Queen Yavara Ch. 48

"No." Leveria hissed, but the tears forming in her eyes bespoke the truth, "I killed her, Yavara. I killed her."

I knelt to her level, and sat cross-legged beside her. "You're a hateful woman, Leveria," I whispered. "You say you love your homeland, but you would rather see it turned to rubble than suffer one day knowing Ternias had stolen your crown." I touched her chin, and made her meet my gaze, "The only reason you're lying to me, is because Elena would want you to; because the only thing she loved more than you or me, was the Highlands." I took a deep breath, and felt the power whisper in my veins. "And that is why I am going to burn it to ash after I'm done with you."

ZANDER

With a flash of green light, I was in front of my old house. The forest dwelling was entwined in foliage, though in the winter months the snarling branches were bare, showing the true extent of its decay. The shingles were a mess, the windows were all broken, and the façade was nearly stripped to the studs and boards. I tapped my staff on the ground, and the house righted itself.

My library was extensive, and mostly consisted of old tomes from the first Alkandran kingdom. Most of these, I'd written myself. During my time as First Mage of Alkandra, I'd authored hundreds of books on the magical arts. Alkandi had been very lenient with ethics, so my research was very thorough, if not sometimes extremely gruesome.

The focus of my research had been reincarnation. Namely, the focus had been of the three planes of existence: spiritual, astral, and earthly. The spiritual plane was intangible to me, but through centuries of brutal investigation, I became the first mortal in recorded history to crack the code of astral projection. Once I showed her, Alkandi became the second.

We were standing naked in a barren, black void. The ground was beneath us, but it was nothing. There was no soil, nor wind, no sky. Alkandi stood across from me, looking around at the oblivion we occupied.

"This is the astral plane?" She asked me.

"It is."

She pondered it with her trademarked crooked smile. "It could use a woman's touch."

"Just project a thought."

"How?"

"You and I are not real. We're our astral projections. We are living thoughts—our consciousness as we see it." I gestured around us, "The earthly plane can hold the mind, body and spirit. The astral plane can only hold the mind and spirit. The spiritual plane can only hold the spirit. You and I are simply our minds and spirits suffused. So, if you want to project a thought, you only have to say it."

She looked quizzically at me, then said, "happiness," and the astral plane glowed warm and orange. She smiled to herself, and said, "pleasure," and the astral plane glowed pink and radiant. She cocked her head, then said, "pain," and the astral plane became a bloody red. She looked to me. "It's rather rudimentary, isn't it? What else can we do here?"

"You know as much about it as I do."

She puzzled over the red void, tapping her lips contemplatively. "It is lesser than the earthly realm, isn't it? It's all very dull."

"It's a place of impermanence. Thoughts are transient things. No one should stay here for long."

"Indeed," she muttered, "but I'm afraid I will have to. This place is the key to my immortality." She drew a line with her finger to the void above, "That place, where ever it is—the spiritual realm—there is no going back from there. That is death. If this place is so bare as to form colors from sensations, then that place is nothing. I must avoid it. I cannot go there. Here, I have a chance to go back even if I die."

"How?"

She closed her eyes, and two more figures appeared behind her. One was a succubus, and the other was a she-orc. "These were the souls trapped in the gemstone that merged with me," Alkandi said, "they live within me. They are part of me. Why? Why is it that three souls can exist in one mind and body? Should it not tear me to pieces?"

"I'd say it has something to do with compatibility."

She scoffed. "Compatibility is what middle-aged bachelors seek in a wife. Compatibility is by definition a compromise. It's a pairing of things that fit loosely together. My trichotomy requires perfection. That gemstone would've killed me if I was anything but kindred with these two souls."

I snorted. "Alkandi, please."

She smirked back. "You're always the scientist, Zander. The astral plane is cognitive; it makes sense like how an equation makes sense. The spiritual plane is irrational by definition. It's why you can't understand it, and I can. It's why love is natural for me, and the greatest mystery of your pathetic life."

I placed a hand over my heart, and doubled-over in exaggerated pain. "Ow, my soul!"

Alkandi tittered, and placed a hand on each of the figures at her side. "They are my kindred spirits, Zander. Here, you can tell us apart, but in the spiritual plane, I am certain we'd be identical."

