Realm Wraith

by T. R. Briar

  “Okay, okay, I’m sorry!”

  The tendril loosened, dropping Rayne on the ground again. He pulled his tail free from the ice, surprised as Tomordred withdrew his tentacles, his eyes closing. Were it not for the black shadow silhouetted against the fire, Rayne could barely tell he was there.

  “Go,” Tomordred said. “Before I change my mind.”

  “You’re letting me go? But—”

  “Do you want to be eaten? Get out of my sight! I want to die in peace.”

  Rayne felt a strange chill creeping through him. He knew he should run, but something held him here, a forgotten truth his mind screamed for him to understand. The idea forming was too much for him to believe. But before he could speak, the ice cracked sharply beneath them, and he heard Tomordred cry out as his form suddenly plunged into the flaming river, the small chunk of ice too small to support him.

  “Kueyin!” Rayne screamed. An emotional storm filled him. The past he’d sworn was a lie felt more real than the lost memories of his childhood. He saw black tendrils flailing in the fire, tendrils that had tried so hard to crush him. He remembered how much smaller they’d once been. So frail and fragile, like the thin strings of a jellyfish. Rayne ground his teeth as the weaving black limbs sank into the bubbling river.

  Without even thinking about it, he held up his hands, cold, mangled hands that bore so little resemblance to human ones. Frost formed in his palm, and he felt the land around him, as if it were part of his own body. This realm he’d found so beautiful, so peaceful, was dying. How dare Azaznir destroy that beauty. He would pay for this. Rayne felt a cold heat in his eye sockets again, a dash of color that turned his vision purple for the briefest instant. He could feel the fire melting the ice, like his own skin was being scorched. He gestured, and brushed it away. And the land responded. The skies cracked wide open as a relentless frozen storm chilled the falling fire into icy shards, and the flames burning beneath the ice shrank against the sudden cold, and seeped away into the darkness.

  The tempest raged overhead, healing the skies and cascading watery torrents upon the land. It filled the cracks and froze solid, joining the ice back together. Rayne gaped, shocked at how easily it came to him, every gesture commanding the world itself. He raised his hands, and roaring geysers burst through the ice, screaming towards the sky, catching fallen souls along the way as a deathly chill radiated from within their cores, turning water to crystalline stone. And just like that, the land was renewed.

  A flat, unbroken expanse lay before Rayne, a sea frozen by eternal winter. He heard nothing, not even a heartbeat, even though his own anxiety should have been deafening. He stretched his hand out, and with a great boom, a massive crack split the ice apart. Tomordred burst free, waving his burned tendrils. The singed limbs regenerated, and Tomordred focused his three great eyes on Rayne, his shock clear. Rayne was certain his own face has the same disbelief written all over it.

  His back ached, and the screaming in his head threatened to tear him apart. He leaned down and touched his hand against the cool ice, connecting himself more deeply to the land. Frost crawled over him, and the six decapitated limbs on his back straightened up. From each wound, countless black serpents poured fourth, weaving over each other, knitting together to heal flesh and bone as they reshaped into much larger snakes, and restored his body to its former state. Each head screeched in exhilaration, echoing Rayne’s own emotion. Only their eyes were no longer black, no longer hollow. A blinding violet light glowed in every socket, and as Rayne noticed, that included the two upon his own face, a fallen god’s power resurfaced.

  He saw all three of Tomordred’s eyes grow wide, the fire within bursting and melting into insane patterns. But demonic beast’s fear, rage, and complete and utter bewilderment spoke volumes to the being before him, who drank in the sensation.

  “You had me worried there,” Rayne whispered.

  Tomordred shook like a rippling pond. “Is it really you?”

  Rayne stared at his hand, the six heads on his back cackling madly. His memory reached out farther and farther back in time now, and he began to feel very strange as it overcame the memories of his former life, bringing a mind-set completely alien, yet achingly familiar to him.

