The young Daed turned to him his glazed over eyes darting back and forth in panic. The other caught him by the shoulders and stared at him.
“Yana amin?” the young Daed asked with an incredible softness to his voice. His mind was blank, completely empty of thought and being and knowledge.
The other recoiled at his words. Laurelin laughed out loud as the other cast around for a way to explain. The young Daed didn’t know who he was.
Because the Flame made him forget.
***
Light & Spark
Companion to Vulture
***
Author’s Note
By now I hope you have read the soul crushing end of Vulture, the third installment of The Ferryman & The Flame Series. If not, you need to go read Vulture stat before devouring these novellas. If your heart is already broken then you might understand why there are two novellas here that explain roughly what happened next. I’m sorry. These novellas are dark, esoteric and largely unfair for both Kaliel and Krishani.
It’s important that you know that Kaliel and Krishani did not die at the end of Vulture, but they transformed into things worse than death. These are their worst nightmares come true, these novellas are a mere pinprick in an ocean of thousands of years they spent apart from one another. If you think it’s easy to write something so horrifying, you’d be wrong. My companion song for these novellas was Sunrise by Lonesome Animals, an incredibly beautiful and depressing song.
I hope these novellas assuage some of the pain I made you feel at the end of Vulture, and again, I am sorry.
***
Chapter 1
She was in the dark for a long time, a tangible, slick darkness that made her weightless. Cold lived in her bones, turned her blood frozen and stole her breath.
She didn’t fight.
Not when footsteps crunched the snow, not when ice turned to metal and everything she used to be became small and insignificant. She regarded the sky—a tumultuously white and gray churning above her, as a clamp came over the small contraption and she felt snuffed from existence.
Juddering through the expanse of time and space inside a tiny golden pocket watch was disorientating. Kaliel found herself ticking out the beat as though it were her own nonexistent heart—the only thing left to comfort her in her non-corporeal capacity. The steady rhythm of the watch only amplified all the grief of her betrayal, something she couldn’t change if she wanted to. Part of her felt like the blizzard was far away, ice stretching across rocky surfaces of land, a full onslaught of retaliation against her. The silent sonic boom she had created before being stuffed into a home of metal made it a hundred times worse, took a hundred thousand more lives, erased every living thing from one end of Terra to the other.
She was only trying to hold onto the boy she destroyed.
She felt like a misfired gun shot at close range. She was the aftermath of a nuclear bomb and whether or not the cold struck the wind out of lungs, the wave of pure Amethyst Flame was sure to rot bodies from the inside out. Kaliel couldn’t hide it anymore; she couldn’t deny it or run from it or change it or pretend it wasn’t true.
She was the enemy.
Whoever had affixed her to the small metal prison lived on the wind and in futuristic dark spaces and in places that were so silent she wondered if sound existed. She was interrupted periodically by the splash of rain on stone, the pound of hooves through trees, the unfamiliar babble of rubber on concrete, crackle of fire and the din of voices speaking all at once. She felt drowned by their acidic tones and their bellowing grunts, the idea of shrinking into the contraption effervescent against the braying noise around her.
Muffled voices cut out by scuffles between her captor and their opponents ensued, the pocket watch jostling, making Kaliel dizzy. She wanted to reveal herself and make the fighting stop but the memory of Cassareece’s syrupy sweet voice forced Kaliel into the undertow. She was an unnatural thing. She heard the contact of limbs on limbs, sword against sword, grunts and guffaws of a fistfight. There were words but Kaliel couldn’t make them out, spoken in some language she hadn’t been old enough to learn. That was the worst of it. This wasn’t the first time darkness ensnared her in its heavy arms. There was a time when she found the sky behind a wall of liquid fire, and as she hit the horizon, her essence winked away from the land, drawn into the safety of comforting arms and velvet cushions. The time alone had been excruciating until Krishani opened the box and unable to speak she glowed. He was always home—she would always belong to him, but he was dead—destroyed and there were no rocks heavy enough to crush her.
The scuffle came to some dead halt as a voice Kaliel did understand cut through the wind.
