Морган Райс - Victor, Vanquished, Son

The question had the feel of a test, and Ceres got the feeling that if she couldn’t give a good answer to it, she wouldn’t receive help from these two. Given what they’d said it might cost them, Ceres was astonished that they were considering it at all.

“ Could the Ancient Ones have destroyed them?” Ceres asked.

Alteus paused for a moment, and then nodded. “It wasn’t that. Think about the world.”

Ceres thought. She thought about the effects of the war. About the blasted wastes of Felldust and the wreckage of the island above her. About how few of the Ancient Ones were left in the world. About the invasions, and the people who had died fighting the Empire.

“I think you didn’t destroy them because of what it would take to do it,” Ceres said. “What’s the point of winning if there’s nothing left after you do it?” She guessed that it was more than that, though. “I was part of a rebellion. We fought against something that was large, and evil, and made people’s lives worse, but how many people have died now? You can’t solve something by just slaughtering everyone.”

She saw Lin and Alteus look at one another then. They nodded.

“We allowed the sorcerers’ rebellion at first,” Alteus said. “We thought it would amount to nothing. Then it grew, and we fought, but in fighting it, we did as much damage as they did. We had the power to wreck whole landscapes, and we used it. Oh, how we used it.”

“You have seen the things done to this island,” Lin said. When I heal you, if I heal you, you will have that kind of power. What will you do with it, Ceres?”

There was a time when the answer would have been simple. She would have brought down the Empire. She would have destroyed the nobles. Now, she just wanted people to be able to live their lives safely and happily; it didn’t seem like too much to ask.

“I just want to save the people I love,” she said. “I don’t want to destroy anyone. I just… I think I might have to. I hate that, I just want peace.”

Even Ceres was a little surprised by that. She didn’t want more violence. She simply had to do it to prevent innocent people being slaughtered. That earned her another nod.

“A good answer,” Lin said. “Come here.”

The former sorcerer went among the glass vials and the alchemical equipment that seemed to exist in illusory form. She moved among it, blending things and shifting things. Alteus went with her, and the two of them appeared to work in the kind of harmony that could only come over many years. They poured solutions into new containers, added ingredients, consulted books.

Ceres stood there to watch them, and she had to admit that she didn’t understand half of what they were doing. When they stood in front of her with a glass vial, it almost didn’t seem enough.

“Drink this,” Lin said. She held it out to Ceres, and although it all seemed insubstantial, when Ceres took it, her hand met solid glass. She held it up, seeing the sparkle of golden liquid that matched the hue of the dome around her.

Ceres drank it, and it tasted like drinking starlight.

It seemed to wash through her then, and she could feel its progress in the relaxation of her muscles, and the easing of pains she hadn’t known were there. She could feel something growing inside her too, spreading out like a system of roots running through her body as the channels along which her power had run regrew.

When it was done, Ceres felt better than she had since before the invasion. It felt like a deep sense of peace spreading through her.

“Is it done?” Ceres asked.

Alteus and Lin took one another’s hands.

“Not quite,” Alteus said.

The dome around Ceres seemed to collapse inward, the contents disappearing as they turned into pure light. That light gathered on the spot where the Ancient One and the Sorceress stood, until Ceres couldn’t make them out in it.

“It will be interesting to see what happens next,” Lin said. “Goodbye, Ceres.”

The light burst toward her, filling Ceres, brimming through the channels of her body like water along freshly built aqueducts. It filled her, and it kept filling her, pouring in so that it seemed that there was more power resting within Ceres than there had ever been before. For the first time, she understood the true depths of the Ancient Ones’ powers.

She stood there, pulsing with power, and she knew the time had come.

It was time for war.

Jeva could feel the tension growing with every step as she made her way up toward the meeting hall. The people of the gathering place stared at her the way she would have expected people outside their lands to stare at one of their kind: as if she were something strange, different, even dangerous. It wasn’t a sensation Jeva liked.

Was it just that they didn’t see many with the markings of priestesses here, or was it something more? It wasn’t until the first insults and accusations came from the gathering crowd that Jeva started to understand.

“Betrayer!”

“You took your tribe to the slaughter!”

A young man stepped out from the crowd with that swagger that only young men could manage. He strode as if he owned the path leading up to the house of the dead. When Jeva moved to step around him, he went to block her.

Jeva should have struck him just for that, but she was there for more important things.

“Step aside,” she said. “I’m not here for violence.”

“Have you forgotten the ways of our people that completely?” he demanded. “You dragged your tribe to die in Delos. How many came back?”

Jeva could hear the anger there. The kind of anger that even her people felt when they lost someone close to them. Telling him that they had gone to the ancestors and that he should be happy would do no good. In any case, Jeva wasn’t even sure that she believed that right then. She had seen the pointless deaths of the war.

“But you came back,” the young man said. “You destroyed one of our tribes, and you came back, you coward !”

On another day, Jeva would have killed him for that, but the truth was that the mewling of an idiot didn’t matter, not compared to everything else that was going on. She moved to step around him again.

Jeva paused as he drew a knife.

“You don’t want to do this, boy,” she said.

“Don’t tell me what I want!” he screamed, and lunged at her.

Jeva reacted on instinct, swaying out of the way of the blow, while she lashed out with her bladed chains. One wrapped around his neck, wrenching as she moved with the speed of long practice. Blood sprayed as the young man clutched at the wound, collapsing to his knees.

“Damn you,” Jeva said softly. “Why did you make me do it, you idiot?”

There was no answer, of course. There was never any answer. Jeva whispered the words of a prayer for the dead over the young man and then stood, lifting him. Other villagers followed her as she continued on her way, and Jeva could feel the tension there now where there had been jokes before. They followed her close as an honor guard, or the escort of a prisoner to her execution.

When she reached the House of the Dead, the elders of the village were already waiting for her. Jeva padded in on bare feet, kneeling before the endlessly burning pyre and tumbling her attacker’s body into it. She stood there as it started to burn, looking around at the people she had come to convince.

“You come here with blood on your hands,” a Speaker of the Dead said, stepping forward with his robes swirling. “The dead told us that someone would come, but not that it would happen like this.”

Jeva looked at him, wondering if it was true. There had been a time when she wouldn’t have questioned it.