CHAPTER 91

For an eternity, there was nothing. A heartbeat, an hour, a lifetime, a millenia, nothing. The endless void of absolute non-existence. Nothing was there, for there was no ‘there’. An absence of space, of light, of anything, a place with no place, a moment with no time, a nothing of nowhere and no-when.

The recognition of nothing was a rejection. Acknowledging nothing begat something, and that snowballed the whole thing. The separation of ‘something’ from ‘nothing’, the partitioning of nothingness and something-ness revealed awareness. I am me.

Details filtered through the endless drift of non-time, emptiness. Remembering reaching for something meant that she had a hand. Wait. She?

A cocky smile above green eyes remembered a face. She breathed out nothing, and breathed in awareness. A chest filled with air, a back faintly twinged with effort, legs twitched, flexing muscles. She opened her eyes, and she saw.

She hung motionless, weightless, inside the heart of a perfect sphere. All around her, in every direction, threads of light, an intricate web of them, danced in front of her. Some places were knotted and discordant, and others flowed in intricate whorls and loops and spirals and mazes as if it was the most natural thing in the world. A massive web of faint trickling streams of light. And, as she examined the glimmering threads, she realised it was a world.

TOO MUCH.

The voice- if it was indeed a voice- came from everywhere and nowhere. It surrounded her, flowed through her, beat upon her from all sides. The word came from outside of her, and suddenly she knew fear.

Her awareness rushed through layers upon layers of stone and earth and dirt, the wriggling streams of light, the trees and flowers and rivers and oceans and still she rose, and air, sweet, glorious air rushed into her lungs as she soared, and she rose higher and higher until she hovered inside the sphere, at the naked sun in the heart.

The heart of the sun was searing but it did not touch her. The boiling fury raged, but could not harm her. Something tugged on her, and she was dragged from the star that was trapped by the webs and traceries of light, feeding and somehow being fed.

The world was massive. The world was all-encompassing, There were no words to describe the vastness of the entire thing. Continents drifted into view, out of view. Rothgar was roughly bean shaped, tapering to a point the further south you went. South? The Continent of Hesperia crouched over it like a bear, the circle of smoking yamato islands off to the west.

Other continents, unknown lands glimmered at the edge of perception and her mind struggled with the realization that the world went on and on, with hundreds of unknown continents with unknown trillions of races, of people, all living and working day-to-day.

LOOK THERE.

Again, the voice from outside of her own awareness. Her bones shook with each syllable, each vowel threatened to turn her to jelly.

Looking, she saw the six-lobed capital fortress of the Alstroemeria. From this height it was nothing, an insignificant speck of light. A flea. A glimmering mote of dust.

I LOVE YOU.

The voice beyond herself. Her mind reeled. Awareness was blown to tatters.

A great and terrible shroud of darkness swam between herself and the light. The light. She realised dimly, flailing at anything, at nothing. I have to endure, I have to get up, dammit, there’re things yet to do, I ain’t finished, dammit! She raged. I haven’t found love!

She knew of the connections between people, between lives, but she was apart from that, the Eternal Outsider. Behind closed doors, eyes smiled into eyes and mouths promised eternity. Large hands held tiny hands as tiny feet tottered to take their first steps. Warm hands, cautionary hands, loving hands carefully poised to catch them if they fell, hands that comforted and soothed away fears and pains.

Where was she? She stood on the outside. She brought the fear. She brought the pain. She brought terror, nightmare, death. Kicking in doors as blank faces mouthed meaningless syllables. There was only the target, there was only the mission, and to reach for magic was to put you under her sights. Her heart screamed for love even as she buried it over, brick by brick.

But that was past. She argued. I haven’t yet found it, but when it comes, I will be ready for it. Unbidden, the words of Araya flashed across her memories. She couldn’t pamper or spoil like the Diviner, but she could love.

It came to her in a flash of memory, a vision, an encounter that hadn’t happened yet. A small, teasing smile from a rosebud of a mouth. Tumbling black waves of hair. Warm brown eyes tipped up to hers confidently.

Her heart suddenly surged in her chest and she was there, she was whole again. She looked up, and into the face of a nightmare.

