The Creators Ch. 15

"Wonderful," she grinned with a mouth full of fangs and gore.

I washed myself off in the puddle as she finished her meal, then we went to the nearby farm and raided it for vegetables. Astrid pointed out all the sadistic traps the farmer had placed in his patch, and I cringed to think of stepping in one. Metal couldn't pierce my flesh, but it wouldn't be exactly comfortable either. We came upon an orchard with Ofan trees—those trees who bore fruit of many varieties, and I let out excited squeal when I saw the size of the fruits. I picked up a nearby bushel basket, and began making my selection.

"Hurry up, Pet!" Astrid hissed. "He will bring his dogs out soon, and then they will come with sun-torches!"

"Hold on!" I hissed back, and selected a grapefruit from the tree.

A loud bark sounded from across the field, and astral lights illuminated a nearby barn.

"Hurry!" Astrid growled urgently.

"One second," I grinned back at her, "I still need some lemons."

"Don't you have enough useless feedstock?!" Astrid whispered as the hounds became louder, and the lights began to dance in the field.

"Let them come a little closer, Astrid," I giggled. "Where's the fun in running off before they see us?"

"Fun?!"

"Do you know what it is?" I teased, and slowly selected the juiciest lemon on the tree. The hounds became louder, and the lights became brighter. Soon, they were shining right through the foliage, painting a silhouette around me.

"It will burn me, Pet!" Astrid hissed urgently. "We must go now!"

"One more second..." I said, and plucked an apple. The hounds were only twenty yards away, and the shouts behind them told me that the men could see me. I tucked the basket beneath my arm, and sprinted over to the quailing vampire just as the dogs burst into the mangrove. Astrid wrapped me in her arms and launched into the air. The dogs barked like mad, the farmers rushed into the clearing below us, and we flapped silently overhead, and toward the monolithic blackness that indicated the Gratoran Wall.

"See?" I laughed. "Fun!"

"What were you thinking?!" Astrid panted heavily, her protective arms holding me against her in a steel vice.

"I just wanted to see if you'd stay with me."

"You play these ponderous games, yes you do," Astrid growled. "That is the last time I ever take you hunting with me!"

"So, same time tomorrow then?"

"I said, it is the last—"

"Yeah, you said that yesterday," I took a victorious bite of the apple, and grinned up at Astrid with the juice dribbling down my chin. "But I always seem to convince you otherwise."

When we got back to the nest, Astrid rolled exhaustedly upon the thatch floor, and I uncinched the belt that held us together. She had an admonishment poised on her lips, but I stopped it with a press of my mouth, and enjoyed her kiss for serene seconds. I had convinced her to shave the strands of hair that had still clung to her head, and now my fingers could run smoothly over her head, though the pate was horribly rough with scars. It didn't bother me. Her kiss was such a sweet thing, and with it fresh upon my lips, I was capable of loving every inch of her.

"What are you doing?" Astrid grumbled sleepily as I kissed my way down her chest.

"You know what I'm doing," I snickered, moving lower, and lower.

"This will change nothing; you're still not going hunting with me!"

"Mm-hmm," I said, "that's what you said last night, and the night before, and the night before, and the night before...."

"For years you have manipulated me!" Astrid bemoaned with a moan as I licked past her pelvis. It had been twenty-two days since my capture, actually, but she always struggled with time. There were nights when she'd awake, and think the evening before had taken place months ago. It didn't bother me. Time didn't really mean much anyway. I licked my way to the apex of her thighs, and grinned up at her. Her red eyes glowed in the dark, smiling affectionately down at me. I used to find them terrifying, but now they were a great source of comfort. But the eyes that glowed behind Astrid were far from comforting. I didn't even have time to open my mouth before Gloria grabbed Astrid by the chin, and ripped her back.

I was thrown off Astrid and into the wall. There was a shriek, a scuffle, the flap of wings and the beating of flesh. I couldn't see anything in the moonlit nest; just flashes of snarling mouths, claws digging into skin, blood splattering and running down pallid limbs. There was a fraction of a second where I saw Gloria's forearm wrapped around Astrid's neck, and Astrid's eyes bulging, then the visage passed with a flash of movement.

"Gloria, stop!" I screeched, but was not heeded. There was the sound of something rending, then a terrible shriek, and a batwing floated freely from its bearer, and down through the hole in the nest. Frantic movement came after, legs kicking wildly, the sound of desperation in someone's combative snarl. I searched blindly for my rocks, but they'd been scattered. I dropped to my hands and knees just to find one fucking pebble, but there was nothing. Another ear-splitting screech, and the sound of bones cracking.

