L. LOST TO THE LIVING
A stiff gale dislodged the ember from Alden’s cigarette, but he hardly noticed as he made another futile attempt to gain a signal on his device. Despite his frantic efforts, the result was the same; the words no signal and a circle with a bar across it flashing in the top corner. In a rage, he prepared to hurl the useless brick from a bygone era over the parapet, but regained his sense and settled on stowing it in his coat pocket. Defeated, he fumbled in his trousers for a lighter and resparked the cigarette, gazing down at the forlorn city below.
He almost didn’t notice Osric skulking in the shadows, watching him like an animal stalking prey. By no means as terrifying as Morana, the man gave him the creeps regardless. The things he did in the bowels of the castle were unnatural, and this was coming from a man that destroyed all civilization.
“Need something?” Alden demanded after several moments passed in silence.
“I do in fact.” Osric stepped from out of the corner and joined Alden on the wall. “I wish to inquire about the nature of your relationship with Morana.”
Alden laughed and flicked the cigarette over the edge. “Don’t worry, we aren’t fuckin’. Least, not anymore.”
“That’s not what I meant.” Osric said tersely, though the way his shoulders relaxed and jaw unclenched said otherwise. “Did you know her before?”
Alden shrugged. “I suppose you could say that.”
“How?” Osric demanded. “She lived more than six hundred years after you, there is no way you could have known her.”
“You assume she is the first.” Alden chuckled. “And that she is even mortal.”
Osric sighed and combed his hair with his fingers. “I am not in the mood for riddles at this time Alden.”
Alden turned to face Osric, the nature of his ignorance and the reality of the epochs that separated them finally becoming a reality to him. He had assumed her name alone would have given her away, but what were “the old ways” in his time had truly been forgotten in their entirety. Alden felt a pang of sadness, the depths of his crime went beyond loss of life and poisoned biomes.
Alden slowly shook his head, his gaze fixed upon the horizon. “You people really have no idea, do you?”
Osric’s brow furrowed. “Hence I am asking you. Who is she? What is she?”
Alden laughed, still in disbelief. “She is death.”
Osric clenched and unclenched his fist, swirls of malefic energy swirled around his hand. “I did not come here to be mocked.”
Alden turned back to the desolate view. There was nothing he could do to harm him, one who was already damned and quite dead. Still, for one such as him to not know who she truly was filled Alden with uncertainty and a certain sense of dread.
“Do you know the sisters?” Alden asked as he fished a pack of cigarettes from his coat pocket.
Osric released his hold on the darkness and took a breath to compose himself. “The constellation? Yes, but what does that have to do with her? Are those stars the source of her power?”
Alden lit his bent cigarette and took a long drag. The man was like a child. Petulant and demanding, but oh so curious about the world around him, despite his ignorance of its true nature. He was to be admired for not accepting ignorance as the others, though the cost of the bargain he had entered in was far too high. Alden pitied him, more now than ever.
“In a sense.” Alden idly twirled the cigarette in his hand, creating spiraling tendrils of smoke. “Can you name them?”
“Name them?” Osric drew a chair to his side and took a seat. “I did not know that they had names.”
Alden smiled as Osric pulled a stick of graphite and notepad from his robes, waiting to take notes.
“Linh, Enyo, Malady, and….” He paused, partially to give Osric time to write, partially in adherence to some long dead superstition. “Morana.”
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Osric looked up with wide eyes. “She is a star?”
Alden shook his head. “No. And the sisters aren’t stars, well, at least not all of them. The four spheres that define them are planets. Two of them we have visited, one supported life, the other did not.”
Osric looked to the overcast sky with an expression of wonder, one at odds with his generally grim disposition, and one Alden recalled holding himself in another life.
“Linh was revered as a motherly figure,” Alden said, annoyed to find his eyes stung with the threat of tears, “and people made offerings for blessings of the home and family.”
“They were worshiped?”
Alden waved his hand in a so-so gesture. “They were, sort of. This was all before my time even.”
Osric furiously wrote down several notes, filling a page in mere moments. “And Morana, she was one of them?”