  “It’s me, Kueyin,” Rayne whispered, overcome by the truth. He could feel it within him, the malevolent and ancient entity that stood at his very core, something far darker than anything he ever dared to imagine, something he had been repressing for a very long time. The mortal shell that had once trapped him became more of a distant memory with every passing second, and he felt a growing fear as he grasped the horror of what he truly was. “I am Nen’kai.”

  Chapter 16

  When the shock faded, Rayne went limp on the ice, staring blankly ahead, as this new understanding settled in his mind. He passed his hand over the ice, but it didn’t feel cold to him.

  “My lord, what happened to you? Your form is so small. Like one of those humans,” Tomordred said.

  Rayne whirled around as Tomordred loomed over him, his massive form dwarfing him by many orders of magnitude. Rayne’s eyes flashed, unfearing.

  “How could you fail to recognize your god?!” he snapped. “You tried to eat me!”

  “I’m sorry!” Tomordred’s tentacles covered his eyes as he cowered. “Your presence was so small and weak! And you were so convinced you were mortal! How was I supposed to know?!”

  Rayne’s expression calmed, and he ran a hand through his hair as it danced in the still air.

  “I know,” he whispered. “I wanted to see you cower. A little payback for hunting me. You were so blinded by loyalty you couldn’t even recognize me in a broken form. But you sensed something, didn’t you? That’s why you took the form of a dog, and followed me around?”

  “I didn’t know what I sensed. You kept coming back here, and I decided you were a threat to my peace.”

  Rayne’s hand dropped over his eyes, and his shoulders shook as he chuckled. “This is completely mad. I must have lost my marbles.”

  His arm itched, and once again he reached down and scratched. He’d felt a faint tingling sensation for a while now, and it was intensifying. Something made him stop. He felt a lump there, right where the itching was. There was definitely something pushing up from under his skin, something that made his face pale as he brushed his finger up against it. The lump jiggled somewhat at his touch, and to Rayne’s horror it started to crawl up his arm. Another bump pushed up on his forearm, and began to move as well. He narrowed his eyes and dug into the lump with sharp fingers, tearing his skin open. Blood spurted out, along with unimaginable pain, but he ignored all feeling.

  “What are you doing?!” Tomordred cried.

  Rayne stared with wide, haunted eyes as something writhed within his blood. It was long and thin, and moved with slow grace. He reached out a tentative finger and touched the thing. It slithered out of the wound, winding its way down Rayne’s arm, a small blood drenched serpent. Two more snakes crawled out of the wound right after, and all three wormed down his arm. Then Rayne felt them, many more of them, crawling right underneath his flesh, all over him, from his tail, to right up on his face, the horrific sensation of a something slithering right below his eye. At least, it should have been horrific, but in the wake of everything else he’d been through, it wasn’t nearly as shocking as it should have been.

  “It’s like my entire being is nothing but serpents,” he laughed, a little madly. “I really do belong here.”

  “You are the lord of all serpents, after all,” Tomordred said.

  “Am I now? You know, you could have mentioned this before.”

  Rayne slid across the ice, his tail leaving a winding trail in the frost behind him. His thoughts were a jumbled mess. There were flashes, tiny peeks through the window into a life that was almost unrecognizable to him. Something held him from probing deeper, a stirring, inhuman emotion deep inside. It frightened him to feel this way. His inability to understand his own self saddened
him, but there was also a faint tinge of anxiety. He feared losing the person he knew, the human ego he had grown so accustomed to, by embracing this demonic part of him.

  “I don’t even know how I ended up on Earth,” he said. “Or how I became Rayne Mercer.”

  He rubbed at his temples, but his fingernails scratched against his skull with enough force to draw blood.

  “Ow!” he yelled. The painful stabbing sensation forced forward a memory. Twice he recalled intense agony, being stabbed right through the skull. A strange fixation on a weapon. And an excerpt from a text about a creature he now realized was himself.

  “That’s right,” he gasped, remembering. “There was a battle. I pushed the humans too far. And there was a weapon.”

