Chapter Nineteen
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Light and Darkness
When dawn came to light the smoky sky, Orphenn started to wonder if the fighting would ever stop.
He was washing his face in the lake water, knelt before the bank, thinking about the previous night at this very spot. So close…But his thoughts were broken by a series of shouts from a ways behind him. He stood and spun on his heel to cast toward the camp. Several of the tents had been set on fire.
“What the-” His interjection was cut off when he felt a sudden warmth around him, as if he’d walked out from the shade and into the sun. He looked from side to side indecisively as he saw that the trees near him had all caught aflame, as though every leaf and pine needle had ignited itself.
“Orphenn.” A wispy voice came from behind him. It was only a hushed whisper, but he heard it clear as day, despite the growing mayhem filling the air. More shouts came from the camp as he spun around again.
Ardara was there, floating above the lake like a dark spirit. She splayed her black feathered wings behind her ominously. “Orphenn.” Her voice came again, though her lips had not moved. He looked down, letting his eyes rest on her reflection in the lake water, intimidated like one look could turn him to stone.
He took a step back as if to turn and run, but a ring of fire had been drawn around him at that second.
Orphenn couldn’t help but marvel at her power. Trapped in a cage of flames, he felt like a hoodwinked lab rat under the gaze of a cruel scientist. He could only stare as Ardara flowed through the wall of fire to hover before Orphenn within the circle.
“Wherever will you run?” she echoed, smoke curling around her, her voice as hushed as the flames.
She had a point, for there wasn’t room enough for Orphenn’s outspread wings, let alone to take flight, and the flames licked too high to pounce over.
“How did you find us?” Orphenn demanded.
She gave no answer but a smile and a flicker of her glowing red and blue eyes, so alike his own, though they held a unique madness, gazing from the shadow that her hood cast over her face.
Orphenn couldn’t recall seeing any other enemies, and there were none of her soldiers in sight. “Why did you come alone?”
This time she opened her mouth to reply. “Oh, but I didn’t.” A blink of her ravenous eyes, and the loop of fire was snuffed to a ring of twisting smoke whirling around them.
A pair of hands came to clamp Orphenn’s arms behind his back, and an arm came around his neck in a chokehold.
Dacian, who had jumped into the circle from outside the plume, greeted Orphenn lowly.
“Hello again.”
Before Orphenn could growl a sarcastic remark, a squall of darkness whirled at Dacian’s back, and the shadow changed to reveal three figures, one of which came behind Dacian to stay a dagger at his throat and point a revolver at his head.
“Hey there Sunshine.” greeted Sven.
The remaining two figures un-shrouded were Cinder and Celina, Cinder creating a dark spear of shade, holding at the ready, and Celina came forward to bravely stand between Ardara and Orphenn.
Orphenn admired Celina’s courage as she stood tall before her powerfully maniacal sister, orange embers from the blazing trees dancing in the air between them.
Unarmed, Dacian chose to avoid a clash with Sven, who was equipped with an expansive armory at his beck and call; and so cautiously released Orphenn, hands in the air, eyebrow arched expectantly.
Orphenn fell forward, steadied by Jeremiah, who appeared in a flash at his side, Xeila and Eynochia coming up behind him at a more human pace.
Sven mercifully released Dacian in return, dismissing his blade and firearm in shining dust in the knowledge that Dacian was at the moment weaponless. Despite the injustice the traitor had done Sven in the past, he remained fair.
Cinder was not so compassionate. With her shadow spear she attacked Dacian, swiping quickly and numerously. He only just avoided each blow, before another that wore the red and black uniform came between them in a blur of violet.
Cinder pulled back her spear’s blade in haste, slightly snipping stray threads of purple hair.
“Nyx.” Cinder seethed.
“Have we met?” Said Nyx, blue and gold eyes blank and unfeeling, twirling a golden feather in her fingers.
“Yes,” Cinder griped, the words in her next statement molding together in her fury. “I seem to recall a branding iron being burnt to my shoulder while you held me down in the boiler room ring a bell yet?”
“Ah, yes. E for Enemy. I remember.”