“Yes and no…”
Osric frowned. “That’s hardly an answer.”
“She was…of them, but not one with them. Her sphere takes a long, narrow, elliptical pass around Lior-“
“Lior?” Osric asked.
“By the Dawn kid, what the hell else do you people call the star in the center of this system?”
Osric shrugged and looked away a bit ashamed. “We don’t actually have a name for it…It’s just the sun.”
Alden cursed under his breath and ashed the cigarette. The world was inhabited by idiots, those who probably attributed thunder and lightning to a wrathful deity, or feared the “sun” had been eaten by a wolf or something with each eclipse. Though curiously, they had forgotten the star’s name, they knew it was the son of Uriel, that great sphere that rises eternally in Elysium.
“Tell me something…” Alden said the words before the thought had fully formed. “That teleportation trick, can you go anywhere?”
Osric crossed his leg and leaned back in the chair. His face was contorted into a mask of indifferent frustration; indifference to the question and frustration at having to pay for play in a manner of speaking.
“There are limits, but as I have recently demonstrated in my trip to Agradya, the whole of Silex is more or less within my grasp.” Osric narrowed his eyes with a hint of mischief. “Why, are you homesick?”
“And what of the moon?” Alden said, ignoring the mocking tone. “Can you take me to Virides Occuli?”
“What the hell for?” Osric scoffed reflexively. “Unless…”
Alden shook his head; it was silly of him to ask such a thing. Even if he could get up there, what did he hope to find? She had died long ago, and it was unlikely there would be a grave or even a corpse. Whoever got stranded up there probably turned the moon into a completely new world, much like they had on Silex.
“Forget it…”
“Are there people up there?” Osric pressed, his pencil poised to scribble down another page and a half of notes.
“I said forget it.” Alden snapped. “I forget how many centuries separate us sometimes…”
Osric frowned, and Alden was certain the terrifying sorcerer who made a pact with a literal devil was pouting. Alden had seen his little books, even flipped through one or two of them. While mostly fantasy or so far off base as to be comedic, the mage had made some sound deductions. There were people up there, at one point, probably still were in some twisted form or another, just not the person he was interested in.
“I cannot, or rather, I would not be confident enough to even attempt.” Osric said at length. “The distance is too vast, and one that I do not know. I do not know if my reservoir of magical stamina will sustain me for the duration of the journey, particularly if I am carrying another, and I assume there is no place to stop and take a break along the way…”
“Just forget it.”
“You could always ask Morana…”
Alden dismissed the suggestion with a flippant wave. “That bitch’ll probably dump me in the void for a laugh. Forget I asked. It doesn’t matter.”
“Very well, but, I am still unclear…” Osric said hesitantly, looking over his notes. “Who is Morana? Our Morana.”
Alden laughed to himself and finished his smoke. There was no easy answer, and certainly not one he was certain of. The gods were dead in his time, mere tradition and superstition, he feared what power he would give by acknowledging what he knew in his gut. Men were once so fearful of the spectre of death, that when that pale blue sphere twinkled in the night, and her sisters fled, they would place wreaths of holly and bouquets of lilies on doorsteps to trick her into thinking they had already died and were in mourning. They burned effigies of her in Deadsun and any utterance of her name was often followed by making the horns with one’s hand, or uttering some nonsense mantra. These traditions lasted well into his time, often perverted as holidays and festivals, and he briefly wondered if the old holidays were still celebrated. Morana was death, the keeper of the keys, winter’s cold kiss and times end. She was a hag at years’ end in Deadsun, and a young woman in Frostmoon. Like her sisters, she had faded with man’s waning reverence, only to return with wars explosion of tribute in the form of young lives thrown to the pyre.
Alden recalled her ruined temple, and the promise he made, to revive a dead god with a grand sacrifice. Nine-tenths of the population would be laid on the altar at her feet, in exchange, Agrardya would return to its former glory with himself as its immortal emperor god. A bargain he made, despite every tale warning him of how deals with gods often went awry, particularly with her.
“I’ve told you,” Alden said somberly, “She is death.”