CHP23

Acryan woke from the confines of a bush, his spirit strong and his memories stronger. He stared at the hands of his body, whispered to himself his new name. “Tuval.” It reminded him that he was just a soul in a borrowed body.

He heard the crying of the boy, the Acerrai prince, he recognized.

Acryan loved three things above all else in his lifetimes. He loved Sai, he loved liquor, and most of all, he loved every child he had ever made with her in every lifetime and every body.

He thought of the first child they ever made. They had barely known what they were, hadn’t known what they had done with their bodies. Acryan’s heart filled with such raw and unbridled joy when he found out that he, too, could create. He knew the pain of a father abandoning his son and had learned, in a few lifetimes, the supreme misery of losing a child.

In this life, his child was grown and his grandchild nearly so.

Those pained cries, those wretched sobs, the pain that Acryan felt brought tears to his eyes that steeled.

He tilted his head up to the heavens. Of all the things the creator would have given him warning for, spoke to him over… The creator knew him too well.

“You waited so long to speak to me. We know one another’s pain, and you know I’ll do what is right,” Acryan choked as he slid from the planter, grabbed his half-empty bottle, and walked far enough away.

Zaien had heard the commotion from his palace, had seen his grandfather with something steel in his eyes as he walked out of sight. Acryan stared at the bottle and poured it into the grass slowly, every drop. He never wasted good alcohol. He never had anything but good alcohol.

“Was that life?... Once more!” Acryan shouted up to the sky, quoting Nietzsche, a human philosopher. He threw the now empty bottle across the lawn, jumped skyward, and beat his wings hard, striking the wind to fly as high as he could. At his apex, streaking through the air, he called out loud with a cry of victory and joy.

He drew attention from every eye. Enough people would see the speck of him so high and shouting.

He pulled a knife from his belt, shrouded himself in the silhouette of the full moon, and slit his own throat in a short jerk of his hand. He spread his arms and charged his own mana over his hands, lightning in this life. He would miss it and the thrills it gave Sai to feel its tingle on her skin.

He fell like a burning comet, blood trailing behind him as his wings went limp, and eventually, his corpse spilled out over the cobblestones not a half-mile from the courts.

Zaien watched with horror as his altsire, his grandfather, fell twirling from the skies and erupted into his own fires, burning away into dust as the spirit of Acryan moved on.

Sael screamed in defeat, pounding his fist to the cobblestones.

-

“Give him a proper remembrance.” Sael choked, and he moved to his feet, dead anger in his eyes.

“What name was he given?” Shythe stared on with pity.

Sael paused as he shook with anger and gave a teary-eyed glance back. “Briel.”

Sael took coarselight once more, the third time, running on anger and adrenaline alone.

Sael started in the dungeon. They moved Felice’s body, and an elder scurried through the hall, fear, and delight on his face at the chaos around them.

The dungeons held not just the old remnants of a prison, but deeper within, there lay a grave, a crypt where the undying body of Vrahe lay elderly, shrunken and shriveled in a stone tomb. Legend said he would grant every Acerrai prince a wish on his coronation day. Kael had never wished.

“I wish for vengeance,” Sael declared as he entered the ancient chamber. This room, unlike the others, had not been hewn of brick and mortar but built into the stone of the earth itself.

“You are not the prince.” A voice darker than black and deeper than any well called back to him, echoing and spinning in the mind.

“I will take the crown by this evening if you gift me my boon, great seraph father to us all,” Sael pleaded, anger dark and passionate coursed through him. Kael forbade him from entering these halls, from speaking to the seraphim, and most certainly from making his wish.

“What is your true wish?” Vrahe whispered.

“I wish for my brother to have lived.”

“I cannot undo that which the creator has meddled with. You are right to wish for vengeance,” the voice whispered, and powerful vindication charged through him.

“Then help me to take the crown and see to it that all who have meddled in my Dyane and brother’s undoing are slain.” Sael’s breath went ragged. His mana dwindled to nothing, and the threat of losing consciousness teased at him. Their bodies weren’t meant to travel like that so much. He’d be sick for weeks, he knew, recovering from it.

“Accept me, and my power is yours.” The whispering voice of Vrahe crept into his mind.

“I accept you, our seraphim father. I offer you my all and service.”

“You offer me your body? Then I shall take it and make sure your wish, all your wishes, are met.”

Sael closed his eyes.

When he opened them, black flames wreathed him, his arms cascaded in them as he left the chambers with the whispering voice of the seraph in his head and the energy of ten of his kind coursing through his body. He barely moved his hand as he walked through the castle. His black fires surged free of him and left smears in the wake of corpses being devoured by their mana.

There were screams as Sael made his way through the castle, murder in his wake.

Kael clutched the burning corpse of Niala, her diminishing form slipping through his fingers. He staggered down the front stairway approaching the palace. Every step he made shattered the marble beneath his feet. His voice cracked from roaring with his anger. The air itself shook, and the true power of a firstborn son of a seraph, long in Vrahe’s line, born of the spirit, raged.

Ashes ran from Kael’s fingers, leaving his scalded skin behind. Tears and blood stained his face, not Niala’s blood, others. Bodies lay around him.

He clutched at the ashes, drawing them to his chest, sobbing in retched blind grief. The last of her gone. Kael’s eyes had filled with murderous intent, and devoid of anything that could be called love.

“Father. It’s over,” Sael said, a command in his voice.

Kael didn’t feel it was over. He turned his hand to Sael, his son, venting his grief and fury as the two locked arms, and Sael found the rage and power within him to force his father back.

Sael was a smaller man, still growing, still thin, and weak. He had many years to go before he could boast the physical body to rival his father.

“How many innocent have you put down?” Sael asked him.

“Any who put their hand to me I have destroyed,” Kael roared.

“AND DID ANY OF THOSE PARTICIPATE IN HER DEATH!? I have killed many tonight, too, father.” Sael growled. Kael’s bloodshot eyes glanced over Sael’s arms, over his clothes.

“I loved her more than you,” Sael snarled as he shoved his father, sending him reeling back. “I loved her more than myself. I would trade our crown for her. You have no idea what I have done!”

A flash rose within Sael’s eyes that Kael knew, a wish he knew that his son had made, a sacrifice.

A flash of his father, Nariel, and his father before him.

“I tried to heal her. I tried to stop it,” Sael sobbed as he forced his father back and bent him to his knees under his raging black fires. Sael slung his father across the flagstones, relishing his newfound strength as the spirit of the seraph rode within his body. Sael, despite being puppeted, moved freely and fluidly in motion. He beat Kael back, taken to his knees, and his son snatched the crown from his head.

It took Sael and several others to restrain Kael, and come that morning, he had been banished from the kingdom. Sael’s last words whispered to his father’s ear were the only words he wanted to hear, “You’re free now, father.”