As much as Alarion felt compelled to argue with Atra on the grounds of pure sibling rivalry, she had a point. Devouring an earthworm fresh from the muddy soil was gross.
He really had been an odd child.
They were out in the garden on the evening of the seventh day. The last day.
It had rained for two days, and Alarion knew it would storm again before the night was over, though the skies above him were clear. The rain had made for a dour few days, and those conditions were reflected on his mother’s face as she joined them in the garden. Her smile was thin, her shoulders slumped. The bags under her eyes told of late nights and worry. They left Alarion to wonder just how much of the story he missed every night when the boy closed his eyes.
He knew that his father hadn’t come home the night before. His mother had danced around questions at the breakfast table. She’d told them not to worry, but when she was unsettled, they were unsettled. Something was wrong, and they all did their best to ignore it as they went about their days.
The rebuke was minor, but the fact that their mother had taken a tone with them at all over the issue had both children fidgeting in the dirt. Nessa was a gentle woman at heart, more likely to use misbehavior as a teaching moment than one for scolding. They were too young to understand the source of the tension, but the impact leaked through all the same.
Nessa waved away the rest of Alarion’s explanation.
Alarion cast an odd look to the heavens, then met his mother’s steely gaze. Her intuition about these things was never wrong, but the boy was still dubious.
He was off in a run, skirting between rows of tall fruit trees as he raced toward the orchard’s northern boundary. It wasn’t a pace he could keep up for long, but the boy was careful to keep sprinting until he was out of sight.
The run left the real Alarion with plenty of time to think.
The last few days had been a blessing. Even with disaster ever on the horizon and worms in his mouth, Alarion had immersed himself in his own history. In time he’d forgotten the callouses of his father’s hands, the white-blue of his mother’s eyes, Atra’s shrill laugh and Aina’s terrible cooking. This time he burned them into his memory, cementing them there in the hope that he would never forget.
He missed them.
It wasn’t until he had them back that he realized how deep the wound inside him truly was. He’d bandaged it with Mira and Erda. With survival. With Elena, ZEKE, Sierra and even Valentina. But there was no healing it. The damage was as raw as the night it was inflicted.
This night.
Alarion found his sister by the northern fence with a basket of fruit in her arm and a perplexed look on her face. She visibly jumped as Alarion called out for her and hurriedly waved him toward her.
Their cousin’s silhouette was unmistakable, even at a distance. Though only a fresh-faced youth of eighteen, he stood a head taller than anyone in their extended community, while being skinny as a fence post.
He was also part of an ongoing, sometimes violent feud with the Shimon family.
Alarion narrowed his eyes once again, then frowned.
Alarion felt a chill go down his spine, and for once the Awakened inside the boy could not tell which version of him was frightened.
----------------------------------------
Of course, his mother was always right.
The storm was the worst of the season, with heavy rain driven by howling winds that sounded like the wails of banshees between the orchard’s branches. Even tied tightly in place the shutters clapped and slammed with each new gust of wind, the clatter dominated only by the occasional crash of thunder nearby.
Dinner was delayed, as had become routine, but as darkness fell without any sign of Bas-Rhin, Nessa was forced to relent. Eventually the children were sent to bed with full bellies and uncertain hearts.
For once the boy could not sleep. Alarion stared at the ceiling and tried to recall what the younger version of him had been thinking. His recollections came up empty, but he could guess. Alarion had always been worried about his father at that age. Sure that his father was going to meet some ill fate in battle or on the road. Frightened that he’d never come back.
If only he’d been so lucky.
It was late in the evening when he heard the door open. The wind’s cry whipped through the common room and sent items flying before the men were able to shut it behind them. There was something behind it, so low that Alarion wondered if he’d heard it at all.
Voices?
His mother had slept in the common room, waiting for Bas-Rhin’s return, and she was quick to interrogate him.
Alarion strained his hearing but their back and forth was drowned by the howl of wind and the crack of thunder. He caught one word in every ten, nowhere near enough to make sense of the flow of the conversation.
Then there was a different sort of crash. The splintering of wood. The thump of a body followed by four emotionless words.