Whatever it was, It was titanic, massive, gargantuan, colossal. There were no words that adequately captured the Angelic Spirit’s size. It stretched for hundreds of miles in every direction, a screaming, laughing, mocking susurration of sound ground at Katarina, forcing her down under the unbearable weight of inevitability, the stirring of hundreds of furious, storm-tipped wings rustling and rumbling with thunder.

It occurred to her that the Angelic Spirit Simurgh stood between herself and the Goddess. Of course it was the Goddess. It was the Sun, and what more could be said than being the Goddess of the Dawn, the Light of Spring, the Fire in the heart of the darkness?

A strange sort of conversation blew past her, a conversation on a level she was incapable of hearing, of comprehending. Emotions drifted through her at strange intervals, the backblast of conversation between the Goddess and one of her own Angelic Spirits. Surprise, irritation, amusement. Defiance.

Katarina on a pale horse, thundering down a hardpacked dirt road. The prey just ahead, screaming in terrified little breaths as it used magic to strengthen its legs, to force it to move faster, to take greater leaps and bounds. Katarina was inexorable. Inevitable. Katarina was a nightmare given flesh. Her hand came up, suddenly shrouded in long trailing tattered ribbons of darkness. The prey squealed, but it was too late, it was always too late, it was forever too late. The crack of gunfire was lost in the thunderbolt, the shroud of darkness leapt from Katarina’s hand like a hunting hawk, and Simurgh powered through the mage in the blink of a moment, shredding flesh, silencing the snapping snarls of power that drifted through the mage, opening the floodgates and blasting the mages nerves with cataclysmic volts of power. The prey’s soul exploded, consigned to the Void of Oblivion. Only those dedicated to the Goddess received the reward.

Katarina blinked. Was that how Simurgh saw herself in relation to Katarina? A partnership? A huntress with her faithful, dedicated partner by her side. What was it she had said to Katarina? At your touch I shouted thunder at our foes. Simurgh was the huntress, Katarina the partner that slowly lost faith, that was endlessly going through the motions. It was Simurgh herself that forced the woman to expel the old pains and hurts and betrayals, opening her to another possibility: the capability for love.

What was this?

Memories flitted back and forth between the Goddess and the Angelic Spirit. Katarina as a child, standing defiantly against four boys early in their manhood, the target of their urgent lust curled, crying in the bed behind Katarina.

Alaine’s butler, reaching out to touch Katarina’s breast as Alaine turned away. A swirl of power and he exploded into scraps of flesh, gory splashes of blood arcing through the air. His death was so sudden, so complete, so utterly devastating he didn’t have a chance to scream. Simurgh smugly stood in the tattered remnants of his flesh as Alaine’s maid screamed in high terror.

You will NOT touch her. Simurgh snarled to the tattered shred of the man’s soul as he faded from existence.

It was her. It was her, she realized. Somehow, some reason, some strange incomprehensible battle of wills was going on between two great powers.

The Golden Lady showed Simurgh memories where she had called on the Goddess. Simurgh responded with memories of Katarina standing alone, triumphant, mages broken and dying at her feet.

"It’s me." Katarina murmured wonderingly. Simurgh clearly wanted to keep hunting across the lands with Katarina. Hundreds of mages, blasphemers, mutants, abominations, and heretics died at her hands. She led a strange, bloody path of death in her wake, and Simurgh delighted in it, reveled in it, and most importantly, wanted to keep going.

The Goddess wanted something else from her. What it was, she couldn’t discern. It boggled her. Who could argue with the Goddess? The Im Adad, apparently. An angelic spirit, a bundle of power and emotion. You did not argue with a storm, but the Goddess did. You didn’t argue with the Goddess, but the storm did.

Strange. The Goddess could simply wave her hand and Simurgh would cease to exist. Why the struggle? Why the debate? It was so blindingly obvious it staggered Katarina in her boots.

Simurgh, the Im Adad, the Spirit of the Storm, wanted Katarina for herself. It was a savage, mercurial love, tethered with a strange sense of possessiveness.

Suddenly, a more realistic question asserted itself.

Where was she?

----------------------------------------

Suddenly, she was in a valley, sitting on a boulder next to a small river. She knew this place. She had spent a month here as a Witch Hunter neophyte. Her Master had died here. More recently, she had nearly died here. How long ago had that been? Months? A year?

