by Sarah Chorn
They all waited. Waited for Seraphina to notice that she wasn’t alone. Waited for her to turn her burning gaze on them. Waited to ignite.
He’d never really believed in gods before. Sure, he’d known religion was a thing, had participated on the occasion; but by and large, the Sunset Lands had always been fairly secular.
But now he sat on the floor with his husband’s corpse cooling in his arms, and knew he was staring at a god. There was no other way to describe her. She wasn’t human, but she wasn’t quite inhuman, either. She ate power and drank fire. The world quivered, the earth vibrating as though shudders were running up and down its spine, small quivers moving up his body, jarring his soul. She looked as though she could turn the stars into a necklace and wear them and they would pale beside her.
He’d never believed in the gods.
Until now.
She was terrible and glorious.
She slowly scanned the periphery of the room, eyes lingering on the artwork. When her gaze hit Vadden, saw him holding the corpse of Eyad, he saw realization and recognition slice through her, stiffening her spine, the fire that made up her body flaring bright, hissing. Judgment flashed across her knife-sharp features in an instant, and he knew that whatever else happened after tonight, the two of them would always be at odds.
He held the man she hated. He loved the man who had destroyed her.
Her lips curled in disgust, fire spraying from the wings at her back, sparking in the air, sizzling where it hit, and all he wanted to do was cower and beg for forgiveness. He would spend his life cold, constantly turning toward her flame, and always being denied it.
Beyond this immediacy, he felt a stirring in his soul. A connection was forming between them, as thin and strong as spider’s silk, like calling to like, but he had no time to ponder it. Her eyes left him, dismissing him, flicked around the room, and finally, with a sigh and a stiffening of her shoulders, a brief bow of her head, she turned to Neryan’s body.
He felt the air heat and thicken. Seraphina’s fire seemed to grow bright enough to blind a normal man, the earth shook harder. She was about to explode. The cavern smelled like ozone and possibility, and he was trapped in the middle of it. Caged, like an animal.
Waiting.
Waiting, for whatever came next.
Seraphina
Seraphina burned brighter than the sun, fueled by a loss so powerful it defied words. She’d felt her brother die. Felt the moment his heart stopped beating, and she’d exploded. Her skin vanished, her body became nothing but energy, potential rubbing and bumping against more potential until she exploded into fire. It was exquisite. She wanted to feel this pain forever. She felt most of her humanity burn up, become so much smoke and blow away in the wind, the small part of her mortality remaining gave way to the Lady of Fire. She was just an inferno, and voice, pouring out her rage to anyone who would listen.
She wanted to press her hands into the sky and ignite it. She would plant her feet on the ground and turn it to so much ash and char. Her brother was dead, and she would make sure all of creation felt her loss.
She’d always thought her fate was written in the stars. Now, she’d hold those stars in her hands and crush them, scattering dust across the heavens. She erased what had been written for her. She would not be dictated. She would no longer edit her own soul.
Seraphina heard the voice from somewhere down below, knew she’d find her brother at the other end of it, and still she’d taken her time before she submerged herself in the world. She wanted to burn. She wanted to drag herself through the palace and watch every single room ignite, let the heat of her fire carry her cries so all might hear the music of her pain.
And that’s exactly what she did. She’d taken history into the palm of her hand, and put a torch to it.
Neryan was dead.
He was dead.
This destruction, this venting of her emotion gave her the room she knew she’d need to face what had happened to her twin.
She would make her way down to him, collect his body, and make whoever had ended him feel the fullness of her anger and wrath. The entirety of her pain. They would know her, for by the time she was done with them their agony would mirror her own.
She remembered something Neryan had said to her so many years ago. “You must follow your heart,” he’d admonished. And she’d replied with, “Tell me, Neryan, as my heart has shattered into a thousand tiny pieces—which piece should I follow?”
That summed up how she’d spent her life. Broken apart, always wondering which piece of herself she should follow.
For once in her life, all the fragments of her were pointing the same direction, and that gave her a measure of power she’d never felt before. It was intoxicating.
Neryan was dead.
Now, she felt as if a part of her was as dead as her twin. The only difference was, she was still able to make sure everyone felt her anguish.
With that realization, Seraphina turned pain into poetry and craved the heart of chaos. Her soul was a feral temple. She wore a gown crafted of vengeance, and smiled as she walked into the fire. Armed and armored, she’d make sure the world knew she was here. She wasn’t a woman anymore, no one would mistake her as thus. She was too sharp. She’d spent far too long pinned under the soul of this dead, rotten world for any humanity to be left in her.
Her brother was dead. The water to her fire, the order to her chaos, the day to her night. How was she supposed to exist without him?
When the palace had been razed, along with her past, she went into the earth. Found a tunnel, and burnt her way through the world; ending up in the middle of a huge, white cavern. She entered the room with a quiet calm she didn’t feel. She knew her brother was in here, knew if she turned her head just enough, she’d see his body, lifeless and cold. But she was physically exhausted and emotionally spent. She wanted a moment to collect herself, to gather her thoughts, to bring herself back into some semblance of sanity. She felt the woman she had been hidden somewhere deep inside, and held onto her. She brought some control back to the raging inferno she’d become. She wanted to be more than a reaction, more than just instinct and fire when she saw Neryan. She wanted to know what she was seeing. She wanted to carve the moment in her heart, and sear it into her soul.