A minute later Alarion felt the gentle touch of his father’s hand on his shoulder. He’d pretended to be asleep, out of fear of being caught awake.
He’d forgotten so much of his family. The scent of his father after a hard day on the farm, the scratch of stubble when he hugged him. But Alarion remembered that sad expression all too vividly.
The boy obeyed while Alarion raged inside him. He’d fought for control in earlier parts of his memories, but never with this level of vigor. He strained his consciousness, perhaps his very soul in an attempt to take some control over his younger self. To alter even the slightest detail of the next few minutes.
But there was only one thing he could change.
“Alarion-Talon…” The young man murmured his unfinished keyword as he woke his sisters. They were deeper in sleep and harder to rouse, but one look at his face told them that the situation was serious. This night was important, and it wasn’t time to argue. They dressed in the dark and followed their father into the common room.
The true Alarion took his father’s words to heart, drinking in every bit of the scene as his father tried to console the boy and his sisters. There had been a fight, but not much of one. Nessa’s worst wound was to the back of her head, a blow from behind that had sent her sprawling through one of the low tables, leading to the rest of her injuries.
The source of that violence hovered impatiently nearby. The sharp nosed Eloim stood next to their dining table with a scowl. His bludgeon was hooked to his hip, a small clump of hair, flesh and blood still stuck to a gap in one of its dull iron studs.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
The man seemed taller, and it took Alarion a moment to realize that he was standing straight for the first time since his arrival. It left him with a domineering, imperial look and set Alarion’s teeth on edge. It reminded him of the Governor. It was like the man had been playing at being inconspicuous and forgettable, but had now molted into a form that demanded attention.
He looked to his mother again. Blood was pooling beneath her.
There were four items on the table in front of Eloim. A feather quill rested next to a short knife; its dull iron tinged darker still with a hint of red. Next to it was an open scroll written in blood and marked with hundreds of signatures and corresponding thumb prints. Lastly there was a book, and Alarion retched at the sight of it.
It was a foul thing. Even at such a young age his body rejected it. Loathed it. Hated it. The closest comparison that came to his mind was that of the revenant Lamesh, but even that paled in comparison. He balked, tried to pull away, but his father was there behind him, shepherding his children toward it.
Oddly, the girls did not have the same reaction. If they felt any of Alarion’s revulsion they made no show of it. They were afraid and uncertain, always looking to their father for reassurance, but they did not have the same visceral hatred for the thing.
Aina was first. Eloim took the blade and opened her thumb with a flick of his wrist, cutting her with the dispassionate ease a butcher took with his animals. Once his work was done, he stood impassively, waiting for the child to follow the instructions that Alarion had been too distracted to hear.
Ever the most obedient child, Aina pressed her bleeding thumb to the parchment, then dipped the quill in her blood. Of the three, she was the only one who could write, and she quickly scrawled her name onto the document. She shivered once, then a strange look came over her.
It was hard to describe what was out of place. To anyone else his sister would have looked normal. But she was his sister, and his sister did not stand quite like that, or move with that much elegance. It looked like her, but… better? As though there were more sheen to her hair and a fraction more energy in each weary step.
Atra came next and was far more difficult.
When at last she did, the cut was quick and precise, but deeper. A punishment. Atra cried out and Alarion reached out for her, only to be stopped by the point of Eloim’s blade mere inches from his throat.
Whatever his father said, it was enough. Atra found her space on the scroll through weepy eyes and cried out again as she pushed her wounded thumb into the scroll. Eloim produced a fresh quill, and his sister marked her X.
The same change came over Atra, but Alarion had no time to dwell on it. It was his turn.
Take that blade and stab him. Alarion commanded his younger self, to no avail. Brave as only a boy child could be, he felt the slice on his thumb an instant before Eloim’s body shattered through a cabinet full of his grandmother’s heirlooms.
Alarion cast a glance at his father. He saw the fear. Sorrow. Anger. His father was not here to help him, and in that moment the spell that was coercing the young man fell away in a moment of clarity. This was wrong. All of it.
He needed to run!
Alarion balled his hands into fists and ducked beneath the table with the speed and flexibility that only a child could boast. His father scrambled after him, clutching at his ankles, but failed to get a hold on his son before Alarion was out the other side, up, and running.