"This place, this valley, will always be special to you." A woman remarked behind her. "In a way, this place is you. Filled with life and beauty..." a hand appeared at the corner of Katarina’s vision, "but bounded upon all sides with high cliffs. If you don’t know the way, you will never make it inside."

Katarina turned to eye her interlocutor. Whoever she was, she was so beautiful she dried the spit in her mouth and a strange ache flushed in her loins, a need she usually suppressed, a need she sublimated into action. She couldn’t even see the woman, not clearly, but she was gorgeous. She couldn’t tell if the woman was tall or short, slim or corpulent, shapely or shapeless, and yet without a doubt Katarina knew what she looked upon was the pinnacle of beauty.

"You have been trouble since the first moment I set eyes on you, Katarina." The woman declared, a slim hand against a slim hip.

"Oh? How so?" She retorted, rising to her feet. The weight and feel of her coat and weapons was comforting.

The woman’s face turned a delicate pout. "I weave the skein, and you turn it aside." She replied.

Katarina gave the other woman a puzzled look. "Skein?"

"The Skein of Possibilities. Every life, every possible encounter, every meeting and parting, every chance and choice, idea or thought." The Goddess replied. "Chance and possibility, and everyone follows the thread of their lives. Sometimes a farmer can become a warlord. Sometimes a merchant a mercenary." She paused, and then frowned down at Katarina.

"But you..." she began. "You were not supposed to die in Aston."

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Katarina blinked at that, confused. "I wasn’t? That’s a relief, I suppose." She replied warily.

The other woman glowered at her. "You weren’t supposed to, and yet you did. So I had to step in and correct it." The Goddess paused. "Resurrection is no difficult matter, but it should not have been necessary."

There was no room for Katarina to argue. How could she argue? What words could she use to persuade or dispute a Goddess, the one that had forged the world?

"So the skein had to be changed. Uncounted ripples amongst the threads threatened to tear the whole weave asunder. The shock that you had died and been resurrected still spreads through the world like a stone tossed in a pond."

"You don’t... often grant resurrection." Katarina agreed. So rare it might as well be a useless dream.

"No, I don’t. People live the lives they weave in the Skein, and their deaths are just as important as their lives. But I had to resurrect you."

"Why?" Katarina asked, and the woman’s face, mildly irritated, suddenly flashed in horrible, naked fury.

"Where were you when I forged the world, Katarina? You don’t get to ask me that."

"I’m sorry." Katarina immediately replied, contrite to her soul.

"You were not supposed to die in Aston." The Goddess repeated. "But you did. You obviated the path I had set before you and instead hurtled towards the inevitability of mortality." She sighed testily.

"So I had to change some things." She gestured to the valley. "I decided that you should make your end here, and pass on your will to that other girl, much in the way your Master passed on his to you. Poetic. Perhaps in her, I could find someone more biddable."

That girl? Katarina wondered. Ah. The one that had helped Katarina. What was her name? Indigo, she called herself, after her hair color.

"What?" Katarina argued, jumping up from the boulder. "That giddy idiot? She was supposed to succeed me? Bullshit!"

The Goddess merely eyed Katarina’s outburst with a wry amusement. "I seem to recall a similar reaction from your Master." Katarina stumbled at that, nearly falling to her knees.

"But you wouldn’t die." The Goddess complained, stamping a delicate foot in the sandy ground of the beach. "Stubborn to the core. So I had to reweave the Skein yet again. I healed you, knowing it would take you to Begierde, and from Begierde to Ardeal."

"Sorry." Katarina replied evenly. Nothing made sense to her, but at least she could keep her wits about her.

"Well, it wasn’t a certainty that you would die." The Goddess waved her hand dismissively. "Besides, I had given you my vow by then, remember?" She asked rhetorically.

"You-" Katarina began, but cut what she was about to say short.

"No, say it." The Goddess urged, her voice low, silky. Husky. Seductive and inviting.

"You let him shoot me." Katarina breathed.

"Take it a step further than that, human." The Goddess urged.

"You... put him in my path so that I would be shot by him." She looked up. "Did you arrange his fall? The murder of the woman he loved? The- the-" She couldn’t get it all out. Morgan’s madness. The fall of Ardeal. Her own kin plotting her murder. Everything. The degree of manipulation, both subtle and overt, staggered her.

"I am your Goddess, human." The Goddess reminded her. "Some choose to fall from their path. Some choose love. Some choose sacrifice. Some choose nobility and dignity or murder and betrayal."

