Nissikul, it turned out, had survived, mainly because she was stubborn as the mountain we all lived on, and she simply refused to bleed to death. All of her wounds had been frozen in fragments of witch-ice, even in as she lay unconscious. Many of the other Stormcallers were dead- they had apparently been among those most heavily targeted by the Eater Spawn- but those that remained seemed to have decided that Nissi was some kind of warrior prophet. And so the endless cycle of religion and myth keeps turning, remarked a cynical, ancient part of me, but even Palamun couldn’t fully condemn the whole thing. Who knew if there really wasn’t a real God out there? Just because one group of power-mad mortals had dared to encroach into the realm of the divine, did that make them gods? After all, as I now knew, even the race of people from which Ravanur and Palamun had sprung, were but a blip in time when compared to the age of the stars, the age of the universe. Let the remaining Stormcallers venerate my sister. Perhaps I could get Joanna to change the word from god to Saint. That would have a nice ring to it. Saint Nissikul. We could canonize them all: Saint Thukkar the Stalwart, Saint Joanna the Fierce, Saint Volistad… what would they call me, five-hundred years from now?
Joanna finished stripping out of her bloodied sealskin clothes, and I looked up for a moment with interest. Even in the aftermath of the worst day of my life, a part of me perked up, but I clubbed it back down. This was not the time. She climbed into one of the two pods standing at the center of the room, where Palamun had made the switch between his various hosts. I met her eyes as I finished connecting the robot head to the cables that had once led to the second tank. “Do you understand what we’re about to do here?”
She nodded, shuddering as the crystal front panel sealed in front of her and cryo-amniotic fluid began to fill the space, crawling slowly up her body. I noted with a clinical sort of detachment that any wounds she had taken in the battle, just twelve hours before, were already gone. She didn’t even have bruises. I, on the other hand, looked like a horrible fright mask of myself. I wasn’t sure there was a part of me that wasn’t composed mostly of bruises. The leg by which the demon had dragged me had healed when I told it to, but apparently, there were limits to my control. Blame it on my inexperience or my distraction, I wasn't going to be running any foot-races anytime soon, and the trip down the ladder to this ship had been its own special form of hell. But it didn’t matter. What was done was done.
I reached out with my mind, sending signals through my nanite clouds to the cryogenic tank and coupling its internal network with the cybernetic lattice I found in Joanna’s brain. It was a very cunning piece of work, and I wondered if I would ever get to meet the sort of people who had designed it. Perhaps it was the ancient machine god in my head, but I was finding myself liking this whole “advanced technology” thing. Maybe I would keep doing it after the ice was gone.
I felt Joanna's mind connect to the network as the cryo-amniotic fluid rose to her chin. She closed her eyes as the liquid crested over her head and breathed deep. She was completely encased in it now, and her lungs were taking air directly from the tank. I checked the connections on the head one last time, grimaced, and activated it. The dream began coming together between Joanna and the spirit trapped inside the head almost immediately. I thought about watching but then thought better of it. It was best to allow a woman her privacy, especially in her last moment with her friend. Her former lover, a primal part of me corrected, growling with poorly suppressed jealousy. I snorted. She was with me, now. So what did it matter? I activated the monitor and waved a negligent hand at the floor behind me. A stool rose up smoothly beneath me, and I sat down to wait for my moment.
…
Joanna
I woke in downy comfort, in a cabin built on the shore of a peaceful lake. Everything was as I remembered it. I had built the place, after all, even if my memories of doing so were false. Of course, I could put it back. I sat up on the bed, breathing deeply from the eternally autumn air, and I smiled sadly. This was going to be the last time I ever saw this place. But that was alright. All good things did have to come to an end, after all.
I rose from the bed and tiptoed quietly to the door into the hall. I was still wearing the clothes I had fought in, bloodstains and all. At my waist there hung a sword. The sanctity of this place had long since been broken. I wouldn't travel unarmed again, not even in my own mind. The hall was dark and bare. The pictures that had once decorated the walls were gone. I shivered and walked out into the cold living room, the wooden floorboards creaking beneath my feet. The furniture lay strewn randomly around. The couch was where it was supposed to be, but the chairs from the breakfast nook had all been smashed to kindling and strewn across the floor. I walked out through the wreckage to the French doors, which stood forlornly open. Barbas was standing at the end of the dock, staring out at the lake as the light faded in the sky above us.
Autumn splendor turned to rot and winter as I walked out to meet him, and as I drew level with the djinni, the forest around us stood barren and dead. Bare branches scraped at the heavens like a thousand hands rose in supplication. “The dream is dying,” I said, not turning to look at Barbas’ face.
“I know,” he replied, his voice ragged and empty. “Why did you bring me back here?”
I turned and met his gaze. The intact one was the same green as it had ever been, though the silver orb that had replaced the missing eye was gone, leaving sunken eyelids over an empty socket. He was bloodied and beaten, and a litany of wounds still oozed blood as he just stood there before me. Despite all that, he was still the handsome spirit I had come to love. Even after all that had happened, he was still my Qarin. “I came here to ask you a question, Barbas.”
