So, after we were done eating that afternoon, Avalon, Koren, Rebecca, Vanessa, Tristan, and I met with Aylen at the park. The rest of us were sitting on the grass, watching as the part-Reaper girl paced back-and-forth in front of us, looking more frazzled and unsure of herself than I had ever seen her.
I wasn’t sure why she was so nervous about us meeting her family. Did it have anything to do with the fact that she still chose to hide her true heritage? Most hybrids around here felt safe enough by now to reveal what they were. But Aylen was still posing as a normal Heretic student, despite the fact that she wasn’t actually a Heretic at all. Her power-gain abilities came from the Reaper side of her genetics, much as her crow form came from the other side. But we knew all that, so what would she be nervous about when it came to us meeting her family?
Avalon spoke up carefully. “Aylen, you know that we all have personal issues and traumatic secrets in our families. Whatever it is, no one’s going to hate you.”
I saw a brief smile cross the noble-looking girl’s face, as she raised her gaze to watch Sovereign glide across the top area of the domed environment. “Still, you’ll understand why I’m a bit… apprehensive once I tell you. Which I’ll do, just as soon as they get here.”
I started to ask who ‘they’ were, but the other girl’s timing was pretty perfect, as two figures came into view just then, approaching us.
“Professor Dare?” Vanessa started, “and… umm, Guinevere?”
“Just Gwen is fine,” the woman who had posed as Harper through almost all of last year replied. It was still seriously weird to look at her. She was still Harper, just older, a woman who appeared to be in her twenties rather than a teen girl. The pigtails I had always associated with her were now a pair of tight braids that fell down her back. The hair that had been dyed pink was now almost fully brownish-blonde, with just a little hint of pink in the braids that helped me see more of Harper.
Dare was looking curiously to Aylen. “Gabriel is a bit busy right now, but he said he will meet us tonight.”
I blinked at that. “Wait, as in Gabriel Prosser? Okay, what’s going on? Now you want Professor Dare, Gwen, and Prosser to come with us to this dinner?”
Tristan’s head bobbed quickly as he rubbed the head of Bobbi-Bobbi, who was draped over his shoulders. “Yeah, what’s with bringing the army along? Are your moms really that terrifying to guests?”
The two women looked just as curious, even if they didn’t say anything. I had the feeling they wanted to know what the deal was as much as the rest of us. Which made me wonder what she’d said to them in the first place about coming to this thing.
For a moment, Aylen didn’t say anything. She just took in a breath before looking to the adults. “Could we get a privacy bubble, please? I mean a really good one. It’s important.”
Whatever doubts they may or may not have had, Dare and Gwen didn’t hesitate to take her seriously. Both formed layered privacy spells, which I had no doubt would be basically impossible for anyone to eavesdrop through. Between the two of them, that was a hell of a lot of power put to making certain that whatever Aylen was about to say stayed between us.
Still, she didn’t speak right away. The girl stood there, hands clenching and unclenching a couple times. She stared at the ground, as though working herself up to this. No one moved or tried to rush her. We all wanted to know what was going on, but it had to come out in her own time, even if I couldn’t stop my mind from racing about what she could be about to tell us. I had a lot of wild thoughts. What if one of her mothers was related to Fossor? What if she was a clone of Litonya? What if she knew where Arthur was? What if she was Arthur?
Now I was just getting silly. But my mind wouldn’t stop racing with various wild thoughts about what this might be about. After the year that we had just been through, this really could have been absolutely anything.
Finally, Aylen let out a long breath and spoke. “What I’m about to tell you is a really, really big secret. And when I tell you, you’re probably going to freak out a little bit. Or a lot. But I really need you to keep listening, please. I need you to hear all of it before you start losing your minds too much. I just need you to know that my family and I would never hurt anyone who didn’t deserve it. My grandfather, he’s… different, and you’re going to have to let me explain that.”
