Without his choice and their inaction, death would have found them in the same time as it did others. Their legacy living on in what children they created. Now they touched many more lives, but themselves remained untouched. Frozen as the dead. No better. Sinda snarled,
"You, Fool."
"Am I the fool? Or are you? You who betrayed the cry of your heart for power. You who betrayed the love of an eternity because you lacked the spine to stand."
His words cut into seeping wounds.
Once she called Ancel Beloved. Once she called his children her own though they were grown when she met them. Once. Once. Once. Before she stood away and let Nalcet murder them. Before she chose to do nothing in the face of insanity.
She had let him suffer for power. She had let them die to advance. And in the end, what she had made the lie of the choice.
"You cannot abandon him," she said.
"I will and so will you when the time comes. You'll see."
He left her then, a puff of wood smoke in his wake. Around her, reality shifted in his absence allowing the between to reflect only her. It should have been comforting, but finding herself mirrored all around her only brought her thoughts closer when she wanted them far away.
Her former lover's words came back to her.
His pain sang in every one.
He lost everything, including her. His children gone. His humanity gone. His love gone. All of it taken from him in a shedding of blood.
Sinda wept.
Backaran said he would abandon Nalcet to his fate.
Would she leave him as well? She held a favored place in Nalcet's circle. Would he abandon her when the time came?
"Nalcet," she screamed into the between. If he heard, he did not come. No surprise, he rarely responded to anyone, but expected they would respond to him.
Sinda would not lie down and die. Her nature would never allow it.
She baited the wolf. Now the wolf returned for dinner. Perhaps she needed to do something more than wait for it to come.
Rise, Immortal
Night fell as Jalcina lay on Mekan's ship with no one left alive. Their bodies smelled and she wondered what would happen if she found a way to set the ship alight. It might well rid her of Leaf's staring eyes and some of the bodies, but the ones in the water caught as they were on the shoal would go nowhere. Then she would be left with a burned ship and a shallow place in the water where she would eventually starve.
Such a fate.
Once she might have expected something better.
Fate never offered her friendship. Jalcina felt much the same.
The realization she had never been her own woman returned like a migrating bird come home for winter. Never had her life been hers. From birth to death to new life, she had never known herself.
It sapped the strength from her limbs, even the strength to throw herself into the sea and let the waves finish the work before she could starve. It would be quicker, if not cleaner, than waiting for thirst to kill her. She did not long for death, but life held no flavor either.
If she let herself quiet, the hidden spirit made music. It offered what solace it could though she chose to ignore it. They would die together. Jalcina's death would finish this cycle. It would not end the spirit within her, but it would end her suffering and take away any responsibility for what happened next.
Her failure held a savage satisfaction. She did not want to be recruited. She had not been asked. Her life had been taken from her without a word and any consent on her part.
She would not be forced to carry another within her.
Then a star fell.
Leviana's return to the body she shared could hardly be called triumphant. Splitting off from her love, pulled in another direction for his continued existence, she found herself far from where she had gone in life. The Xernian islands never interested her. Being at sea held no charm. She went to sea out of necessity with Warden, escaping those who hunted them.
Now she found herself once more on a boat surrounded by bloated and rotting bodies and sharing a body with a woman she had only known from fragments of half-remembered dreams and antecdots from her love.
Jalcina shuddered where she lay and opened her mouth to scream but nothing came out.
Again she felt a foreign power within her and fought against it despite its familiarity. The shades of Leviana's presence left a color to everything she didn't truly know.
"Leave me alone," Jalcina said. "Go back to where you belong."
This is where I belong, Leviana said. This is my body.
"No. It's mine. Get out."
Beneath them, rising like a snake from a burrow, the other presence snapped at them both.
Suddenly both Leviana and Jalcina found themselves staring at each other with identical faces of disbelief.
"What?"
"Welcome."
They turned to the new voice. Her face was a mask of theirs, the same features, but a difference that came not from look but carriage. She seemed ancient. Jalcina thought she recognized only to realize she did not know her, she knew someone close to her.
"Who are you?" Leviana's demand did not phase the stranger.
"Neither of you exist without me," she said. "I am the first, but we are only complete when we are all together."
Crossing her arms over her chest, Jalcina stared at them.
"Explain," she said.
"Those who have come will come again. I have been and will be again. You are me as I was reborn, the awakening power made flesh, each of you." She offered them her hands, one to each. "Together we are our most powerful because we are complete."
Neither took her offer, but Leviana cocked her head to one side.
"Your power underlies ours."
"Each of you has a strength brought by your birth."
Jalcina watched her eyes with their off colors. They weren't brown or blue but something else. A look she didn't know how to describe.
"Yet that strength starts with me. It changes with you. Our power lies in fragments. Join me."
Drifting to a seated position, Jalcina awaited what would come.
"Where are we?"
"The between. A place of power lost to most. Our opponent comes here."