"So, kindred spirits are the secret to your immortality."

"Yes," she said, and the two figures merged back into her.

"That begs the question then, how do we find you more kindred spirits?"

"There's something hereditary about behavior, isn't there? Two shy people rarely make an extroverted child, and two extroverts rarely make an introvert. The soul of the mother has sameness with the soul of the child, and I have thousands of descendants."

I frowned. "How the hell are we going to get you into an already-living person?"

"It cannot be done once the child is already formed in the earthly plane. I must merge with the soul before the egg is fertilized."

I rubbed at my temples, and sighed, "And how are you going to do that?"

"I know what my kindred spirit looks like, Zander. I have seen it three times now—I know the pattern. When I die, I will seek out the mother who will bear my reincarnation. When I find the host, I will merge with the spirit that lays within her egg, and prompt the mother to fertilize it."

"You're going to make her fuck at exactly the right time." I said incredulously.

Alkandi grinned wickedly. "There is a succubus soul in me, Zander. Once that egg hits her ovaries, the host mother will hardly have a choice in the matter."

I blinked, shaking the memory from my mind. After our first meeting in the astral plane, Alkandi had tried to go there herself, but she could not. She tried meditating, hallucinogenic drugs, and mind-altering conditioning, but she could never get there without my guidance. When she died, I sought her in the astral plane, and found it empty. It was then that I resolved to kill myself, and it was only when I was literally strung from my own neck that she came to me. A phantom, a whisper, a faded image; there was so little left of her, but there was enough of her left to bind me to her death curse. "Until I once again sit on the Black Throne in the reborn kingdom of Alkandra, you will suffer life indefinitely." And I had suffered. Oh, how I'd suffered. I was fed youth like poisoned milk, given its energy and sapped of its joy. I was stretched out over a millennium, scraped across time like some piece of dogshit stuck to the bottom of god's bootheel. There was no peace, no escape, no sanctuary. The curse pulled my soul off its axis, and I swung precariously out of sync, existing in each moment feeling perpetually lost.

And so, I lived, and with me alive, Alkandi could exist in the astral plane. But she was so fragile, barely clinging to existence. It was as though the earthly and spiritual realms tethered the mind in place, and if one tether was cut, the other pulled the mind away. She realized then that the astral plane was not a place of permanence, that eventually, she would be pulled into the next realm, so she devoted her entire being to seeking out mothers. If I visited the astral plane, I would find her as a comatose husk on the floor, unable to acknowledge me at all. It was only when she finally found an egg to latch onto, that I would see her mind hale again.

But then the imperials wiped out the dark-elves, and Alkandi's reincarnations became less and less frequent until they were gone. For four-hundred years, I thought I had failed her. Then, a high-elf girl named Rheyari came to me, and when I looked at her astral mind, I found twenty-four kindred spirits within her, and Alkandi was one. It made sense to me that Alkandi could find such spiritual kinship with high-elves—she was originally a high-elf, after all. It also made sense that her resurgences would be much less frequent, for though there was spiritual kinship, it would be so much rarer in high-elves, and required the mother to mate with a beast. I resigned myself to waiting for long stretches of time. When Alkandi's incarnations finally showed themselves, it was my duty to assist Alkandi in completing the spiritual merging of their souls. While with dark-elves, Alkandi could merge in the womb, high-elves required a maturation period. Though the spirits were kindred, the mind and body were different. It was a delicate process.

I opened the door to my study. I clapped my hands, and a volume of my journal flew from the dusty shelves. Opening it, I sat down, and poured over my observation notes. In total, there were six high-elf merging episodes—seven, if I counted Yavara. Rheyari and those that came after her all merged seamlessly with Alkandi, but Yavara fought. Yavara fought tooth and nail, and nearly rejected Alkandi outright. The event had been so violent that it almost killed everyone involved. Why had it been different?