Cinder slapped her, then again, then punched her. She fell to the grass.
Dacian made an attempt to back away, but was met with a wall of diamond.
Jeremiah, of course, was there when the traitor turned, armor crystallizing. He made no attempt to attack. He only held his fist at eye level, the diamond at his knuckles crackling as it grew to a frightening point, nearly pricking Dacian’s nose.
His brows came together in puzzlement when Dacian cooed, “Ooh…” gazing admiringly at the reflecting sunlight upon the adamant armor. “This will do nicely.” He grasped Jeremiah’s arm, and at his touch, the armor there slid off as a glittering liquid. Dacian caught it and solidified it before it splashed to the ground, molding it into his ideal lance-just as Xeila and Eynochia caught up, consoling Orphenn.
Jeremiah held up his other arm to combat Dacian’s new lance, and the two continued to spar, as Nyx did with Cinder.
“Never fought someone your own size, have ‘ya?” Cinder taunted, easily overpowering the violet-haired twenty-year-old.
Jeremiah’s success was similar. Though Dacian now had a way to fight back, Jeremiah was still faster, and stronger by far. He had torn through Dacian’s jumpsuit faster than he had made his new lance.
Eynochia stared knowingly at the scar on Dacian’s newly revealed skin, the scar she knew was made by her own claw.
Dacian took note of her eyes on him, and slyly molded his lance blade into a four-pronged fork. He made as if to attack Jeremiah, but instead he lunged oppositely, fooling everyone, and giving Eynochia a slash that matched his own.
She flailed to the ground with the pain, but Orphenn was quick to heal her, just as Jeremiah was quick to knock Dacian to the ground with the force of an airship collision.
Orphenn’s light warmed the air, but he was unaware of the poison that had infused the wound from the toxic lance.
Dacian glared up smugly from his prone position in the smoky grass where Jeremiah held him down with a foot as if he were a hickory stump.
The poison etched a scar across Eynochia’s shoulder as Orphenn healed the wound, four wide marks.
Orphenn shot a glare of absolute abhorrence at the tyrant who was once his sister. Ardara smiled back at him.
“Cira…” Celina beseeched, inching closer. “Cira, please stop this.” Her typical, confident, arm-folded-behind-her-back posture had slumped into a more desperate pose, drooped shoulders, hands clasped before her. “…Cira…”
Ardara’s eyes seemed to glow with an extra flash of rage. She said her next words with clenched and shaking fists.
“My name…” she lifted her arm, flames licking her fingers, “is Ardara!” she shrieked. A burst of fire shot from her palm and barreled outward.
“No!” Orphenn wailed, but his cry was lost in the blaze’s loud crackle.
The burst torched Celina’s side in her effort to evade. She fell to the singed grass.
“No!” Orphenn cried again and stumbled to Celina’s side. No other had his strength to move, seemingly frozen by shock.
Even Ardara was still, staring astounded at the smoke rolling off her fingers, as if she had subconsciously realized that she’d fatally injured her own sister. Then, as she witnessed Orphenn’s healing light illuminate Celina’s burns and erase them, her personality switched again to a state of wrath. She looked at him. Almost instinctively, she felt the bonds of the people around him, connected to him. Like threads running through each of their hearts in a web.
Ardara looked harder. All of the threads were impossibly strong, she could see, but there was a special one that seemed to emanate a silver hue, and it looked absolutely unbreakable. Upon further observation, she realized that this invisible thread connected Orphenn’s heart to Eynochia’s.
Orphenn saw the look in Ardara’s eyes. He knew what she was thinking in a split second when her eyes traveled from him to Eynochia. The desperation on Eynochia’s face showed she knew it too.
Ardara smiled.
She aimed her palm at Eynochia.
In an instant, that seemed to take eons, almost like slow motion, Orphenn yelled once again, “No!” his hand pleadingly reaching out to Ardara. A heavy, dreadful fear weighed on him as he realized what Ardara would do, and that he was already too late to stop her, all in less than a second.