Talk of opposition perked up Leviana's ears and a sword flickered into her hand.
"You will not need that yet. Or perhaps at all. He is not much of a warrior."
"Then how?"
"All things are not solved by swords. Did your life teach you nothing?"
"My life taught me the one with the sharpest blade and the fastest hand often lives to decide what happens."
"Who are we fighting," Jalcina interjected.
"My murderer is the great magician, Nalcet. You know his son," she pointed to Leviana. "He crept into your kingdom as a venomous serpent and poisoned the heart of your Trusted against you."
"Kendrick."
Jalcina and Leviana both scowled.
"He tried to have me killed."
"Yes."
"He meant to destroy us before we could threaten his Father. He wanted to destroy all that has been done to insure his own place. The Empire grows too close to him and he does not wish to be discovered and perhaps overrun. Even his power cannot completely hold at bay a concerted army." She stopped for a moment, her shape turning indistinct. "He wanted to stop us from finishing what was started with the spilling of our blood."
The sky above turned gray then ink black, not like night at all, but something more sinister.
"Nalcet murdered us for power. We held the power of the earth in our blood."
Her voice disappeared into a rising wind as Jalcina and Leviana tried to huddle against it.
"That was not enough," she said. "He punished our father with our deaths. He destroyed him and yet made him immortal."
The three drew together against the wind whipping across the endless plain. In the distance, a mountain grew with features they all recognized.
"He has suff
ered for so long. Watching and waiting. Now he will have his peace. We will bring it to him with soiled hands."
With that she disappeared and the pair exchanged glances before realizing they too faded.
Jalcina awoke stretched on the wood of the deck. Her muscles screamed their stiffness as she tried to move. The others, Leviana and the elder, slumbered under her skin yet offered all that they were to her just the same. Jalcina continued to hold out against it. She did not wish to be a vessel for someone else. Her life was her own. She would die herself.
Her former death had been a choice to relinquish all she was into death out of guilt for her part in the sacrifices. He helped her slaughter the innocent. Vad'Alvarn had not blinked. He ordered their deaths and slit their throats without hesitation. Jalcina could not do the same. Leviana could and had.
She remembered closing her eyes and realizing she drifted away. The between had cradled her then. She hadn't understood that then. Hundreds of years spent hiding only to be thrust once more into the light.
"Who am I now?" The question floated between them, though only she paid attention to it for now. The others would wake to find it there, the question of their existence. Who were they? Were they one person or three or no one and everyone? How would they survive now when they did not share all their memories or motivations?
Fear gripped her with chilly fingers.
She would be lost leaving only a few unnecessary memories.
Her future could not be so bleak.
Night sky crowding close over of the ship, she sought familiar stars. These were not the same stars as over Sartol. How she ached for the stars of her childhood. The sunset above the lovers where she met Lecern as they courted. Strange how much she wanted to feel his arms around her comforting her as she once imagined he would when her father passed away at a ripe old age, his shaking hand releasing her from his bedside.
None of that happened.
Her father fell in battle against an army led by Navar under Leviana's rule. Everyone she loved cut down by the swords of Leviana' s men, not even Vad'Alvarn's men then. He promised Mordaen he would be given the chance to defend himself and even possibly defeat the army coming for him. Vad'Alvarn, Vadian, who had loved Jalcina for bearing Leviana, made the promise his lover carried out. Mordaen never stood a chance. Had he known that at the time?
Perhaps.
Jalcina stood a similar chance of survival.
If she fought, she would die. If she hid, she would die. If she surrendered…
If she surrendered she would be destroyed.
Lying there, her eyes full of the sky, she wondered if that were true. She had not been destroyed before. Not even after she abandoned her life to Leviana for hundreds of years. She survived to return from the seeming abyss. Though the Immortal had been snatched from her body, she continued to exist to become once more a part of her.
Sinking into her thoughts, she reached for the other woman. Each of them stood distinct. Each of them had thoughts. For now, Jalcina woke while others slumbered, but she felt them. It was the same awareness she had of her siblings beyond the edge of the room as they slept. If she wanted, she could touch their heartbeats. The feeling worked on her, offering a splinter of madness.
If she did not fight, she would be destroyed.
If she did fight, she would be destroyed.
If she died, would it matter?
Pounding on the wood, she sought to make sense of her own ideas. Were they even her ideas? Did they exist in her mind or the minds of the others? Could they influence her so deeply she didn't even recognize their fingers?
Frustrated, she returned to the inner room and found a wall to sit against out of sight of the oppressive sky.
Leviana wanted power.
This other, what did she want?
Jalcina sought the answer and found silence. Whomever she was, she did not share freely. Yet they were one and the same, she said. How could they be so distinct and yet so connected? Their bonds hugged tighter than siblings or lovers.
Shadows did little to comfort, but she took from them what she could as they crowded close. She put her head back to the wall and let it support her. She needed a plan.
