Chapter Seven – A Common Man’s Cloak

    The Emblem of the Star-Crossed Lovers (Interitus 1: Book X)

Chapter Seven – A Common Man’s Cloak

 

            Ever since she swam through the steaming sea and sailed into my sordid existence, Aeliana had set my world alight and alive. She had given purpose to a person who otherwise had none. But after hearing her admission in the place where we met for the first time, I was overwhelmed by a dismal doubt driven by despair. How could I forge an eternity with the woman who had killed Alyssa? I wondered if perhaps I had forced myself into seeing something I wanted to see but wasn’t actually there. Perhaps it was all a pareidolia portended by a perishing mind left to paltrily persist in the wreckage of love and loss. Perhaps I had invented our ethereal meeting in that forest as a last-ditch survival effort by my brain so it could trick my heart into living on. Perhaps we were not destined to eternally dance as a spiral of twin flames. Perhaps when the stars had crossed us, the stars had killed us.

Though this agonizing doubt engulfed my breaking heart, my brain drove my legs to dash across that quiet beach and into the city. Just as it had possibly deceived my heart in the past, it now directed my body to escape the source of my anguish. It was driven by its innate intent to survive, even though it had no future for which to strive—even though it had no reason but biology to bother living on. Perhaps it knew all along that I was always its greatest threat. I convinced myself that my muddled mind was a battleground between indulgence and delusion, replacing a failed lifetime with a rewritten reality. But even when these chaotic conclusions came to a crescendo, I couldn’t help but feel the heat of love still burning on around me. I passed slowly and silently through the streets of the city like a sunken specter, covetously watching couples cling to each other. I wondered if perhaps their lives were easier without the knowledge of destined encounters or the echoes of lost love in their last lives.

Just by a fortunate roll of the cosmic die, I stumbled upon Donovan and Anna from a short distance away. I saw him purchase a small pastry from a booth when she wasn’t watching, and then he set it close to the side of her face. The pastry’s aroma attracted her attention, but she jolted with a quiet yelp when she turned and saw it. She gasped at first, almost as if she were playfully offended that he would startle her in the first place, but then she thanked him and sank her teeth into the glazed bread. I could tell by the glimmer in her bright blue eyes that this thin pastry was the most delicious thing she had ever tasted. I could tell by the glimmer in his dark green eyes that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. I couldn’t help but feel a sense of envy at the simplicity of their love. Though I hardly knew her, Anna seemed to me like an angel that epitomized everything pure in life, and yet she passionately loved Donovan despite that he stood knee-deep in the darkness.

It was in that moment I realized that I had been a fool overreacting to some impulse emotion. I imagine it was one of the worst choices I had ever made. Aeliana had literally swum across an ocean away from the only life she ever knew, following nothing more than the whisper of a voice echoing in her head that we were meant to be together. That was all the proof I needed that our destiny was real. Regardless of the bloody circumstances that haunted the world from which she ran, we were still meant to dance in an infinite spiral like a whirlwind which cuts through space and time. And in my impulsive escape, I had left her alone on the shore of a city she did not know—in the place where we were destined to meet for the first time in this life. So I swerved away from the markets and left it all behind. I sprinted across melting snow in starlit streets; I pushed my way through crowded and empty streets alike.

But when I finally reached the quiet beach of Ember Bay, I realized with shock that Aeliana was already gone. I saw the silhouette of my wagon standing ajar by the edge of the ocean. The sea had smothered the wagon in a thin layer of water which shimmered in the light of the stars and distant streetlights, but Aeliana was nowhere near my disguised hearse. I wondered if perhaps she had returned to the ocean, in which case the tides would have washed away her footsteps. But as I peered across the area, I saw three sets of footprints. Two were larger and spread out, one left by my departure and the other summoned when I returned. But the third set of footsteps returned to the city in the opposite direction of my home. Without any other evidence, I initially concluded that this was her way of saying goodbye, like a farewell letter left in the sand. But when I looked closer, I realized that these footprints were even larger than my own. Just a short distance away, I saw a flurried stampede in the sand before the trail resumed. Someone had taken Aeliana, and the stampede in the sand was a sign of her struggle.

