Chapter 104: Our fate (Second Part)
Paul marked a long break after his last few words to let the children, and especially his daughter, digest what he had revealed. She had always been shy and discreet, but she was at her core a strong-willed girl who never complained about her condition or about the thankless job she had to do to help her father on his farm.
In the same way, she rarely cried.
However, after hearing what really happened to her mother, these rare tears kept pouring out of her eyes in an incessant heartbreaking flow.
She didn’t die of a cold when she was little as he had always pretended to spare her a truth she was too young to remember.
Her fate was far more cruel.
Sillath stayed silent, his hand had caught his daughter’s in silent support she gladly accepted.
“Did she… Did she die?” she finally muttered in a croaked voice, distorted by her sobbing.
For a moment, Paul wanted to lie to her.
He had done it for so long each time a difficult subject or event entered their life that it had almost become a reflex, a second nature for him. The truth could only harm her further and keep an impossible hope alive. The words were on the tip of his tongue, ready to leave his lips when he crossed Sillath’s gaze.
There weren't any tears in his eyes, but sadness for his friend standing by his side could still be seen in them. However, the emotion Paul saw in these blue gems wasn't what abruptly stopped him from answering with comforting lies.
He saw something else in them: judgment.
Not for what he did or didn’t do, but for what he was about to do.
Frozen by his sky-blue eyes seeing right through him as if he was able to peer directly into this soul, Paul’s lies stayed stuck in his throat, unable to leave his mouth as shame started to build up inside him once more.
Sillath had understood what he wanted to do and warned him against it.
How a child younger than his daughter could be so perceptive, Paul had no idea.
For him, Sillath was a mystery.
When he met him, he was just a lost child with an unknown, but certainly cruel past that needed their help to send a letter to his family. A magically talented child, willing to work for his meals and the roof above his head. In short, a good-natured kid who had seen too much, too soon.
Paul could never have imagined how wrong he was about him.
Just like the true nature of his wife escaped him all those years ago, Sillath’s real self also eluded him.
It wasn’t the shocking power unsuited — unnatural even — for someone his age that he showed time after time to save them across their journey nor his determination to risk his life for them that made the biggest impression on Paul. It was the apparent wisdom that at times radiated from him as if he had already seen and understood everything around him.
Maybe it was simply his instinct instead of an experience he shouldn’t have at his age, nonetheless, Sillath’s gaze in his instant was unambiguous.
Like when he had confronted him near the carriage before his attempt to steal it, Sillath had understood the truth and wanted Paul to know it.
Paul knew Sillath wouldn’t say anything if he chose to lie in the end.
However, he didn’t need to.
This single gaze was enough for him to remember what these past weeks had taught him.
Sooner or later, the truth will always catch up to you for there were no true immortal lies. Delaying the inevitable will only cost him more. This wasn’t something he was willing to risk especially after his daughter forgave him for his sins when he himself would have never done the same in the opposite situation.
Therefore, he steeled his determination to answer his daughter’s question, looking at him with her big eyes filled with expectations he was going to extinguish.
“No, he didn’t kill her. Even after her wings were ripped off and her body restrained, she continued to resist. To have her cooperation, he proposed to let us all go if she accepted to quietly come with him,” he slowly explained with a voice heavy with meaning. “She accepted and left with him. This was the last time I ever saw her,” he concluded.
As Paul had anticipated, Alianelle’s tears abruptly stopped when she heard that her mother may still be alive, but her face became deathly pale when she understood what Paul didn’t say out loud.
Sillath’s face also became somber when he realized the same thing.
With her otherworldly regenerative ability, Eleanor’s wings could continue to grow back almost endlessly no matter how many times they cut them off. Something that no other member of the Third clan was able to do.
For them, and for Paul, once their wings were lost, they were gone forever.
Whatever the reason the Ryunno clan had to be so desperate for those wings that they were willing to commit such atrocities, the fact remained that the number of healthy members of Paul’s tribe still hiding with their wings intact was almost negligible.
It was inevitable after decades of hunting and oppression.
Even their project to forcefully make them reproduce under captivity didn’t yield the desired results as Paul had learned a few years after this event.
That’s why someone with the unique ability to give them endlessly what they desired was a fatal attraction for the Ancestor of the Ryunno clan.
He wanted to have her submit to him for this single reason.
