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The night I met him is a night I’ll never forget. But that isn’t the night I mean to talk about. One of the few nights after the first, he told me a story. This was a man who spoke, at large, only twenty or thirty words a day. I listened. And now I want to tell you.
It was a dark and stormy night, as they say. The best stories start out that way, in my opinion. This one was no different. In fact, I think he told it during a storm, as well. Perhaps that’s what led him to tell it, though I really couldn’t say. He’d made us tea after dinner, and the cottage was warming up with the fire he’d just built. I always felt safe during those times. We sat at the table, which he’d made, along with everything else we were enjoying. I hadn’t expected that that night, I’d learn more about him than I had in the entire year pervious that I’d been with him.
“Mara,” he said softly.
I loved the way he said my name, the way it rolled off of his tongue. I watched him, and when he didn’t continue, I pressed, “Yes?”
I knew about him only as much as I could see. I saw a loner, a man who’d been left on his own for his whole life, a man who’d adapted and was able to take care of himself in any situation. But he wasn’t always that way, he told me. A long time ago, he’d been part of a family. He had a mother, and had had siblings. For his first few years, he’d had a big brother, though he told me little about him. The son of an emperor, he said, but I couldn’t tell if he was being ironic or not. He mentioned his brother only briefly, and instead focused on his mother.
She was beautiful, he said. Hair like autumn leaves, with the smell of ginger and lavender. Her face was always full of life, and when she smiled, she shone like the sun. Her eyes could look right through you, he said, and see everything that made you who you are. When he talked about her, I could see the admiration shine in his eyes and fill his voice. She was full of love, and could make even the most broken of souls feel whole again. But there was another side to her that he revealed to me in the story he told; the side that belonged to the world that had taken so much away from her.
They were coming home after a day of foraging for wild strawberries. They’d tried multiple times to plant their own, but the soil around their village was so stripped of nutrients from the other crops they grew, that it was never fruitful. The place he described sounded so foreign I had to ask where, and when, this was. The Far East, he said. More than a thousand years ago. My instinct told me not to believe it, but then I reminded myself that this was Seth. He wasn’t human, and a thousand years was far from impossible.
As they crowned one of the hills surrounding the little village, they saw a group of their neighbors crowding around the fence they had just recently put up to keep their dog from wandering off and killing chickens. The two glanced between each other.
“What do you think it is, mom?” he asked with a frown.
She shrugged and looked back down at the spectacle. “Only one way to find out.”
Once they were sure their bounty was secure, they rushed down the hill and through the village. The other villagers glanced back at them as they approached. Judging by the looks on their faces, whatever had brought them to their house was nothing good.
“What is it, what’s going on?” Rhia demanded. Seth stuck close to her side, watching the crowd uneasily. They wouldn’t answer her. Most of them couldn’t even look at them. What had happened? Rhia pushed past them and came to the fence. At once, she recoiled with a startled shout. She tried to cover Seth’s eyes and pull him away, but it was too late; he saw.
The yard was covered with blood, as though it had rained down upon it. It was splattered across the face of the house; the windows; the door. As he described the scene, I had to do my best to hold my stomach. I was sure the colour had completely drained from my face, and I could feel myself going cold. The bodies of two children had been tossed aside as though without the tiniest thought, Rhia’s newest children, Seth’s half brother and sister. At first glance, Seth had immediately thought wolves, but he told me his mother had known better straight away. Nothing was eaten, and the wounds were clean and straight. Men had done this, with swords and daggers and God knows what else.
Trembling, fighting back tears, Rhia pushed Seth into the hands of one of their neighbors, a man who’d been a good friend to the family. Seth watched as his mother entered the yard. She bravely walked through the carnage and somehow managed to open the door. She disappeared inside, but Seth already knew what she would find. She knew it as well, he was sure. Even so, he heard her scream, a cry of absolute anguish, and the sound caused the reluctant tears in his eyes to fall. Her husband, a man Seth had, though grudgingly, learned to call father, was also dead.
I cried silently as he told me about them, about what that family had meant to his mother as well as to him. Ever since his older brother had died, Rhia had gone without anyone but Seth for five hundred years. And now, just when she’d begun to heal, to be alive again, it was all taken away. Seth cried for her that day long ago. And now I cried for him.
When Rhia came back out of that house, the whole crowd took a few steps back, for she wasn’t the same woman they’d grown to love and cherish. Instead, they got their first glimpse at the woman the world loved to hate. Her once calm, crimson eyes had been set ablaze. The sword Seth so despised was once again gripped tightly in her hand. She stepped out of the house and came to stand in the middle of the yard. I tried to picture for myself what she must have looked like. The woman Seth had so lovingly described only half an hour before had been transformed into a whirlwind of hurt and hate. I found myself looking intently into his face in order to get the image of the woman out of my mind.