But to where?
Their house was small, only a few rooms. There was no place to hide, let alone with his father right on his heels, and no locks on the interior doors. He had to go outside. He’d lose him in the storm. In the darkness of the orchard. There were places out there not even his mother could find him when he didn’t want to be found.
A gust of wind blew the door open the moment Alarion turned the lock. The sudden impact sent Alarion sprawling, but his mother saved him once again as her scrap with the Thing momentarily cut between father and son. Whatever force drove Bas-Rhin to this madness had left him enough sanity not to step into the middle of a sloppy brawl between two Awakened, which left Alarion enough time to run out into the storm.
The night was pitch-black, with the moon hidden behind layers of angry clouds. Only the open door provided even a hint of illumination and Alarion outran that quickly as he ran and stumbled toward the treeline with footsteps in hot pursuit. He had to get away. He had to hide.
It was a dangerous thing, running in the dark. In a storm, in the mud. Anywhere else and Alarion would surely have broken his ankle. But this was his home. He knew the slopes that would flood, the roots that could trip. Each flash of lightning helped to guide him. He could escape.
“Alarion-Talon-Valentina…” He was shouting the words as he ran. Over and over. Daring himself to stop this while he could.
Even with the benefit of a second set of eyes, even with the benefit of hindsight, of knowing they were out in the darkness, Alarion didn’t see the man until he struck him at a full run.
They both fell, stumbling around in the rain and the mud as they tried to get their footing.
Lightning crashed, and the boy realized his error.
There were dozens of them. All firmly upright. All with that same empty gaze.
The sky lit up again, and this time they weren’t all strangers. The woman to his right was the town shopkeeper, Shireen. Beside her, one of the local boys who used to bully Alarion. They made no move toward him, but to his horror they did move to stop him when he tried to circle past them. Never threatening. Only impeding.
With his father quick on his trail, Alarion started running alongside the human wall, looking for gaps, but to no avail. The line was haphazard to account for terrain, but the otherwise impassive villagers were frightfully quick when he tried to slip past them. Worse, they were slowly closing ranks, shrinking the circle a step at a time.
Try as he might, Alarion could not follow his mother’s order any further. There was nowhere to run.
To the boy’s horror, there was a scroll in his father’s free hand.
Inside his head, the older Alarion wanted nothing but the same.
The way he said it almost made sense. Even inside this retelling, Alarion felt the pull of the coercive magic. The argument was absurd, but the way he said it. The tone, the stretch of each syllable. Alarion felt compelled to obey. His thumb was still bleeding as his father unrolled the scroll and gestured to the open space.
The words woke Alarion from his stupor like a glass of well water. He stumbled back and tore the tail end of the scroll away with him as he went, staring incredulously at his father all the while.
Realising his mistake, Bas-Rhin sighed and closed his eyes. He lifted a hand, calling for peace as he focused on whatever inner power allowed him to manipulate the children.
He didn’t finish his thought. Alarion struck him in the mouth with everything he had. Admittedly, that wasn’t much, but Alarion had the element of surprise. And anger.
Fury, really.
He struck his father again. And again. He pushed the man off balance and forced him into the muddy ground. They toppled and the lantern broke. For an instant they were plunged into darkness. Then a blaze roared to life with new intensity as the spilt oil caught fire.
Alarion was having none of that. He kicked, scratched and bit, using every tool at his disposal to try and dislodge his father, until the man simply threw him aside as one might a rabid animal.
The boy had no idea what it was. Only that his father valued it. That it was important. Important enough to stop the man in his tracks. That it, and Eloim were the source of the family’s strife.
Looking down at his father was enough to break Alarion’s heart. The mantra that he’d murmured a dozen times a day for the past week fell away, forgotten. He didn’t want this, but he wouldn’t turn away from it either. From any of it.
This was what happened. Not what he wished would happen.
His father was a pathetic cultist of some lesser god, willing to enslave or sacrifice his family because he was too much of a coward to fight a losing war, or face the consequences for refusing to fight. He sold his neighbors, his family, out to that thing Eloim. And for what?