Paul knew he could have simply taken her when she was defeated. No one had the power to stop him. However, even with such strong natural regeneration, someone condemned to the repeated torture of having their wings regularly ripped off would die without a powerful motivation to hold on to life.
If allowing her this compromise by letting everyone around go was all it took to have what he so dearly wanted, then the choice was quick.
Paul knew he could be wrong, but he had repeated this scene so many times in his head that little doubt remained. The speed at which this so-called Ancestor accepted her plea for mercy for her companions was all he needed to draw this conclusion.
To him, and to probably everyone watching this terrible scene from afar, it was clear that this Ancestor didn’t care one bit if everyone around lived or died as long as she accepted her sordid fate.
And accept her fate she did, with her head held high and without a single look at her husband or her children to avoid this undefeatable monster to renege on his word and use them as hostages.
Shocked, but free for now, all the people present left in small groups. For almost a day, Eleanor had acted as their leader to guide them toward better days for their race. She had reignited lost hopes and distant dreams with abilities and a leadership Paul never suspected his wife had.
However, with her demise, all those rising hopes were mercilessly destroyed in an instant.
It was too much for many of them.
The largest of these groups, made up mostly of his wingless clansmen, eventually broke up a few weeks later, each going their separate way. It was the inevitable consequence after their cohesion was gone, replaced by despair and the implacable realization of the part of themself they had lost forever.
Paul did the same and left only with his two children. He hid in an important town near the border of the wilderness and acted as a Human refugee. Without his wings, his appearance was more than convincing. He worked there as a farmer and buried the events of that day so deeply that he never talked about it to anyone including his children.
They weren’t part of this cursed clan that was doomed to have everything taken away from them anymore.
He convinced his oldest son of that and, fully aware of what he was doing, chose to cut his half-grown wings that he had dissimulated until this day.
No father should have to harm their own child, but he did it without regret.
The terrifying events of that day were still fresh in their minds. Eleanor had been stronger than anyone they ever saw, but she was still mercilessly crushed in the end. There was no victory to hope against this kind of monster that had sworn to hunt their kind to the end of the world.
His old dream of taking back his tribe’s pride, of rising from the ash once again, was impossible from the start. This was and had always been a losing battle since the beginning, but they only understood it now that it was too late.
Eleanor was gone, but the rest of his family still had a chance to live and grow in peace.
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Their mother had sacrificed more than her life for this chance, so they couldn’t throw it away for an illusory hope.
For them both, the time of dream, hope, and pride was gone.
These wings would never bring them enough power to overcome someone like the Ancestor of the Ryunno clan. They were once a symbol of their glorious past, a living sign of the superiority of their tribe among all the others, but in this instant, Paul and his son were sure that all these wings could bring them were horror and despair.
So, when the bud of his daughter’s wings started to appear a few years later, Paul didn’t hesitate. With his son’s help, he immediately cut it off. Unlike her older brother, Alianelle’s wings hadn’t started their growth spurt yet, so she suffered less than him. Another motivation to do it as soon as possible as the pain Paul had endured when his own were mercilessly ripped off still haunted his nights.
She didn’t remember what happened that day thanks to the drugs Paul had used to put her to sleep. She probably didn’t even realize that the strange asperities on each side of her waist were gone.
She simply accepted her brother’s story of an accident to explain the scars and the constant pain she had on each side of her waist.
Such was the beauty of children’s naivety and innocence.
Even if she had doubts or somewhat recalled a part of the truth, she was too young to properly remember her mother and unable to understand what Paul had stolen from her that day.
Because of her father, her entire magical potential was gone forever.
On the other hand, it would allow her to grow safely without the risk of being discovered and denounced by one of their Human neighbors. That's how Paul rationalized it, and for years he was persuaded to have made the right choice. Without their wings, they looked more like Humans than Beastmen after all so hiding among other Humans proved easy.
The only way for them to be discovered was to make a mistake, so he decided to keep the whole truth from Alianelle. Her mother, her story, her heritage: everything.
Days were tough in the ‘Magic Kingdom’ if you couldn’t use magic yourself, but they had enough food to fill their bellies and warm clothes to put on in winter. This was more than what Paul had when he was a kid relentlessly tracked inside the wilderness for what he was.
Time did its work to allow the opened wounds of the past to slowly close.
Until the worst happened.
Alianelle’s wings started to grow back.
Their entire lie they had to shed blood for was threatened as Paul immediately understood that she was just like her mother.