Once she gave up out of pain and fear. Now she intended to fight, but was it a battle she could hope to win? If she destroyed the others, if she even could, would the victory be worth the slaughter?
The Black King Returns
To say Warden slept would give him too much credit for control. He passed out as his body surrendered to the constant torment of his physical form. No more, no less. Taking in Ernal had the effect of overloading his system all the more leading to an overwhelming desire for rest. So he woke up at the bottom of the same hole where he lay nearly trapped. Waking to utter darkness reminded him instantly of where he was and why he was there.
A moment later, a star descended and hovered before his eyes emanating a familiar light.
He swatted it with broken hands and it looped around his touch and then away before flying straight at his face. Warden put up his hands to stop it, but he could not more have stopped it from entering than he could have chosen to never breath again.
The Black King's return tainted the landscape of his thoughts and brought him to stronger wakefulness.
Vadian did not chatter, but settled in the back of Warden's thoughts to watch what happened. Their common progenitor, caught in his own feelings, had done much the same leaving Warden to make decisions alone. So they stayed at the bottom of the well, sitting in darkness deep enough one only imagined light and waiting for something to happen.
They were not powerless. Warden knew that.
His strength did not make the pain go away, but if he wanted to take a rock in hand and crush it nothing would stop him. Still he didn't move.
Where would he go?
If he got out of the mess he was in, where would he go?
A vision of Jalcina rose up in his thoughts to be superimposed with a vision of Leviana as he had seen her at the Voice's coronation. A beautiful woman no matter how one looked at her.
Revulsion swept through him and forced him to retch.
He couldn't think of his sister that way.
Sister?
Warden sorted everything he could. He had never seen Jalcina before she appeared in the cell across from him. Leviana had been only a rumor before he attacked her at the coronation. They were nothing alike. How could she be his sister?
Vadian's confusion mirrored his own. Before they were lovers, he and Leviana had been close, but they had never been so close as to say they were brother and sister.
The two looked at the third of their triumvirate with incredulity.
His sister lived in the same body with Vadian's lover and a stranger.
Warden blinked.
Strange bedfellows they were. Very strange indeed.
"Are we strong enough to escape?" Vadian asked.
"Yes." Warden's confidence belied the way his hands shook and his failed attempts to rise.
"We can fly," their third said and with his words came the leather snap of skin wings. It engulfed them, its essence creating loops with them, like ropes holding climbers together near an unscalable cliff.
Immediately Warden dug in. This felt too much like the emergence of the dragon in Kerlan. When it consumed him and removed his ability to think of anything other than where it wanted to go. Where it wanted to go was to a sister he had no interest in meeting.
"Let me go," he said.
"Do you wish to die in this hole?" Vadian's words came to him between the cracks of beaten air. "Your refusal dooms us all."
With a scowl, Warden looked Vadian up and down. The man stood without armor; however, Warden knew better than to take that as an invitation. Those who wore no weapons could quite often be more dangerous than those who openly did. His hands itched for the hilts of his daggers, something to give him the upper hand. Around them, the air charged with their strength, yet it could be more. Each fe
lt it.
But while the others embraced it, Warden stubbornly stood his ground. He had never wanted power.
Yet he couldn't deny the seduction of it. Knowing he could survive even the worst others threw at him with little more than a flick of his wrist. Palacia, who dared to set him up, and even Helenia, his once lover, would learn not to turn on him. Except that wasn't why he truly wanted power.
He wanted to punish those responsible for the death of his father, mother, and sisters. Let them suffer as he suffered, dying of starvation in a frozen wood. They would know how every aching step felt under feet cold to the point of pain.
"Destroying one's enemies is a noble way to live. You survive well."
A sick chuckle worked out of Warden's throat and for a moment, he saw himself lying on a stone floor half-crushed by the large rocks tumbled down from the ceiling. It overlaid his world. Then it was gone.
"Am I dead?"
"No, no more than I."
"But you are dead."
"Death does not mean to us what you think," Vadian said. He cocked his head to one side and brushed his hair off his shoulder. "Tell me something, assassin; do you enjoy your work?"
"How do you know I'm an assassin?"
"I've spent many a night watching the world through your eyes. The things I have seen leave little doubt."
"You were awake?"
"A bit, more recently."
"Then you know—-"
"Leviana is my beloved, but she did not begrudge me multiple wives, so long as she stood first among them."
"Then you don't…"
Vadian stopped him with a gesture.
"It's nothing. Leave off."
Between them were no words punctuated by the movement of those elegant wings.
"We should go."
"I don't want to go back to her. To become a pawn in her game."
"Her game is not our worry. As we are three, they are three. The time has come to complete the curse."
"What curse?"
"The curse my father laid on the killers of me and my sister."
"Your father?"
"Ancel."
Warden could have been knocked over with a scarf. Similar feelings came off Vadian.
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