Chapter Five
~
Enma
She was bleeding from her eyes, her nose, her mouth. She was pale, and she looked thin, and limp. Her black wings hung down, the tips of her feathers brushing the floor. Sven folded them gently to her back and set her down on the closest bed, moving her hair from her bloodied face as the others swarmed around them.
The medic pushed her way to the bedside as Sven lightly removed the coronet from Celina’s forehead.
Orphenn and Cinder too stricken to speak, Xeila and Jeremiah gaping, they clung like magnets to the bedside.
“What happened?” Cried the panicky medic.
Sven almost screamed. “It was that traitor! Again! That filthy, vile, traitor! I swear, it seems like he’s bent on hurting me, though I doubt he even knows!” With a raging cry he turned away, with his scarred face in his hands. “I’ll kill him. I’m going to kill him.”
“Traitor? What traitor?” The medic questioned ignorantly.
“Dacian.” Sven, Xeila, Cinder and Jeremiah all hissed in unison, leaving the medic and Orphenn clueless.
No more was said.
It had been a few hours. The medic came in occasionally to check on Celina. Orphenn still had no idea why she was hurt. She had stopped bleeding, but was still very pale. Sven, Xeila and Jeremiah sat together on a bed across the room, conversing. Orphenn sat on a stool by Celina’s bed, Cinder seated on another bed to the back of him.
Celina breathed slowly. Her eyes were sunken and darkly circled, and her skin was pasty white. Her red-stained robe had been exchanged for a gray infirmary gown.
“I want to go back.” Xeila whispered. “I want to try again.”
“No, Xeila.” Said Jeremiah, who was seated behind her, rubbing an antitoxin cream onto her bruised skin.
“You’ll get your chance, Poppet.” Sven assured.
Orphenn held Celina’s hand, and laid his head on the bed, remembering a time back on Earth, when he had had a nightmare. Celina had let him sleep in her bed with her. He relished the memory, now even more grateful to Sven for liberating his mind. “You never finished your story.” He informed both her, and Cinder.
This caught the others’ attention. “Why don’t we continue, then?” Sven suggested.
“Where did we leave off?” Cinder said.
Orphenn closed his eyes. “I was born.”
She resumed immediately.
“Cira, as you know, could see the future-not voluntarily-she couldn’t control the premonitions she had.
“A few years after you were born, her visions became more frequent. She was constantly suffering from headaches and nightmares.”
Orphenn recalled waking up to Cira’s screaming one night and traveling to her bedroom to investigate, but his mother had arrived before him and ordered him to go back to sleep.
“Her visions began to show her things she didn’t want to see. She told me about it once, when she had woken up screaming again. She said she kept dreaming about people hurting-being tortured, burned, struck by lightening, crushed by boulders. They showed her nothing but death and pain. Later I would find out her dreams were also glimpses of the future.
“One night I found her crouched in the corner of her bedroom, rocking back and fourth, muttering to herself. Her wings were splayed out. We typically used a cloaking ability to hide them, so this was unusual.”
So that’s why my wings were only seen when I wanted them to be. Orphenn thought. I had an ability I never knew about.
“When she saw me, she stood up, and glared at me. She didn’t look like my sister. The moment she started to speak, I knew she had gone insane, honestly mad. She kept saying that she’d seen another world, and that someone named Ardara was telling her she needed to conquer it. She trailed off about it, saying Ardara wanted her to kill Earth. She wanted me to come with her, to be her partner. She said we would be the most powerful beings in that world, that it would be a fast, simple takeover. I asked her, ‘What about Celina?’ She said we would make do without her. Her eyes were crazed, and violent. It scared me. I tried to talk sense into her, but she refused to listen and started in with, ‘You don’t love me,’ ‘I’m alone. None but Ardara understand me.’
“Electricity shot from her hands-the lightening power she’d mastered. It jolted all up the walls and ceiling, and the power through the whole house went out. When Celina came to investigate, we started to smell smoke. The area surrounding Cira caught fire, and soon the whole room was ablaze.