Young Alarion didn’t give Bas-Rhin another chance to coerce him. His thoughts were simpler. Whatever the scroll was, whatever the reasoning behind the night’s terrors, it was corrupt. Nothing good came from a creature like Eloim or that foul book it carried. Nothing good would have led his father to hurt his mother. Nothing good required that Bas-Rhin terrorize his children.
Alarion threw the scroll into the fire.
For a moment there was nothing. Just a defeated expression on his father’s face.
Then, distantly, came the sound of a body slumping over into the mud.
She’d been a young woman, barely older than Alia. She had a crush on the neighbor’s boy but was betrothed to a man twice her age. She cried when her father put down her horse and stood dazzled under a travelling merchant’s firework display on the new year. She was frightened when the strange man asked her to sign her name, but she’d obeyed all the same.
She died face down in the mud, like a puppet with her strings cut.
Then there was another thud.
This man was old, with one foot in the grave already. He’d buried his wife and all his children. Those memories were bitter, but they were tinged with a lifetime of love. He pushed his wife’s face into a cake, he killed a lord he didn’t know while fighting in the army of another man he didn’t know. He played with his friends, dreaming of one day going to war, for glory and honor. He fought mock battles with his children, then urged his last son not to follow his brothers to their early grave.
He died face down in the mud as another body fell.
The deaths were endless, their lives blurring together in Alarion’s mind as he passed from one to the next. There were hundreds, each snuffed out as ink and parchment caught fire. He lived lovers' quarrels and sibling spats. He created works of art and shoveled shit. He saw wonders of the world and the same quarter mile of farm a thousand times over.
He saw Nessa in love, dancing at a harvest festival. She thought he was funny. They fell into each other’s arms deep in a hayloft, whispering secrets and promises that could never be kept. He saw war, brutal conflict that he could never explain to his children. A man disembowelled. Another burned so badly by magical fire that he was only charred meat. Meat that could still scream.
He heard whispers of origins. Of secrets, not lies, for they were never the same thing and only the latter was immoral. He made promises that he kept, even in his death throes.
He saw desperation, the agreement. The tome. Six-Hundred and Ninety-Seven. A horrific name spoken into his ears that vanished when he heard it, and a three-fold name that overlapped in ways he could not understand.
It Who Was All, Kol Seras.
It Who Was Not All, Kol L’Seras.
It Who Was Nothing, Kol Tiras.
He saw himself in a crib. She’d been so excited for a brother. She already had an older sister, but a boy to boss around? That would be fun!
There was so little of that final life. Cut short as it was.
Alarion drew a deep gasp as the moment passed, as though he’d lived six hundred lifetimes without a breath. He was himself again. His father lay dead in the mud before him. Six-hundred and ninety-four lay in dirt and the mud surrounding their home. One laid dead inside.
Two if you counted the Thing that was Eloim.
Alarion did not.
He plucked the scrap of parchment from the mud where it had fallen. For years he’d wondered why Aina had died while Atra survived. He’d blamed himself. The magic. The gods. Anyone and everything.
He hadn’t even realized he’d torn her name away. He thought he’d burned it all. That small scrap of parchment was probably still buried in the mud outside his former home. The difference between Atra’s life and death.
A shimmering portal had opened nearby and Alarion started toward it without a second thought. If he took even a step toward his home, then he’d be lost. He’d never leave, not unless Valentina forced him.
Would that be so bad?
“You made it.” Valentina’s voice was soft silk as he re-emerged in her private chambers. No food or drink awaited him, no smarmy once-God or her opinions on his success. She was quiet, almost apologetic.
Alarion said nothing. Tomorrow he could speak. Tomorrow he could deal with others. Not yet. He turned and pulled open the door of his sleeping chamber and was surprised to see Sierra waiting for him, book in hand.
“Took you-” The girl started to chide him, then stopped as she caught his expression. She watched as the young man moved to sit on the nearby bed, his back to the wall, knees up to his chest. Then she asked, “Are you okay?”
Alarion drew a shallow breath through his nose, about to reply. To tell her yes. To tell her to leave. To tell her anything. Then his eyes began to sting. They began to blur.
“No.” he said at last, before the sobs overtook him.