Dare took a few steps that way, her voice gentle. “I know you’re nervous, Aylen. But it’s okay, we’re going to listen, I promise.”
As if she was ripping off a particularly stubborn and painful Band-Aid, Aylen looked up to meet Dare’s gaze, the words popping out in a way that seemed to surprise even her. “My grandfather is a Fomorian.”
Well, that bomb went off and physically rocked everyone. I saw Dare actually take a reflexive step back, while everyone else gave soft gasps. Well, most of us anyway. Beside me, Avalon quietly murmured, “That’s what I thought.” Seeing the incredulous looks the rest of us gave her, she offered a one shoulder shrug. “After everything that happened last year and what she already knows, there were only so many possibilities. A connection to the Fomorians was my best guess.”
Rebecca spoke up then. “Wait, wait, wait. I don’t understand. You can’t be… I mean you’re not Fomorian. You’re not. You’re part Reaper and part werecrow. There’s no Fomorian in there. Wha-what?” She sounded like she was pretty close to hyperventilating. Which, given she had grown up knowing about everything those monsters had done, was fair.
And speaking of people with plenty of reason to freak out, Koren was on her feet. It looked like she didn’t know what she was doing there, whether she wanted to run away or at Aylen. Her voice trembled. “What are you talking about? You can’t be related to them. They’re all evil. I mean, I know what this whole school is about and everything, but still. It’s the Fomorians. Their whole thing is being evil monsters. You can’t have some kind of connection to them. Do you know the things they do? Do you know how many civilizations they’ve completely wiped out? Do you know how many hundreds of thousands of genocides they’re responsible for? They’ve wiped out half the universe!” She was getting louder with each word.
Tristan spoke then, gesturing between himself and his sister. “And our mom’s species has enslaved the other half, you know. She’s different. Tabbris is different. So is Uncle Apollo, and a bunch of others. If there can be enough good Seosten to be an entire section of their populous, then why not one Fomorian who is different?”
Koren shook her head at him. “You don’t understand.”
The boy slowly stood, head tilting. “I don’t? I spent years with Grandpa Nick, traveling all over the universe on his ship. We saw world after world after world that was hit by the Fomorians. When I was fourteen, I tried to help a little girl with purple skin and these glowing white braids. She was so scared and I told her we were there and she was going to be okay, and do you know what happened? She exploded because of a genetic bomb that the Fomorians planted in her. She exploded when she was hugging me. She blew up and I spent three weeks in the infirmary dealing with the infection that almost killed me. They saved me from the infection, but they couldn’t save me from that memory, and I still have dreams about it.
“So don’t tell me that I don’t understand. Because I do. I know exactly what they’re like. I saw world after world of examples of what they’re like. I know them better than almost anyone here.
“But I also know that the entire point of everything we’re doing here is that not everyone has to be evil just because others like them are. The entire point we’ve been trying to say this entire time is that people should be judged by their actions, not the species they come from. But if we’re just going to say that it’s completely impossible for a Fomorian to be good, before even listening to Aylen? Then we might as well just pack this whole thing up and go back to Crossroads. Because we don’t really believe it.”
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Vanessa had moved to stand behind her brother, putting a hand on his back as his voice grew more emotional throughout that. He finally quieted, while Dare cleared her throat, glancing toward Gwen briefly before nodding at Aylen. “I believe he summed it up better than I could,” she said in a soft voice with clear emotion behind it that I was sure only Koren and I had any real inkling of the reasoning behind. “It’s okay. Keep going. We’re listening.”
Aylen did so, biting her lip before pushing on. “Nothing I told you before was a lie. One of my mothers is a werecrow, and the other is a half-Reaper. Her father is the Reaper that Crossroads uses to power the Heretical Edge. But he didn’t raise her. Neither did her mother. We don’t actually know what happened or why she was alone, but she was. She was on her own as a tiny little girl, until Grandfather found her.