"...so what is this?" Katarina asked, and gestured around her.

"I have a problem, human." The Goddess replied. "Two of them. One is standing defiantly in front of me, and yet another." She jerked her thumb to the sky.

Katarina looked up, and although she’d seen it before, her heart still clutched in her breast. Massive, mammoth, spanning miles in every direction, a thunderstorm, dark and massive, lightning flickering within, hung overhead. A thousand, a million, a trillion ruffling wings filled the air.

"The Im Adad." Katarina confirmed, tearing her eyes away.

The Goddess nodded.

"They are power, and instinct, and emotion." She explained away, seemingly indifferent whether Katarina followed. "But they lack something you mortals carry." She paused. "What you carry in an overabundance, it seems." She paused, as if expecting Katarina to answer.

"Will." Katarina offered, and the woman’s eyes widened in surprise.

"Yes. Exactly that. They are the impartial storm, the indifferent earthquake. Desire and ambition and greed come from will."

She raised her hand to the sky, and, hooking her fingers into claws, raked downward. The human form of Simurgh huddled at the side of the Goddess. Katarina had never seen the Angelic spirit so bedraggled and... lost.

"Fancy learning that, having no will of their own, and certain extenuating circumstances, one of them would seek to gain one of their own." The Goddess’ eyes flashed accusingly to Katarina’s.

"I’m not sure what-" Katarina began, but the Goddess made a slashing movement with her hands.

"No. You know. You called on her, Witch Hunter. You commanded her." She gazed down at the whimpering angelic spirit at her feet. "You dared tread the path of divinity." She breathed, fury crackling in her voice.

"No, that’s bullshit." Katarina replied, moving her own hand in a cutting-off gesture. "I prayed to you every morning, thanking you for another day so that I could hunt the witch, the heretic, the blasphemer, the mutant, the abomination. I never asked of you anything I could not accomplish myself."

"Except with Morgan Blackhand." The Goddess remarked pointedly. "Did you call for me? No. You called for her, and she answered." The Goddess replied angrily. "And in Wallachia, as the blood-hungry damned swarmed down upon you, who was it that you called out to?" She glared down at Simurgh.

"I prayed to you, also." Katarina replied. The Goddess nodded.

"You invoked Glory, and I responded." She agreed. "But you commanded her." She added warningly, her anger renewing.

"I have never commanded Simurgh." Katarina replied. "She’s certainly warned me enough times of the consequences. Not that I could forget them." She threw out her hands expansively. "What arrogance could a mortal have, to try and command the storm? Might as well ask the sun to stop in the sky." She paused. "I have asked for help, not commanded." She shook her head. "I have will. I have strength. I know the depth and strength of my own ability." She remarked decisively, and then looked the Goddess in the eye. "And I know when it is simply not enough."

The Goddess hmm’d. "You miss the point." She finally decided. "You dodged the skein I had woven for you again." She gestured at the Spirit. "Because of her."

Katarina’s eyes narrowed at this. "How, exactly?"

"You remember Anya?" The Goddess replied. Katarina nodded.

"You were to follow the path of Sainthood, Katarina. From that camp of devoted followers to begierde, to Ardeal, to Schactice, to Montesilvano, to the Black City."

"But I did all those things." Katarina objected.

"Yes, but that is not all you did." The Goddess argued. "All along, Simurgh was pacing you. Watching you. Helping you."

She paused. "You were meant to walk the path of Sainthood, and ascend to my side once your work was complete." She licked her lips. "No one deserved it more than you. There was only one final thing you had to do in Hesperia, and then your life would have been complete."

She shook her head. "But you dodged the skein again." She let out a breath, and the sun rode brilliantly in the sky, and birds twittered.

"I love you, Katarina." She spoke calmly, evenly, but her words carried almost a tangible weight.

"As a Goddess for Her creation, as a mother for her child, as a husband for his wife and a wife for her husband, as a sister for her sister, as a child with her pet. I have loved you more than any of the others in the entirety of the world."

Katarina blinked at that. Such a frank admission.