I closed the book, and closed my eyes. I had known thirteen of Alkandi's thirty incarnations. Most of the dark-born ones had died before I could get to them, but the others usually lived at least into their teens, and all the high-elf-born survived into adulthood. Maybe I had undiagnosed autism, maybe I couldn't understand people as Alkandi had stated, maybe I couldn't see her design of souls, but there was... something between all of those women and girls. There were differences between them, of course. Some were evil, some were good, some were lazy, some were ambitious, but there were similarities across all of them. They were all exceptionally cunning, manipulative, and resilient. Their greatest powers weren't there magical abilities, but their abilities to navigate turbulent social waters, use people to their advantage, and take emotional punishment in stride. Was that Yavara? No. All the incarnations took full advantage of my devotion to manipulate me like a damned puppet, but not her. She gave me autonomy—hell, she often put my judgement above her own. While the others had paid simple lip-service to my suggestions, Yavara actually heeded them. Had she decided to become the Dark Queen, or had I set her upon the path? She had done all that I wanted her to, and none of the others had done anything but what they desired. Yavara was a dream come true. My dreams never came true.

Another memory invaded my mind. A more insidious one. The parting words of Brock Terdini before he was forever banished from Alkandra. "Don't you see, Zander? Alkandi picked the wrong Tiadoa Princess!"

And the piece of the puzzle fit perfectly into place.

I sighed, and rested my head on the back of the chair. "Of course." I whispered to myself, rocking in my chair. "Of course, of course, of course, of course. You got impatient with me, didn't you?" I looked at Alkandi's skull, and whispered, "Why didn't I see it? I remember the way you lusted for Yavara. When you infected Trenaria Tiadoa's womb, you saw the potential that egg would carry. 'She is the one, Zander. She is the most powerful incarnation I've ever had. I will risk everything to become one with her.' That's what you said. You would risk everything to become one with her. Everything. Everything. EVERYTHING!"

I picked up the staff, and smashed the skull against the ground. It shattered into a thousand pieces, and the pieces sprayed across the room like dust. The crown that topped her head bent, and I stomped it into the floorboards until it was flat. "You greedy fucking bitch!" I roared, "You thought you could cheat your way to destiny! Were you so sick of waiting that you finally concluded it was your own goddamn soul that was the problem?! Who the fuck is Yavara Tiadoa?! Just some magical fucking egg you decided to hop right into?! Kindred spirits be damned; all my fucking life be damned; just jump on the expressway to power and hope that the logistics sort themselves out, but what about me?!"

"Fuck it!" I roared, and stomped over to the window. I grabbed the curtains, ripped them from the rungs, rolled them into a tight rope, then made a slipknot, pulled it around my neck, and looped the end of it to the balcony railing. I stepped onto the balcony, and looked down. Goddamn, it was far. How could ten feet look so harmless from below, and so terrifying from above? My knees became weak, and my balance shifted. My foot slipped, and with a cry, I lurched backwards, and fell right on my ass. I lay there for a moment, staring up at the ceiling, hating myself and Alkandi with every breath. For a thousand years, I had waited for that one moment when Alkandi's incarnation would look at me from the Black Throne, and smile. I would feel the curse ebb from me, and I would know in that moment of grace that I had been forgiven and absolved of my betrayal. But she had decided to take matters into her own hands, and she had passed her kindred spirit by to infest the egg of a powerful imposter. Yavara Tiadoa was nothing more than a gifted mage. She wasn't a kindred spirit... she was compatible. Alkandi had to take control of my body and rape her way into Yavara's soul and force the merging, and I'd gone along with it like a damn fool because I loved her.

"You used me, then you threw me away like trash." I whispered, "A thousand years, I served you. I served you in dozens of bodies and lives, and each one of you was as useless as the last! Hedonistic sluts with no care for me! I should've dragged you all to Alkandra and glued your fat asses to the fucking Black Throne!"

I wept like a child on the floor of my forest abode, where I'd spent centuries in exile, waiting to find the next incarnation. I wept until my eyes were dry, and my sobs had so wracked my diaphragm that my lungs were burning. Then another thought came to me. An extremely dangerous thought, for it gave me the barest glimmer of hope. I reformed the skull that I'd shattered, fixed the crown that I'd flattened, and fused them together atop my staff. I sat upright, and stared at Alkandi, the thought playing out behind my eyes. It couldn't be. No... it couldn't be.

"Don't you see, Zander? Alkandi picked the wrong Tiadoa Princess!" Those weren't the last words Brock had said to me. The last words Brock had said to me were, "The real Dark Queen sits on the throne of Bentius!"