She needed to be fully present.
So, she held herself together.
She beat back the wave of her anguish.
Seraphina studied the room. It was large, a huge domed ceiling, carved from white rock that seemed to glow somehow. Paintings lined the walls in rainbows of color. The air smelled like iron and life. She realized, belatedly, that she wasn’t alone. She saw Vadden first, registered, with some shock, that he was holding Eyad; clutching him as though he was the only thing that mattered in the world.
That was when Seraphina seemed to reach a point where she stopped feeling. It was all too much. Vadden cleaving to Eyad. Neryan dead. Numbness filled her. She realized, in a cold, distant way, that numbness was worse than anything she’d ever felt before. It was empty, and lifeless. Numbness was, perhaps, the worst thing in the world, but here she was, feeling nothing. Her body so full of emotion she just stopped registering any of it.
Her eyes continued scanning the room, returned to Vadden and Eyad, and realized that both men disgusted her. How could Vadden hold onto someone who had been that evil, that heartless, and cruel? How could he be pathetic enough to weep for this person?
She dismissed him in an instant. He wasn’t worth her time. He would never be worth her time. If they left this place alive, she would put an end to him. Someone who sympathized with someone like Eyad didn’t deserve to set his feet on the earth again, or feel the sun one last time. Eyad had destroyed the Sunset Lands, enslaved her and her brother, and here Vadden was, clutching his body and weeping. It made her sick.
She shifted her attention, saw a man walk toward her, a stranger with pale green skin and eyes that gleamed like polished emeralds. He approached slowly, giv
ing her time to adjust to his presence.
“Seraphina,” he said her name almost like a question, as though he was confirming her identity. As though there was any question as to who she was, dressed in flames like this. She clutched the head of the cane she had crafted up above, made of a column of her fire. Felt her feet fully land on the earth, her right leg sending a spear of agony slicing through her.
This room was doing something to her. Up above, she’d been able to rage, cast out an inferno, ignite entire rooms with a glance but down here, she felt muted. Her fire was still there, but it was distant, held apart from her. She couldn’t reach it. She blinked and suddenly felt like Seraphina again, though different, too. The ground under her feet shook. She looked over the shoulder of her brother’s murderer and saw another man behind him, bent over, hands buried deep in the earth, face locked in a silent scream as his body flashed from flesh to bone and back again in the blink of an eye.
“Seraphina, you can stop now. There is nothing left to burn.”
She looked at the stranger before her, his mossy green eyes, his brown hair. She felt connected to him somehow, but…
Who was he?
“I will never be done burning,” she said honestly. The cold numbness she’d been locked away in moments before was melting, and she was starting to feel again. All that grief and emptiness opened its mouth, threatened to swallow her whole.
No. She would not be its meal.
She shook her head. She needed her brother. She needed Neryan.
“Your brother needs you, Seraphina,” the man said, voice crooning out the words like they were a lullaby. He reached toward her with an outstretched hand, didn’t quite touch her, gave her time to decide if she wanted to be touched.
She didn’t.
“Neryan is dead.” Her voice still sounded odd, even to her, but her fire was fading and she was coming back to herself, becoming something close to mortal again. Her body ached, and her stomach was empty. She felt so tethered. Prisoned. She’d had strength once, and now she barely had the ability to stand. This room had sucked all of her ability right out of her, turned her from goddess to slave. Her fire seemed to concentrate in her lower back and right leg, and this time it didn’t feel empowering, but painful, eating her alive from the inside. She lived in a world of extremes, constantly swinging from one pole to another. She was sick of it.
Neryan was dead. She felt a huge, gaping emptiness inside where her brother had always been, that connection, even when they were apart, had always kept her full. She hadn’t realized how entwined they’d been until he was gone. Now, she felt the emptiness inside he left behind suck her down, pull her under, suffocating her. She felt lost.
She realized then that lost was a state of being. It was a frozen heart waiting to thaw. An inert soul, waiting to be moved.
“He’s right over there,” the man told her, his eyes full of compassion. He turned, gesturing behind him, to a spot near the man silently screaming.
Her breath caught in her throat, hitching there, stabbing her like a knife. She limped forward and fell to the ground beside the body of her brother. His chest had been torn open and left that way, his heart sitting cold and red on the stone slab beside him. He wasn’t breathing. He wasn’t moving. He was as cold as the rock he was laying on.
She wailed, cutting the room with the sound of her mourning. Sacrificed. How could someone do this to him? They’d just found each other again, and now this. Neryan was gone. She threw her arms around her brother’s mangled corpse as though protecting him. Her cane clattered to the floor beside her, steadily burning.
“You did this,” she hissed, glaring at the man over her shoulder. “He’s my brother!”