If my theory was right and someone had taken her, I knew I would drown myself in guilt because I had left her all alone on the beach in the first place. If only I had stopped myself from succumbing to an onslaught of emotion, then none of this would have ever happened. But at the same time, I knew that I could not save her if I got caught in the crosshairs of my own self-blame. When I was younger, I would sometimes have magnanimous fantasies where I was a mastermind with the whole world on strings. But these fantasies were just that; my mind was too weak to even pretend that they were real. I get overwhelmed easily. I often empower my heart over my head. So as I followed the trail of footprints in the snow-strewn sand, I dismissed my heart and focused only on hunting the person who had taken her. The trail transformed when it crossed from the sand onto the asphalt streets of the city, but I could see the faint presence of sandy footprints in the places he had stepped. I had practically memorized the print of his shoe to the extent that I could even recognize it in sloshy clumps of snow.

The day was unusually quiet, and the streets were mysteriously empty. I had always considered this section of the city empty and abandoned, but I still crossed several streets that led to bustling markets. Any time I lost the trail before an intersection, I guessed that the person who took Aeliana had chosen the quieter route. These guesses were rewarded when I invariably found his shoeprint later in a starlit sheet of snow. This tiresome trail traversed roads between abandoned shacks and storage warehouses. I knew that the kidnapper could have taken her to any one of the warehouses, but I wandered onward instead. A long-abandoned factory stood at the end of the block, left hollow by its workers and condemned by the city. Rusty gates enclosed the factory, but they merely appeared to be locked; a gentle nudge was enough to force my way through. Though I had lost the trail of footprints, I could see from the street that the factory door had recently opened. Not only was the door untouched by frost, but as I approached, I saw that its handle was unstained by the dust which clung elsewhere to the building.

            I drew my sword and tilted the door open. The rusty hinges creaked as I opened the door, so I slid my slender body through the opening and entered the dusty space. The darkness was dimly lit by three flickering lights, though another three failed to pierce the shadows. Rusted equipment and broken tools scattered the quiet place, but when I scanned the shadows, I saw the silhouette of a woman on the other side of the room. The darkness nearly concealed her completely, but I could tell just by the way the light shimmered in her hazel eyes that this was Aeliana.

As if my tunnel-vision captured my mind and quarantined everything else, I threw myself across the clearing and dashed toward her. I silenced my brain as I ran to her, convincing myself that I had to forsake my curiosity to conserve energy. Only one thing mattered at that moment. It was because of my hyper-fixation that I did not think to question how a vicious woman like her had been captured in the first place. It was because of my monomania that I did not even realize that she writhed and groaned, desperately trying to warn me of a figure in the darkness behind me. A thick rope over her mouth bound her ability to speak.

            The sound of snapping wood echoed from the shadows beside me. I swerved to face the sound and saw a towering figure in the darkness, standing atop a broken pulley which revealed his presence in the first place. The figure lunged at me with a large dagger which glistened in the flickering lights. Still startled into a state of shock, I scurried backward and swiveled my sword to block his blade. But as soon as our weapons clashed, the attacker redoubled his assault and attempted a high-speed uppercut with his left dagger; I threw myself blindly backward just to dodge, but I nearly tripped over a broken machine on the ground. The assailant capitalized on my moment of weakness, so he lunged forward a second time while thrusting his right dagger. I swiveled my sword and blocked his blade again, but a spark illuminated the dusty space beside our swords.

            The attacker twisted his body and pulled his left dagger back, but I acted on instinct and struck him first in the forearm with a full-force kick. He grunted from the impact as my kick sent his right dagger sliding across the dim-lit clearing behind him. I clumsily lunged forward and tried to slash again while he was partially unarmed, but he threw himself backward even faster than my lunge. He retrieved his dagger a few seconds later at a short distance, standing beneath the flickering lights while I stood at the edge of the shadow. I recognized the hilt of his weapons and realized that he had somehow stolen Aeliana’s daggers.

            “How the hell did you find this place?” asked the daggerman with a furious gaze.

            “You made a mistake when you took Aeliana. I can sense her love, her joy, her trauma; I followed a trail of footsteps to find her here. So if you end this fight, we will disappear. I want nothing other than to take her home,” I said as I steadied my heavy tone.

            But he said as he stood in the center of this space, “I cannot let you leave now that you’ve seen my face. If anything, it’s better this way. I don’t even have to pluck another victim from a quiet street. You brought yourself here and did all the work for me.”

