The Trial

by James Hunt

  The Skyrider jumped from his seat in a whirl of motion, the bright blade of Dekarsil cut through the air as he moved and a thin line of red welled up on her cheek. Niyana didn't flinch from the superficial cut, she lowered her head, and looked up at him dangerously. Every breath in the room stopped and all eyes were on the freed captive. Silver steel moved silently from a dozen scabbards. The Skyrider clutched the sword steadily in both hands. If Ismeril's spirit still lingered, he wasn't showing himself. Niyana stood up, and lifted a calming hand to the room to ease back the hungry eyes ready to exact revenge.

  "Show me," The Skyrider almost squeaked out in disbelief. "Show me where thou pulled this from." his voice was heavy with conflicting emotions, anger and grief battled against prejudiced and presumption. Niyana lifted her hand again and made the signal to the others to stand down. Dozens of steel weapons silently found their way back into their scabbards. She gestured to the altar in the back of the chapel pointing the way. The Skyrider switched his grip on the blade to underhand, a subtle signal of a cessation of hostility, and crossed the room to the stone altar and the steps below.

  "Before that," Rad said loudly for all to hear, as he rose unsteadily to meet them. "I need to recover someone still down there." Niyana looked from him to the dark stairwell.

  "The Mischievous." Niyana said, suddenly remembering.

  "These Zeks said you made a deal that they get to hunt her," he closed his eyes and shook his head with a sigh of exasperation. An overly dramatic way to call that idea idiotic. "Stay here. Rest. It'll be over by morning." Rad made his way across the room to meet them. His wounds were bandaged as best they could be, and by the look of him he should be on the floor, comatose, and not walking around. That bewildering fact kept anyone from stopping him on his own behalf. "She may be Zek, but she's Huanguard trained. I'll go looking for her." And with those words, Rollis and Ut'van who were about to protest and follow, promptly stopped and sat back down.

  "Well then," Rollis said, and leaned his head against the stone wall. "best place for a nap." he grumbled and folded his arms over his chest to get comfortable.

  "Remember," Rad called back as he descended to the first step. "She's a shapeshifter. If you see me come back without her, kill me."

  "Kill you?" Tamain called after him incredulously.

  "Don't worry, it won't be me." Rad laughed. Then coughed from the pain of the action, and wilted to one knee. Niyana helped him back up, and he thanked her softly before pulling away. They watched him slowly disappear into the darkness. Most of the elves expected him to stumble around blindly, but he took the steps with regular precision until the sound of his footfalls disappeared into the darkness below. Niyana chuckled lightly at some hidden joke as all the elves kept listening for the human to stumble and fall in the darkness.

  "That man," She said mildly, without affection or distance, but merely respect. "Is responsible for invading Zecair. Freeing me from their dungeons..." she motioned for The Skyrider to follow behind her as she descended the first step of the stone stairs of the catacombs. "He fought as a gladiator in their slave pits to purchase me for his own. He challenged a General to single duel combat, wherein he slew a warrior named The Unkillable who was in full armor and sword with only his bare hands and the chain around his neck." She paused right before her head disappeared below the floor. "He did all this, so I could come back here and kill his Demon..." she folded her arms over her chest as she met their gazes. "Do you think a misstep in the dark is going to kill him?" she raised an eyebrow, smiled impishly, and resumed her descent.

  The Skyrider scoffed, but grew eerily silent as the truth of the matter dawned on him. His own strike force had been defeated by this very same man.

  * * * * *

  "No."

  He heard the voice in the darkness, and knew he was close. The path down the catacomb walls was etched into memory, and he found her not far from the chamber of the Mother.

  "no." she muttered again. He came upon her, and found her rocking herself slowly on the floor with her face buried into her knees, and her knees wrapped to her chest with her arms. She was naked, but looked unharmed, and muttering to herself.

  "No!" she barked.

  "You must be The Mischievous," He said calmly and knelt before her. She jerked suddenly, having not noticed his approached, and looked up at him. First in surprise, them confusion, then with suspicion and wariness.

  "I am Rad." He said. "but we've met before."

  "Why did you bring me here?" she asked, as recognition quickly came. The one question she needed answered and it had been plaguing her all these many past months.

  "Because you are special, and you don't know it." He said with certainty. "I needed you." she scoffed at him. "You were my secret weapon if the Elth princess failed." Behind him, a respectful distance away, The Skyrider and Niyana stopped and watched. Niyana tilted her head curiously and her ears twitched ever so slightly in annoyance.

  "Me?!" she laughed. Then she laughed harder at the absurdity of it all. Something unseen plagued her, and shook in irritation, as if a sudden migraine burst hit her.

  "The mother is still in your head isn't she? I can teach you to be rid of her... to kill her completely." Rad said and stood.

  "ha!" The Mischievous scoffed at him again bitterly. "Another deal with a devil lover." she sneered. "What is it this time? I let you make copies of me so you can fuck them and kill me as many ways as you can create?"