As a result, he was sure that no matter how many times he cut her wings off, they would always regenerate. Alianelle was eight years old at the time so definitely not young enough anymore to be fed the same lies he had told her the last time. Moreover, if she was like her mother, her healing abilities would continue to become more powerful as she became older. After all, it took Eleanor less than an hour to have her wings entirely grow back.
Sadly, this wasn’t the only thing Paul needed to consider.
There was a reason for the Ryunno clan’s Ancestor to have accepted Eleanor’s offer to let everyone leave. The kind of special and overwhelming ability she manifested was in extreme majority an isolated event. A miraculous anomaly that would never be replicated.
However, two individuals directly related by blood sharing such a powerful ability none of the members of their tribes ever possessed could only mean one thing.
Alianelle and Eleanor were both Progenitors.
Lesser people knew it these days as it had probably been decades since the last occurrence of a similar event, but this was how clans were formed.
One or several individuals who developed, or were born with, a new superior ability that they could pass on to their descendants. It happened that way with the Ancien Human clan. Years or even decades after the sudden appearance of their first member — their progenitor — with overwhelming abilities never seen before, and when the number of these exceptional individuals had risen enough, they were able to detach themselves from their initial race to become a clan in its own right.
Although a clan appearing within an already existing clan was unheard of, Paul was sure of himself and could only lament what their future might have been like if things had been different. However, there was something much more important and alarming than lost potential and wasted future.
This ability meant that just like her mother, Alianelle could share the same horrendous fate if the Ryunno clan learned of her existence.
They would submit his sweet, shy daughter to the worst of agony time and time again.
He couldn’t allow that.
Without anyone to ask for help, Paul looked for a solution on his own to find a way to get rid of her wings for good. Unfortunately, he found none, and time was playing against him as Alianelle had already noticed the strange bulges on each side of her waist. In his despair, Paul had no other choice but to put Alianelle in a prolonged sleep with the same drugs he had used years before to cut off her budding wings. No matter what, he couldn’t allow her to know she wasn’t Human and to understand that he and her brother had lied to her all this time.
Days succeeded one another without any appropriate solution.
His son, saddened to see his sister continuously asleep, was also starting to lose faith in him until Paul finally noticed something.
Her wings had stopped growing.
A few simple deductions were all it took for him to understand that her body had to fight against the drug in her system — whose doses he had to increase daily — before it could make her wings grow anymore. It took much more time and study with horribly expensive men more scholarly than him to find an alternative to the common drug he was using.
After using this new poison and cutting once more the buds of her wings — still under her skin — in her sleep, Paul finally allowed his daughter to wake up. She was confused but didn’t appear weakened despite the poison coursing through her veins. A lie about a disease and an operation to remove tumors on her waist was all it took for Alianelle to believe him and to accept to take a daily dose of poison.
However, the elation Paul felt after his unexpected success was short-lived.
Just like her mother who had appeared unstoppable even when her arms were cut off, or when half her body was burned to a crisp, Alianelle’s healing ability also couldn’t be so easily controlled. As he had feared, her power grew, forcing him to use more poison.
Always more poison.
So much so that she was starting to have trouble bearing the initial onslaught before her regeneration began to kick in. Paul didn’t have any other poison as effective, all he could do was continue to make her drink this poison each day while pretending it was medicine for a disease she never had.
He was forced to watch her having more and more trouble bearing the effects of the massive doses she was receiving. Anyone other than her would have long died, but Alianelle’s pale face, lessening strength and constantly fleeting consciousness told him that she would share the same fate if he didn’t find a solution soon.
Once more, Paul had the choice.
He could have accepted his failure, told Alianelle the truth, endured her scorn, and left his comfortable life behind before her true nature was revealed and things took a turn for the worse.
However, Paul had become weak.
His pride and strength were long gone, violently ripped off from him at the same time as his wings, leaving only a broken man behind. A man traumatized by what he had seen and experienced and who refused to return to those days of wandering, especially now that he was left without the means to defend himself and his children.
So weak had he become that Paul’s nightmares had changed from the events of this terrible day when he lost everything to the scene of his daughter finally discovering what he did to her. Each time he woke up panting, covered with sweat, and with the image of his daughter’s face filled with rage at his betrayal, Paul knew that he couldn’t tell her the truth no matter what. Not now and probably never for the rest of her life.