“Who did this?” she asked, fury bubbling up behind the quiet words. No one answered. “I said,” her voice grew steadily louder, until she was screaming with rage, “who did this?!”
The whole crowd jumped in surprise and fear, and finally the one holding Seth spoke, though with obvious hesitance. “Mercenaries, Rhia. They were looking for you. A…a creature led them here, to your house.”
The fury in her eyes only grew, and as she gripped that sword, its black blade turned white hot, and an incessant hum rumbled out from it, beating against the hearts of all who could hear it. I had never heard of a weapon like that, but then, I was only the daughter of a money-loving aristocrat, and had never had anything to do with warriors before Seth. “Where are they?”
To avoid her fury, an answer came quickly. “They said they would wait at the Plateau. They expect you to go to them.”
The man holding Seth spoke up quickly, desperately, “You won’t go to them, will you? They’ll kill you, Rhia!”
Fiery eyes turned on him, and out of reflex, he released Seth and stumbled back. “This will not go unpunished.” The thickening atmosphere around the area, what the others had assumed was their own imagination, suddenly exploded out, then sucked in towards Rhia. The air grew dense and circled in around Rhia’s feet, until she was lifted up onto a black, swirling disc. It took only seconds to form, and in the next, she was gone. Though he’d never seen a Helolth before, he knew that’s what it had been; a spell that aided the caster in travelling long distances. He didn’t try to explain how it worked to me, knowing I wouldn’t understand.
Against the frantic warnings of the villagers, Seth went after her. He knew where the Plateau was, even if he’d never get there when she did. Even on his horse, he’d never be able to catch up to her. He only hoped she’d be there when he did make it. He couldn’t explain to me how he knew he had to get there before she left, but I could tell from his voice that there hadn’t been any doubt in his mind that it was important, even if I couldn’t understand why.
It was well into the night when he finally reached the foot of that looming landmark. I’d seen a plateau before, in the desert a few hours south of where I grew up, so I could picture it clearly. From the ground, he could see smoke rising into the sky, obscuring the full moon. The smoke reflected white light from above, but orange light from below. Fire. He swung his horse around and charged up the path he knew to be nearby. His step-father had taken him here before he married Rhia, and he’d come here often ever since, to get away. I could only guess it was because he felt separated from this new family, a feeling I knew well, myself.
His horse was exhausted by the time they reached the top, and Seth quickly got off of him to keep him from pushing too hard. The sight he came upon was one nearly as dreadful as the one at the house. Everything that could burn was burning. Trees, the grass, the few bushes and flowers that grew in the higher altitude, it all burned. Most of it was gone by now, and he could see clearly across the flat top of the Plateau. Twelve men, he counted. Three of them were strung up on make-shift crosses; others were tied to trees with grass and bushes piled at their feet. She had taken her time, I could clearly tell from what he described. The creature their neighbor had mentioned turned out to be some kind of giant lizard, which he could now see staked into the ground, just as charred as everything else.
But, more than anything else he could see, he saw that she was gone. When he realized it, he turned full circle, searching for her, but there was no sign of her. What he had feared had come to pass. She was gone. Even as he told me this, he still wasn’t sure why she had disappeared. All he knew was that she had been broken by the death of her family. Maybe she had left to protect him from the same thing happening to him; that’s what he liked to think, he told me. The only thing he knew for sure was that every time someone dear to her is taken away, another piece of her dies. It was something that had happened all of her life, and even he didn’t know how much of her was left, or whether some of it ever came back when she found another family.
It was that day that Seth had set out on his own, determined to make his own way. From the condition he came to me in, it was only too obvious the world hadn’t been any nicer to him than it had been to his mother.
It didn’t occur to me until he finished that it was much too strange for him to be telling me this out of the blue. I suddenly felt cold, and for the first time in the three months we’d been living in that cottage, I felt exposed, and afraid.
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked him.
The smile he gave me broke my heart. I had never seen him smile so sadly.
“I have a sister. She’s in danger.”
New tears fell down my cheeks and I couldn’t bear to look at him. “You’re leaving,” I said. I didn’t have to ask; I knew.
He nodded. “I am,” he said quietly.
I looked up and reached out for his hands, gripping them tightly. “I’m coming with you.”
His smile only grew sadder, and I was compelled to let go of his hands. “You cannot follow where I’m going.”
He was right. I couldn’t follow. But I went ahead of him. Even so, I couldn’t be with him in that place. I was lucky, though. He saved me, and brought me here. And now I wait; I wait for him to come home to me.
