Ohira would not let Alira leave until the following morning. She was adamant that she rest and even though the young witch protested, a sternness emerged from the crone that cowed Alira into agreement. She drank her tea quietly, watching Ohira move around with a limping shuffle indicative of age and wondered how much of it was affectation and how much was truly her aged bones giving out. Once Alira had rested, eaten, and bathed, Ohira relented, giving her the information she so desperately wanted.
“Yous better listen, as I ain’t gonna be repeating nothin’.”
Alira nodded. “Yes, ma’am.” The crone smiled at her, her eyes crinkling.
“Our princelin’ is sufferin’ something mighty serious. He done been sufferin’ for years, child, and it’s thanks to them years atop that burial mound. I reckon you both will feel a good deal better once that syphon is destroyed. But,” Ohira said, raising her gnarled finger in warning. “It ain’t gonna be easy to destroy. The weapons that Erin done made from him will need to be hunted down, too.”
“Right,” Alira nodded, tightening her belt. Her father’s prayer beads jingled on her chest and Ohira frowned then reached out, touching the beads softly. She met Alira’s eyes, their faces nearly on level with one another.
“I knowed he’d have been proud of you,” whispered the crone and Alira blinked back the tears that immediately sprang to her eyes.
“Thank you,” she whispered in reply. Ohira nodded, clapping her on the shoulder and grinning.
“Now,” she said, hobbling to the table. She sat and faced Alira, rubbing her knobbly hands together. “Yous gonna want to make sure to protect that princelin’ before you ruin that syphon. He’s still tied to it, ya see, and it might be a shock for him to get that power back all in a sudden.” She watched Alira for a moment, searching her worried face.
“What?” asked the younger woman frowning, feeling self conscious under the crone’s scrutiny.
“You ain’t what I thought you’d be,” said Ohira softly and Alira felt her stomach clench in disappointment.
“I’m sorry,” she said and dropped her gaze. A wizened hand touched her cheek.
“Nay, child, you’re more than what I reckoned on.”
The two women planned for the rest of the morning, talking and discussing ideas until the sun peaked. Ohira was adamant that the younger witch understood the dangers of destroying the syphon, especially as the best weapon would be her untested Light powers.
“I don’t like that mix,” Ohira admitted. “Light and Witches don’t go together. I understand the circumstances ain’t usual,” she said, pausing Alira’s protestations. “But it ain’t natural and it’s dangerous for him.”
“I have sheltered him from the Light before,” Alira reminded her but Ohira merely tilted her head, her eyes squinted in thought.
“Mayhaps we'll do a few tests afore you leave.”
The crone helped Alira practise sheathing the tether in darkness, the borrowed gift from Shadesorrow. Her own witch’s powers seemed to be tied directly to that particular set of powers and the ease at which she summoned the darkness seemed to imply some innate ability of her own.
The Light, however, was different. It felt unyielding in her grasp, stern and unbending. She took a longer time to tap into the well of Light inside her than she did the darkness and while that didn’t bother Alira very much, the crone seemed to find it a little disturbing.
“It’s a human gift,” Ohira said, as though that explained everything. “You’re a human and it should be easy for you once you’ve tapped into it.”
“I’m trying,” Alira said, panting. It was incredibly tiring to shield her bond with Hrulinar and call upon the Light, as though trying to make her hands perform two completely separate actions. Her head spun as she bent over, her braid swinging with her heaving breath.
“Again,” Ohira said.
Frustrated, Alira drew in a deep breath, straightening. She threw caution to the wind and unthinkingly reached within herself, trying to remember how it felt to cast the brightness at Therin not that long ago. With his handsome but petulant face in her mind, she easily reached within and summoned a blinding ball of golden Light, letting it shimmy down her arm to her hand. Surprised, she checked her bond and noted that without thinking, she had cast a cloak of darkness around the princeling’s tether.
“That’s better!” Ohira cheered. “What did you do differently?”
