Blood of War

by Remi Michaud

  As his rage faded to defeat, he began to feel a distant discomfort; he had worked his body into a sweat with his exertions. He could feel strained muscles in his arms and chest. He felt his body draw in a long breath as he connected enough to loosen himself.

  As he backed away from the light—Daved used to tell him that finding a solution to a problem sometimes entailed looking at it from a more distant perspective, to view it in its entirety; in this case, he followed that advice literally—a different flicker out of the corner of his awareness drew his attention.

  Metana had drawn closer again and began berating him for his latest failure, but this new light far in the distance held him and he tuned her out. There was something about this new light; it was somehow familiar to him. Unable to curb his impulse, he drifted toward this new light at the back of his mind. Behind him, Metana's receding voice took on a tone of bewildered shock.

  “What do you think you're doing?”

  “I see...there's something...” he sent the thought back.

  “Get back here. There's work to do.”

  But he had already tuned her back out. He passed more buffeting memories and vagrant thoughts, ignored more voices from his past—even in his memories, Valik's viciousness and selfishness was nearly palpable. As he moved forward, he felt a tug from behind; Metana was trying to reel him back in. But he was relentless and he continued forward. The light expanded much as his source light did, though this one had a greenish tinge to it as of fresh grass.

  “Jurel! Come back here! Jurel!”

  He drifted closer, unable to shake the sense of familiarity. He thought to stop himself short, or at least he thought that some sort of invisible barrier like the one around his source would stop him short, but he got closer to it, then closer, and it expanded more quickly as though he was riding a galloping horse at a breakneck pace. Then...

  “Jurel! Wait! Come ba-”

  A brilliant light exploded, drowning out all his senses and he fell for what seemed an eternity.

  * * *

  He breathed the sent of fresh grass and jasmine and honeysuckle. He opened his eyes and found himself staring into the velvetiest, bluest sky he had ever seen. He moved his head, feeling a springiness under his body as though he lay on a cushion. Instead, he saw a seemingly endless field of fresh grass.

  Lifting himself off the ground, he shook his head like he was clearing the effects of a blow.

  Could it be?

  He spun on his heel, looking behind him. The verdant field continued in every direction. In the far distance, along the horizon, he spied a darker smudge ringing the field; he assumed it was some sort of mountain range or forest but it was too far away for him to know for sure.

  How did I...?

  He took a tottering step, suddenly wondering where Metana was. He closed his eyes and searched his mind but found no trace of her. He imagined she was back safe in her own head sitting in the classroom at the Abbey. He hoped so anyway.

  “Ah, young brother. I see you have finally discovered how to get here without being unconscious first. Good for you.”

  Jurel yelped and spun at the sound of the voice, a long, heavy sword appearing in his hands as he assumed a defensive stance.

  A few paces away, a prim looking man stood facing him. He wore a bright white shirt and linen trousers under a simple robe that dangled loosely open. He had a massive tome under one arm, the title of which was in a language Jurel had never before seen and could not decipher though he somehow almost understood it. Middle-aged by the look of him, the man gazed through a pair of delicate golden spectacles that perched on the edge of his prominent nose. He had a scholarly air that Jurel recognized from the brothers and sisters at the Abbey, only more intense, almost tangible.

  Then it came to him.

  The man smiled knowingly and nodded. “Yes. I see you have figured me out.” He spoke in a clipped, precise tone.

  “How could I not? You're supposed to be my brother.”

  Maora, the God of Knowledge, extended a hand and gripped Jurel's in a firm shake. “Indeed. It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance.” Then a smile broke across his face. His eyes twinkled mischievously. “Though I feel I already know you.”

  Jurel chuckled. “I hear you know a lot.”

  The smile broadened. “Quite.”

  As one, they turned to face out across the field. As they stood shoulder to shoulder, a silence fell, one so deep it passed beyond uneasy to as comfortable as a down filled comforter on a cold day. The air was warm but not uncomfortably so. There was no breeze; the grasses were a calm sea sparkling under the golden light that came from no known source but was everywhere.

  Though Jurel was loathe to break the silence, he had questions he wanted to ask.

  “How did I get here?”

  “It helps first to understand the nature of this place.” Maora shifted, assuming a lecturer's pose. He clasped his hands behind his back—an interesting feat with a massive tome under one arm—and swayed as he rolled his balance from the balls of his feet to his heels and back. “Do you know anything about where we are right now?”

  Jurel looked around, searching. He had been here several times. But each time had been while he slept. He had thought it some sort of dream world but Gaorla had implied it was much more. It is your place. What did that mean? He thought about it for a moment but he had to admit he had no idea. He shook his head.

  Maora squinted appraisingly at him. “Hmmm. Have you learned anything about interplanar or intraplanar physics?”

  Jurel stared blankly.

  “I'll take that as a 'no' then. The world as you know it is an infinite plane-”

  “A what?”

  “A plane. Think of it as a huge flat space-”

  “But how can it be flat? I can see up and down.”

  “I know. It's a difficult concept to grasp. It's flat only in comparison to the multiverse because it is made up of only four dimensions instead of-”

  “Multiverse?”