“We all call him Grandfather. I don’t think he has any other name, at least not one that we can pronounce. He’s a very old Fomorian, like… really old. And he’s not like them. He’s not like them at all. He’s the one who stole humans from the rest of his people to begin with. He’s the one who brought human ancestors here to Earth to begin with. He sabotaged their whole project, made sure they couldn’t make any more humans, and set up this whole world to try to keep us safe. I know that’s really hard to believe, but—”
“The traitor!” The words came from both Koren and me. The two of us glanced to each other before I quickly pushed on. “The Hiding Man, the Fomorian who… who killed Koren’s dad. He told us about this guy! He told us about a Fomorian who betrayed his entire species and stole the human project to bring it here. They hate him. They loathe him. He’s like the Benedict Arnold for their entire species.”
Beside me, Avalon murmured a quiet, “Victor Benedict probably wouldn’t like that comparison.”
Aylen gave a faint smile. “That’s Grandfather alright. He sort of… made me. He took samples of both my moms and put them together. and he did some other stuff too. The point is, I’m both their kid and sort of a combined clone or whatever? With some other bells and whistles that even I don’t know everything about. Grandfather likes to tinker.”
Finally speaking up as she lifted her chin, Gwen asked, “And now he wants to meet, after spending the entirety of human history in the shadows?”
“Stuff is happening,” Aylen replied. “With all this that’s going on, and… other things, Grandfather says that you should meet and talk. He can warn you about some things, and explain some other things.”
Dare’s voice was careful and measured. “What makes him so different? Do you know why he’s not like the rest of his people? What could possibly make him turn against them. Because if this is true, he’s the only one I’ve ever heard of like that.”
Gwen nodded. “Same here. I’m pretty curious too. I mean, I am in for meeting this guy anyway, because… a good Fomorian? This I’ve got to see. But still, what do you know?” Coming from her, it managed to sound less like a demanding interrogation and more open curiosity.
Finding my way to my feet, I put in, “Yeah, Aylen. I think you’ve got us all convinced enough to at least go through the meeting, even if some of us are going to be pretty freaked out the whole time, but if there’s anything else you could tell us so we could maybe understand a little more?” Rebecca, in particular, still looked really uncertain about this. Koren was more mixed ever since she and I had simultaneously realized that the girl was talking about the Fomorian traitor. She still looked torn, but not exactly like it was completely abhorrent.
Aylen, in turn, nodded. “I can. It has to do with the place the Seosten call Tartarus.”
Vanessa blurted, “The empty universe with that energy that gave Mom and the other Olympians their powers?”
“Yes,” Aylen confirmed. “A long time before the Seosten ever found it, the Fomorians did. They found a way into it and they sent one of their best scientists inside along with a collection of minions, genetically engineered creatures that were basically like guard dogs. These creatures barely had any intelligence of their own, and the energies in Tartarus messed with them first. It made them stronger, meaner, gave them powers and took them out of the Fomorian’s control.”
She took a breath then, and I had the feeling this was the first time she’d ever told the story herself. But she had clearly heard it plenty. “The mutated guard dogs attacked the Fomorian. They destroyed the thing he was using to tether himself to his own world and left him stranded there. He managed to kill them, but he was really badly injured in the process. One of the minions managed to rip part of his head off. Literally, it took off a big chunk of his skull and brain. And not just that. It went all the way down through a third of his head and into his neck and then out under his shoulder. All of that was just cut off, including his arm. But Fomorians are tough enough that he survived.”
Rebecca managed a weak, “He survived having a third of his head, part of his neck, and his arm ripped off in one big wound?”
“Like I said,” Aylen replied, “Fomorians are tough. Plus he had a little help. That energy in Tartarus started regenerating them. Both of them.”
I blinked. “Both? Wait, you mean the three quarters of his body that was still intact and the one-quarter that was on the ground?”
