by Joe Jackson
Kari glared at him, but after a moment she returned to her position at the brys’ side, and put pressure on the worse of the two wounds once more. “This brys has been helping us, and is under my protection,” she said. She looked at the captain over her shoulder. “You’ve already made one mistake, don’t make things worse by standing in my way.”
“How dare you!” the rir male replied, but he backed up when she sprang to her feet.
“Because we’re demonhunters, you stupid ass!” she yelled. “You’re supposed to help us, not kill our friends and then ask questions! Now show me to Kaelariel’s temple or get the hell out of my way.”
Erik tried to step between them and laid his hand on Kari’s shoulder. “Kari, this isn’t exactly how we should introduce ourselves to the city,” he said.
“Erik, by the gods, he’s going to die!” she barked at him. “Do something! Help me!”
He just stood staring at her, and Kari wondered what was wrong with him. The captain looked at her suspiciously, but once he took a closer look at her dog tags his eyes went wide. He motioned for his guards to stand down and ordered one of them to lead the demonhunters to the temple of Kaelariel. He started to offer an apology but Kari cut him off with an impatient wave of her hand. She picked up the wounded brys and cradled him to her breast, trying to keep pressure on his wounds even when her hands were full. The human guard led her through the gates and along a main thoroughfare to the eastern hill, but Erik lagged behind. At the top of the hill was a temple district, and they easily found the winged focus of Kaelariel. Kari wasted no time and hurried through the doorway. Several acolytes saw her enter with someone cradled in her arms, but even they seemed surprised when they saw it was a brys. Once they noticed his wounds, they had her lay him down on a stone altar, and they began to cut away his armor to inspect the damage.
Kari stood by, her hands, belly, and legs coated in the brys’ black blood, and she knew the situation was dire. Makauric had lost a lot of blood, and even if the priests could stabilize him and seal his wounds, it would be a long time before he would recover, if he ever did. She sank to her rear end a few feet away from the altar and stared at her blood-covered hands, and she closed her eyes and held her breath to try to calm her racing heart. In a span of moments, she could recall nearly every time she had been covered in the blood of a serilian demon she had killed in defense of her people. Now she sat covered in the blood of a creature she had led to his death – which she had in effect killed after he had done nothing but help her – and she wanted to vomit. Kari’s skin crawled as Makauric’s blood cooled against it, leaving her cold and empty, and her hackles rose as she felt the chill of death run down her spine. She prayed silently to Kaelariel, asking him to spare the brys, and she unthinkingly offered herself to the god of death in the demon’s place.
She opened her eyes when one of the acolytes called across the temple. With hurried footsteps he rushed to fetch a robed human who emerged from a back room. Together the two ran back to the altar where Makauric lay, and Kari saw the brys’ blood run down the side of the white stone and begin to pool on the floor. Her attention was drawn to Erik when he arrived, and he spared the bleeding demon only a glance as he approached Kari.
“Let the priests do their work,” he said, squatting to bring his face in line with hers. “We should start looking for my siblings, or for someone who might know if they’ve been here.”
Kari met his gaze evenly and wondered how he could be so callous. “Makauric might not survive,” she said quietly. Her gaze returned to the altar where the priest and his assistants worked at healing Makauric. “Don’t ask me to walk away from him now.”
“Kari, he’s a demon,” Erik returned with an unmasked sigh. “We’ve been trained to kill these things, not feel bad for them when they meet their end. Yes, he helped us and made our work here easier, but in the end, he’s still a brys and they’re still ruthless, murdering bastards. The world’s not going to miss him and neither should we. Let him go.”
“This is my fault, Erik!” she said, staring at him incredulously. “I told him he’d be safe under my protection. He never would have come here if he doubted me, and I failed him. You want me to just walk away from him because some of his kin are rotten?”
“Some?” Erik repeated. “Kari, all of them are rotten. You promised him he’d be safe, and you did everything that anyone could expect to keep that promise. He’s reaping the rewards of being what he is, and that’s not your fault. We’re pretty lucky to even be alive, and a dead brys is a small price to pay for that. Right now we’ve got more important things to do than cry over a dead demon.”