“We ran from her, even though she was only slowly walking toward us. Something about her was just so….Menacing.
“I was grateful, at the time, thinking our parents had gone out that night. I remember you were at your friend’s house near Time Square….” Orphenn was shocked-he remembered too. His friend’s name was Brenna. He wondered if she remembered him.
“We rushed outside, and she calmly came out the front door after us, like nothing at all was wrong. Her face was blank, but again, I could tell by her eyes that she was enraged. With just a wave of her arm, the entire house exploded. There was a huge cloud of fire. I had no choice but to port all of us away to escape the blast.
“But Cira had known that I would do exactly that. She forced a thought into my mind. As I only have to think about a place to teleport to it, this turned our course onto a completely different path.
“We saw the solar system pass us by like hyper speed, then the galaxy, and billions of stars, until we reached a planet so much like Earth, it was hard to tell the difference with just your eyes. It was called Verlassen.
“We landed in a courtyard, outside a city. It was the capital of the most powerful country in this world, the Verlassen Empire, which had entire control of the planet, apart from one little wasteland. Cira knew just where to go. She ran away from us. I tried to run after her, but Celina stopped me. ‘Find Keiran.’ She said. So I ported back to Earth to retrieve you and bring you here. We thought if we used you to persuade her, she would come to her senses-she loved you so much….”
Orphenn’s eyes began to sting with the beginnings of tears, remembering when Cira would read him story books when Mom was away, complete with all the different voices and enthusiasm.
“The plan didn’t work. And Cira nearly killed you. She was blinded by rage and madness.
“We had no choice but to run. We stayed one night hiding in the wilderness outside the capital city. The next morning we were woken by gunshot. We only just escaped the men that pursued us, who called themselves ‘Ardarans.’ We later discovered that Cira had gained the loyal support of that country’s power-hungry leader: Rammes Cain. In what seemed like only hours, the Ardarans started raiding neighboring lands and conquered them easily with the power of Cira’s gifts, and the power of Rammes’s military. In days, they together, literally, had taken over the world.
“In the days that followed, there was nothing but war. In the midst of hiding, Celina and I found ourselves in the center of a battlefield putting us and you in immediate danger. The only escape route was a shortcut through a calm river. It was hidden in the dense surrounding thickets and no one caught us. The river sparkled with color, and its water was warm. We drank our fill from it.”
“I remember that!” Orphenn announced, immersed in the story.
Cinder nodded and continued. “But before, in the chaos, I had been wounded-shot through at least three times. I couldn’t stand keeping you in such danger any longer. I used the last of my energy to take you back to Earth.
“My first intention was to leave you with Mom and Dad, hoping they were living somewhere safe with a friend of the family. But when I focused on them and ported, with you in my arms, we were brought to the ashy remains of our old house in New York. I found their bones among the rubble.
“You were unconscious for that bit, thank God. You had passed out from the pressure of the portal. That’s why you lost your memory.
“With our parents dead, and no other family, I was left with no other option but Kinder Rose orphanage.
“The boy took you in his arms like you were his brother instead of mine. It hurt. But I had to live with it. I had to hurry back to Celina. I could only tell them one thing. ‘He is an orphan.’ And apparently, that’s what they decided to call you. I had to leave before I could give them your name. I was surprised I had the strength left to port back to Celina, back on the planet that Cira had also renamed ‘Ardara.’
“I was weak, and losing power. I was dying.”
Cinder’s and Orphenn’s eyes had been leaking tears since the bit was told of Cira’s old love for Orphenn. Xeila was bawling. And so was Celina. She had finally woken.
“I was so scared for you,” She said to Cinder, carefully sitting up. “I thought I would lose you after we had already lost our brother.”
Cinder started again. “The both of us suddenly began to go into convulsions. Painful seizures that lasted several minutes.
“My wounds were miraculously healing, though my body was racked with pain. Our eyes changed. We found ourselves with new abilities. We had mutated for a second time.”
“We discovered it was the river we drank from that had altered our DNA. After several experiments on frogs and squirrels and things.” Celina added.
