poised his sword to slice the young man’s neck. “Tell me.”

  “I knew you would not give me the Blue Eye or sword, but I knew you were stupid enough to listen.” He raised one arm and pointed a finger upward.

  Degarius felt Ari grab his coat and pull it. Breaking glass shattered the silence. The roof was collapsing.

  “Get under a table,” she screamed.

  He turned. She was scrambling under a table. He dove after her. Giant panes of the atrium’s glass roof and pieces of metal crashed around them. He turned on his side, threw his arm over her and drew her close so his chest shielded her head.

  A heavy, dull thud shuddered the table. The blanket of snow from the roof had fallen on it. The sound of a flag lashing in the wind, except louder, whooshed through the room. The snow that had fallen from the roof whipped in a blizzard-like frenzy. Degarius’s face stung from the pelting ice crystals.

  When the snow settled, he peered from under the table. Flakes drifted down from the open roof. Across the room, two massive, black feet with claws that burned a deep orange color like a smoldering coal, stood amid the roof’s wreckage.

  The draeden.

  The bottoms of its wings, darkly translucent like a fish fin, folded up.

  Arvana uncurled from Nan. Her vision flickered between this world and the next. Lina hovered near Nan. The table oddly bisected her spirit. Arvana shook the image from her head and got to her hands and knees, like Nan, under the table. The draeden’s neck bent toward them and routed its snout under the table edge. Arvana’s pulse tripped. The creature’s hide around its nose glowed red. The air waved with heat. It could incinerate them. She had to draw it into Hell. Where was its soul? No aura surrounded it. Arvana glanced at her palm to the open Blue Eye. Assaea gleamed with otherworldly light and the golden aura of life surrounded Nan; the relic was working. Dear Maker, how could the Blue Eye be useless against the draeden?

  Assaea flashed. Nan jabbed at the draeden’s snout. The blade sliced the flaring edge of the creature’s nostril. The draeden reared and heaved the table across the room.

  A gold tendril snaked from the wounded snout.

  “Nan, do you see that?”

  He squinted hard. “What?”

  It was the draeden’s soul; its body simply encased it. Deep within her chest, Arvana set her will, hard and fierce, against the draeden. The tendril of spirit wove toward the Blue Eye, but it grew thinner as the wound on the draeden’s snout closed, the flesh knitting before their eyes. When the wound fully closed, the bit of spirit that had reached the Blue Eye turned to a wisp of smoke and floated back to the draeden, who was breathing it in. Nan would have to deal the draeden a terrible wound in order for it to lose enough spirit to die before the injury healed. Perhaps she could hasten the leaking of the spirit. Draw it out. Lina could help. “Lina, we have to engage that spirit.”

  Lina shook her head. “I can’t leave the blessed light. I will fade.”

  “Being always alone isn’t a blessing. It’s a curse.”

  “I know,” Nan said grimly.

  Arvana hadn’t realized she’d spoken aloud.

  Nan held his sword ready, his narrowed eyes fixed on the draeden. It coiled its neck to the side and looked at them askance, as if planning its next strike. In the open, they were easy targets.

  A tangled heap of metal lay to the right. “Nan,” she whispered and gestured to the wreckage. He nodded. In a crouched run, she headed for the debris. It wasn’t much cover, but would keep the creature from getting right to them. Her boots crunched through the snow. Shards of glass were everywhere. Would Nan see them? “Stay behind me.”

  From the corner of her eye, she saw the draeden move.

  They reached the pile of twisted metal, and the draeden was on the other side, arching its neck up and over the wreckage. It opened its mouth, filled with rows of spiky, yellow teeth.

  Nan stood tall with poised sword. The draeden turned its head and swooped it down to take him in its jaws. Nan skirted to the side and swung his sword at the exposed underside of the jaw. His blade slashed through the soft tissues.

  Spirit and blood streamed from the wound. Arvana grabbed the ethereal tendril with her free hand. It wrapped around her forearm, coiled her elbow, and slithered to her shoulder. She backed violently away.

  The tendril wrapped Arvana’s neck. She knew she should pull the tendril away, but the Blue Eye was in her free hand and she couldn’t drop it A spirit couldn’t kill her. It couldn’t hurt her body. Physically, there was no pain or choking, but why did she feel so languid, as if in bed, just awakened and unwilling to be aroused?

  “Let go of Willow!” Chane’s spirit, a tangle of dull, gray desiccated life-threads, flew at the draeden with all the uncompromising authority he’d had in life, and began to wrench the coils. “Get away,” he shouted at Arvana as he loosened the coil around her neck.

  Arvana dropped. The moment she was free from the coils, her spirit seemed to expand with great force and vigor as if it had been smothered and was now taking a deep, reviving breath. She edged backward from the metal tangle through the snow. The draeden’s head hovered for a moment, caught in indecision of whether to attack Nan, her, or recoil its soul from Chane. In its moment of consideration, Nan hacked its long neck.

  The draeden’s open mouth barreled toward Nan.

  He leaped away, pivoted, and brought his sword down into its skull.

  Spirit gushed out.

  “I vowed to defeat you,” Chane shouted and flung himself into the new tendrils of the
draeden’s soul as they passed through the Blue Eye. They twisted around him like thread on a spool. The creature moaned and Chane’s agonized screams, so like her father’s in his last days, made Arvana want to do anything quiet them. Oh, the horrible things she had considered doing to her father.

  Nan brought his sword down again and again, hacking the draeden’s flesh.

  The Blue Eye flashed and in Hell, Arvana saw Chane cocooned by the draeden’s writhing coils. Chane’s screams grew muffled, then stopped. It seemed impossible that his spirit, so strong in both anger and righteousness, had been finally subdued.

  Then, bright bits of light, like sparks from a flint, flew from the cocooning shroud of the draeden’s spirit. These bits of light joined into a brilliant sphere. Though it bore no resemblance to Chane, Arvana knew it was he, as one’s body knows it is daylight before the eyes open from sleep. His valor and suffering had transformed him. The sphere of light grew small, kept concentrating until with a final flash it disappeared. There was something, someplace beyond Hell.

  The draeden’s body lurched forward and collapsed onto the pile of metal and glass that groaned and crackled with the impact.

  As when Nan had killed the poison draeden, a foul wind whipped from the creature’s spirit fully entering Hell. The tendril that had held Chane turned a dead gray color and rejoined with the rest of the draeden’s spirit in a spinning vortex that snatched up millions of spirits with its power. Out of the vortex’s center came a spirit image of the draeden. In life, the creature’s carcass was a steaming heap of flesh.

  Nan, his hand to his hip and his face red with exhaustion, stood catching his breath.

  “No!” a shrill voice cut through the air. It was Alenius. He stood before the pavilion. Its roof had collapsed and its curtains were sheered away, revealing the throne, a massive table turned on its side, and a box with a glass top that had been shattered. Alenius’s gloved hands picked away pieces of glass from the box. He reached inside and was stroking or petting whatever was in it. “Breena, don’t do this. The people will finally love me,” he mumbled as if to himself. “My power will bring peace. We will be the saviors. Breena, I gave you life within me. We are soul mates, finally husband and wife. Don’t you love me? You know I tried to bring you back with the Beckoner, but your body was too ruined. Isn’t it better this way? Otherwise, I would have died of age. We will be together always.” He jerked his hand from the box and gripped the front of his robe and his voice went higher pitched, as if it were a woman speaking, “You’ve always been a fool, Alenius. The power is mine and so is your life.”