The priest looked at the demonhunters over his shoulder but said nothing. Kari drew her legs up to her chest and rested her head atop her knees. “He’s not a demon,” she said quietly.
“What?” Erik returned. “Kari, be sensible...”
“Go find your siblings, Erik,” she said dismissively. “I want to be alone.”
He stood up and shook his head. “Don’t come apart on me, Kari,” Erik said. “We still have a lot of work to be done. We don’t have time for this.”
Kari raised her eyes to meet his. “Erik, go find your siblings. Go spend a little time with them and ask yourself if you’re going to be like this if one of them dies,” she spat. Erik’s brow came low, but ultimately he simply sighed and headed out of the temple.
Kari bit back a sob, determined to not feel sorry for herself or Makauric. Instead, she rose and approached the altar. “I can channel some healing; is there any way I can help?”
The human priest, whose robes were already stained with the brys’ blood, shook his head. “I’ve stabilized him as much as I can and he feels no pain, but the wounds are too extensive,” he said. He looked up to meet Kari’s eyes and sighed quietly. “He will not last to evening. If you have anything to say to him, do so quickly if he regains consciousness.”
Kari shook her head slowly, fighting back tears, but she let forth a single, biting sob. “This is all my fault,” she said.
“No, it is not,” Makauric rasped, and his dragon-like eyes opened and fixed on Kari. His eyes rolled but he fought to stay conscious, reaching his hand up toward her face. He managed a pained smile when she took his hand in her own. “This is my fault. I started to see myself as mortal because you treat me with so much respect for one of my kind. In the back of my mind I knew entering this city would be the death of me, but after our visit to Talvor, when I saw how far you would go to defend me, I thought perhaps I was wrong. I was not.”
“I’m so sorry,” Kari said. She moved beside the altar and laid a hand on his chest. “The priests say…”
“I will die, yes,” he said. “I had no doubt about that when the guards shot me. Erik is not wrong, Karian. You should not feel sorry for me.”
“But you’re my friend,” she said, and the brys’ brows rose in surprise. She was amazed at how expressive he was, but she guessed that in the face of death those carefully constructed defenses and gruff exterior were no longer necessary. She didn’t have time to think about it, but a part of her wondered if there was far more to a brys than she had ever imagined.
“Your friend?” he returned in amazement. Even the priest regarded Kari with interest, but she did her best to ignore the anxiety she felt under the scrutiny. Makauric watched her intently, but his pupils began to dilate as his eyesight failed, and he gasped lightly, his breathing becoming shallow and quick.
Kari gave his hand a squeeze and ran her other hand along his snout and down his cheek, and she bit off another sob. “Yes, my friend,” she said.
“I am scared, Karian,” he said, and she didn’t bother to correct him. “I never gave my life much thought, but I never expected it would end like this.”
She hushed him and shook her head; her suspicions that he was young for one of his kind were confirmed. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. Death isn’t the end, it's just a new beginning,” she said. He met her gaze as e
venly as he could, his dying eyes full of questions. “I’ve been dead before, Makauric. It’s scary to pass, but when you do…it’s beautiful. Like all the cares in the world fall away and you’re left in its naked beauty.”
The priest watched her intently but did not interrupt, and the brys squeezed her hand as tightly as he could. “Do I go to Kaelariel, though he was not my maker?” he asked.
Kari smiled. “I believe so. You’ve been a good friend, and gave your life for someone else’s cause. There’s reward in that, I promise you,” she said. Kari leaned down and kissed him lightly on the side of his snout as his eyes closed and his breathing became even shallower. “And I will remember you, Makauric: you will not go quietly into the night.”
“Go in peace,” the priest intoned, and Makauric’s last breath came forth in a quiet sigh.
Kari turned and walked away, and she sat on a stone bench a few feet away and hung her head in her hands. Away from Erik’s judgmental gaze, she let herself cry for a few minutes to let the emotions play themselves out. She was vaguely aware of the priest issuing orders to his acolytes to clean the body and the altar as much as possible, and she came to attention when the priest sat beside her and put his hand comfortingly on her shoulder.
