Regarding Tauhrelil’s Bond
"You probably figured this out on your own already," Virenina said as they walked, "but autokinesis isn't really one of my powers. Not the way most people think it is, anyway. It's more like a…side effect, of my real power. Or maybe a byproduct."
"Byproduct," Asaau repeated, somewhat faintly. It made sense, given what she'd just shown him, but even so, it chilled him to hear Virenina call the power of sustained flight a mere byproduct. Part of Asaau wondered, faintly, how long it would take him to adjust to this new and inhuman sense of scale. Perhaps he never would.
"My real power," Virenina told him, "is restraint."
He knew what she meant. The killing light, the awful pressure, the screams, the screams, the screams, he knew – and still, Asaau had to press his lips together to hold back a hideously ill-timed laugh. To hear Virenina, of all people, declare that her greatest power was restraint was the final little absurdity that threatened to snap his fraying self-control.
"What I showed you just now was nothing," Virenina said, and the urge to laugh died within him as swiftly and sharply as if decapitated. "If there's an end to Ai Naa, I've never found it. I've never even come close. Some people have a hard time channeling because they drain their reserves too fast. For me, though…"
"Too much?" It was such a simple, obvious guess that Asaau felt stupid for even voicing it, but anything was better than letting Virenina drift back into silence.
"Before we paired," she said, "Ai Naa could only taste blood through mind-echoes and secondhand dreams. Then, suddenly – " Virenina mimed shock with a widened eye, a splaying of the hands. "A body!" She spun on one heel so that she walked backwards facing Asaau, grinning, arms flung wide, telegraphing exultation. "Flesh and feeling! Skin and sensation! A tongue to taste with, a mouth to devour…"
Her arms fell slowly back to her sides. Her hands tightened into fists.
"My mouth." Her grin stiffened; her lone eye shone with fury. "My mouth, my tongue, my body – "
She stopped and drew in a long breath through her teeth, then exhaled with a hiss that reminded Asaau of steam escaping a volcanic vent.
"Seket." Virenina fell back into walking alongside him. Her voice sounded almost cheerful, almost like her usual self. "You love quizzing me so much, now it's your turn to answer for once." She tossed back her head, then folded her hands before her the way Asaau often did himself. When she spoke again, she imitated the smooth, soft-edged propriety that colored his own voice. "Recall, if you will," said Virenina in her Asaau-voice, "the introduction to Urasyata Utsaya Reim's Foundations of the Unseen Art. In what terms does Syata Reim describe the nature of a paired human?"
Well, she has to be feeling better if she's back to needling you. But Asaau was too tired to manage more than a brief flicker of annoyance. He wasn't sure if it was at her imitation of his voice, or at the basic nature of her question. Oh, just give her an answer. If it helps her to explain…
"A gate," he said. "Syata Reim posits that the enmeshment of body and soul allows a paired human to act as a conduit. By bonding to the soul enmeshed in the body, the paired spirit becomes enmeshed in turn and may then flow from the unseen world to ours. With the introduction of a stable third object, an anchor – "
"Oh, we'll talk about anchors soon, just you wait," said Virenina, with all the cheer of a merrily crackling funeral pyre. Then, slipping back into her Asaau-voice, her playing-teacher voice: "But why a gate? Why not a bridge, a passage, a way-path?"
Why those three counterexamples? Asaau asked himself, and from there soon had his answer.
"One may simply walk over a bridge or along a path," he said, "but a gate must be opened. And a paired spirit – though connected to our world through a human soul, it can't simply flow across from the unseen world. Even a paired spirit must still will itself across the – the gap, so to speak, between its world and ours, and its partner must let it cross. Or desire it to, at least…their wills must align. The gate must unlock."
"Or be forced open," said Virenina.
Asaau tried to say something in response and managed only a faint movement of his lips. His face felt numb, bloodless. Ahead he could make out the first far-off glitter of moonlight dripping down cold metal.
"Through me," said Virenina, "Ai Naa can finally touch the world of flesh and blood. Imagine if your soul was grown from the seed of red hunger, Seket, and suddenly for the first time you can really taste this thing you've spent gods know how many thousands of years starving for…but only when the royal slitting cunt of a human you're paired with lets you." She was grinning again, grinning, a bright hateful crescent of teeth that glittered like her distant blade. "Wouldn't it make your hunger even worse? Wouldn't you be furious? All that pulsating bright red life hanging just out of your reach, wouldn't you try to force your way across so you could just eat?"