Astrid's voice broke horribly, and the fervency of the battle grew. I felt around for anything at all, but there was nothing—fucking nothing—in the thatching but twigs and thorns! I finally just began punching my fist through the wall over and over again until my knuckles were scraped raw, and the sounds of Astrid's shrieks became so high and terrified that they rang in my head. I punched and punched and punched until my fist connected with solid rock, and my entire hand sank into the side of the Gratoran Wall. I was still so weak. I tugged, and tugged, and tugged, but despite my gritted teeth and sweat, I could do nothing! Another bone cracked, and Astrid's gurgling shriek cut through the nest. With a roar, I spent every ounce of energy I had, and I ripped a blade of stone from the Gratoran Wall, and cut the top off the nest.

The moon shown overhead, illuminating Gloria Titus as she dug her nails into Astrid's neck. One of Astrid's wings was gone, one of her arms was broken several times, and her body was covered in her own blood, but she still stared at me with clarity in her red eyes. So did Gloria.

"Let her go, Gloria," I whispered, leveling my blade against her neck. "If you kill her, I will bring this whole fucking mountain down onto you, I swear I will."

"She's not your Astrid!" Gloria snarled.

"Pet?" Astrid croaked, staring confusedly at me, at the miracle I had just performed.

"Let her go, Gloria," I said as calmly as I could.

"What, so you can go west with her? Hide behind the mountains with your zombified master?" Gloria glowered at me. "This thing is incapable of loving you! I would know; I'm its mother!"

"What?" Astrid asked, her eyes dulling.

"It's no business of yours what I do," I hissed at Gloria. "I choose my master; it's the only choice I've ever been given in this life! So for the final-fucking-time, let her go!"

"No," Gloria hissed, shaking her head, "no, no, no, no; you don't get to run off into the desert this time, Willowbud! Do you know what awaits you on the other side of that wall?"

"Freedom."

"Death!"

"What's the difference, huh?" I growled. "I've been trying to find a good place to die since I was five years old! You think you know everything? You know nothing about me, do you understand? NOTHING! I'm not your goddamned god, and I'm not your goddamned daughter, so stop trying to FUCKING HELP ME!"

"You blind, petulant little child!" Gloria screamed at me. "Do you know how long it took me to find you?! I had to climb up the fucking Gratoran Wall to get here, and I'm not leaving without you!" She thrusted her finger at the mountains above us. "You don't even know what's going on, do you? You've been so wrapped up in your twisted fucking fairytale that you haven't heard that Julia Gendian and her daughter are assembling a horde of ten million in the Gratoran Desert! Oh, and let's not forget that Diamond somehow emerged as the god of water—and oh, am I leaving a special detail out? Oh yeah, THEY'RE BOTH CORRUPTED AND BOUND TO EACH OTHER!"

Gloria's voice echoed off the infinite wall behind us, and the two of us stared at each other in its dimming wake. The revelation crashed into me, and washed over me just as easily. Julia, Diamond, Corruption; these were names from another life. Just another abstract fever dream haunting my sleeping hours.

"I don't care," I said softly.

Gloria blinked at me. "What?"

"I said I don't care." I angled my blade against her neck. "What do you expect me to do? Go face two gods on my own and die so that you can sleep easy knowing you at least tried to save the world? No, fuck that. Fuck you. Fuck the world."

"You don't get to say that," Gloria hissed, "you don't get to give up! You haven't even started to try yet!"

"You had your chance before, and you ran away from me, Gloria. You don't get to be my savior now."

"Oh, so it's my fault then? Or is it the world's fault?!"

"It's my fault. Only mine."

"That's fucking peachy, Your Holiness, but there's a difference between taking blame and taking responsibility! One of them allows you to be a victim of your own faults, and the other makes you own them! Now are you going to grow up, or are you going to stay this pathetic little girl forever? What's it gonna be, Pet?"

"Let go of her," I whispered.

"Heed your own words!"

"Let go of her!"

Gloria narrowed her eyes at me. "Fine." And she tossed Astrid off the cliff. I didn't even think. I raced past Gloria, and jumped after her.

