Ted Dekker - Mortal

“Will the children all die? Will the sun be turned red? Will you drain my blood to feed your own ambition? Do I die so you can live?”

His braids flew back in the face of the storm. Tears streamed from his eyes, blown back toward his temples before they could mar his cheek.

“Find love!” he screamed. “Find beauty! Find life and know that the realm of Sovereigns is upon you!”

A lone voice of objection pierced the valley from far and high. Saric turned his head and saw a lone figure up on the western cliff, arms spread wide. A woman crying out in horror at the scene beneath her.

“No!” She fell to her knees. “Jonathan!”

She lifted her chin, drew a deep breath, and hurled a great wail at the sky.

A helpless sob erupted from the boy, dangling from the poles as though they held him and not the other way around. He stared up at the lone woman, his face twisted with anguish. “For love…” He sucked at the air, a horrible, lurching gasp. “For you, Jordin!”

Saric felt his mind fracture, broken by the war in his soul.

These were surely the words of a love saturated with power far greater than any he knew. He could not kill the one destined to bring such life.

These were surely the words of a power that would render his impotent. He was compelled to destroy the one destined to crush his lesser life.

Jonathan suddenly grasped his tunic at the neckline with both hands and ripped it wide to bare his chest. His eyes lowered to Saric.

“Take it!” he screamed, face red and drawn.

He grabbed the poles again, arms spread wide, his chest bare.

“Take my life for all of them. Spill my blood and drain it for this world. Take what you have come to take and be forever changed!”

Saric remained frozen.

“Obey me,” the boy said in a lower voice that reached into Saric’s mind and shattered the last of his confusion.

Darkness flooded his vision. He grabbed his sword by the hilt, shoved himself to his feet, and with a full-throated scream, lunged for the boy.

The blade slashed down across Jonathan’s body, severing his torso nearly in two.

Jonathan’s eyes went wide. His mouth was parted, midgasp. He stood motionless for a suspended instant before sinking to his knees. Cries from the Mortals drowned out the high keening on the cliff.

The boy collapsed into a pool of his own blood, a broken heap at Saric’s feet.

Saric staggered back a step. The sword fell from his hands and with it, the world.

The ruins began to shake beneath his feet. Wind roared through the valley, threatening to push him to the ground.

He staggered, struggling to keep his footing beneath the blackened sky. Before his very eyes the valley floor buckled. Large slabs of the far cliff began to slide into the valley. Unrelenting peels of thunder crashed through the heavens, shaking his bones to the core.

A full half of his children hugged the earth for safety, the other half tried to run, staggering and pitching like a drunken mob. The Mortals’ horses reared and threw their riders to the churning ground.

Then, as quickly as the quake came, it quieted. The earth rumbled to stillness. Unnatural calm settled over the valley, punctuated only by the rattle of falling stone and whinnying horses.

With a final whoosh, the vortex in the sky sucked up the dark clouds, returning them to an overcast gray pushed by a gentle breeze.

Silence.

What have you done?

It occurred to Saric that he was still on his feet. Alive. But the moment the thought entered his mind he knew that he was not the same man who’d considered himself alive only moments earlier.

His thoughts were no longer those he’d entertained before. He’d seen a light in the boy’s eyes. He’d obeyed his commands. He’d submitted to a power that left him crushed for all the world to see.

Nothing was the same.

Nothing could ever be the same.

Shaking badly, Saric walked to the edge of the steps, descended them one at a time, and crossed to a horse whose flesh still quivered with terror. He unsteadily mounted, only vaguely aware that Dark Blood on all sides were rising, some of them taking an unsteady knee at sight of him.

Varus rode up, face white. “My Lord?”

Saric avoided his gaze, the questions in his eyes, and pulled his mount around, only vaguely aware of the myriad gazes upon him.

“What is your command?” Varus said.

His command? He could not summon the resolve to lead. The boy had cursed him and robbed him of that power. Something had happened to him. The light in the boy’s eyes…

“My Lord, your orders?”

“Leave this place,” he said. “No more death.”

He turned the horse and rode out from the valley under the gazes of his children.

Behind him a wail rose to the sky. The Mortals were mourning the death of their Sovereign.

THE WESTERN EDGE OF THE SEYALA VALLEY was filled with midmorning sunlight. Overhead, starlings burst from the trees atop the eastern cliff, too startlingly alive above the ruins below.

Bahar, the ruins were called. The Spring of Life. They lay broken, shrouded in shadow so that none who looked at them might ever think that life had been granted here.

And taken.

Rom squinted across the first stirrings of a camp rising from a night of mourning. Those unable to fight had returned and a few had erected yurts, most of them in the same place they’d stood before, perhaps seeking comfort in familiarity. But all it did was draw the eye of anyone looking to the gaping patches of ground in between. Ground covered not with the dwellings of the living, but the bodies of those dressed now in death.

Despite the objections of more than a few, Rom had insisted they leave Triphon’s body on the pole, guarded to keep vermin and birds away. Jonathan’s dying demand made little sense even to Rom, but they were all past reason now. When they vacated the valley, nature would consume Triphon’s flesh and leave only a skeleton as its own kind of memorial, a monument of death in this place where life had once reigned.

Two hundred and thirty-nine Mortals had perished in yesterday’s battle. One hundred and seventy-eight Nomads, sixty-one Keepers. The fallen Nomads lay together in rows, leaving space for the living to move among them-bathing and dressing them, wrapping the disfigured in makeshift shrouds of bedding and canvas. The Keepers lay apart, faces shrouded. Rows of dead warriors, no longer aligned in the formation of battle as one race, now separated by kind in death. Nomad, to the pyre. Keeper, to the ground.

But it wasn’t the line of dead that drew Rom’s eye again and again. It was the single body wrapped in muslin atop a carefully constructed pallet nearest the ruin steps.

Jonathan.

The young girls had come down from the hills with armloads of fragile anemones. The younger children crowded around them-children he recognized as those Jonathan had often run off with to carve their toys as they laughed in the western hilltops. They had covered his body in flowers.

Too red. Too much like the blood they had carefully collected from the ruin steps and sealed in ceramic jars solemnly provided by the Keeper. The initials on them had been scratched out. The Keeper had kept them for his own burial, to be placed beside the body in acknowledgment of the day that it would be reborn-the ritual of all Keepers.

A day that would never come.

Jonathan had died on his eighteenth birthday.

Rom looked away.

The previous evening scouts had reported that the bodies of the fallen Dark Bloods on the plateau had been collected by their comrades. No word of Saric. No word of Feyn.

The Keeper had come to Rom to say he’d run a final test on Jonathan’s blood. Dead, he said. All its extraordinary properties depleted.