Despite the protests of his son, devastated to see his sister getting weaker every day, Paul wasn’t able to face his crimes and guilt. To protect his lies, he neglected each opportunity and rejected every pleading from his son for weeks until Alianelle’s body finally failed her.
She fell into a coma.
Finally realizing what he had done, Paul stopped giving her the poison. Her condition improved the next day, but with a terrible surprise. Her body started to release a massive, uncontrolled amount of mana to forcefully heal itself. So much so that even if they were living on the outskirts of the city, people were doomed to notice and investigate this anomaly.
Soon, their cover would be blown up and their identity questioned, something he definitely couldn’t afford.
Resigned, Paul didn’t have much choice and gave her the same poison again to put an end to her crisis. He had let things escalate to hide the truth and was left in a terrible situation without any solution in sight. He became desperate as none of the massive books he read in the small town’s library was offering any solution until, finally, he found the information he needed only a few days later.
The perfect plant to contain Alianelle’s regeneration without harming her more than necessary.
This blue plant was rare, had a name he had trouble reading but had the interesting property of absorbing mana. Not like an Elemental stone — furiously seek out by the Ryunno clan — but if ingested, this plant would prevent the correct use of mana making any magical ability impossible to use. Her regenerative power was directly linked to her mana and would as a result be greatly influenced by this plant, Paul was sure of that.
The torrent of mana emitted from her when her regeneration got the upper hand over the poison was already proof enough of this. For Paul, there wasn’t any doubt that her regenerative abilities grew alongside her mana capacity, increasing — like all children her age — as she got older.
If he was right, this would also mean that this plant wouldn’t create any accommodation phenomenon requiring to increase the doses regularly since it will be the power itself that will be targeted and not her body as a whole like before.
Fortunately, even if this plant was rare, if this modest town’s library had a book talking about it, then it wasn’t for nothing. It grew in the region, less than a day away from the town.
Paul went there, took as much as he could find and replaced the poison he had been continuously giving her, and as he had predicted and hoped, her crisis stopped. By slowly adjusting the amount of this blue poison, Paul was finally able to have Alianelle wake up peacefully, without any torrent of mana, a few days later.
She could barely use her mana anymore, was physically weakened, but her general condition had improved compared with the previous poison, and more importantly, her wings never started to grow again after this day.
Unfortunately, Paul’s unnatural spending and research over the past months had attracted unwanted attention from the authorities. After the efforts he had to make, Paul was still forced to leave the city with his children to find another safe haven. Another town very similar to the previous one they used to live in, but with one major difference that Paul didn’t foresee.
The blue plant didn’t grow there.
Without this daily decoction, Alianelle’s mana once more rampaged when her power took the upper hand to get rid of the poison in her body before Paul had the time to replenish his reserves. Unfortunately, while Paul was busy controlling his daughter’s sudden outburst, the authorities were quicker to react this time.
What later happened to his son while they were running away from this town, Alianelle already knew and Sillath didn’t need to learn about it. Paul didn’t want to be reminded of it either.
Several days after that, Paul was forced to reveal to her that she was originally from a Beastman tribe. He didn’t have a choice as this time she was awake when her sudden release of mana happened. However, Paul skipped over all the important details. Giving a part of the truth to bury the important information was the last trick Paul used on her. He was aware that this deception was only effective because the loss of her brother had driven away any questions she might have had, leaving only the absolute realization that, just as her father had said, she could never let anyone find out what she was.
With this half-truth revealed, they were able to rejoin an Advanced town inside the wilderness a few weeks later. Definitely not a peaceful place or somewhere fit to raise a young girl, but safer for now than all the other towns inside the Dorell kingdom.
Their story mostly completed, Paul finally closed his mouth and waited for the children’s reaction standing still as statues in front of him in the smelly and poorly lit room they had rented. In the dim light of the flickering candlelights, Paul had trouble seeing his daughter’s face distinctly. Or maybe, it was the tears gathering at the corner of his eyes that were responsible.
Tears of regret and shame he hid for too long.
Was he right?
Did he make the correct choice?
What could he have done differently?
Paul could answer none of these questions. All he could do in this instant was to wait for his daughter and their common savior to judge him. However, for the first time in years, he wasn’t afraid anymore.
The truth that had been pressing on his chest all this time was finally out, freeing him at the same time from this heavy lie.
What her daughter would choose to do after that, he didn’t know, but this was alright because, for the first time in her life, it would be her choice. A decision she could take with the entire truth, which was more than Paul had ever offered her.