Chapter Sixteen- Difficult conversations
“Three, two, one, now!” an ugly snap resounded as Mark rolled Lilliana’s ankle back into place, and held it there. Lilliana, much to her credit, didn’t cry out, or complain at the incredible pain that Mark knew must've been coursing through her in that moment. “You ready?” he asked, ensuring her ankle didn’t leave its position. Through gritted teeth, Lilliana responded. “Yeah.” Mark went quiet and let her focus, simply holding her in place as she tried something new. All of a sudden, curse energy flared around Lilliana. It was very similar to the energy she normally manipulated in their training, but to his energy sensing ability it felt warped, almost backwards. She groaned, and her ankle pulsed in his grip. A spark of worry ignited within him, but the energy flare was brief, ending within moments.
Cautiously, with Mark holding tightly to her arm, Lilliana eased off of the bed and put weight on her previously injured leg. When she didn’t immediately show any signs of continued injury, Mark breathed a heavy sigh of relief. Lilliana’s curse reversal skill appeared to have done its job admirably. He slowly released her arm, and she took some careful steps around the room. “No pain,” she announced after a second. “I think we’re in the clear.” Then, seemingly out of nowhere, she popped a difficult question on him. “Can I tell you how I died?”
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Lilliana wasn't quite sure what had inspired the question, but when Mark responded with a reassuring nod of his head, she decided to continue. “When I was 23, I was wrapping up my duties as head of negotiation for a continental peace treaty,” Lilliana began. “A week before the treaty was to be signed, I fell ill. At first I thought it was because of all the stress," she admitted. "Tensions were high at the time.” Lilliana thought back to the arguments she had needed to quell, the demands that each empire and kingdom needed to meet for the rest for the treaty to go through. She shuddered, and continued. No use thinking about that now. “It turned out it wasn’t the stress- I was the first person in 700 years to contract what we called the Indigo Eye Plague- an incurable disease.” Lilliana watched as Mark cringed in recognition. She had, after all, told him about her skills. He could connect the dots between the description she had provided him with earlier and what she was telling him now.
“Nobody knew how it was caused, or what might have spread it. It wasn’t contagious, to be certain. Most people thought it was a legend- a tale told to children to get them to listen to their parents.” She paused momentarily, thinking. “My illness was a well guarded secret. My family only told those who they believed might be able to help me. Nothing did, of course.” Lilliana could hear the scathing tone her voice had adopted, but continued anyway. “Within a week, I was locked away in the recesses of my mind. A passenger, no, a prisoner in my own body. I felt everything my body felt; heard everything my family said as they watched me scream. “I watched myself die, Mark. I- I lost everyone.”
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A heavy weight settled on Mark’s chest at this admission. As he listened, he grieved for the woman in front of him, who had lost so much. What an awful way to die, he thought sadly. He hadn’t struggled nearly as much to tell her how he died. As he recalled, his tone when recounting the unnatural glowing whirlpool that had taken his life had been almost irreverent. He had had it easy in comparison- a few short minutes of terror, and it was over. He hadn’t had anybody left to lose, either. He flashed back to his childhood. It hadn't been the kindest.
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When Mark was eight, his mother had been struck by a drunk driver outside the law firm where she worked as an estate planning lawyer. She had died on impact. He never did get to say goodbye. His father lost his job a week later, after having shown up drunk to the supermarket where he worked as a cashier. After that, despite the money provided to them by the government, life quickly became somewhat of a downhill spiral. His father tried his best to be a good single parent, or at least that’s how Mark saw it, but more and more of the money seemed to go to liquor. His dad hadn’t been a mean drunk- he had never hit Mark so much as he had just been absent, but he wasn’t a happy one, either. He was a sad shadow of the smiling man he had been when Mark’s mother was alive.
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Eventually, liquor progressed to harder drugs, and the money ran out. His father would be gone for upwards of a week at a time, off doing odd jobs for his dealers, offering favors for drugs. The neighbors got in contact with Child Protection Services, and one day they showed up at the front door. Mark was the only one home, and had been for a week. The wrappers and remains of any and all food he could find in the house were piled everywhere. When he had opened the door, the inspector asked him if he had seen his father in the past few days. When the answer was “No”, the man had the pleasure of telling him that his father was dead. It had been one year to the day since his mother was killed.
Mark, all things considered, had been very lucky to have a positive experience with the foster care system. The first household he ended up in was that of one Edna Vanderbilt. Edna was a widow in her late fifties, who had always wanted children. Her heart went out to Mark. After all, her husband had died in much the same way as his mother. After living with the boy, and finding parenting to be as rewarding as she had hoped, she filled out the adoption papers. Living with Edna was not very conventional. At her age, she retired by the time mark was 16.
The old firecracker was a personality to be sure. She couldn’t cook worth a damn when she adopted him- so they went and took cooking classes together at the local community college. They were quite the sight to be sure, but she taught him not to worry about standing out, and to do what made him happy. She picked him up each and every day from school in her old chevy, and when the he told her that the kids at school made fun of him for “getting picked up by his grandma”, she had laughed and then told him that were just “jealous of the kid getting picked up in the awesome car.” When Mark was going through a breakup with his high school girlfriend, she had known exactly how to comfort him. Even more than she was his parent, she was his friend.
Then, a week before the end of his first year of college, Edna suffered a heart attack. He had stayed in state, and drove three hours to see her. He was with her when she died. Mark, although his last name hadn’t legally been changed before, took hers in solidarity; in memory of the woman who raised him to be the person that he was.
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Looking back on his previous life now, Mark was finally able to realize that, though it was years before his death, Edna’s passing was where Mark’s ability to cope with loss had been broken. Over the final few years of his previous life, he’d split himself away from people. His friends became acquaintances, and acquaintances people he’d never met. All because he was afraid to lose again. Part of him wondered if the real reason he had accepted the jobs that led him here was because he subconsciously believed that he had too much to lose. I categorically denied myself of the most important part of life, Mark realized. The only benefit to that is that I have less to miss now, which is sad in and of itself. But Lilliana… Mark could only imagine what Lilliana must have lost. He thought about what he would’ve felt like had he lost his parents, Edna, and everyone and everything else he’d ever cared about, all at once- but less definitively. That would be the worst part, he thought; Knowing that they were still around, but not how they were feeling, or whether they were doing alright.
So, he started to tell her his own story. “When I was a little kid…” he began.
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Novi looked on from his celestial viewpoint, the system feeding him insights into the psyche of his two favorites. They had a lot of trauma- something not unexpected based solely on the criteria of their choosing. He didn’t care whether they had trauma or not, but they had seen barely any of what the island had in store for them. The water dragons, the hawks and bears, all powerless in the face of the scariest of what the island had to offer. They needed to be powerful despite what they’d been through. They had little to live for now, save for their little found family. They would, he supposed, have opened up eventually. They just needed a push in the right direction. He watched as they poured their hearts out, giving freely the secrets of their past lives to each other; as they listened somberly to each tale of loss. They cried together, and shared tears always give way to purpose. As the sun dipped below the horizon, the man and woman promised each other one thing: that they would never lose anything again.
Of course, they'll need to be powerful, Novi thought, chuckling to himself. But they're going to realize that pretty soon, I think. After all, the eve of the shade moon approached, its oppressive aura growing closer and closer with each passing day.