Jin Amaris is alive.
As of this day, I have received approval from Khavah Dantò, Divine Matriarch of the Glory Beyond and Imperial Guardian of Caeli, to schedule a demarcation event to separate the soul fragments of Aria Jinni from Jin Amaris’s soul.
In order for this to be successful, it is imperative that anyone with any emotional connection to Jin Amaris is kept from Caeli. We have faith that you will cooperate in keeping your captains and yourself from Caeli for the time being. We also have faith that you will not assist Aiden Choi in any means or methods in getting back to Elysian.
We will contact you when it is safe to come home.
Godspeed, Kithlish,
Bon Baji, Interim Leader of The Above.
CHAPTER ONE
Elysian Bay Bridge
Time: Unknown
“Do you believe that I would hurt you?”
Jin’s chest heaved. She sucked in air, large inhales and dry agonizing gulps that burned her throat as she fought to catch her breath. It hurt to breathe. She bent over, her hands slapping to her knees and her fingers shaking as they clutched her pants between them. She tried to fight her bone soaking exhaustion and failed. Her legs felt like rubber. Her eyes stung. Her skin simmered.
It was sweltering, the kind of heat that made Jin feel like she was inside of an oven. Sweat drenched her brow and rolled down her temples and over her forehead, right into her eyes, causing her to squint and blink. The only relief came when the wind blew across the water, bringing a cool breeze with it. Yet, the air was heavy with smoke and ash, so the same breeze that cooled her down, choked her.
They were standing on the bridge–the one that connected Au Courant to Elysian, the one Rooke was so excited for them to see their first days here. It had long been abandoned, leaving nothing but an empty stretch of concrete and asphalt. Jin peered over the concrete barrier and towards the city of Elysian. The people in the city went along as if nothing was wrong–vehicles zoomed up and down the street and signs buzzed with lights and sounds. A boat approached the harbor and laborers scuttled to the pier in preparation. Some kind of aircraft zipped across the sky. It was the picture of a normal day.
It was not normal! It was a lot of things but it was not normal! How could they not see? How could they go about their day without seeing the smoke and the fire and debris? How could they not see the gaping hole in the bridge that prevented Jin’s escape?
She shifted her gaze from the city to the figure in front of her, her brown eyes narrowing to a point. Billows of smoke rose and drifted between the two of them, at times concealing the other person’s visage.
That didn’t matter. She knew who the person was without knowing why she knew. She remembered the soft lines of her face, the hue of her brown skin, the sound of her voice, the color in her eyes.
She remembered her name.
Aria.
She was dressed in antiquated clothing, something akin to a warrior goddess. It damn sure didn’t look like it belonged in Elysian. Her shoulders were bare and a fitted, sleeveless, deep blue tunic wrapped around her torso and draped down over her legs like gonfalon flag. A tailcoat of the same color was there too, but Jin had only seen it in quick flashes, and even then, she’d been too…busy to pay attention to the detail. Stitched into it was the vestige of a phoenix and a lion in gold, like a coat of arms or a badge of honor or some silly shit that meant absolutely nothing at the moment. Around her waist were three sashes–a dark red, a gold, and a black one–that hung down her side, almost to her knees. Two leather straps ran across the bodice, securing a sheath across her back, and another piece of leather held back long, back-sweeping locks that huddled around her nape and in between her shoulders like a tapestry of brown and black rope.
Loose fitting harem pants were stuffed into tall brown leather boots and razor-sharp golden bracers were on her arms. All of it was strange, weird, alien…but it was the glowing pendant around the umber column of her neck that stood out as the most extrinsic. It echoed faintly in the back of her mind, a dream she’d once had, one where she’d seen a sword plunge through Aria’s back and–
“I asked you a question,” Aria repeated, her voice, clear and demanding, slicing through Jin’s thoughts like razor wire. She brought her sword down and the movement cleared the smoke and ash away in a whirl of grey and black. “Do you believe that I would hurt you?”