"I don't know," Asaau said, faintly, tremulously. "I…"
I can't, he wanted to tell her. His mind had been forced to accept as real one impossible horror after another. He was beginning to wonder, genuinely, how much more he could stand. It's too much. Let me turn back, let me unknow it. The words piled up on his tongue, festered behind his closed lips, and oh, gods in their graves, how could he say them to Virenina? How could he tell her it was too much for him, when she was the one fused by the soul to Ai Naa? Forgive me, Tauhrelil, I know you've trusted me with your most terrible secret, but you must understand, it's so very upsetting to listen to…
"My real power," Virenina said again, "is restraint. Every minute of every day."
Asaau tried to focus on her words, in spite how much he didn't want to hear them. Better to focus on her words than on the shrinking distance between himself and Ai Naa's anchor.
"But it's a power, right? So there's going to be offbleed – don't worry, I won't quiz you on circulation theory…"
Better to focus on her words than on how the moon's silver light gave way to green where the spearblade bit into rock. On how that green light sank sizzling into his vision like acid if he looked for more than a moment.
"My concentration limit is pretty inhuman, but it's still, you know, a limit. I have to vent the offbleed sometime, and – most people, they can just do that without even thinking, you know? Like breathing. Me, though…I don't know what kind of Tehariel wave Ai Naa puts out, but I'm not about to risk hitting innocent people with it. Why do you think I had you watch from so far away? I had to get you out of my radius."
Her radius, Asaau thought, and another chill swept through his flesh. With power like that, she could crown herself in blood and rule the world entire…but only if she wished to reign over a court of the dead. His mind wove him an image against his will, of Virenina enthroned above a roiling sea of blood, clutching Ai Naa's anchor in one hand like a scepter, alone with her paired monster and everything it wanted. Asaau shook his head once, sharply. Cut that thread, before it strangles you.
With an effort, he wrenched himself out of his mind and back into the present, where a low green glow now tinged the air, rising from the ground where the killing light had struck. Asaau made half a reach for the darkglass lenses before realizing that the groundglow didn't burn when he looked. The spear. It burns only when reflected from the spear. That was – that was good. It was useful. He could do something with that, change his actions, make it more bearable. Just look away, Asaau told himself. You don't have to see it. You don't have to touch it. She would never let you touch it.
"If most paired humans are like a gate, I'm more like…secondary containment," Virenina went on. "Ra, vaara, his, mine, it doesn't matter – he can't do anything if I don't let it into the anchor. The body is full of hollow places." She seemed to be talking half to herself now. "You have to think about it like containment. Where can I store it? Lots of holes in bone marrow. Every cell can be a little vessel, if you let it, but I like to keep it in the bones. Less risk if I get cut."
"In your body?!" Asaau repeated, horrified, then: "Wait." Something was beginning to occur to him. "Wait – so when you fight, that means – "
"I guess it's still Ai Naa's power, if it came from him," said Virenina, "but he doesn't fight with me. Not really. The control, the release, every broken bone or bruised organ I've ever given out – that's me. I'm just using his power to fuel it. If I actually brought him out, tried to use him in a fight…well, you can probably imagine it yourself by now." Her grin looked closer to a grimace. "Like detonating a fusion bomb to snuff out a candle."
Asaau knew what she meant. How could he not? They had reached Ai Naa's anchor, the spear in the ground, the thing rimed in burning light.
And, behind it, the wound in the earth.
I can't look, Asaau thought helplessly, and another part of him answered: You must.
But before he could, Virenina's arm was out in front of him, barring his way. "Wait here," she told him, and then closed the distance between her and the spear alone. Asaau kept his eyes on the quietly lit ground and watched as their shadows became one. Listened to the wind, to the distant sea, to metal scraping free of rock, to Virenina murmuring "Partner mine," to anything but the chiming of metal rings striking together. A blade-shadow slid past his vision and melted into the shape of Virenina, until it was nothing but a point rising from one dark shoulder.
When her shadow was gone, when her footsteps stopped beside him, when he knew he wouldn't see the spear; only then did Asaau finally look up.
The first thing his eyes found was the molten channel carved down the cliff face; its edges frothed with shapes his mind could only understand as boiling rock suddenly frozen in time. His eyes followed it up, and up, to the rim of the cliff and the raw new half-moon cut into it, and then dropped to the ground. Dropped further. And here, at last, was the source of the glow.