  "No," Rad said simply, completely ignoring her accusation. "I cannot build trust between us in the short amount of time we have here. So you will have to judge my words on faith." He stood slowly, painfully, and took a deep breath. "I am Rad of the Huanguard. I am also The Killer of Zecair - a freed slave. The name I earned for killing The Unkillable during a trial by combat in defense of The Majestic. At that time I was her slave, and I went by the name Kreth. I accomplished all of this, because they woefully underestimated me." The Mischievous was about to laugh at his absurd tale until that last word "underestimate" rang in her ears. Only if both The Majestic and The Unkillable had indeed underestimated this human could such a tale be true. Yet here he was, in the blackness of the catacombs with no light, looking right at her as if he could see in the dark. By the look of his body, he had been involved in the fighting above - and lost, but somehow wasn't dead.

  "What happened to you?" She asked carefully.

  "I killed Rasj." He stated plainly. "the Elth Queen's soldiers, and her Discarded allies killed the rest of the Huanguard."

  The Mischievous measured him again with her eyes. His claims were unbelievable, but once again she would have to underestimate him to abide by her skepticism. The same fatal flaw all those that had stood before him had apparently made. Somehow he had made it out of the dungeons of Zecair, where they had last met - there was that to consider.

  "How am I special?" she narrowed her eyes at him. His confidence was unmistakable, he was either a master liar, or telling the complete truth.

  "You are a bastard." He smiled. "your father was a general of Zecair... before he became High Archon."

  The Mischievous burst out into cruel laughter again. But when The Mother suddenly resumed her pleading in her head, trying to distract her from Rad's words. She knew there was some truth here. That fact scared her. She didn't want to know this. This was dangerous territory if it was something that upset The Mother.

  "Your mother kept it a secret from him, to use as leverage should he become High Archon. She died before he rose to power, and you were pushed into the Academy as an orphan. You graduated faster than your peers and joined the border scouts. My freeing you from that dungeon was not an accident. There is power within you. Power I needed to destroy the Mother. The only power that can destroy The Mother."

  She digested his words. They were her life story spelled out in annoyingly brief detail, but with missing pieces filled in. He hadn't missed a single fact. She wanted to doubt him. Everything he said was a long lost secret that no one cou
ld have learned or know, but he somehow had. So she had to accept it on faith, without the explanation of how, because it felt true. Once she opened that door to accepting his words as true, another opened.

  "What do you want in return for my help?" she slowly got to her feet to stand bravely before him. Rad smiled, and in that smile she saw more of the man emerge from the expressionless mask he wore. He had a larger plan in action she could tell, and this moment was a critical deciding factor in it. There was a battle being waged here, she could see it in his eyes - it was the same look The Father sometimes had when she asked a question about her missions with Trent.

  "Your allegiance. Your loyalty." He simply shrugged. "This isn't a simple favor for a favor, but a longer commitment. Decide carefully" Rad began. "I will continue your training, in exchange you will serve me as my disciple until I die. There is no backing out once you commit, commit wholly, or I will have to kill you to prevent The Mother from resurrecting... or later to prevent what I teach you from being misused."

  "Such high stakes." The Mischievous sighed. She knew now, he had been telling the truth all along. She knew why the Mother was in her head - she needed a new body. She had listened to his voice, his tone, the way he spoke, analyzed it for the slightest tell that he was lying or hiding something, but it never changed. He wasn't a braggart or a deceiver, he didn't need to be he had the power to enforce his will - deception was not his style. "Are you worthy of my devotion?"

  "Are we worthy of each other's devotion?" Rad returned it on her. She scanned his face, his eyes. Those words struck an old frayed nerve in her, and she wondered if he knew it and meant it so. Of course he did... this monster of a human apparently knew everything already.

  "I need more," The Mischievous said. "Give me something to dissuade these doubts." Her face was tormented. He had dangled an appropriate bait before her and laid the trap to coerce her into his plan so effectively that the only thing holding her back was her own instincts that nothing was ever so easy. Rad understood this.

  "When I passed my harrowing with The Mother," Rad started. "My gift, was to be linked into her network of spiritual energy. She is everywhere, tapped into the link between all living things, especially those that carried her flesh inside her." Rad said with an impish smirk. "This network allowed me to see and observe everything that was going on around me and anyone I wanted simply by focusing on an individual I knew and reading them. It made me the ultimate spy."

  "Wow..." The Mischievous said as she digested that. All the connections were made then, all the pieces of his story fell more into place. Now she understood how he knew so much. "And the ultimate killer. You could know any weakness, any strength... any secret." Rad slowly nodded. The Mischevious's leg started to twitch nervously, uncontrollably. She, who had worn a mask her whole life, was suddenly feeling exposed before this man.

  Rad took her fidgeting as a consenting agreement to their deal.