Jin’s eyes flickered to the sword before traveling up Aria’s sword arm. Thick black tribal tattoos looked back at her, peeking behind the dangerous metal of her bracers, almost intimidating her into silence. Almost. Without thinking, Jin straightened and it cost her. A sharp searing pain ripped across her chest and she clutched at it as if the desperation to make the pain disappear would bend it to her will. “Why are you asking me a question you already know the answer to?” she wheezed. “Look at me!” She pulled her hand away from her chest and it came back red. “I am hurt!”
“I didn’t do that to you.”
“I don’t care! It still hurts! You said you would protect me! Key and Tahir and Rooke, all of you said you would protect me! And in the end, it was your kind who did this to me!”
Aria tilted her head as if she were studying Jin, as if Jin were not wounded, as if Jin had time for her to be an inquisitive ass. “So, you’re tired of being misled,” she stated. “Big deal,” she sneered. “Grow up.” Another billow of smoke passed over Aria, obscuring her from sight and for a moment, Jin wanted her to be swept up in it and carried off. Disappear.
“Shut up!” Jin gasped, the will to stay upright taking more energy than she had. Of course, she was tired of being lied to! Everyone last one of them had been lying to her since this whole ordeal started and every time they told a lie, she just so happened to die!
“Do you want me to shut up,” Aria mocked, a hand on her hip, “or do you want me to tell you the truth?”
Jin growled because she didn’t want anything! She wanted to go home!
“Make up your damn mind. I don’t have the time for this! Neither of us do! It’s not like I’m asking you a hard question!” Aria lifted the sword at her side, aiming it at Jin from across the bridge, the black blade gleaming. Her tattoos shimmered gold. “Take your pick. The hard truth or momentary peace. Both will cost you. One will end up with you dead.”
Jin rolled her eyes. Aria had been making that same threat for the last…well, Jin didn’t know how long they’d been on the bridge. She didn’t understand how time worked here. Jin hadn’t given Aria the answer she was looking for yet and every time that she gave the wrong one, Aria would attack her until Jin was out of breath and out of energy. She couldn’t decide if this or what she’d left in the Dome was worse.
The pain flashed and pulsed again, horribly. The warmth she felt was a spreading splash of vibrant red. The tip dripped rivulets of blood into the lake.
“W-why?” she asked. She blinked at Ahn through the spots as white fogged her mind.
“To find out the truth, Jin.” Ahn stood there, frowning. She didn’t know why and she didn’t care. Her eyes fluttered as she lost her grip on the world. She couldn’t hear anything.
The truth.
Jin remembered Aria staring down at her as if she was some sort of salvation, a path to another world, a guide to the peace she hadn’t experienced since she set foot in Caeli.
Bullshit.
The only thing Aria had given her was the spear that laid discarded at her side and a chance. At what? Who knew? Aria wouldn’t tell her.
“Go to hell,” Jin rasped, her mouth curling in contempt.
“Fine,” Aria spat, and Jin felt her stomach churn. She wiped the sweat from her upper lip and prepared herself for another attack by picking up the spear.
Aria took off, dragging her sword across the ground, leaving a shower of sparks in her wake. Jin felt a pressure crash into her, oppressive and heavy, weighing her down. Jin tried to follow Aria, the sparks zigzagging across the bridge, debris flying left and right like she was a hurricane. Then ev
erything stopped–the scrrrrrrrrrr sound of metal against pavement, the flare and flash of Aria’s sword, the sound of her boots slapping against the ground. It all stopped. Then Aria…disappeared.
Jin felt panic welling up inside of her as her head jerked left and then right. Chancing it, she looked behind her but saw nothing, just the empty road that led to Caeli, a place that would not help her.
“Where are you?” she muttered.
Aria reappeared with a speed too quick to be real in Jin’s head. The woman stormed towards her out of the smoke, her teeth bared like a lioness. Jin jumped back into a defensive stance with an ease that came with experiencing the same thing over and over and over again.
Jin was out of energy, she was in pain, dizzy with it, and she was out of the will to fight, especially considering she didn’t know why she was fighting. “You said you wouldn’t hurt me!” Jin yelled as her ankle gave way and she fell to a knee.
Aria didn’t stop. “I’m not going to if you defend yourself! I am not your enemy!”