            In that moment, the daggerman threw himself at me at an inescapable speed. Countless thoughts flew through my mind like a shower of sparks, all striving to ignite with either intent or strategy, but I had no time to sort through the embers. I could not give attention to anything other than the shimmering edge of his daggers. In the second he stepped within striking distance, I suddenly swung my sword in a slash so swift that even I was surprised. My enemy jumped with an earthshaking spontaneity and flew over the sword; he nearly struck me in mid-air as he flew past me. As soon as he landed in the shadows, he swerved around and lunged at me again, almost from behind, but I desperately swerved and deflected his dagger at the last moment. The impact knocked me back into the center of this abandoned building, but my assailant redoubled his assault with a high-speed lunge.

I dodged one dagger and then jumped to escape the other, but every time he slashed as I dodged, he closed a portion of the distance. Like a convergent series or a game of synthetic division, he quickly cornered me against a pillar at the edge of the light. He attacked again with a dagger lunge that narrowly struck me, but I deflected his blade with a crash of my sword. Our weapons pressed together just inches from my face, and that was when I saw the symbol inscribed near the base of his blade. It was the same symbol I had seen in the dungeon beneath Bellaina’s house. This was the Array of Black Fire.

“Why do you bother to bring your victims to your lair? You could burn them with black fire in the city somewhere. This step is dangerous at worst and extraneous at best,” I said as I pushed back on his blades with all the strength in my chest.

He said as an amazed stare flashed in his eyes, “You know far more than I first realized. That knowledge is meant to be secret, which is all the more reason I must silence you. If my boss or my clients learn that their secret is spilled, they might just kill me. Or at the very least, they would try. I was playing with you before, but that ends now. The underworld demands secrecy.”

I realized in that moment that the assailant and I were both bound to Bellaina; we were both helpless pawns to the queen of the dark. We had never encountered each other as we both fulfilled a diametrically different detail to her design. He procured her victims, and when all was said and done, I buried them beside the sea. I thought for a split-second that I could possibly reason with him, since we were both orchestrators of the underworld, but I could tell by the lustful glare in his eyes that he had succumbed to a monomania of his own. Just as I only wanted to save Aeliana, he saw us both as living fuel begging to be harvested.

He suddenly struck with a pair of rapid slashes, but I pushed off the pillar to escape his attack. I swiftly stopped and swung my sword with all my strength. He did not swerve or run; my sword instead tore cleanly through his body in a burst of blood and bone. I felt an exhilarating shock at first, but when he fell to the ground, I saw the enervating truth.

The enemy daggerman stood behind the bloody body which fell to the dusty floor. Still clenching a pair of daggers, he showed a sinister smile. I glanced briefly at the bloody body on the ground, one which greatly resembled his, but then I threw myself backward to dodge his high-speed lunge. I had to quickly consider the possibility that he had summoned this second body as a lifeless substitute. Just as Bellaina had in some way created a storm of energy blades to kill her victims, this assailant possessed the power to create a substitute dummy as a shield.

He asked as he saw the shock I could not disguise, “Do you see the tears which stream now from her eyes? You say that you are both bound for each other, so what will she feel when I burn your very soul? What will be her final words before I burn her breath away?”

I think these words set a fire in my soul. Though he outclassed me in every way, from his speed to his strength to the power he possessed, just the thought of him hurting her empowered me with an unmatched strength. So just as I would kill anyone for her without question, I destroyed my trepidation and threw myself forward. The flickering lights shuddered from the shockwaves when my enemy and I crashed our blades together. He tried to strike with his left dagger, but I dashed to my left and unleashed a forward kick. As soon as he tried to dodge and stab my leg, I hobbled backward and counterattacked with a full-force slash. He dodged with a backward hop, then sprang forward, and struck me in the sternum with a kick which sent me flying backward. I slammed into the same pillar as before, and the impact forced the dangling lamps to shudder. Light and shadow danced around me, but still infuriated by the thought of her pain, I unleashed a shout and kicked off the pillar. I threw myself straight for him with a powerful swing, but my enemy jumped again over the attack. He struck me in mid-air with a swift slash, and then he landed near the door to the dark building.

I said as I glared at my enemy and seethed from sharp pain, “I’ll beg for forgiveness when I conclude this campaign. Aeliana, I need you to know that I love you more than ever. We love with a love that the stars themselves could not dissever. I was overwhelmed, conflicted; it’s my fault I left, and it’s my fault he hurt you. This gash on my arm is infinitesimal in comparison to my regret. Just please… please know that I am sorry.”