Gloria's horrified scream died in my ears almost as fast as it came, replaced but the deafening rush of wind as I plunged down, down, down into the darkness. Astrid spiraled below me, vainly trying to flap one wing as the world came rushing up toward her. Toward me. Somewhere in my primal brain, the realization came to me that I was going to die, but it didn't seem to matter. I just needed to get to her. I just needed to hold her. I angled my body toward the ground, and dove headfirst. The ground came surging up at terrifying speeds, but my heart remained calm. It thudded resoundingly in my chest, giving cadence to the whistling symphony that rushed through my ears. My only focus was on her. Even as she plummeted, she flapped frantically with her one wing, and though she did little but lengthen her terror, she gave me a chance. I tucked my shoulders in, and dropped like a spear through the air until the whistling rush was accompanied by a horrible manic scream.

The realization of her end was wide on Astrid's face. She flailed in the air with her arms and legs, trying to catch the wind that rushed past us, clawing at it as though to drag herself down its medium to slow her descent.

"Astrid!" I screamed.

Her manic eyes looked up at me. In that moment, she didn't see her Pet; she just saw something to grab onto. She latched onto me, sunk her nails into my back, and screeched in my ear. I wrapped my arms lovingly around her as she gouged desperate holes in my flesh, and I tilted backward. There would be no last kiss, no parting words, no revelation in the end. All there would be was her panicked bulging eyes and horrified screeches, and that was OK. I whispered sweet love into her ear to quell the whistle of the wind, and I counted down the seconds, knowing how close we were to the ground by the pitch of Astrid's shriek. Just as the treetops rushed past me, I felt the impending connection with the rock. I let out a shriek, and hurled myself into it.

THE HUNTRESS

When I opened my eyes, I was lying in a massive crater. The rim was hundreds of feet above me, and the rock around me was pulverized. I was dumbly aware that my arms and legs were shattered, my ribs were all broken, and my pelvis was snapped. I was only dumbly aware of this because my spine was severed, and I could feel nothing below the neck. Still, I was alive, if only for a few more minutes. Blood ran continuously from my nose and mouth, but it didn't bother me. The night was cool and pleasant upon my face, the only part of me I could ever really feel. I took a shuddering inhale of the world, and smiled up at the moon. It had been a grand journey, I supposed, though I wish I remembered most of it. I was surely thousands of years old, but the time that stretched over so many years was vacant. There was only one thing that stuck out.

I looked down at the broken creature beneath me. She was hardly more than the dust that covered her, she was so broken. Pet blinked at the moon. Her eyes were filled with blood, but they could still see, for they focused on my face. Her bloodied lips formed a hideous little smile, and she tried to open them, but she didn't have the strength. She just stared at me until her pupils unfocused, and she looked into the void beyond. With the utmost effort, I nestled my face atop hers, and planted my lips against her mouth. There was no breath in her anymore. There was only the residual heat of what was left of her body, and that was becoming cool. I rested my eyes, and found my last bit of comfort in the last bit of warmth that lay upon her lips. Then the world exploded.

WILLOWBUD

I blinked my eyes open, and stared at the ceiling. Gloria was leaning over me, tending to me as she always had.

"I just had the weirdest dream," I muttered. "Goddamn, that mushroom you gave me is no fucking joke."

Gloria paused blotting my brow, and narrowed her eyes at me. "What the hell are you talking about?"

"Very funny," I croaked, and snuggled further into my covers. "But I think you were right about the mushrooms. I think they helped... you know..." I made a motion with my finger, "...rewire things up there. I feel a lot better."

She raised an eyebrow. "I'm... glad," she said at length.

I laughed. "Goddamn craziest dream I've ever had. The kind of shit only my fucked up mind would think of."

"Shit like... going to the astral plane because I gave you the wrong mushroom, seeing an abstract vision of Corruption with Lucilla's patterns, then being kidnapped by the reanimated corpse of your beloved Astrid, then falling in love with your captor only to have her cruelly taken from you, and in the last minute, you sacrificed yourself just to be with her for one more moment?"

"Yeah, all that shit," I snorted. "God, I really do scream in my sleep, don't I? You know, you were a real cunt in my dream."

"Was I?"

"Yeah! You threw Astrid off the Gratoran Wall, you bitch!"

"Probably because you were shirking your holy responsibilities in favor of a guilt-ridden slave fantasy."