“Not my enemy?” Jin snarled. “If you are not going to hurt me, why do I need to defend myself?”
“Because your true enemy will hurt you. They will hurt you, Jin, and I can’t take you with me, I can’t save you. I have to leave you and you will have to find your own way! Raise your weapon. Please!” A look crossed Aria’s face and for a moment, Jin felt Aria’s desperation. Tasted it. Breathed it. Could run her hands across it if she had the energy to. It felt like the smooth edges of a void, dark, bottomless and unafraid to gobble up anything that fell in its gaping ravenous maw.
She didn’t understand how a woman as fearless as Aria could feel something so black and consuming. Jin’s shoulders deflated as she tried to summon the energy. “You’re not making any sense. Please stop,” she begged. “I don’t–I don’t want to fight you anymore.”
Aria’s lips curled into a snarl and the desperation was replaced by a look of frustration and disappointment. “I’m giving you a chance! Why won’t you take it?” she shouted.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“Damn it, Jin! Wrong answer!” Aria raised her sword higher, her face stone with conviction. She took one step, two, before she was leaping through the air, her sword singing. Jin had just enough energy to raise her spear to block Aria’s first swing. Metal collided against metal and the vibration ran up Jin’s arm. She winced. Aria pushed forward, pressing her weapon down.
“Stop being weak! If you live amongst lions, you have to act like a lion!”
Jin’s heartbeat thudded in her neck and her blood boiled. She recognized the emotion–anger.
“This is stupid!” she roared in Aria’s face. “The shortest distance to a destination is a straight line. Not a hop, skip and a goddamn jump around the obvious. It’s a straight line! If you want me to tell you something, asking me a straight question might help, you freak! But I’m not about to die, again, because you want to complicate common damn sense!”
The silence stretched long before them as Aria studied her. Jin’s arms shook with the effort to keep the crazy woman back. Then, without rhyme or reason, the pressure lifted, dissipating like windblown dandelions and the air became light again. Aria eased out of her unrelenting press, shoving off Jin’s spear and bouncing back a step or two before sheathing her sword. Then she smiled and Jin noticed the differences between them. Aria’s smile was more of a smirk, always lifting higher on one end than the other. Her eyes didn’t twinkle–they did something funny, something that made you feel like she knew something you didn’t, that she and the universe had been privy to a joke that you were left out of.
“I hate fighting with swords,” Aria said with a simplicity that did not align with the sheer madness of the situation. “It’s something in the way you have to grip them that annoys me. I’m good with them, don’t get me wrong. Really good, but spears are more my thing. That spear, actually,” she said, pointing to the one in Jin’s hands.
Jin blinked, her chest tight with exertion. “W–what?”
“It was a lesson. You don’t have to take what is given to you. It’s okay to demand and to fight for your right to exist. Remember that.”
The spear fell to Jin’s side as if it weighed a hundred pounds. “You mean me asking you to make sense…is fighting?”
“Questions like that are. ‘Why are you doing this?’ ‘Why can’t it be this way?’ ‘Why is this happening?’ ‘How can I change fate?’ Demanding answers that are connected to your survival will always be considered fighting. I figured you wanted answers because you kept going on and on and on about it and oh,” she squatted low, peering at Jin’s chest. “We should do something about that.”
Jin looked down. “Thanks, I was only dying,” she snapped.
Aria tsked. “Oh, sweet cub. That’s subjective.”
“What is? Dying?”
“Everything,” she stated. “Hold still. Later on, you’ll have to figure this out for yourself. I’m not the best healer nor do I want to bandage you up every time you get a boo-boo.”
“I have no idea who you are or what you do or why you’re so hellbent on stalking me. All I know is that you keep showing up and every time you do,” Jin glanced down, “this happens.”
Aria rolled her eyes–light brown eyes. Jin had darker eyes; a deep brown that Aiden had once said reminded him of the beans on a carob tree. “Holding still means you not talking,” she grumbled. Aria moved closer, placing her hand on Jin’s chest. “Machen path, 2nd disciple,” she muttered. There was a slight glow from the ends of her hands and it reminded her of Key.
