Chapter Twenty-seven
~
His Own Darkness
“Mama.” Said the child in the back seat. Two of the triplets sat on either side of him, the third in the passenger seat.
“Yes, Keiran?” Kella Avari replied from the driver’s seat.
“Are we going to see Papa?”
“Not quite yet, dear.”
What’s going on?
“Owie…” Little Keiran rubbed his eyes, as if suffering from a headache.
“Oh, there’s no need to cry.” His mother criticized, mistaking his painful tears.
A hand rested on his shoulder as the car pulled into the driveway of the family’s dinky white house.
“Does your head hurt, Keiran?” Came a soft, excruciatingly familiar voice.
When the boy first turned to look up at Cira, he saw the sweet, blue-eyed, pig-tailed girl, wearing the floral summer dress that matched her sisters’.
The next instant, she was Ardara, in her red robes and purple leather, lines of anger and insanity where kindness and understanding had once been, so long ago.
Lightning flickered all around her.
“Does your head hurt?”
He looked to the driver’s seat again. His mother wasn’t there.
With no driver, the car careened out of control and crashed into the house, stopping halfway into the living room. Destruction and debris fell all around them, window frames through the windshield, dust and broken glass everywhere.
Orphenn’s mismatched eyes stared back at him from the rearview mirror. He went tense and rigid in the back seat as his own name echoed in his head, the two of them rocking around his mind like a one-word argument.
Orphenn. Orphenn Keiran….Orphennnn…..
Celina was her recent self as well, gone from third grader to white-robed Supreme Commander in the passenger seat.
Keiran….Orphenn…
But she wasn’t moving. Blood leaked from her onto the gray upholstery.
Orphenn whimpered. “K-Or-Orphenn…Keiran? Orphenn, Orphenn, Orphenn!” he wailed. “My name is Orphenn!”
Ardara’s hand was still on his shoulder. Now so was Cinder’s on his opposite side. He looked at Ardara and screamed, and his head twitched to look the other way. He put his hand on the top of Cinder’s.
Half of her was gone. Nothing but white bone and hanging entrails. The remaining half was blackening flesh. “Immortal.” She kept saying. “Immortal….Immortal….Immortal….”
Orphenn screamed. Without thinking, his hand had reached for his silver pistol. He fired maniacally. Soon the ammunition ebbed and the trigger made a fruitless click. No more bullets. Even so, each one had hit its mark without fail.
The homunculus that bore Cinder’s face, and Ardara both lay motionless in the awkward stillness that death brought about. A few bullets had even gone all the way through leather and plush of the passenger seat, lodged into the already lifeless corpse of Celina, making the blood flow even faster.
His breath calmed, and he reloaded his pistol before replacing it in its holster.
Any second now. I’ll be free of the Dreamhold. He thought, and his eyes widened at the realization that the bodies of Cinder and Ardara had disappeared, leaving him alone in the totaled vehicle with the carcass.
“Immortal.”
Orphenn hadn’t spoken.
He began to tremble violently and desperately clambered out of the car.
He quickly crossed the devastated living room and stamped up the stairs, heart hammering. When he reached the landing, he folded his arms to try and hold back the biting cold that had crept into him.
He slowed as he reached the second flight of stairs, feeling an ominous energy intensify as he climbed higher. He stopped completely when he reached the top, suddenly, dangerously second-guessing his own judgment.
Was this really the Dreamhold? Or had he truly just murdered his sisters?
“No!” Orphenn needed to hear it out loud. “No!” He stomped. He clenched his hands through his hair, pulling as if it would peel away the ache in his skull. “Let…Me…Go…” His teeth bared, hunching over in agony. “Leave…Me…Alone!” He shrieked.
He looked up briefly, then stared at the Supreme Commander standing only inches away from him.
It took tremendous energy for him to stand up straight and look her in the face.
She was bloody, torn through with bullets, white robes red-stained and ripped, though she didn’t appear to notice. Her face, blood dripping from it in waterfalls as it had when her essence had been stolen, was serene. She showed no sign of pain; in fact she had a certain shine about her, almost ethereal.
She said nothing, only held open her arms.
She held him like she had when she had lived, arms around his neck.
Orphenn wished he could have returned the embrace.
She fell away, run through with crystal, for he had thrust his lance into her middle. He grew sick with shock as she gurgled and slid off the blade and onto the hardwood, finally gone.
He looked down at his Ardaran uniform, felt his heart compress and crack inside him. He dropped the lance and it landed with a clatter.
Not him. “No!” I’m not…
“I am not Dacian!!!”
Orphenn screamed.
Dacian felt his stomach lurch.
“What did he say?” Jeremiah hushed, carefully stepping to stand by Sven after setting the Day Star to auto pilot.
Sven held a seizing Orphenn in his arms, trying his best to restrain the boy’s fretful thrashing. “Orphenn, come on, come on, it’s alright. Wake up!” He shook Orphenn, trying desperately to reach into his mind and calm him. He seemed to be running against a brick wall.