“Then we were so scared; you had also drunk from that river. We feared you didn’t survive the mutation.”
“It was then that I had an epiphany.” Celina enthused. “If we could convince the remaining faithful Verlassians to drink the water, we would have a mutant army-and easily overthrow the still human Ardarans.”
“This is where we come in, isn’t it?” Sven interjected.
Cinder smiled. “Sven was the first to volunteer. Sadly, there were few of us. Even children had to go through mutation. But they were all successful, which gave us new hope that you had survived. Thankfully, we found that injecting the water directly into the bloodstream was much quicker and less painful than simply drinking it.”
“Convenient, that they had to figure that out after I had to drink it.” Sven griped playfully.
“We called ourselves the Enma,” Celina said, “and our rebellion was named Aleida. In the Ancient Tongue, it translates to ‘winged one.’”
“And what does ‘Enma’ mean?” Orphenn queried.
“Hope.” Cinder answered for her.
Celina smiled and continued. “We trained our militias in secret, perfecting the skills of each and every mutant. When they were all trained, they were organized into squadrons based on capability and skill. Only after our first few victories were we able to acquire a few airships, but that was later on.
“I was proclaimed Supreme Commander after our first victory. It was a rather epic event. Everyone wanted for both me and Cinder to lead them, from the proven success of our own leadership and strategy, but Cinder had turned them down. To this day, I don’t know why she did. But I digress.
“The war against Ardara lasted six years. During that time….” She paused, allowing tears to fall down her cheeks, “I was betrayed by my best friend. He was my squadron’s sharpshooter. He killed my squadron, destroyed my airship, and ran to the side of Ardara. So I was forced to join Cinder’s squadron. And with heavy hearts, and rapidly depleting numbers, we raged the last battle.”
“Each member of my squad as well were killed in that battle.” Cinder proceeded. “And we were severely outnumbered. When it seemed like the end, and we had lost all hope, there came strange lights in the sky.”
“It was Mother Sun.” Celina clarified. “She and the rest of the Celestial Family-Saturn, Jupiter, and so forth-came to our aid. Even Earth came, to fight for her children on Verlassen.”
“Ardara was conquered at last. Sent to fester in her barren wasteland. She is in exile, though her few remaining supporters are still loyal to her. They were exiled as well.”
“Then the planet was renamed for the last time.”
“Aleida.” Orphenn murmured. “After the battalion that saved the world.”
Celina nodded. “Cinder and I were regarded as saviors and angels by all the people here-most of them who had been kept as Ardaran slaves in the war. And now, every Enma is revered and respected as an icon. A symbol of freedom.
“By these same people, I was named Queen of All the World, though I prefer to keep the title of Supreme Commander.
“Cinder and I would have shared power, but she refused. She’s intent on being a drifter.”
“That’s beside the point here.” Cinder defended.
“The point is,” Xeila sniffed, “That Ardara is planning a comeback.”
The others all listened intently.
“I heard her talking to Rammes about it.” She clarified. “But I only heard something about a source. I had to retreat before I heard any more-but at the last minute I caught something like ‘the Enma’s power source….’”
Sven gave Celina an intense glare. “So that’s why!” He exclaimed, bolting to his feet.
“Oh, God…” Celina cursed. “That’s why he came.”
“Who!?” Xeila squealed.
“Dacian!”
“He was here?!” Orphenn yelled, squeezing Celina’s hand.
They all stared at Celina now.
“He beat you senseless!” Sven shouted.
“You saw it?” Roared Jeremiah.
“I got there in time for him to jump out the window and escape!”
“That bastard!”
“He barely touched me,” Celina objected.
“And yet you’re bleeding in a hospital bed?!” Orphenn demanded.
Celina looked at him, sad, and hurt. Orphenn realized with a shock that her eyes looked normal. They were both the same universal blue, no odd pupils, just one black orb in each iris.
“He used a new gift.” She said. “He called it ‘Diffusion.’ He took the mutations from my blood stream, and removed them through the pores of my skin. He stole the Enma right out from my body.”