“You’re an angel,” Jin pointed out, her tone monotone. Not that it shouldn’t have been very obvious to her from the beginning but there had been a lot of things that short-circuited Jin’s thought process when it came to Aria. Like a sword flying at her face.
Aria’s hands stopped glowing and Jin realized the pain in her chest was gone. She looked down, peeling her blood-stained white shirt back. With stark fascination, she watched as the bloody cut grew smaller and her skin began knitting itself together.
“Wow,” she whispered.
“There would be a bit of disorientation with that, but I’m not a conglo so you should be lucid as a lark,” Aria said, winking and hauling Jin to her feet.
“Conglo?”
Aria canted back and forth from her heels to the balls of her feet. The look on her face suggested she was thinking of…something. “Ah, what word did the kids use? A…halfly?”
The word registered, although the term left an unfamiliar and unsatisfying taste in the back of her mouth. “You mean you’re not a Mutare.”
“Well, would ya look at that? Sometimes I think you’re an idiot and by sometimes I mean most of the time, and then you go and prove me wrong, Jin Amaris! You are correct. I’m full-blooded.” Aria bent low, grabbed the spear and without explanation, chucked it into the air. It fell over the bridge in an arc of red, gold and black. “You won’t need that here. It’ll find you again.”
Jin stared at where the spear once was. “How am I supposed to fight without a weapon?”
“Yeah, because you were doing such a swell job when you had it,” Aria giggle-snorted and Jin was a tad bit disgusted. “Plus, we’ll have visitors soon and I don’t want you to get in the way thinking you can stop what’s going to happen. You can’t. We aren’t in a timeline that’s in play.”
Jin squinted at her. “A timeline in play?”
“Yep. There is no dependence on conditions here, no chess moves to make, no stars to realign. It’s fixed–this,” she waved around, “is a non-linear system of sorts.”
“Oh.” Jin’s frowned deepened. “Math.” If she never heard that word again it would be much too soon.
Aria shrugged. “Whatever you want to call it.” She walked to the side of the bridge and took a seat on the rail, swinging around until her feet were dangling off the side. “Caeli is a special place. A place that I love, a place that I woul
d die for…have died for. It's flawed, like any society, but it’s worth everything we fight for.”
“So you lived here?” Jin asked, pointing towards the city.
“Here? Jannah, no! I hate Elysian. All of this metal and no.” Her mouth was pinched as she shook her head. “It’s just too cold to me, too impersonal. Aeon Terra is my home.”
Jin didn’t know what an Aeon Terra was. “Are you one of those Root Watcher people?”
“Nope,” Aria said, popping the p, which was sort of amusing for a homicidal maniac. “I was not one of the originals. I came later at the request of my cousin and made the decision to stay. There was something…attractive about the way they did things. You know, the whole obsession with humans. And it is an obsession, almost a fetish but not in a grotesque way. It’s just…clingy?” She scrunched her nose as if she would revisit that thought later. “Don’t get me wrong, I get it. Humans, by design, are decidedly stupid and very emotional and rash and watching you stumble all about is a lot more interesting than sitting around with those pompous, overly self-important, lazy asses up there,” she finished, nodding upwards toward the sky.
Jin’s brows dipped. “I’m sure there is a compliment somewhere in there.”
“It is. I think very highly of humans. Even half ones! I mated one, adopted one–”
Jin held her hand up. “Hold it. You’re still making it sound like we’re…Tamagotchis or Furbies or something.”
“What’s a Tama…Tamagoochi?”
Jin opened her mouth to explain and then decided it wasn’t worth it.
“The point is you guys aren’t so bad once you get to know a few of you. Dad hated the fact I worked down here. He always told me I should be a proper noble, but,” Aria snorted, “nothing about me is a proper noble. I hated when he did that. ‘Come home, Aria. Be the distinguished Eldest Miss of the Eliyah clan, Aria. Join Seraphim, Aria.’ I wish I could tell him to his face how stupid–”
Jin held up her hand again, interrupting. “So do angels have like a…separate heaven they go to or are you like stuck here and can’t get to heaven? Is this…purgatory?”
The Halo of Amaris Page 34