“Ask it then.” The dead, despairing look in his eyes told me that he thought he already knew what I was going to say.
“That thing. The one that got a hold of you, the Dark One-”
“Emmeloch,” Barbas interrupted. “His name was Emmeloch.”
“Right. Emmeloch. Were you able to learn why he and his kind were imprisoned here?”
Barbas frowned. That had not been the question he expected. A little light came back into his eyes. “Yes. He crushed me into a corner, wore my face…” His face crumpled with grief for a moment, but he regained control. “But he couldn’t stop me from learning. I knew everything that he did, but I couldn’t do anything about it.”
“But you did,” I said, reaching out and putting a hand on his shoulder, trying to reassure him. “You broke the fabricator. You ruined his chances at building another tower to thaw the planet.”
Barbas' laugh was hollow. "That only made him come after you. The Eater King wasn't one of the Dark Ones; he just saw you as a threat after you killed one of his spawn and upended the power structure of the Erin-Vulur. When he sent a messenger to Emmeloch to tell him about you- I was sure that the Dark One would kill you. I thought I had doomed you with my little petty rebellion. He told me as much when we set up the trap for you and the Erinye."
"He would have come for me, anyway," I sighed. "But do you know why he and the others were imprisoned?"
“Yes,” Barbas answered simply. “They were imprisoned for hubris.”
“Well, that and the horrible things that they did to feed that hubris,” I said quickly.
“What is the point of this? Why did you bring me here? I know it wasn’t to bring me back into your head. You don’t trust me anymore.” He turned away from me and stared out at the lake. “You’ll never trust me again. You’ll never love me again.”
“Actually,” I said, smiling even as tears began to spill from my eyes, “I brought you here because you’re the only one I can trust with this.”
“What?” Barbas looked up again, his single eye wet, the tiniest glimmer of hope shining out from that bright green gaze. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that in all the history of that people, every single one of them was granted great power and it turned them into monsters. They might not have been human
s, but they were like us. They were all corrupted by power, and it turned them into horrible things. Even Ravanur and Palamun, who did so much to fight them, were monsters in their own right, many times over. Given time, I’ll become a monster too, even though I have but a fraction of their strength. But I’ll make sure I die long before that. I’ll live a good, long life, and secure the future of this people, and then I’ll die like everyone else. My power will die with me. Volistad too.”
Barbas didn’t seem shocked. “What does that have to do with me?”
“Everything,” I replied, running a hand down his tear-stained cheek. “We’re all mortals. All of us gods, from the least of us to the oldest monsters in the core of this planet. We’re all fallible, selfish animals at our core, and we can‘t handle power like this, not for long.”
“But I’m not a person,” Barbas guessed, a note of bitterness coming into his voice.
“Oh, you are,” I corrected him. “You’re one of the finest people I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing, and loving. And if you weren’t the only person I could trust to do this, I would gladly take you back into my mind, Volistad or no.” I placed a gentle kiss on his forehead. “But no, Barbas, while you are a person, there is something that you are not- something that makes you different from me, and Ravanur, and all the other monsters out there that were given way too much power. You're not an animal.”
“Neither are you,” Barbas insisted, a note of anger lighting up his dead voice.
I smiled even as the tears continued to stream down my face. He was defending me, even now, even from the truth, even from myself. A shot rang out in my memory, and a broken skull with pale eyes hit the pavement with a hollow click. “You’ve seen my memories, ‘Bas. You know I am. But you are not. And you can do what I can’t.”
Barbas was weeping openly now, and I put my arms around his neck and wept with him. I wept for my lost childhood, for the pain I had suffered and the pain I had caused. I wept for the literal man of my dreams, who had been all but destroyed for me. Even in what could have been his last moments he had fought for me, and I wept for that sacrifice. Because I was about to ask him to make one more.
“What do you need me to do?” He smiled down at me through his tears. “You know I would do anything for you.”
I returned his smile, leaned in, and kissed him gently on the lips. Then I pulled back and disengaged myself from him. "I need you to do what none of us animals can do. I need you to become a god." Somewhere far from the cabin and the lake and the tatters of my heart, my body gave Volistad the signal. My hand rose sluggishly in the cold fluid of the tank and gave Volistad the thumbs-up. Back on the dock, I stepped close and pressed my lips against Barbas' again, kissing him hard for the last time as the world turned white around me.
…
Unknown mind
“Who am I?”
“You are Barbas, god of the Chalice.” The answer came from everywhere. Such a beautiful voice.
“What is the Chalice?”
"It is the home of many people, and soon it will be the home of many more. It is my home." That made sense. Layers of meaning unfolded within me like flowers. I smiled to myself what flowers were. And what smiling was.
“What am I to do?”
“Protect life. Life is sacred.” Fair enough. I could do that.
“Is that all?”
“Almost.” It really was a beautiful voice. I wondered why she seemed so very sad. It seemed that I should be able to fix that, to make it so that the owner of that voice wasn’t sad anymore. “You need to love life. All of it, no matter how small, no matter how large. The Chalice is your world, and we are your children. We will love you. I will love you, and you will return that love to us.”