Asaau stepped forward, hoping desperately that his eyes had misled him, knowing already that they saw it true. At the foot of the cliff, at the bottom of the channel, lay the open mouth of a sheer-sided pit, a column of emptiness punched down and down through solid rock. Bottomless, his mind whispered, but no, no, the light had to come from somewhere; there had to be a bottom, something at the bottom, some source for this green light that shone wetly up the gleaming-raw sides of the pit and spilled over its molten lip and colored the ground, the air…
The world shifted; the lip of the pit fell closer. For a moment Asaau veered toward panic, until he realized he'd simply fallen to his knees. In horror, certainly, but also in a kind of defeat; for he saw now that a last, desperate part of him had been hoping that all this might somehow still be a trick of the mind. No longer. Now the proof was burned and blasted into the same rock he felt beneath his hands and knees. The wound in the earth made it real.
"I don't know how deep it goes, so don't ask," Virenina said from behind him. "Get away from there, Seket. You don't have to make yourself keep looking."
Any bloodroyal worth his pedigree should have been able to go in one smooth motion from kneebound to standing. Asaau had done so more times than he could ever hope to count, tried to now, and failed. He had to brace himself with his palms before his knees would unfold. Slowly, he turned his head, and hoped with all his heart that he wouldn't flinch at the sight of Ai Naa's spearblade hovering behind Virenina's head.
He didn't. It wasn't there.
"Don't look up," she said. "I have him – " She cast her lone eye skyward and twirled one upraised forefinger.
Asaau, of course, immediately looked up, and then hurriedly snatched his gaze groundward once more, before he could catch the very sight she was trying to spare him.
"I thought that you…" he started. "That is, wasn't he – calling you back? Didn't you need to…reunite?"
"A little of my blood on the blade keeps him quiet," said Virenina. Asaau's stomach tilted sickly. "For a while. That's how I left it behind, earlier, when I came back for you after…" She pointed over his shoulder, toward the pit. The look on her face suggested she was waiting for some sort of reaction from him, but by now Asaau had been reacting to so much for so long that he felt nearly spent. Of course Virenina fed her partner her own blood. That might have sickened Asaau, but after everything else he'd learned tonight, it certainly didn't surprise him. What else was she meant to do to pacify the spirit of red hunger?
"There's a few more things you should probably know," Virenina went on, "but nothing that can't be said in private back in the Opaline City. We can leave right now, if you want, but…"
Then she trailed off and just looked at him, her brow furrowed, her teal-black lips twisted into a thin, dark line. She looks almost worried. Asaau knew there had to be a reason, but he couldn't think for long enough to find it. His mind was clouded with exhaustion and, once the words 'Opaline City' left Virenina's mouth, with sudden longing.
"Please," said Asaau. "Let's leave, Tauhrelil." Then, to cover up the desperation he heard in his own voice: "We've already been gone a whole day, after all. Your audience may well die from want of you if we keep them waiting much longer."
He expected her to grin at that. Instead she only looked pained.
"Seket," she said, in a voice that matched the look on her face. "I flew us out here."
"Fl – oh." His face must have cracked like a porcelain teacup, judging from the quick, hurt way Virenina dropped her gaze, but the guilt it caused him quickly gave way to a fresh surge of dread. Flying us, she'd have to – the spear… Asaau fought the urge to look back at the pit, and made himself breathe slowly, but there was nothing he could do about sudden, sick speed of his pulse. Au Melai save me, I can't go near that thing, not after…but how else will we…?
"We could go back overland," Virenina offered, still looking at the ground. Her voice sounded almost small. "I could keep you safe."
Asaau almost wanted to say yes – until he tried to imagine how long it might take to cover a mile of the Shattered Lands by foot, and how many days the miles might amount to. We'd have to sleep out here. The thought alone was almost enough to make him shudder. Though he had no doubt that Virenina could keep him safe from whatever horrors the Shattered Lands held – at least physically – a horror survived was still a horror, and Asaau had already seen enough tonight to haunt him the rest of his life.
If they flew, it would at least be over quickly. He suspected it was the best he could hope for.
"Take us back to the Ring," he said at last. "By air, if you would."
For a moment, Virenina's lone eye glimmered in such a way that Asaau thought she might cry. Instead she blinked once, hard, and stepped his way. It fell to Asaau to close the distance between them, to come near enough that she could pick him up the same way she had before.
"Close your eyes," she warned him. There was no need for Asaau to ask why. He waited blindly; heard and sensed Ai Naa's anchor arrowing downward through the night; felt Virenina step up and onto its waiting haft.
"I'm sorry," she said, quieter than Asaau had ever heard her speak before. "For – everything."
She took off before he could say anything; and then, for the second time that night, the only thing Asaau heard was the wind.