  "Let us begin," He said. The Mischievous couldn't meet his gaze. She bit her lip, and timidly nodded in agreement. She held her arm to try and keep herself from trembling as it grew worse. Was it anticipation Fear? She couldn't stop it, she didn't understand it. Rad started to pace around her slowly.

  "I am going to awaken you," He started. "First you need to release your falsehoods. Share yourself with me. Your true self. Yes, I can read you with my gift, but that is not the point. The point is for you to accept yourself and purposely share yourself, even the most intimate parts. Your flesh stopped being your intimate side long ago... you quickly learned to use your sexuality as a tool to get what you wanted. Why?"

  The Mischievous looked to the black ceiling high above, she felt cornered already. Unable to meet his gaze has he paced. He was too good at this.

  "Because it was easy." She choked out through the emotion. "Men are idiots and easy to manipulate."

  "But you also enjoyed it."

  "Sometimes."

  "Did you enjoy it with Trent?" The Mischievous bristled and wanted to punch him. But she knew why he asked the moment she clenched her fist and pulled it back to swing it.

  "Of course." She sighed. "He was wonderful."

  "Was he another idiot?"

  "No," she practically whispered.

  "So you did not need to seduce him. You could have won his loyalty through words."

  "Possibly."

  "You regret manipulating him."

  "Yes." she whimpered. Choked out a brief sob, and then breathed deeply to clear her mind.

  "Does admitting that lessen the shame?"

  "A little."

  "Do you feel responsible for his death?"

  Again, the fist clenched.

  "Yes, He would have stayed just another idiot student and would not have earned the Father's special interest if I hadn't seduced him."

  "Where would his allegiances have fallen during this coupe?"

  "No where, he would have run away."

  "Like you did?" she remembered the night she tried to leave.

  "No, they would have killed him trying to escape."

  "So.. he would have died siding with the Father, or with Rasj when the Lunarians attacked."

  "So he was doomed either way." The Mischievous scoffed and threw her hands up in frustration.

  "Yes." Rad said softly, almost sympathetically. "sometimes fate is immutable." The Mischievous lifted her head to the ceiling far above, closed her eyes, and shed her held back tears silently. But in doing so, her trembling stopped, and her shoulders lifted as she stood up straighter. A great burden had just lifted from her shoulders. "But not always. Why take the name that you did?"

  "As a warning," she said calmly.

  "You think of yourself as smarter than those around you. Your name is a warning that they'll fall to your pranks and schemes eventually."

  "That was the idea when I won it."

  "You delight in it, why?"

  "Because they're all idiots." she almost barked out. "Every Zek man is the same, they want sex and they want power. They want power so they can have more sex. Everything they say to you is just a ploy to get those. Once you realize that, you can toy with them to show who's really superior. All their bravado, all their gifts and displays of power, they're all just simpletons too eager to get what they want. And the women? So wrapped up in their own plans for power and fame, they think they're clever with their plots, but once you get a hold of one of their strings you have them at your mercy. One simple pull and you can ruin their ambition."

  "all of them? There wasn't one that wasn't like that?"

  He knew. "Since you know everything, you know damn well there was one that didn't. One I couldn't manipulate. One that showed me I was smart and how to use that to survive."

  "Your last teacher... at the academy."

  "Yes, him.

  "Your first love."

  "Yes."

  "The first person worthy of your devotion."

  "Yes!"

  "And he discarded you the moment you proved your devotion. When you realized that your love for him made you his slave, you would do anything to keep it. It made you a simpleton, just like all the others. And since then you have never loved someone like that again."

  "YES!" she screamed in bitter rage. She gasped suddenly as a brief, somewhat pleasurable convulsion ran through her body. She went stiff and rigid as it ran its course. The convulsions lasted awhile. It wasn't a sexual orgasm, but something akin to it. Heat flowed through from her chest though her body, down her back, and into her extremities.

  A soft violet glow bathed the room. The Mischievous blinked from the light as her eyes adjusted and turned to find a source. Yet where ever she turned it was always behind her.

  "Beautiful." Rad breathed in appreciation. Then she caught a glimpse of it right behind her.

  Wings. Deep violet wings beat the air softly behind The Mischievous. Rich indigo veins ran through them between the translucent interspaces out to the violet edges. When she caught sight of them, she curled them in
, touched them with a hand and shuddered at the tingling sensation as she felt her hand as they were a part of her. She looked around the room as if seeing things that were not there for the first time.

  "Wha.. what is this?"

  "Your inheritance." Rad said through tense words, and clutched at his head.

  "You have awakened. She cannot posses you now." He stated as his breathing grew heavy and rapidly as he was beset but some tremendous exertion. "You can see her now right? You know what to do? How to kill her?"

  "Its so simple..." The Mischievous breathed in wonderment as she stared at the cavernous blackness now turned purple.

  "Do it!" Rad said desperately. "She cannot take you, so she's putting all she has into taking me before you wise up!" He groaned, whimpered, and collapsed to his knees grabbing his head.