She nodded. “Exactly. The part that was standing up realized that his other part was regenerating too. He freaked out and tried to stop it, but the one on the ground, that was mostly just an arm and part of his head, fought back. It was regenerating the whole time, so there was this little barely forming body while they were fighting. They fought and they got separated. Geographically, I mean. The other Fomorians found the one that was rebuilt from just part of the head and the arm. His body had completely re-grown by then, so they didn’t know the difference. They went in to find out what he discovered, and he escaped.”
“The one you call Grandfather,” Dare murmured, sounding completely taken aback by all of this.
“Yeah.” Aylen hesitated then, before continuing. “When he regenerated, something changed. He doesn’t know if it was just because he only had a third of his brain left or what, but he didn’t think the way they did anymore. He felt things like remorse, and pity, and… and love. He loves his creations. Us, I mean. Humans. His original self was one of the lead scientists on that project and suddenly, this version of him actually cared about what happened to us.
“First, he knew that Tartarus was dangerous, so he destroyed everything they knew about how to reach it. He wiped it all out so they could never get there again. I don’t know exactly what he did, but he’s pretty confident they can never open the portal to get there. Then he stole all the samples for humans and all the other regular animals here on Earth.”
“Wait,” I put in, “all the other animals?”
“Well, a lot of them.” She looked to me. “That’s why there’s so many Alters all over the universe who kind of or really look like animals here on Earth. They started out as Fomorian experiments based on those species. It’s also why humans don’t Heretic bond with Earth-native animals, because they’re Fomorian experiments. Or they started that way. They were the ancient ancestors of the animals we know now. Grandfather mixed them in with the animals that were already here. And from that point, they’ve intermixed so much over the millennia that the genetic lines are indistinguishable. There’s so much of the Fomorian-creations in them that humans can’t bond with them, just like they can’t bond with Fomorians themselves.”
“But we can still get powers from most of their creations,” Dare pointed out. “Not from the Fomorians themselves, but from the things they send after us. Trust me on that one.”
“Yeah,” Aylen confirmed. “It’s the specific creatures from that lab. Humans were designed to be incompatible with them from the start, and the Fomorians can’t make new creatures that are incompatible with humans because Grandfather destroyed all their human research and samples. He also sabotaged any attempt they could ever make at resuming the process.”
My mouth was opening and shutting. It was all I could do to keep this straight. “So he destroyed their experiments, stole all the samples, and came here? And now he’s been here on Earth just watching us this whole time? That’s… that’s…”
Avalon spoke up. “He’s hiding for a reason, isn’t he? His other self.”
With an audible swallow, Aylen confirmed, “His other self got out at some point. We don’t know what happened or how long he’s been around. But he’s been trying to find Grandfather because he wants to re-combine with him. Believe me, that can never happen. It would be apocalyptic bad. Grandfather basically has all the cheat codes for the human genetic line. If his other half manages to join with him and take over, he could basically control all humanity. All of it. Everyone with even part human blood would be under his control. Everyone in the universe.”
To the side, Gwen quietly remarked, “Well, as long as it’s nothing too serious. Here I thought learning about the only good Fomorian would be cupcakes and rainbows.”
Aylen’s voice was somber. “Grandfather said that if it would save his creations and the universe, he’d destroy himself to make sure that never happened. But he and his other half have matching Tartarus Energy in them. He says that if he dies, everything in his brain will go to his other half. So destroying himself isn’t an option. Because that would just give the other him everything it wants anyway.
“But now he’s afraid that things have happened, that the other him is making moves. So he wants to meet you guys, because there might be a time in the future when he has to ask for help.”
Clearly finished, Aylen shrugged. “I… know this is a lot. Really. A lot lot. So… I’m just going to step away and let you guys talk for a minute. You probably have things to discuss. Just let me know when you’re ready to go.” With that, she stepped out of the privacy bubble, leaving the rest of us to look at each other.
Which was the exact moment I felt a sudden familiar presence in my mind. Hi! Tabbris blurted happily.
What’d I miss?