“High … King … Tor?”
Kaliel’s heart would have stopped if she had one. She waited with bated breath for the villain to speak again but there was a snickering through a crowd, followed by the sweeping of something across grass, like hands feathering fingers through tall strands. Kaliel imagined her captor standing ramrod straight as the smell of the Valtanyana came closer. Kaliel hadn’t met this one, but the way his body clicked in awkward sequences made Kaliel think of him as an insect.
“Zion,” Tor sneered, seeming completely unruffled.
Tor.
Kaliel sunk. She didn’t realize that of all those who could have stuffed her into a pocket watch it would have been Tor. The High King of her battered youth, the very king she should have served in a war against the Valtanyana. The First Era was a fuzzy string at the edge of her essence and while she tried to pull it closer all she succeeded in doing was unraveling herself more until it was as though she was locked in her own self created spider’s web. Tor should have hated her for the betrayal. He shouldn’t have found her—a last tiny relic—all hope of shoving the Valtanyana back into their deadly prisons dashed. She heard Tor gulp as the putrid scent of Zion hit her.
“You must forgive us, Toraque for being very confused,” Zion began, an enchanting lilt to his melodic, clicking voice. “Is it truly necessary for us to fight for what is rightfully ours?”
Tor took a step back, and Kaliel felt his hand close around the little chamber she was in. So he knew as well as she did what they wanted most. She couldn’t blame them, in a single breath she decimated everything on Terra and for that there was no better punishment than shame and consciousness. Thousands of microscopic quiet hours to relive the look in Krishani’s eyes, the feel of his thumb brushing her cheek, his lips on hers as the Vultures folded him into their ranks.
“You’re not here to negotiate,” Tor spat. Kaliel couldn’t help but think Tor was all brawn and muscle, something she hadn’t really thought of before. She used to believe he was a benevolent leader, regal and noble. The High King Tor in all the stories was a gentle creature, bound to the land. He instigated the Lands of Peace movement, cared for every Lord and Lady under his protection. Kaliel couldn’t help but scoff at the tales of grandeur that followed this scrapper. Tor was nothing but a coot, well dressed and clever.
The snickers resumed throughout what Kaliel sensed to be the others, nine resilient, thoroughbred members of the Valtanyana, the original tyrannical and insane rulers of the Lands Across the Stars. Around them were the staccato bursts of squeaky laughter that Kaliel didn’t recognize. Creatures from the Lands of Beasts maybe, Kaliel couldn’t make out what they were, but their laughter filled her with dread, as though they were already celebrating their victory.
Zion sniggered, a grotesque kind of sniffling and slurping sound that sent shudders through Kaliel. “No, I’m impartial to the capture and kill method.”
Kaliel felt cold on the inside, the kind she couldn’t ignore until it wore off on its own. Tor flinched backwards and she felt them behind her, the laughing beasts nipping near the pocket where Tor concealed her.
“Another time perhaps,” Tor said, and she felt him bend over in a cordial bow before the dizzying sensation hit her and they catapulted through time and space aimlessly afoot in all the in between
places Kaliel was unfamiliar with.
Kaliel held onto the shards of what Cassareece had said. She couldn’t stop them from awakening, couldn’t stop them from hunting Tor, but she could take herself out of the equation. Tor must have thought he’d sweep in, whisk her away to become his champion. She never thought long and hard about why Crestaos had come for her, and why Tor didn’t. Perhaps he was waiting for her to pledge her allegiance to him, appear on the battlefield at the height of the war and help him as she once did.
Make the stars fall a second time.
This time she brought the apocalypse upon herself. She let it worry itself into her bones and let it destroy all the things she loved. Tor lived on the other side of the frozen tundra she caused and not once had he spoken to her. Not when he put her in the watch and not when he traveled through the darkest spaces between the Lands Across the Stars. It took her awhile to realize why a man of his stature, a man who could do unthinkably heroic things would refuse to speak to her, and it was with undiluted clarity that she understood.
It wasn’t her betrayal.
It wasn’t the war.
Tor thought she couldn’t feel, think, see, hear, or act.