“Are you all right?” he asked when she looked at him.
Kari blew out a long sigh to further calm herself, and when she looked down to her black hands, still covered with the now-dried blood of the brys, she imagined her face was, too. “I never thought...I’d get attached to one of them,” she said, staring at Makauric’s body rather than the priest. “I’ve been hunting his kind for most of my life, I fought against them for eight years in the Apocalypse; Makauric was the first one that’s given me pause.”
She finally turned to meet the man’s chestnut eyes. “I’m Karian Vanador, Shield of the Heavens, by Zalkar’s grace,” she introduced herself.
The priest shook her hand; his was also covered in the drying blood of the demon. “I am Samuel Tirar, ranking priest of Kaelariel here on Tsalbrin, though I am not very high up in the hierarchy across the world,” he said. He gestured toward the dead brys. “Would you care to explain what happened?”
Kari braced her elbows on her knees, leaned forward, and let out a sigh. Samuel touched her shoulder lightly and told her to take her time, and the acolytes brought bowls of water for the two to wash their hands and faces. Kari cleaned off Makauric’s blood and Samuel did the same, and once she finished Kari rose to her feet and approached the body of her friend. She touched his face gently and felt the chill already spreading through his normally warm flesh. She looked around the temple to clear her thoughts.
The décor was not at all what she expected: the white walls were accentuated with black drapes and tapestries depicting various scenes from Kaelariel’s past. Most prominent was one of Kaelariel swearing brotherhood to Erijinkor, which marked the turning of the guardian demons to the service of the pantheon. Its make was intricate and intriguing, but Kari realized she had little time to indulge herself in the deity’s past: there was no avoiding talking about Makauric. She glanced toward the three altars, one set at each major cardinal direction save the one on the side of the main entryway, and the stone benches that fronted each of them. The room was lighted by braziers, with torches on some of the simple columns, and the air was warm and quiet.
“Sorry to have made such a mess in your lord’s house,” Kari said, glancing down at the pooled blood at the base of the altar. She knew she was stalling, but even being mated to Grakin, she felt uncomfortable in the temple of the lord of serilian demons, given her profession.
“This is not our lord’s house. It is a gathering place for giving thanks, and Kaelariel would be touched to see such a display by a demonhunter, regardless of the mess,” Samuel said as he approached. He stood across the altar from Kari and regarded the dead brys for only a moment before his eyes met hers. “What happened?”
Kari blew out another calming sigh. “My partner and I were assigned to find and kill a demon - an underworld demon - somewhere on the island,” she said. “We landed in Riverport when we arrived and headed into the rainforest, but we got lost pretty quickly. This brys, Makauric, found us and offered to guide us to a nearby village of czarikk, and eventually to the lair of the demon itself. Once we killed it, we headed here to meet with my partner’s siblings and a couple of other companions, and Makauric agreed to accompany us to help with our other task. But when we got to the gate, the guards shot him without question...they didn’t even seem to care that he was walking between two demonhunters and showed no signs of aggression. I thought I could protect him; he trusted me, and I failed him.”
Samuel touched her hand as it lay on Makauric’s chest. “You did what you could,” he said. “Even the brys expected no more. We will take care of the body; go see to your partner;.”
Kari growled. “To hell with him,” she snarled, and she returned to the bench. “You serve Kaelariel; can you tell me why this brys would have helped us in the first place? My partner believed he would have betrayed or harmed us at some point, but I’ve been dealing with his kind for many years, and they’ve never been known for subtlety or fancy schemes.”
The priest came over to sit beside her again. “Many things have changed even since the end of the War. Kaelariel is – in appearance, at least – a serilis-rir,” Samuel said, and though the term serilis-rir piqued Kari’s interest, she didn’t interrupt. “He has taken those that remain under his wing as his people. With Seril’s death, the malignant will that sustained the lesser of the serilis-rir – the solas and the kryons – was severed, and they lived no more. The stronger types, however – the corlypsi, brys, elites, and guardians – survived her passing, as they relied less on her power to sustain their life force than their lesser cousins. As a demonhunter, I assume you already knew that the elite and guardian demons broke free of the Devil Queen’s will long before the Apocalypse?”