The daggerman threw himself at me in a meteoric rush, and I tensed every muscle in my body for his inevitable arrival. I steeled my biceps and threw myself backward to dodge his initial slash. My sword was longer than his daggers, so I swung my sword with all my strength; he crashed his daggers to deflect my strike. Sparks set sail to the shadows all around us, but I jolted aside and then thrust my sword again in a straight lunge. He dodged with a backward hop, but then he rushed me for a second time. My fury designated him as the single obstacle blocking my tunnel-vision, so I jumped in the air and swung my sword at full speed. It struck him in the side of his head with a bloody splash, but then I caught a glimpse of my real enemy hiding behind this decoy. He kicked his injured decoy so that it struck me in mid-air, and then I slammed onto a plastic container which shattered beneath my weight. I tumbled from the impact and threw myself to my knees, but my assailant rushed me in that moment with an X-shaped slash. I desperately blocked with my sword, but the impact knocked me tumbling backward once again.

I jolted upright and said through the pain, “I will use your blood to spell her name. I will kill you for even daring to scare her. Black fire will burn through all you ever were.”

He then said as if those words would be my last, “How don’t you see it? You’re simply outclassed. An unpowered enemy has no chance against someone like me.”

Unlike before, I actually saw my attacker summon a substitute dummy; it almost looked like he had stepped out of it from behind. And as soon as he emerged, he stabbed his left dagger in through his own decoy. He charged toward me, practically using his own lifeless clone as a human shield, forcing me to jolt aside just to dodge his right blade. He quickly veered and rushed me for a second time. Even with the weight of his decoy, the daggerman could easily outrun me, so I threw away any hope of evasion. Instead, I planted my feet on the ground and flexed my arms. I swung my stolen sword so swiftly that the shadows shuddered from my strength. I destroyed his decoy and knocked his dagger aside; I practically stunned him with the spontaneity of my strike. As the torn pieces of his body now fell to the ground, I lunged myself forward and unleashed a full-force sword-thrust straight through his chest.

But in the moment that I heard my sword shatter his ribs, I realized that I had fallen for his obvious ploy. I failed to recognize that my enemy could summon a second substitute as easily as the first. I desperately tried to retreat from the two falling decoys, but I was too slow; he struck me with a pair of dagger slashes as I strived to escape. One tore through my thigh while the other struck my side with a shallow slash. My blood spilled onto the ground in a pair of narrow streams, but I stared with shock at the daggers which glistened in his hands. Light and shadow danced at the edges of his daggers. Blood stained his blade almost to the base, but it stopped slightly short of the Arrays etched into the metal. I glanced down and saw a jagged edge in my flesh where I had been struck. It was almost as if my body acted on instinct to escape the Array of Black Fire, but then I realized that this reflex was not my own. Aziel had dedicated his life to his own survival, and now that he was a piece of me, the barbarian cannibal had saved me from the inside. He had compelled me to survive.

With every drop of blood departing from my body, I felt my perfect future slide farther away. I felt Aeliana slipping away from me. But I knew I could not let this daggerman divide us, just as it was all my fault that he even had a chance to take her in the first place. I reminded myself in that moment that I vowed to not let anything stand between us. No irrelevant distraction in this ephemeral world could ever keep us apart. Even the shining stars in the silent sky shuddered at the power we possessed. The people of this world were steppingstones at best and obstacles at worst, and this kidnapper was no exception. He was a puppet of the stars which sought to cross us, but he would fail now as they failed before. His strength and power were nothing more than the hands of a darkness that dared to defy our destiny; I determined in that moment that they would become the very ingredients for our ascension.

I steadied my nerves and sprinted diagonally past the daggerman. He flinched with surprise, unsure why I would do this, but then I executed a swift swerve and threw my foot upon a pillar. By pushing off of it, I catapulted myself straight at my enemy and slashed my shimmering sword. Aeliana yelped in the background as an admonition to a truth I had already expected. I tore down my enemy before he could even swerve to face me, but my blade had only destroyed his decoy. He tried to strike from beneath the cascade of his dismembered dummy, but it was in that moment that I brought my sword crashing down with all my strength. In a scarlet splash of blood and bone, I broke his body and severed his right arm in the moment he tried to strike; his right dagger flew into the rafters with a resonant clamor. He shouted with pain and tried to stand, but then I plunged my sword again through his left forearm and pinned him to the dusty ground. Aeliana watched with wide eyes, but I stood over my crumbling enemy with a gratified glare. Blood and ink poured through his jacket and stained the ground beneath his body.

