C.E. Mutphy - Hands of Flame

She scrambled backward, trying to hide within the white noise generating inside her own head. Flame was doused by static, the rush and color of hissing snow reminding her again that her focus was the gargoyle; was Ausra. Memories of the woman formed in the whiteness, stalking toward Margrit as she felt her left arm snap again, pain howling through her body. Memory flashed forward to the hospital: Daisani rolled up his sleeve in tidy motions, and the sugar-sweet coppery taste of his blood clogged Margrit’s throat. She would never be quite human again.

And back, reminded of Ausra once more by not quite human. The memories that barraged her this time were the gargoyle’s own, histories of a broken mind. So many human women dead at Ausra’s hands, so many women whom Alban had dared to watch over, dead for a vengeance that was never Alban’s to pay. Pain crackled through Margrit’s body as she remembered, experienced, the first morning Ausra had stood against the sunrise and seen gold fire glimmer over the horizon before she succumbed.

That image caught in glass, so gorgeous and deep Margrit gasped with it. Pity surged in her for the first time and she reached toward the frozen memory. But the glass began to crack, thin lines of strain a too-clear representation of Ausra’s mental state. Perhaps it hadn’t been her fault; Hajnal had died birthing her, and a family’s worth of memories had cascaded into an unformed, unready mind. Madness had been the only path open to her; revenge against the gargoyle she believed must be her father, who had abandoned her and her mother, the only choice she could see that she had. So many flavors of despair, all prismed in glass so they could reflect and shine on roads taken and decisions made.

One bright shard lit Biali, who stood at Ausra’s side and did not stop her from becoming what she was. Perhaps he had helped shape her; perhaps he couldn’t have saved her. The memories Margrit held of the gargoyle woman ran too shallow to answer that question. For the first time, she felt pity for the creature who’d tried to kill her, but as she touched the glass, it fell into slivers, cutting deep into her fingers.

Drops of blood scattered, carrying with them moments of her life. Afraid she would give herself away, Margrit scampered after them, trying to collect droplet-shaped bits of crimson glass. They fell through her hands instead: a first Communion and the turning of her tassel as she earned her law degree; her first kiss and her most recent, twining together so one became the other. Frantic, she tried harder to pick them up, losing bits of her life in the process.

Ausra reared up above her, a promise that those precious seconds would never be regained. One blow; that was all it would take to end Margrit’s life. She would watch it fall, not out of bravery, but because she couldn’t make her eyelids close, and when a roar cut through the static, her only thought was, so that’s what dying sounds like.

And then her life was spared and Ausra’s ended, a reversal of fortune against every law the Old Races held dear. A human life over an ancient one; human awareness of their people allowed to persevere where immortal hope ended; a child of two worlds destroyed because there was no other choice.

Sarah Hopkins, dark-haired, pregnant, afraid, alone, became a cutting edge of color, wedging her way through memories Margrit was only too glad to let go of. That same triumvirate of men surrounded her: Alban, tall and calm and dressed in quiet colors complementary to his paleness; Janx, gaudy and bright and gorgeous as he always was, a peacock in supersaturated shades; Daisani, small and lithe and exquisitely outfitted in sober tones, and all of them in the fashion of Sarah’s century, nearly four hundred years gone.

Then heat shattered the glass, breaking away Sarah’s image. Beautiful colors blurred together and turned to brown in the wake of the fire that burned London down and down and down. She was gone from them, lost to fire, lost to flame, and each day it burned higher, fueled by rage and grief, as she was nowhere to be found. Janx and Daisani stalked the city together by day and by night, never followed by a pale shadow, too united in their sorrow to trouble themselves with the absence of their third.

And so all unknown that third slipped away so easily, a human woman borne in his arms, her belly cradled in her hands as London burned beneath them.

Margrit, steady and ready as she always was, touched her palms to Eldred’s, and chaos erupted in Alban’s mind.

Gargoyle memory stretched back inconceivable years, touching the minds and hearts of the Old Races. Their discipline retained histories that no other recording method could so faithfully keep. Often it was by stories shared, but the ritual invoked by Eldred was one well known to all their peoples, and it let breath and bone and body become one with the memories.

Not in all the history of five races and more now lost to time had opening a path from one heart to another torn the roofs off all the minds in contact with the story-giver.

Not in all the history of five races and more now lost to time had a gargoyle ever tried to join minds with a human.

He should have known. Beneath the screaming blur of emotion and memory that poured from Margrit, Alban’s self-directed recrimination bit hard, then lost its teeth. He couldn’t have known; there was no way to know a human mind didn’t hold information in the same structured, stylized way the Old Races had learned to retain their own memories. Humans had so little time to learn, so little time to remember; it made sense that they had less need of the formalities of recollection that allowed the oldest of the immortals to remember their own lives without resorting to gargoyle tales. It made sense, but Margrit’s easy ability to ride gargoyle memory had made the possibility of the reverse seem easy, too.

Details of her life washed over him, intimate and sweet, a gift he wanted to savor. An early memory, child’s irrefutable logic wearing down her mother, who in her youth had been luminous, and who in maturity was, to Margrit’s adult mind, mixed with the childhood memories, intimidating. Her father’s rich laugh mingled with it all, warm voice promising, “She’ll grow up to be a lawyer if we’re not careful.” The memory’s soft edges told Alban that Margrit didn’t consciously remember the comment, but the way it hooked and pulled and weighted other memories, becoming an epicenter, said that it had affected the choices she’d made in her life.

Alban flexed his shoulders, feeling wings stretch and fold, reminding him of who he was. Helping him to break out of the phenomenal static rush that Margrit’s life, pictured in moments, made up. Only just then aware his eyes were closed, he forced them open, and let go a rough, low sound of astonishment.

The gargoyle tribunal had joined with Eldred before he’d completed the ritual to enter Margrit’s thoughts. That they should be enthralled was to be expected.

That Janx and Daisani, that the gathered selkies and djinn, that even Grace O’Malley, should all stand slack-jawed and silent, was not expected. Mutable expression slid over vacant faces: fear and anger, dismay, outrage, hope, delight, all tangled with the endless rush of memory pouring from the dark beauty at the room’s center. A shard of panic sparked powerfully, not from Margrit at all, but, if Alban read its flavor correctly, from Janx or Daisani. Of the two Janx was the more likely to revel in such raw emotion, strong enough to alter the path of recollection Margrit followed.

Keeping his own thoughts unclouded was difficult. Margrit’s memories were as forceful and brisk as her personality, and the new thoughts she lingered on were deliciously seductive.

And hardly to be shared with others. Concentrate, Margrit. Focus your thoughts. Think of Ausra. He formed the thoughts with caution, uncertain if she would hear him in the chaos. Her mind was alight with fire, leaping easily from one scene to another, as quick and light as flame jumping a river. There was too much to take in, too much to hold on to in the quicksilver way her human mind processed images and discarded them.