  “Yes. Think of the multiverse as a universe of universes. When you look up into the night sky, you see stars-”

  “Unless it's cloudy.”

  Now Maora turned and glared at Jurel. His tone went flat and he spoke through clenched teeth. “When you look up into the night sky on a clear night, you see stars, right?”

  Jurel thought about that. It made sense—the only thing so far that did. He nodded.

  “Well, if you could look into the multiverse, it would look similar except that each individual star would be a full universe.”

  “What's a universe?”

  “Oh father,” Maora muttered, pinching the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, “please help your child.”

  Jurel wondered which of them Maora was referring to.

  “The universe is the world comprising everything you know: grass, trees, sky, stars, everything,” Maora continued. “It is infinitely large, containing countless stars and planets and myriad other breath-taking objects and phenomena.

  “The multiverse is similar but infinitely bigger than the universe.”

  “How can it be infinitely bigger when the universe is already infinite?”

  “Well, though the concept of infinity is widely misunderstood, in this case it's a matter of dimensions. This universe is comprised of four dimensions: longitude, latitude, altitude, and time.”

  “Huh?”

  “Forward and backwards, side to side, up and down, and time. Can you please stop interrupting? This is taking much longer than it should.”

  “Sorry.”

  “The multiverse is comprised of twenty-one dimensions. In the multiverse then are infinite planes of universes of lesser dimension. Within each universe, an observer sees that it is infinite but an observer in the multiverse sees each universe as finite because he is seeing it from a position where there are twenty-one dimensions. Do you understand?”

  “No.”

  Maora stared helplessly at Jurel. He opened
his mouth to speak but clamped it shut before saying anything. Jurel began to squirm as Maora's gaze turned speculative.

  “All right then. Let's try this a different way. Close your eyes.”

  Jurel did as he was told, feeling slightly foolish as he stared at the inside of his eyelids. Without warning, like a kick to the gut, he was bombarded with imagery. Sun-bright light seared his mind, shifting colors at blinding speed. Jurel cried out, lurched, fought to keep his balance. He thought he recognized some of the imagery but they came too hard, slamming into him like stampeding horses and disappearing so swiftly, he did not have time to decipher what he saw. Gritting his teeth, he clutched the sides of his head.

  Then, as suddenly as they had started, the images vanished. He slumped bonelessly to his knees, as though cut from a noose, only barely managing to catch himself from pitching forward onto his face.

  Dazed, he opened his eyes and blinked repeatedly to clear the last vestiges of his experience. The world, his world, his place, seemed dark to him. He wondered if he had somehow affected it or if it was because his eyesight seemed darkened, with an imprint like the after effect of seeing lightning.

  It took him a moment to find his voice. He croaked, “What was that?”

  “Your education was too sorely lacking for me to explain it well enough for you to understand. If we had continued to rely on words, it would have taken me weeks to give you all the information necessary to answer your question.”

  “So you're saying I know the answers now? Why didn't you do that at the beginning?”

  Maora chuckled softly. “As you may have noticed, it is not the most comfortable way to pass information. It is easier with a trained mind—Shomra or Valsa would not have been affected nearly so strongly—but with so much to assimilate in so short a time, the mind reels and must adjust. I hesitated at first to subject you to that experience since to join with a human mind is not only uncomfortable, it is dangerous. If you had not been sufficiently advanced in your progress toward divinity, that passing of information might very well have erased everything you ever knew, and perhaps killed you in the process.

  “And, no, you do not have your answers yet. I have simply provided your mind with all the necessary tools to discover the answers on its own.”

  “I don't understand.”

  Again, Maora chuckled. This time it was accompanied by a rolling of his wise eyes. “You say that a lot. I think you are impatient. Give yourself time. You will understand.”

  As he said this, Jurel was struck by the notion that Maora was not only referring to understanding the nature of this strange world that Jurel had created. A memory emerged, a memory of him speaking with Valsa in this same place not too long ago. She had likened him to a flower seeking sunlight to continue growing, to become what it needs to be while still remaining a flower. Had she been saying more than that? Had she been hinting at a deeper truth? The same deeper truth that Maora now seemed to be implying?

  It seemed likely. But as Jurel thought of it, he still did not know what that deeper truth was. Maora had said to stop being so impatient and give himself time to understand.

  The problem was that he did not seem to have time. The Abbey was riven, split in half by those who believed in him and those who did not, and if that rift was not soon healed, he feared it would spell the beginning of the end for the Salosian Order. Because certainly, the prelacy was not sitting still. Not after the massacre at the temple in Threimes the previous spring.

  Thanking Maora, he tried to smile. He assured Maora that he would think deeply on all he had been taught. With a smile of his own Maora gave him one last piece of advice before departing.

  “Be open Jurel. You have difficult conclusions to reach but you must remain prepared to accept them.”

  Alone once again, Jurel lost himself in his thoughts for a short time before deciding he should try to get back to the Abbey. There was no doubt that Metana would have...words for him when he returned but there seemed no help for it.

