| Jan. 26th, 2005 @ 04:17 am (no subject) |
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Purgatory is quieter than he'd expected.
Not that he knows much about the place. His world is simpler, more clear-cut -- there is an afterlife, where good people go, and bad people get -- oblivion. Or the world of the Seker. They don't have an in-between. Their world is the in-between.
Grey mist, and quiet sounds at the edge of his hearing, and something note-quite-solid beneath his feet, and the link that he's grown used to is empty. Still there, but he can't feel Bartleby anymore. Can't send the calm and support that he has been.
The quiet sounds are growing louder, and he frowns, straining to hear them. Voices, perhaps, or music, singers? He can't quite tell.
And then there's song, and it's in a voice he's become familiar with of late, and he sees them.
Tall, brown-eyed Shona, blonde hair in a thick braid, stomach a gory mess where his knife ripped into her and took her child from her. Cradling a tiny child, a baby boy less than a month old, white-skinned and blue-lipped from the lack of blood that couldn't be pumped by a tiny heart that had been stilled with a mere thought and a whisper of magic. Princess of Homana, Prince of Solinde. Kin through his father.
Murderer, Shona whispers. Owain cannot speak, is too young for speech, but his very presence is condemning.
He takes a step back, and stumbles on something soft and yielding. And behind him are bodies, so many bodies, so many people who should not be standing and somehow are and each one of them bears the sign of how he killed them. There are some clean, merciful deaths in there, but far outweighed by the horrible ones, the hangings and the disembowellings and the deaths by magic that were more excruciating than their victims had ever imagined. Everyone he ever killed in the service of Asar-Suti is here.
Don't try to take the blame from yourself and tack it onto him, Shona whispers. You knew what you were doing.
And he knows she speaks the truth, he knew what he was doing each time, from the first to the last. And a part of him wants to accept whatever punishment they deem necessary, but a bigger part of him insists that now of all times is not the time for self-flagellation, and can he get on with his self-pity trip at a time when he's not possibly needed?
"I knew what I was doing. I've changed. That doesn't change what I've done."
You deserve to feel everything you made us feel, Shona whispers. Lochiel nods.
"Aye, perhaps I do. Perhaps there's no redemption. But there are more important things than me and what I deserve at stake. And I won't let you jeopardise them."
Do you think we care what you want? Shona whispers. You destroyed us. You took our lives and extinguished them, as though you had the right. Why should we care what you want?
"Killing me again won't bring any of you back."
A group of men, women and children detatch themselves from the horde, moving to the fore. Bronze-skinned, black-haired, yellow-eyed -- Cheysuli. The Cheysuli he murdered on the night he stole Shona's baby, broke Aidan's skull and decimated Clankeep.
Shona gestures to them with a wave of one hand, still carefully supporting Owain in her other arm. You see them? You stole their lives, for what? Your god? Your perverted version of the prophecy? Or just to show the Mujhar that the Ihlini can kill Cheysuli wantonly?
"For all of that," he admits.
And now you pretend kinship with the man whose life you destroyed.
"Aidan chose to support me. I would have accepted his enmity, expected it. I force acceptance on no man."
You expect us to docilely let you walk through us.
"Killing me will change nothing."
We said nothing of killing, Lochiel the Ihlini, servant of the Seker.
Purgatory doesn't remain quiet for long. |
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lochiel's journal
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