Fire burst out along her body again and the man made a calming motion with his hand, but he wasn’t afraid. Her fire didn’t scare him. There was nothing she could do here, not in his sacred space. Her ability to touch and use her fire was diminished. A faint tug rather than the full access she’d had before. She couldn’t hurt him here. She was on his turf. He held the power in this room, and his easy, fearless motions made that perfectly clear.
This had been a trap. They’d walked right into it, and now she had to live with the irreversible consequences of those thoughtless actions. She gave up her power the second she’d crossed the threshold into his cave. He knew it, and now she did as well.
“You two have to ascend together.” He paused and studied her. His eyes were so old. He’d seen so much. She felt like she was falling into them, feeling the full force of them as they skewered her. He was desperate for this, almost as desperate as she was. “You need to take your brother’s heart, and put it back in his chest.”
“You killed him!” she shouted, her voice echoing off the walls around her.
The stranger acknowledged her words with a solemn nod. “You cannot fully Become until you put his heart back in his chest, Seraphina. If you do not do that, you will die. Your body cannot hold this much power without paying a steep price. And all of the rest of these people will die as well. You are the same as us, but different. More. You and Neryan are the center of our host. Without the two of you, we can’t survive. Do you want that?”
“He’s dead!” She shouted. “You can’t bring him back. No one can bring him back. You killed him, and now he’s gone. You ripped him from this world. When you leave this place, this haven of yours, I will make you feel my pain.”
“Oh, Seraphina,” the man suddenly looked so impossibly sad, like he’d been born of it, bones and sinew woven together by filaments of sorrow, a body held together by an emotional torment she couldn’t begin to imagine, made all the worse by the timeless stretch of his life. “If you only knew what true sorrow felt like, little sister.”
His words hit her right in her heart, full and weighed down by a darkness she couldn’t penetrate. Their eyes met, and she felt like a wailing child before him, this god who had experienced a sorrow the likes of which she knew she could never imagine. He let her see his naked soul for a second before releasing her with a blink.
It frightened her, all of that agony held in check by sheer willpower alone. What would he be capable of if he gave vent to his emotions on the earth itself? The thought left her cold.
“Put his heart back,” he whispered. He rested a hand on her arm, heedless of her flames. Knowing that in here, she couldn’t burn him. “Trust me.”
She briefly looked back into his eyes and saw depths of understanding reflecting back at her. Saw lifetimes lived. Stars born and died. Eons come and go. Civilizations rise up and fall. He was as old as time itself. A kindred soul. A flickering light in the middle of all this darkness.
Silence stretched between them until she felt like she’d shriek just so it would end. Finally, with tears in her eyes, Seraphina picked up her brother’s heart. It was cold in her hand, and large, which was fitting. Neryan always cared too much, felt too much, saw too much. His heart was big, because he was big. He was her other half, the part that tempered the madness in her soul, the half that reminded her to feel and understand, not just react.
The muscle was lifeless in her hands, and heavy as a stone. Tears stung her eyes. This all felt so final, so futile. She wanted to be numb again. This was what it felt like to drown, this ocean of loss, and she’d never learned how to swim. She longed to be that devouring fire, nothing more than a force of nature.
Being human hurt too much.
Life hurt too much.
She had been in a dark place, planted there like a seed. Now, she was blooming. She was a flower, but she wasn’t delicate. When her petals fell, they fell like daggers and the earth shuddered when they struck true.
“Put it in his chest,” the stranger said again in a whisper. His anticipation filled the air, infecting her like a sickness. Something was going to happen. She could taste it. More than that, she wanted it. This was the calm before the storm. The static hiss before lightning strike. The instant before the flames took hold. “You must join yo
ur life to his, Seraphina. You must put his heart back in his chest. Only you can do this.”
Fire walked down her spine with fingers made of ice. It hurt to keep all of her locked in now. She was too small to hold everything she was, so she wore her inferno like a second skin. The lick of flame on her body was almost erotic. She looked at her brother’s heart again.
“Neryan,” she murmured, her eyes caressing his face. “I love you, my brother. I always have, and I always will.”
Then she slammed his cold heart into his chest.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then the heart began to vibrate in her hand. His skin started to grow back. Ribs shook, and started to move. She pulled her hand away, watching as the muscle beat once. Twice. The horrible, hollow hole in his torso began to close over.
Seraphina watched her twin, and realized what eternity was. It was the space between two heartbeats, the instant of waiting before lungs filled with air. This had to work. They shared a life. They always had, and now this stranger had demonstrated that fact in the starkest possible form. One could not live without the other. Never before, never again. They’d live and die as one. Forever.
The magic in the room wrapped around them both. She felt their hearts synchronize, their lungs fill with air at the same time, their souls twine together. Life, shared between them. Fully. Completely. Where one ended, the other began.
Neryan, come back to me, she pleaded.
Neryan’s eyes opened, blue as the bluest ocean. His back bowed, and he roared.
That was when Seraphina truly burned.
Taub
He was once known as Taub, and later as the Bone Lord, but now he wasn’t quite sure who he was anymore. He’d been twisted and broken, and now he was just exhausted.