He screamed again. “I didn’t kill her! I didn’t, it’s not my fault!!”
“Come here!” Sven demanded savagely. He grasped Orphenn’s head between his hands and butted his forehead to the other’s. “Little Bird!”
Finally Orphenn’s eyes opened, and the thrashing quieted, but the sobbing and shouting did not. He clung to Sven like a child.
“Celina, wait!” He wailed. “Nnot…Youu…”
“Orphenn!” Sven snapped him awake with a violent jerk. “You’re right, Orphenn! It wasn’t your fault!”
“She’s…Not….Here!” He writhed.
Eynochia cried into Xeila’s shoulder.
Nyx sat silently in the corner.
Dacian could not take his eyes from the bawling boy, traumatized by the sight.
“Don’t dwell on her passing!” Sven shouted, his arms growing more and more tense around Orphenn’s trembling. “Remember the way she lived! My Little Bird, remember the way you loved her! Do you remember why you loved her?!”
Now everyone let the tears come, even Nyx, even Dacian.
Dacian remembered.
I remember. That smile, that laugh. How happy she looked whenever it rained. The way she never failed to make my heart beat faster. She never let me stay sad…She could never do wrong in my eyes…She never hurt me, the way I….
Before he began to blubber as badly as Orphenn, he escaped to the gondola to let the wind swipe at his tears. He leaned against the railing and sobbed into his palms.
Ardara had never been smacked harder in her life. The retaliation of the intercepted Dreamhold flung her across the room as if she’d been in a collision with a speeding vehicle.
Wynne watched her as he slowly came to. He curled into a ball to best avoid connecting again with his electric entrapment, aching viciously from his beating.
She rolled across the floor, moaning. Grunting with the effort, she lifted herself, only managing to get to her knees. Whining in pain, her fingertips touched the blood coming down her face. Her eyes bled, even more profusely than they had last. “I can’t reach him! No!” She pounded the floor. “He’s becoming more stable…This can’t be happening…” She spotted Wynne heave up his leaden head, and threw her wine glass in his direction, to shatter to pieces far from its mark. “Slave! More wine!”
Unable to comply, he could only watch. Ardara disregarded it anyway, for she fainted from the retaliation’s fatigue.
Cinder watched with a mixture of pity, fear, and disappointment. Her head sloshed through the plasma as she turned her head to look back at Wynne, her hair floating weightlessly and trailing behind every movement.
Her eyes held only love for Wynne. He looked up and their eyes met, like a crash, a burst of everything they felt, colliding in the distance between them.
Full of new intent, Wynne began to tinker with the device at his neck.
When Dacian could finally breathe without difficulty, he wiped his face and closed his eyes. He felt the zephyr curl around him and let the sun touch his face.
He heard the door hinge squeak behind him, but didn’t bother to look at who it was. He knew exactly who it would be.
Nyx stepped forward and leaned on her elbows at the railing close to him, their shoulders touching. He did not acknowledge her, only watched the dark inside of his closed eyelids, glowing red from the sunlight.
“Dacian.” She said. He tilted his head slightly, still not opening his eyes. “There’s been something on my mind.” His silence gave her incentive to continue. She took a deep breath, looking down at her hands. “I hate to see you in all this pain…” She sniffed. “All this chaos Ardara has created for us…Makes me realize how grateful I should be for the things in this world that have the power to shine through everything else. Such as…Love for another.” She looked at him expectantly, with a look of hope and knowing. His eyes had creaked open, but only just. “Dacian.” She said, as if it was just a simple fact, “I love you.”
His eyes opened wide, and fierce.
“You love me?” He spat. Suddenly he straightened, his old temper flooding into him. “You’ve only ever known a shell of who I am! You’ve only ever known the Dacian that Ardara created! How dare you confess your ‘love’ to me now?!”
“Ardara loves you.”
“What?” He hissed.
“Why do you think she chose you to control?” She fought, her own temper flaring now. “She was envious of Lady Celina for having you. For her own sick revenge she manipulated you into murdering the original White Herons! I knew it had to be true. For what other reason would you eliminate your own squadron!?”
“I was merely a toy, a plaything! How is it that you think you know Ardara well enough to know who she loves?”
“I’ve been serving her my whole life.” Nyx calmed, remembering, anger abating. “All because my parents were supporters.”
Now Dacian also relented. “Who were your parents?” He exhaled.
“Vivana and Rammes Cain.”
Dacian started. His features became gentle, concerned, recalling the man that Ardara had shot to death and thrown into the castle moat. “Rammes Cain…”
“Yes.” Nyx confirmed. “Ardara killed my father.” She looked at him, and for a moment it was silent. Her one golden eye, again was like a beacon cutting through his own darkness.
“I had no idea, I-”
She looked away. “Don’t bother yourself with it.”
She turned and left him alone on the lofty gondola, the door slamming behind her.