Ardara’s hand fumed, the precursor to a rapid fiery end to anyone at the other end of her palm, too quickly to prevent, when just as rapidly, erupted from Orphenn’s outstretched hand a shaft of golden light, burning their eyes and somehow putting out any remaining flames.
Orphenn’s light bombarded Ardara’s pale frame before she could cover Eynochia in flame. Fearful, he strained to clench his fingers and held his arm to his chest, cutting off the flow of light.
“Master!” exclaimed Nyx and Dacian in unison as Ardara toppled to the burnt ground, bleached-out grass flying.
With a painful squeal, she looked at Orphenn, face twisted in rage. Her skin was singed in patches, bloody and steaming, tears falling. The strange light had scalded her skin. She hadn’t believed it possible, but it was so. This light wasn’t the same as the elemental fire she manipulated. It was purer, and white hot.
Orphenn was just as surprised. He glanced at his palm in disbelief.
At Ardara’s command, Nyx rushed to her Master’s aid, Dacian following suit when Jeremiah hesitantly relented to release the traitor from under his foot. The two readied to carry her to a cruiser and flee-but not before Ardara furiously produced one of her favorite instruments from the folds of her cloak-a syringe- and quick as lightning, thrust the needle straight into Orphenn’s abdomen as he stood.
He lurched at the assault, and the black liquid was quickly injected into his body. When the syringe was retracted, Orphenn clambered back down to the grass in agony. The substance was like molten tar in his bloodstream, burning every vein.
The cruiser flew Ardara and her two favored henchmen across the lake and away, without even a scornful threat as farewell. She sat backwards on the cruiser’s platform and leaned her head back against the motor, watching the White Herons shrink in the distance. She twiddled the syringe in her fingers, then let it plunge into the lake.
“Let that be a lesson to you, my brother.” She aimed her thoughts, and they vibrated loudly in Orphenn’s head. “Even the brightest soul has his own darkness.”
Orphenn writhed on the scorched earth as the cruiser sped out of sight, blackened soil and soot smearing his skin, wailing painfully and muttering unintelligibly. His one arm clenched around the painful injection point around his stomach, the other hand pulling and ripping at the charred grass.
Eynochia screamed a demand twice, the second time even more imploring than the first. “What did she do to him, what did she do?!”
She crawled as close as she dared to Orphenn’s seizing and snarling body, the others only staring, frozen, horrified, stricken.
He looked as though he were being possessed, eyes brightening, mouth foaming. He didn’t look conscious of anyone or anything, only of the pain. He bellowed.
“What did she put inside him?!” Eynochia cried with a banshee-worthy shriek, terror twisting her face.
Then there was a darkness, similar to Cinder’s traveling shadows, but unmistakably more menacing. This darkness swirled about his eyes, his face, tendrils whipping about his body, dark appendages pulling him deeper. Soon he would no longer be Keiran, nor Orphenn Avari, but a winged creature of nothingness, a harbinger of destruction.
Sven took action, clamping his hands on either side of Orphenn’s face to look him straight in his clouded eyes. The deep tentacles of malicious nothing whisked at Sven’s wrists and forearms as he reached into Orphenn’s mind.
It was almost like Déjà vu for the boy. Just like Sven’s power had opened the flood gate of Orphenn’s trapped memories before, he closed a protective drawbridge, complete with portcullis, temporarily sealing Orphenn’s darkness, though as only a hindrance to the creature that was now inside him. Nonetheless, he managed to bring Orphenn back and the angry tendrils subsided.
“Little Bird.” Sven beckoned as Orphenn’s eyes cleared and his writhing ceased.
Eynochia scurried closer and held him as he heavily exhaled, and lost consciousness.
“He’s fainted…What was in that syringe?” she asked, the question directed at no one in particular.
Celina and the others moved closer.
“Likely a tainted essence.” Said the Supreme Commander. “There’s no telling what it’s done to him.” She fondly stroked her brother’s face. “I suppose we’ll find out sooner or later.” Her eyes closed, then harshly opened.
“Cinder. Port us to the ship. We’re leaving.”
Cinder eagerly complied.