Alira frowned and shrugged. “I was thinking of Therin.” Ohira’s brows shot up and Alira blushed. “His face…” She shook her head, willing the hurt of Therin’s betrayal away. She had barely known him and the pain of his selfishness stung far more than their acquaintance warranted. The crone seemed to read Alira’s hurt on her face and touched her hand gently.
“It’s stupid–”
“Nay,” Ohira stalled her. “Here.” She reached out and handed Alira the book, open to a page. Alira read what she pointed to.
Daughter of Man,
Gifts of Light and Dark
Ignited by the mother,
Sustained by the Son.
Chosen of the Light,
Gifts of Man
Bestowed by Sacrifice.
Enemies by Fate,
Allies by Choice.
Alira looked up from the short passage and blinked in confusion.
“I understood some of it,” she admitted slowly. “Daughter of Man–myself. The Son? Likely Hrulinar. But it’s strange…” She traced a finger across the words written in a spidery hand, realising as she did that it was the Witch Script she was reading.
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“The Mother isn’t capitalised,” she noted, her finger landing on the word. “Is that a mistake?”
“Aye, could be. Or it could mean someone else other than Aethra.”
“Mother,” Alira mused, re-reading the words. “My mother.”
Ohira nodded and watched her read the next lines again.
“Chosen of Light…” Alira said the words, letting them imbue with meaning as she spoke them aloud. “Chosen of Light–Therin.”
Ohira merely looked back at Alira, her face unreadable.
“Do you think my mother knew what this passage meant?”
“The chances ain’t bad,” Ohira admitted. “Could be why she seduced Galvyn. Could be she was hoping he was the Chosen of Light.”
Alira ran her finger across the words and read them carefully again, mouthing the words.
“This passage must have been a warning for the witches.” She mused, thumbing through the small book carefully. Some passages seemed to leap out at her, like memories or previous thoughts–an echo of Shadesorrow responding to the words. Some passages were new to her, no flicker of recognition, no meaning behind the words that she could immediately decipher.
“Some say,” Ohira began, her eyes on Alira. “That it weren’t only Shadesorrow who the witches were listening to. That Aethra herself spoke to them and that their messages did interfere with one another.”
“So some of what is in here might contradict itself is what you mean.”
“Aye,” Ohira said and handed her the empty tea kettle while taking the book from her hands.
“How would someone reading it tell them apart?”
Ohira ushered her out the door, indicating the need for water. “Ain’t sure they could tell the difference,” the crone admitted.
Alira watched the stream running past her, deja vu coursing through her like the water itself. It wasn’t just the act of fetching water for Ohira that felt familiar, but something else. It was as though something akin to the concept of home was awakening within her. She was pondering the older woman’s words when a voice whispered inside her mind, echoing as though shouted from across a vast space.
Hrulinar…
She froze, her heart racing at the recognition of the voice.
Alira… whispered a second voice, one almost as familiar but infinitely more dear. She plucked the bond, letting her acknowledgment ripple across the distance. The thin strand suddenly became taut, tugging painfully against her heart, which stuttered in response.
I obey. Her other half said and with a dread that seemed to magnify as the seconds ticked by, she felt a strange desire to leave Ohira’s sanctum, to change her shape and fly, fly, fly–into the arms of her dead mother.
The flight to the plateau had been shorter than she had anticipated. Ohira’s directions were ringing in her head as her wings beat against the warm air coming from the red rock of the burial mound. She flew over the top of the plateau and looked down but cursed her sensitive owl’s eyes. The sunshine hurt and she blinked then descended, landing on the top and changing her shape in a nearly graceful flutter of tawny feathers.
She fingered the beads at her neck while she paced the flat surface, marvelling at the view. She thought that if she cleared away the woods, she might see her cottage. He had sat here, for over two decades, almost within sight of Erin and Alira.
She felt closer to Hrulinar atop the mound. Something about the impression of him lingered, as though just having existed here imprinted a speck of him into the red sand. Being closer to a part of Hrulinar seemed to soothe that need and allowed her to push away the desire to abandon her current quest.