He thought she was unconscious.
She wasn’t—and harrowingly—she was able to do one thing.
Watch.
Rain on slick stone, honking but not from birds, the squish and squeak of leather, footsteps clacking up wooden steps, a hollow feeling to the tap, tap, tap, as a fist hit wood. Startled gasp, crackling flames and the smell of hazelnut. Kaliel warmed at the thought of safe places and Avristar, roasted hazelnuts in a cast iron pan, wrestling them open with slim, nimble fingers. The urge to gasp, choke, vomit and cry hit her, but she tamped it down as a voice left them and Tor set the pocket watch on a flat surface. In Kaliel’s mind it was a tree stump, but it could have been anything. The face fell open and light poured in, an ivory ceiling speckled with odd little bumps and winks of silver. She couldn’t see anything else, and Tor’s ability to pace was like that of a mad man’s.
She heard his footsteps move to the door and back again, ensuring they were in fact very alone. His face loomed over parts of the pocket watch, a silver gray blur against the peripheral of the curved edges.
“I’m sorry,” Tor began. He sounded truly distrait, sincere and fragile. The Tor she thought she knew was never fragile. She went to speak but he barreled on. “I shouldn’t have listened to Avristar—to the Great Hall. I shouldn’t have granted their demand.”
What demand? Kaliel felt like she had been set upon the dance floor and spun too many times by too many partners and left with a dizzying sense of perception. She tried to let out a pip but it seemed Tor didn’t acknowledge her.
He sighed. “I never thought you’d do it again, Aria. And if you did I thought it would be as it was in the First Era. Victory. I thought you’d destroy the Valtanyana once and for all.”
He paced and she felt sick, the urge so strong she thought there was bile in her essence. There was of course nothing. She was all Amethyst Flame and nothing more, a prisoner to High King Tor, the failure of all the Lands Across the Stars and murderer to her soul mate. Thinking about Krishani made it seem like swords were stabbing her clean through, and she spasmed at the feeling, darkness covering her even before the lid of the pocket watch was pushed shut. She wanted death, or the epitome of something like death. She wanted to be erased because how could Tor allow something as volatile as her to exist?
He had to find a way to destroy her.
“I’ll fix you.”
No.
Kaliel heard his scarce whisper and if she could have blanched she would have. He couldn’t have said it, not in any sane capacity would he have wanted to help her. She hurt him, just as much as she hurt everyone else. He couldn’t sit in his fortress and wait for them to attack. He had to disappear and he had to destroy her. That was the only surefire way the Valtanyana would never get what they wanted from her. She was too dangerous, too unstable, too melancholy and too willing to erase the Lands Across the Stars. She had to die—it was the only way to rid her of the weight on her chest, the memories flickering across her form, and the gnawing, stringent feeling.
Death in the snow was all she wanted.
To be lost and never found.
“I will fix you, Aria,” Tor said, his voice roped and thick. Her vision clicked in again, the defined line of his jaw covered in tiny gray scales and horns. He flexed his jaw as though determined, and she wanted to scream, bat her arms against his strong chest, cry and bray and beg him to kill her.
Kill me, kill me, kill me, kill me, she thought with as much strength as she could muster, all the while envisioning herself on the floor at his feet, a stark, helpless expression across her face.
Footsteps approached and like a fox he swiped the pocket watch off the smooth surface, stuffing it into his breast pocket. Kaliel listened to the labored beat of his breaths and the steady lub dub of his heart muscle as the ticking in the pocket watch rose to a crescendo. It cast a measuring stick over all the other sounds, from the startled young woman who entered the room and fainted, to the older woman apologizing and telling Tor he needed to leave because there were bobbies on the doorstep. Kaliel didn’t know what a bobby was, but she couldn’t protest and that jarring feeling returned as Tor transported for what seemed like the thousandth time since that sparkling snow covered day.
Fix her, he was going to fix her, and she wasn’t going to let him.