  With a sigh, he concentrated and found the pin-prick of light that was apart from his source. He felt a wrenching tug, a disorienting sense of displacement.

  The grasses of his field, his place, were empty; the only residual evidence that anyone had been there was the trampled grass where Jurel and Maora had stood and talked. And soon, even those grasses sprang back up, leaving no trace that anyone had ever been there.

  Though there remained a sense in the empty air, a feeling, as of a pent breath, of waiting.

  Chapter 9

  As the winds of autumn cooled and became laden with winter ice and snow, a deep melancholy began to infuse Jurel's soul. At first, he ascribed this new sadness to exhaustion caused by his schedule. Metana worked him harder than ever, heaping work on work until most nights he did not sleep at all so that he could complete all the assigned tasks she had set him.

  This new schedule had begun upon his return from his place. She had been apoplectic, demanding to know what had happened and where he had gone. Jurel, feeling that his visit with Maora had been too personal to share, had answered her vaguely. So vaguely, in fact, that her apoplexy had grown to epic proportions.

  And the homework list grew. He had not even been able to join in the New Year's festival.

  He soon came to realize that his dolor had very little to do with his exhaustion. In fact, the heavy workload seemed to mitigate his melancholy as though entrenching himself in his textbooks and his papers helped him forget something...

  And then he understood. The understanding was not pleasant. So much so, that for the first time since he had been handed over to Metana for his education, he purposely avoided her. He did not want her to see him weeping. It had been a year since he'd been exiled from his life and almost a year since he had witnessed Daved's murder. With his hectic workload, he had almost forgotten, had in fact barely thought of his foster father at all in the last few months.

  He escaped to his secluded arbor located deep inside an unused section of the Abbey to think. Metana would make him pay full recompense for this transgression but at that moment he did not have the heart to care.

  Leaning against the bole of his tree, he let his memories have free rein. Days spent in the fields under the sun working alongside his father; evenings spent studying history and geography as Daved knew them; the memories were a cool breeze over the simmering cauldron of his emotions. Even the upbraidings—and there had been many, he thought wryly—were now a cherished memory. The only memory he would not entertain, would not allow a chance to materialize, were the last ones he had. The ones from Threimes. Where everything changed.

  At intervals, Jurel wept, chuckled quietly, or simply gazed wistfully at the foliage and the wild roses and lilacs without really seeing them. How his life had changed! In a little more than a year, he had gone from being an ignorant boy on a farm leading a near idyllic life—save for the constant minor torments Valik visited upon him—to being thrust onto the world stage, killing hundreds, and discovering that he was...a god? If it had not been for the apparently genuine visitations by Gaorla and Valsa and now Maora (he wondered if Shomra would be next) he would have discounted this whole business as the insane imaginings of a deranged mind. As it stood, he still had doubts. How could he—he!—be a god? How could a timid nobody from the back end of nowhere turn out to be one of the most powerful beings in creation? And if he was one of these powerful beings, then where was his power? Where was the power to topple mountains or set the sun to rising in the west? He could not even convince skeptics that he was who he was supposed to be let alone cause oceans to dry up.

  Who was he? He was the God of War. Was he? Knowing was easy. It was accepting that was nearly impossible.

  * * *

  The westering sun was gilding the trees and the wall surrounding the arbor when he finally stirred and rose to his feet. Melancholia nibbled at him and he was feeling wistful and not quite substantial as though he was not fully in the world. Except for his belly which ru
mbled all too real protests. He had not eaten yet that day and his body was making him fully aware of that fact.

  He made his way through the corridors of the Abbey, passing through uninhabited wings and into more populous sections until he properly got his bearings and headed for the dining hall. At that time of day, the hall was quite overflowing with denizens but when he sat at the end of a table, suddenly those closest to him all seemed to remember important engagements elsewhere and he found himself alone. Those that remained outside the void quietened until only an occasional whisper or clinking of cutlery could be heard. He did his best to ignore the surreptitious glances various people cast his way, intent instead on the trencher and cup of ale a young novice placed before him before hastily scuttling off as if afraid Jurel would chase him and bite him.

  As he sat staring at his food and chewing mechanically, his mind continued to drift. The food at the Abbey was always well made and tasty but thoughts of Daved made enjoying his meal impossible. He sopped up beef gravy with his bread, and swallowed a mouthful of ale while he chewed. He sighed.

  The main door of the hall bounced off the stone wall with a resounding boom. Startled, Jurel's eyes shot up and he saw standing in the door, her eyes full of fire, Metana, searching the hall.

  Fantastic, he thought.

  When her eyes caught his, her lips pinched and she raised one finger to point directly at him. With such power did she glare that it had almost a physical weight, like a slap, and Jurel flinched. She strode toward him, still pointing with one hand while her other was clenched into a fist at the end of a ramrod straight arm.

  Knowing what was coming, and knowing there was no escape, Jurel rose and headed toward her.

  “Do you have any idea how furious I am with you?” she growled, glaring lightning bolts at him.

  She spun on her heal and stormed from the hall. He, not being completely without sense, knew that she expected him to follow. Which he did. With all the enthusiasm of a child expecting a whipping.