  The image cleared in his mind, and he saw massive armies scattering before him. He towered over them in an enormous form, a monstrous leviathan with seven heads, crushing them beneath a howling maelstrom. Their weapons and primitive magic were useless, for he had known far greater pain than anything these mortals could throw at him. And he saw a being, glowing gold on the horizon, wielding a holy spear, the form of a man, yet also a lion. Divine eyes leveled upon him, burning with a desire for revenge. Overwhelming pain followed, an explosion of the senses, his body ceasing to move as it hardened to stone, and then darkness. A thousand years of darkness, a complete loss of awareness.

  “Yes,” he hissed. “That weapon had my true name written on it. I died that day. I think I wanted to die. I don’t know why. That spear almost destroyed my soul. I forgot who I was, what I was. I was in Limbo for so long. That awful place.” He started pacing. “My true name?”

  “I would speak it,” Tomordred said. “But such a name is not meant to be spoken.”

  “Right. Of course not.”

  Rayne’s eyes shifted. Something stirred in the darkness, watching him. He didn’t have to turn his head, as his snakes cast their sight for him, and he saw subtle movement across the ice. Like lightning, a serpent shot forth and snatched up a cloud of black soot. He shoved it to the ground, where it took solid form within a black cloak, sprawled there, holding twin blades up defensively.

  “Darrigan!” Rayne exclaimed.

  “Reaper!” Tomordred bellowed, his tendrils lunging.

  “Wait! Stand down!” Rayne stood between them, and Tomordred stopped short. He turned back to Darrigan. “It’s rude to eavesdrop, you know.”

  Darrigan dusted himself off, his hands trembling. “When you didn’t return to the rock, I assumed you had died. You—you remember.”

  “I wouldn’t say I remember,” Rayne said. “It’s more than just a recollection. It’s a crushing feeling, like I’m drowning in a typhoon. But now I know why this place calls to me so deeply, and why my power connects here.”

  “That’s not right,” Darrigan muttered to himself, backing away. “I was lied to—”

  “Why didn’t you tell me I was a demon?!” Rayne grabbed Darrigan’s scythe to keep him from fleeing.

  “I was told not to! But I only knew you were a demon! Nobody told me you were Nen’kai!”

  Silence fell between them. Rayne’s mad fury ebbed, and he stood there, too bewildered to think. A black rain poured from the dark skies, and he looked up, feeling it wash over his face, confusion and disquiet overcoming his soul as his instincts dulled. The persistent slithering sensation continued to remind him of what he’d become.

  “You knew I was a demon,” he repeated. “How long?”

  “For well over a millennium.”

  Rayne’s face turned stormy.

  “Start talking,” he said.

  “I wasn’t lying about how we first met,” Darrigan began. “But it was over fifteen hundred years ago, in a small village in northern France. My fascination wasn’t because you could see me. It was because you were a complete sociopath.”

  “What?”

  “The way you acted—you saw humans as merely prey. You slaughtered your own family. But you weren’t damned for it! You were barely twelve when you died, killed by humans who saw you as a monster. And you were simply reborn as another human, years later.”

  “How could such a thing happen?!” Tomordred demanded.

  The visions flashed back into Rayne’s mind. A farming village, hunting deer in the forest. A grand palace deep in the desert. He sailed on a great ship through the northern seas, and bunkered down with soldiers in cement barracks. They were not a single lie, but many lives all lived by one soul, never ending.

  “I realized you had all the instincts of a demon, but you could not reconcile your own nature with a mortal form,” Darrigan explained. “Demons are not meant to be part of the cycle of life and death, and there was no natural order, no damnation if you sinned. You had no idea that you were a demon at all, which was why you could not free yourself.”

  “And it never occurred to you to tell me this?” Rayne asked. “Or get me out of there?”

  “I didn’t know what the other reapers might do if they found out! Knowing them, there was a good chance they put you there to begin with. So, I just kept watching.”