Alira had warned Ohira of the voices that spoke within her but felt reluctant to admit that she felt a desire to return to her mother. Something about the pull felt shameful after all she had learned about Erin. That she should miss her, that she could want to see whatever remained of the witch who had raised her seemed incongruous to the pain and anger she felt.
She toed the sand around the fire, letting thoughts of Hrulinar flicker across her mind. His coppery hair, his pale skin, his sharp-toothed grin that was almost painfully bright when he was happy–all images that played across her with ease as she relaxed, letting his residual power flow.
He had been so desperately lonely. The syphon robbed him of the power to leave, robbed him of even his memories. But he knew, and was intimately acquainted with, the deep-seated loneliness that pervaded the wind-swept top of the burial mound. The syphon could not take that particular pain away.
He watched the moon rise, his form aching to disperse. Suddenly, a shockwave, invisible but for the distortion it left in his vision, ripped through the night. He felt it course through him, rock him to the core of his being.
Erin was dead.
The adoration that he had harboured, the unanswerable question of his devotion, was suddenly wiped from him, replaced with a single, brightly lit face.
Her parting directions had been to lure this woman.
Her parting words, flung across the distance between them, had been to force her hand to the blade that rested below him. Unthinking, he understood the commands but a sliver of him shuddered as he thought about the violated weapon that awaited the young woman.
She would reach for the blade and at the exact moment her flesh was breached, Hrulinar was meant to extract the promise himself, binding not the blade to her…but himself, the syphon, the crystals within, and the entire weapon’s cache that had been created using his essence.
If it didn’t work, she’d die and he’d be free.
If it did work, he’d lose himself completely, entwined inexplicably to the woman and her fate, their only escape being their deaths.
What promise would he take from her, he wondered as he felt the death of his mistress fade and a new bond slip into its place.
He understood it must be a sly one, this promise. It needn’t be grand or especially fantastical. The only requirement was that she accept the words with her heart.
It wasn’t until her presence was close, that his luring had worked and reached its climax, her hand slowly dipping into the grave, that he knew what promise he would take from her. She was already whispering the words to herself as she reached into the tomb, grasping the blade.
Endure. He begged her.
Promise to endure the trials you face. Promise to endure the fate your mother has thrown across us both.
As her hand touched the blade, her own heart beating the two syllables, Alira promised, and was bound to Hrulinar.
With the transfer of power, he faded, his memories so pale that he trembled and struggled to remember who he even was. He felt a vast expanse yawning all around him, the space he used to occupy suddenly empty.
Alira gasped, clutching her chest, as the vision faded. He had been utterly shattered by the things her mother had done and she was only now seeing how literal that breakage was. Pieces of him lay about her, scattered like the shards of a broken mirror, trapped here beneath her feet. She reminded herself that he also had fractured himself further, using himself to sustain her to his detriment. He was a shadow of what he had been, a ghost of his power whispering in her blood.
She would not let this injustice remain. She would not let him suffer longer than necessary. Shadesorrow loomed, she acknowledged, but she was certain that this path she was on, this path to release his power from the syphon, was the right one. After he was restored, they could face his Divine kin, together. After he was whole, or as whole as she could help him become, they could decipher the things in the book at her waist, together.
She changed her shape and threw herself off the plateau, gliding on silent wings to the base of the rock face and scanned for the tell-tale signs Ohira had told her to look for. She spotted it on the second pass around the cliff and dropped, reverting her shape and landing with a grunt atop the large, red boulder. She summoned her Light, just enough to check, and as the boulder glowed faintly purple she released the Light.
She connected to the power that the burial mound thrummed with, a power she knew belonged to her other half, and before she could think about what she was doing, she drew her daggers and plunged them into the red stone, their shadowed blades slipping into the stone with ease. She shielded the thin strand of her bond and pulsed a shock of Light down her blades and within seconds she had cleaved the boulder beneath her feet, opening an entrance into the catacombs.