Kari nodded. “If I’m not mistaken, it was shortly after Kaelariel’s rise to power as lord of demons,” she said. She remembered as much from the years shortly before her own death, though such had not been the case when she attended the Academy. Kaelariel was born seven years after Kari, and his rise to power had only shortly preceded her death. When he ascended, he wrested control of much of the Devil Queen’s army from her, and subsequently used it to fight against her in the Fifth Demon War and the Apocalypse.
Samuel nodded. “More or less. Once Seril was destroyed at the War’s end, the others were also freed of her will. Though the corlypsi remain savage, cowardly, and stupid, the brys are much more intelligent and cunning. While many of the serilis-rir have been fighting against the mortals or their own kind for too long to ever change their ways, some have and continue to do so. It would seem that Makauric was one such brys.”
“I think he was still just a child, if such a thing is possible. He seemed young and was a little, eh, underdeveloped when I saw him nude,” she said slowly.
The priest regarded her curiously, and Kari wondered what he was thinking. “It seems you may have been closer to him than you thought,” Samuel said. “If Makauric showed himself to you, then he found you attractive and was trying to see if you felt the same. As for being underdeveloped, brys are all like that. Their kind has not been on this island for long or in large numbers. It is entirely possible that he was only a ‘child’ by our reckoning, but the serilis-rir are not created as children. They are created whole at adulthood, with much of Seril’s knowledge already imprinted upon them so that they are prepared to serve her immediately. It is tragic that he would be killed so young, but it is not as though he died a child.”
“I understand,” she said absently, still at a loss over Makauric being attracted to her. “On our way here I heard others call the serilian demons serilis-rir. Why do you call them that?”
His stare drifted away from her for a moment. “This may be difficult for you to hear, especially being a demonhunter, Karian,” he s
aid.
“Kari,” she interrupted, and his brows arched. “My friends call me Kari.”
Samuel smiled. “Very well then, Kari,” he said. “As I was going to say, it will likely be hard for you to believe, but the serilis-rir are not so different from your kind as you may think. Though they were created by Seril, the Devil Queen created them in a similar image to your lord – all, of course, but the solas, who were intended to be more beastial.”
Kari considered his words for a few moments. “It’s not that hard to believe, really. They can breed with us, and other than the wings and the immunity to fire…,” she said. “And the others that called them serilis-rir referred to the half-demons as serilian-rir.”
Samuel nodded. “The only other major difference would be the simple fact that Seril never created females for their kind,” he said. “We have long believed this was so that the two races would become one over time, after she won. It was not because she was unable to do so, however, as Kaelariel was once able to create a female serilis-rir.”
She regarded him with surprise. “He did? I had no idea.”
The priest nodded. “He created only one, and it is a long and sad tale,” he said. “Our lord has never created another, and seems to have no intention of doing so again. Nevertheless, they are no more or less people than you – or your partner, regardless of what he may think.”
“I don’t understand him,” she said, and she shook her head and looked down at her hands. “I thought he’d be more tolerant, given he’s half-demon himself.”
“His attitude is very common among serilian-rir. For many generations they have been persecuted outcasts, and they place the blame on Seril and their fathers as much as on the rest of society. I cannot say I know him, but I think there is much in your partner’s heart that he has yet to come to terms with, and killing demons acts as an outlet for him,” Samuel explained.
“Makes sense,” Kari said.
“Kaelariel is working to integrate his people, as it were, into mortal society, but this is something that will take many, many years. As I said, many of them have fought against mortals for so long that they will never acquiesce to their lord’s wishes no matter how much he assures them. Others will come out slowly, moving into towns like Awlinscar’s village, learning to live among mortals,” he explained, but he paused when Kari glanced at him quizzically. “I assume you know of Awlinscar, the lord of the elite demons; he established a village many years ago where mortals and serilis-rir are both welcome to live together. And indeed, they have – and peacefully – for as long as he has been in charge of it. It is his hope – and that of my lord – that over time the serilis-rir may learn to coexist with our peoples in peace. But some will not, and will instead go to another place that was prepared for them.”