***
Chapter 2
There were so many hours to think about his lips on hers and the awful mistake she made. In the stark darkness there was little of anything but the steady ticking which patterned into a rhythm and dulled all other senses. She liked the raucous sounds around the pocket watch but Tor transported and traversed and traipsed and Kaliel got lost in all the footsteps and the heavy wind, rain, and battle cries around her. The Valtanyana weren’t going to let Tor escape the war—not this time.
They weren’t going to let him win.
And she couldn’t help him. All she knew was the pain in her heart and the steady need for the blade. Part of her wanted a body, fresh soft flesh she could cut and bloodlet. The idea of rivulets running down her arm was much nicer than the idea of starving in silence. She couldn’t exist this way. Tor left her somewhere for a long time, and she didn’t know where she was or what he was planning. How would he fix her? She didn’t have strength for consciousness and yet it was like a forever awake. She could be frozen and yet her mind would whir on, braying, cloying thoughts clogging her essence and making her heavy when she was weightless. Weightless and lethal.
Without a body she was nothing but a weapon, a broken weapon in need of repair. She waited, hearing a few clanks of metal on metal, not from a fight, this was different. Metal slid along metal, making it sharper and stronger. A hammer pounded out chinks, and fire sizzled whatever it was Tor was creating. Kaliel couldn’t describe the fear in her, an all consuming, petulant fear that rose from her center and moved outwards making her ripple and shake. She felt her aura extend around the pocket watch, and that’s when the face clicked open.
Tor’s leathery human face stared at her, stone-blue chips for eyes replaced gold lightning eyes and tan wrinkled skin replaced gray scales. Brown hair was pulled back into a ponytail and he smiled, showing off perfect rows of white teeth in place of the silver tongue. He moved out of her peripheral and she saw a crenellated ceiling above them that somewhat resembled a dome. She wished she could see more and before she had a chance to speak she felt a ripping, tearing sensation as Tor drew her out of the pocket watch and into an orb.
No, no, no, no, no, no, Kaliel thought as she was forced into a crystalline orb. It reminded her so much of the orbs the other Flames had occupied after the battle at Castle Tavesin. She traded those little orbs for something far worse than she ever expected. Krishani’s lips on hers had tasted like salt and in her final moments all she tasted was grit—like a mix
of sand and dirt. His earthy musk was dulled by snowflakes and curses. He was innocent—he never deserved that life, he never deserved her hate, he didn’t deserve to pay the price for her mistake.
Around her was a worktable, the orb bigger than Tor’s fist. He fit it into a metal holder in the center of the table. Faint sun slanted in through the broken jaundiced windows and Kaliel begged with everything in her to be destroyed. Blood may as well have been on her hands—she was impure, she was the weed, the weed, the weed.
Birds cawed as they flew over the shack and Tor’s footsteps retreated. Kaliel perceived everything around her despite the lack of eyes. The room was cast in an eerie amethyst glow, but there was a stone fireplace, and machinery she didn’t recognize. It was crowded with not nearly enough room to wend around the large items. She couldn’t make heads or tails of the tables with straps, the coffin shaped box with a layer of spikes inside it, the clockwork items with larger gears and cogs than she had wrapped herself around in the pocket watch. These were things Tor hadn’t put words to in conversations she had all but eavesdropped on. Across from her on a smaller table was a shiny golden thing, the only thing she understood in this land of pewter and steel.
Tor wasn’t the one to return but a shorn woman with black hair pulled into a bun at the nape of her neck marched into the room. She looked so funny with a mask over her mouth and round looking spectacles on her face. Kaliel hadn’t seen anyone wear anything so ridiculous. The woman bent a little to be at Kaliel’s level, apparently inspecting the orb. All Kaliel could think about was the woman’s eyes—bright, cornflower blue.
The woman seemed harmless, curious, and timid. She turned her back and Kaliel took in the woman’s stark white coat. The woman handled the pocket watch with care, holding it up and stroking the side of it thoughtfully. Those spectacles didn’t do her much good as she kept squinting. Kaliel wanted to say she was human only those slightly pointed ears and glass-like face wasn’t fooling her. Whoever the woman was she was fae.
Villains Page 18