"That's exactly what you said in my dream," I narrowed my eyes at her. "What are you, some kind of fucking telepath or something? I know vampires can fuck with people's heads, but..." I trailed off. The ceiling above me was not that of Gloria's cottage. It was short and cobwebbed, like that of a dwarven barn. And I wasn't in a bed at all. I was lying in a stack of hay. I could feel the coarse sticks poking into my back, scraping at the renewed flesh that had once been burnt away by the Heat Bringer. Out the window, I could see the imposing figure of the Gratoran Wall, its snowcapped top slowly being illuminated by the morning sun while the rest of the world clung to darkness. There was a robed figure standing in the field outside. Her great black wings were feathered and mighty like some nighthawk, her hair was thick and darker than a raven's, her steely blue eyes stared at me, the pupils slit like those of a reptile, the irises glowing in the dark.

I rolled off my bed, forgetting that Gloria was even there. When my feet touched the floor, I felt the tremendous weight of rock beneath the hay. There was an unbroken plane of shale from me to the Gratoran Wall, and I could see every crevasse, crack and fissure, every break in continuity for miles and miles. I could see the roots of trees that scraped against the bedrock, the aquifers that held their reservoirs deep in the earth, the tunnels and caves the dwarves had dug so many thousands of years ago beneath the Gratoran Wall. With one touch of my toe, every secret of the earth within fifty miles was revealed to me, but there was one mystery I couldn't glean with all the power in the world. Upon shaking legs, I walked from the barn. I walked toward the silhouette in the field, and every step toward those blue eyes made my legs weaker until I dropped to my knees ten paces away from her. In the twilight darkness, we stared at each other across the meager breadth between us, but to me, it felt like an infinity of distance.

"Do you remember me?" I whispered.

She nodded slowly. "You are Pet," she said with such a beautiful voice.

"Do you remember me?" I asked pleadingly, tears running down my face.

She cocked her head. "You are... Mistress."

"No, no, no," I whimpered, "do you remember me?"

Her blue eyes stared coldly in the darkness; the reptilian pupils dilated to extract my visage. Her black feathered span was wrapped around her like a cloak, so rich that it shimmered iridescently with the meager dawn light. With her bountiful raven hair catching the wind to reveal the magnificent stoic portrait beneath, she walked toward me, every step an impossibility of grace, her predatory gaze assessing me with the utmost trepidation. She was a wild creature now, a nighthawk of the northern skies, some untamable and unobtainable wonder so rare and so exquisite that her very presence was a blessing. I was a wretch, a worm hardly fit for the soil beneath her feet, and when she loomed over me with her towering blue gaze, I felt so small that I seemed to shrink into the very earth I commanded. Who was I to this? Nothing at all, and yet I held her gaze even though it felt like I was staring into the sun, something so radiant and deadly that it was impossible to behold, impossible to look away.

"I remember you, Willowbud," Astrid said softly. Her voice cut right through the wind, and died in the billowing of her feathers, the rustling of the wheat that undulated in great waves across the amber fields beneath the mauve sky, the sun drawing a golden line across the mountaintops. There was nothing in her eyes that bespoke forgiveness or affection. Nothing but the steely blue depths, and my unworthy visage reflected in them.

"I'm sorry, Astrid," I hissed through my tears, "I'm so, so sorry."

She didn't respond to me. She just looked upon me, then opened her wings. Her body was covered from foot to chin in glowing white patterns. They thrummed from her silken white flesh, now perfect and unblemished, canvasing a statuesque form of such curves and lithe muscle that it felt like I was staring at some marble-rendered god. The patterns were of mountains, hills, plateaus, canyons and fjords, and they drew across her body without the lines ever touching, moving with such intricacy to contour to her bows and bends that it nearly painted her like a map. She dropped to a crouch before me, and took my dainty hand into her long fingers.

"You are so small," she mused, her fangs showing behind her lush lips. "I used to think of you as a towering figure, but you're shorter than most children."

"I'm nothing," I whimpered, and watched my tears fall to the soil. Astrid's other hand touched my chin, and raised it.

"Nothing?" she asked softly. Her blue eyes were awash with tears, and they streamed down her face in great rivulets. "Willowbud, you are everything."

She forced her face to mine, and drove me backwards into the ground. I wrapped my arms and legs around her, and kissed her with the same fierceness with which she kissed me. It wasn't a kiss of celebration, nor of sorrow, nor of lust. It was an action like that of a drowning woman desperately gulping for air. We kissed like life's reservoir was within the other's mouth, our tears comingling and smearing upon our pressing cheeks, our urgent hums and moans filtering between our consuming lips. The world tried to drown us in its depthless ocean, but we gave each other breath in this tiny sanctuary.