"Every one of those I have raised to Saint I have loved. They are pure. Their wills are their own. Their desires clean. Alicia only wanted to fight alongside her love. Andrianna only wanted to heal those less fortunate. Celestine..." She paused. "You know that one, already." She smiled. "And you. All you wanted was to walk the endless path of the Witch Hunter." She shook her head. "But that was not enough for the one I loved, so I gave you Glory. I offered you the oath. I wanted to make you mine. I gave you the path to walk- I wanted you to retrieve the Regalia I forged for my Chosen. I wanted you to bring the Emerald Tablets back to my people so that they might re-learn to walk in the sunlight of my will."

Her mouth twisted. "But you kept jumping the skein." She stated flatly. "How could I write the noble path of the brilliant Saint Katarina if she obviates every plan I lay at every turn?" She growled.

Katarina let out a slow breath. "So I am to be punished, then."

"...perhaps." The Goddess offered enigmatically, and then peered down at the Angel of the Storm. "You’ve never cared one whit for the thrashings of mortals for millenia beyond counting, and not only have you chosen one for yourself, you set yourself in defiance of me." She laughed then, lightly, melodiously.

She turned back to the Witch Hunter, emerald eyes flashing.

"What do you want, Katarina?"

"The same as I’ve always wanted: To be a Witch Hunter." Katarina replied, looking to the sky. Somehow, it was midnight again.

"No, Katarina." The voice was insistent, touched with anger. "What do you want."

A pause, then. A silence in the heavens of the void. The Golden Lady sighed. "That wish has already been fulfilled, and not by me. You are a Witch Hunter. You chose that path, and the doors have opened unto you."

"I don’t understand what you mean, then." Katarina finally replied, and the other voice burst into peals of laughter as silvery as a bell, as soft as velvet.

"The agreement was made. You are my servant. You carry my strongest, most powerful blessings, so that you might carry my name into the world." The Golden Lady made a gesture with her hands, taking something with one, offering something with the other.

"But such things come with a price." The voice continued. "A price I pay willingly. Alicia asked only that she be allowed to rest with her love, to be called only when needed. Cassandra demanded the right of furious vengeance against those who put her country to the torch." The voice explained.

"I am... to request a boon of you?" Katarina replied doubtfully.

"In exchange for your service to me. What boon do you require?"

"I-" Katarina began and shrugged helplessly. "I have no idea what to ask for."

The voice pealed with laughter again. So rich. A hint of sultry huskiness, a hint of delight, a hint of even surprise.

"I know. You have never asked of me anything you could not accomplish yourself." A pause, as the Goddess eyed the weeping Angel of the Storm. "I will solve a problem and give you something no other has received from me."

Something was happening, but Katarina couldn’t figure it out. She couldn’t understand it. It was beyond her comprehension, even as her comprehension filled the skies. She was the storm. She was the figure among the wheat, she was the storm bearing down upon the figure. She was insignificant, a speck, she roamed the lands, her claws were hail, her laughter thunder. A lone figure on horseback struggled through a forest with determination filling her eyes, she laughingly released the floodgates, pouring rain down upon the figure, watched as it hunched, drawing its coat around it. She was the storm. She was the woman. Whole years and centuries spun by in a dizzying heartbeat, in that heartbeat she was born to a gasping mother. To her side, her sister screamed her arrival to the world.

Simurgh’s memories blended into her own. Hers were simple and direct; drifting over lands and seas, wreaking indiscriminate havok. Colliding with her sisters, intermingling, tearing away. Simurgh blended into her, lived her own life.

Endless training to make her mind flexible, elastic, and creative. Endless puzzles, testing, riddles, scenarios that needed to be solved for hours every day, then another two hours running around the training yard, a sack of rocks over her head to build strength and endurance, followed by more hours training with the sword and getting ruthlessly beaten down again and again by Nadette.

She focused on Nadette. The woman was a campaigner of indeterminate age. She was a boulder upon which everything broke. Nothing got through her defense. She was immutable, impervious. Katarina remembered the slow burn of anger she felt towards the woman, the determination to one day best her. The determination giving way to grudging respect as they mutually admired each others’ relentless determination.

Who am I? She asked. Certainly, she was Boiyar Katarina lon Pavlenko, but there was more there now, wasn’t there?

She turned her determination inwards. Memories flashed by; irrelevant. People, strangers, faces flowed by in an endless parade. Pointless. Life was meaningless and fleeting, the only reward anyone received was a shovelful of earth to the face when it was over.