“You died in the moment you dared to hurt Aeliana. There was never any outcome other than this; the wave function could never collapse in any other way. Even the stars and the city are set to stand against us, but I will eliminate anything that keeps us apart. I knew I would kill you because I am an optimist—I foresee a favorable future and disregard any alternative. But in truth I am also a realist; I know that the world will not conform to my dream unless I force it to conform in a shower of blood and black fire. Your only solace now is that you’ve become a steppingstone to our immortal love. You are an ingredient for our unholy ascension,” I said to my enemy as a lurid exposition.

I dropped to my knees in that moment and bathed my hands in the blood and ink. I could tell with one glance that this ink was not the same as what I used to scribble ordinary equations into a notebook filled with nonsense. This ink was the same vague color as that with which those in the underworld inscribed each Array of Black Fire. I glanced at his bloodstained dagger to show the shape of the Array, and then I began to rewrite it myself on his dying body.

The defeated daggerman glared at me and said, “The knowledge that you killed me will live forever in your head. Just in trying to stop a killer, you became a killer yourself. Now you’re no better than me.”

I simply showed a sinister smile and spoke, “I am a monster hiding in a common man’s cloak. I care only about Aeliana and myself; I could happily eradicate everybody else. I have no interest to call myself the better man. I never cared for justice even before all this began.”

It was then that I completed the Array of Black Fire. As soon as I closed the final bend in the inscription, it activated and illuminated with a golden glow. Black fire burned the bloodstained body of the man who strived to steal Aeliana, but his skin did not succumb to the forces of fire. Instead, his soul burned as a catalyst that then surged into my being. In a chaotic convergence which traversed the mind and soul, I could feel my victim seep into my head while his stolen fuel empowered my spirit. But before he could even scratch the surface of my mind from the inside, I could feel Aziel suppressing him. It was now that I realized that this confirmed something I had only suspected in the past; my mind was a cauldron cursed to carry the molten ghosts of everyone I killed.

As a warm welcome to the nameless daggerman I had locked inside my head, I ripped my sword from his corpse’s arm and then crushed his shoulder with a stomp. With all the strength in my arms, I sent my sword slashing through his back in a full-force crash. Blood and bone blasted from his body like an ocean wave, and then I brought my foot down on his head. I slammed his face into the ground with all my strength, again and again, shouting to the world a vile warning to anyone else who dared to stand between us. Even as my own shouts echoed off the empty walls of this abandoned building, I continued to stomp until his broken teeth blew out of his mouth. I sustained this onslaught as his jaw collapsed and his eyes erupted in a bloody splash; I stomped until his skull shattered into splinters. But with the same stomp that blew through his brain, the shockwaves pulsed through the shaky structure and shifted the rafters above me. I could hear the crash of metal, and then Aeliana exclaimed through the rope which bound her mouth.

In the moment that my enemy’s dagger fell from the rafters above, I desperately protected myself in the only way I could; I activated a technique that I had not yet realized I possessed. Right before I would have been struck, I summoned a decoy to take the hit for me, just as the daggerman had done all throughout our fight. The blade pierced partway through the dummy, but I had survived the strike without a scratch. I was shocked that I had inherited my victim’s power, but even more than that, I found myself fascinated that I saved myself with this weapon so suddenly. There was no question about it; Aziel had saved my life from the inside by wielding the weapon we witnessed together.

When I threw the decoy aside, I saw Aeliana still bound to the wall at the edge of the shadows, watching me with tears which shimmered in her eyes. I could sense her bittersweet sadness even from a distance, so I rushed over to her and tore the restraints which locked her in place.

“I thought you wanted nothing to do with me,” she said in the moment she finally fell free. She stared at me with tears in her eyes, but I wiped the blood from my skin and then wrapped my arms around her.

“I have reason to believe that you and she share the same soul. Perhaps you became her when you killed her, or perhaps you simply devoured your own past life. We have no way to know for sure. But all I know in this moment is that we are meant for each other; we are destined for each other as twin flames dancing in an endless spiral, like two black holes caught in the other’s infinite orbit. We are scattered in space but together in time, constantly crossing paths like the double helix in the code that conscripts us for the other.”