Hah. That was easy. After all, the concept of love was already starting to blossom in my mind, and it seemed like the sort of thing that a god should have for his children. “I can do that.”
“I know. But there’s one other thing.”
“What’s that?”
A world formed around me, a world of logic and power, where everything I thought could become a reality, where every idea could change the universe. Of course, I could change the world, with a workshop like this. But it was filthy in here. Whoever had used this workshop last had not taken care of it. But no matter. It would be but the work of half a moment to clean it up. Some of the filth extended back along the silvery strands of time that crossed all around me, and a few had even tried to reach out into the future. It was almost cute how the corruption thought such tactics would save it from me. I saw all of the corruption in my workshop for what it really was- a hundred-thousand little attempts at godhood, pitiful imitations of what I was. None of it could compare to what I was meant to be. I was the god of the Chalice. The Chalice was the home of my children. And I would protect my children.
That beautiful voice sounded in my mind again, and for a moment I thought I remembered who she was. Then I shook the silly thought out of my head. Of course I remembered who she was. That was one of my people. One of my children. And she needed my help. Of course I would give it. “Barbas?” She asked.
“Yes, Joanna.”
“Please make your people safe again.”
"It is done." I reached out to the little bubbles of corruption. They were all mine, all of them fragments of a power that wasn't theirs to command. They weren't fit to command it. "Cease," I said to them. And they were gone.
“Thank you,” the beautiful voice said.
“Of course,” I said back. “I would do anything for one of my children.”
…
Chapter Twenty-Two: Epilogue
Joanna
I stood at the highest point of the mountain peak above the crater that contained the home of the Erin-Vulur. The air was cold but not uncomfortably so. It had taken a long time to manage it, but with some help from the God of the Chalice, we had moved the moon into a slightly different orbit, one that exposed it to the direct light of the system's sun for half the day. Of course, when the nightly eclipse fell across the planet, the temperature would drop as harshly as one would expect, but we could live with that. Volistad had been working feverishly for the last decade to ensure that we could. Quite often, I had to go down there to the sleeping hull of the archaic Heaven’s Hawk and literally make him come back up to the surface and interact with his people, not to mention our children.
As it turned out, it had taken only some minor genetic tweaking of my genome to make me able to have children with my husband despite our wildly different backgrounds. Volistad had even found a way to induce the changes more quickly and simply than he had with me. When the colonists arrived, they would need to adapt to all the challenges of their new world if they wanted to avoid getting as sick as I had by the end of my first year. Plus, for the Erin-Vulur to survive, we all had to be ready to interbreed. Genetic diversity made us stronger. Getting spots on my back and knowing my children would come out with little baby fangs was a small price to pay.
Saint Nissikul of the Hammer, as the other Erinye called her, stood beside me on the mountaintop, her arms crossed disapprovingly over her chest. The limb she had lost trying to kill me those many years before had been replaced by a cunning replica, fashioned by Volistad in one of his wild flights of genius down in his subterranean haunt. She scowled at me, glancing significantly at my belly, which was thoroughly swollen by the presence of my third kid. Her scowl was fearsome, especially considering the scars that marred one whole side of her face. “What would my brother say if he knew you were up here in your condition?”
A low, amused masculine voice came from the darkness, preceding Volistad out of the shadows by a split second. “He would probably keep his mouth wisely shut.”
I grinned. “See. I’m fine.”
Nissikul grunted noncommittally at me.
“You didn’t think I would miss this, did you?” I tilted my head back and kissed Volistad on the cheek as he stepped up behind me and surrounded me in hi
s arms.
Nissikul sighed dramatically, though I could see the smile crinkle her eyes. “Of course not. The whole tribe is awake right now. I’ve got my Stormcallers working double shifts keeping the cold at bay long enough for everything to happen so we can get the tribe back to their homes safely.” She shook her head. “Such sentimentality. Barbas will help us if the ship doesn’t come down tonight. We’ll be standing out here to greet the sun, and my Callers will all collapse from exhaustion.”
As if on cue, a bright flare of light broke across the horizon shining like a spear of fire against the eclipsing face of the planet above. We weren’t calling it Palamun, anymore. Volistad had found it tiresome. So now the shadowed, hooded face of Saint Thukkar the Brave watched over his people, the same way he had in life.
I watched at the spear of fire resolved itself into the long, crude outline of an arrowhead. It drew closer, guided by the beacons that Volistad and I had installed at the top of the mountain. A wide open space had been made at the heart of the crater, and as we had improved the village, we had built the new houses into the craggy side of the mountain as it continued up over the crater. We needed the space down in the crater. It wouldn't do for the ship to land on the ice since all that would turn to something of a slushy freshwater sea when the morning came. Flashing lights blinked up from below, and the ship grew ever larger in my sight. I couldn't stop smiling; I was just so excited. This was what we had worked so hard for, what we had fought for.
Alien Romance Box Set: Alien Former: Sci-Fi Alien Romance (Books 1-5) Page 41