  The more truth Rayne grasped, the more it added to his confusion. Every life, he recalled slipping deeper into darkness, repressing his own nature to blend in with humans, completely lost. He never understood who he truly was, and it led to emptiness, and misery. But he could not clearly recall each lifetime. It was like watching some pageant where the actors forgot half their lines, and the scenery was made of wet tissue paper.

  “There’s so much of it, all lost,” he whispered. “And you just left me there to suffer.”

  “No!” Darrigan exclaimed. “I mean, there wasn’t anything I could do at the time. But eventually, I met another, who watched you like I—”

  “Another? Another reaper?”

  “No”

  “Then what?”

  “I can’t say. We made an arrangement together. He wanted my help to set you free, and made me swear not to reveal any of this to you, especially not his identity. But he is someone you knew once, he made that much clear.”

  “So that’s why you took such an interest. And this arrangement?”

  “All mortals are bound between the physical world and the transcendent. When they die, the connection to the physical body is severed, and they are pulled back into the cycle of souls to be reborn. If that person sins, they become chained to the Abyss instead.”

  “Right. That’s why Realm Wraiths come here.”

  “Reapers like myself can sever and re-forge those chains as we see fit, but it must be done at the moment of a person’s death. So I waited for you to die. The car was a lucky thing; I thought I’d have to wait decades for you to knock off. I interfered a little—had to be certain the car would hit you.”

  Rayne remembered the dreamlike sensation out in the middle of the road, and he ground his teeth together.

  “You killed me.”

  “You were not meant to be alive.”

  “You could have at least given me a choice!”

  “I did what I had to! And yes, I broke some rules. When you survived, I came to the hospital to finish you off. But you saw me, and I fled. I feared I’d be caught. You became like a Realm Wraith instead. But as long as you had your mortal body, you could never fully awaken. You had to die.”

  “You still didn’t have the right! You lied to me!”

  “No! Well, yes, I lied about your being a demon. But I swear, I did not know you were Nen’kai. I was misled; it was only when you kept returning here, that I started to wonder. But your aura was too weak to be sure!”

  “Do you have any idea what you’ve done! Azaznir almost destroyed this place! He would have succeeded if I hadn’t—” Remembering Azaznir brought out more seething hatred within him. He remembered Azaznir’s boasts, and he felt a far buried emotion from something in their past together, something still unfathomable to Rayne.

  “Why is it you serve him?” he asked. “And if you do serve him, why would you help me?”r />
  “We reapers did not always serve Azaznir.” Darrigan hesitated. “Countless ages ago, my kind had no master. But he appeared to us one day and declared us all his new minions. He sought our combined strength to add to his own. Some of us were against it, but the majority feared his power, and not wanting to be destroyed, they prostrated themselves before him. He promised not to interfere with our duty of claiming souls. But he called upon us to do his bidding as he pleased.”

  “Children, under the thumb of a neighborhood bully.”

  “What?”

  “It was him!” Rayne spat. “He’s the one that started it all! He’s the reason I went missing! And he used your kind to overpower me!”

  The six snake heads roared, leveling their scowls on the smoky demon. Darrigan seized up, eyes squinting in panic. He dropped down to his knees, clasped hands beneath sharp blades seeking supplication.

  “You are right. Azaznir summoned us to aid him when he attacked you. He was tired of your battles always ending in a draw, and he wanted the upper hand. We had agreed to serve him; we had no choice!”

  “What the hell did you do to me?!”

  “All we did was aid him in battle! You were just the enemy of our master; it wasn’t personal! After we overpowered you, he took you somewhere. I swear this to you, I do not know any more than that!” The reaper’s cowering was genuine.

  “Then why did you seek my favor? The little tasks, helping me out so I might owe you later? You expect me to believe you didn’t know?”

  “Originally, I thought having any demon owe me a favor might have its uses. But as your true identity became more clear: yes.” He bowed his head so low his horns brushed the ground. “The other reapers already condemn me for having dealings with a Realm Wraith. If they find out that Nen’kai has returned, and it was because of me, I’m done for. Azaznir will scorch me to cinders, and feed the rest of me to his hordes.”