The Bonds of Blood (14 page)

He sat on the edge of the bed and
tossed a glance at the small goblet holding the one swallow of the
Dark Flower infusion. Picking it up, he took a deep breath and
tossed the swallow far back into his mouth.

It burned, and not from the
temperature. It was acrid, pungent, and almost instantly numbed his
mouth and throat as it slid down his throat.

“It’s poison,” he gasped, reaching for
the mug of water he always kept on his bedside stand at
night.

Yes, it is poison. Do not
drink any water, Jovian Neferis; it will dull the effects of the
poison.

“But that is what I want to do,” Jovian
mumbled awkwardly now that he could not feel his tongue or
lips.

No it isn’t. In order to
halt the winds, you must not dilute the poison.

Jovian instantly felt a gripping pain
in his stomach, and he unconsciously lurched as the pain wrenched
through his midsection. He gasped as more pains took hold, like
fingers cutting through his intestines. He breathed heavily, tears
coming to his eyes, and he tried to cry out, but all that broke the
silence was a loud escaping of breath.

Lie back on the bed,
the voice urged, but Jovian could not. He was
huddled in a ball and could not move because of the intense pain he
felt tearing him apart inside.

Sweat instantly sprang from his skin,
covering him in a light glimmer of moisture. He heaved, gagging,
trying to vomit, but nothing would come out. His face turned beet
red, and he lurched again. All the muscles in his body tensed, like
a tightly strung cord.

Blackness crowded the edges of his
vision, and Jovian felt himself losing strength. His body suddenly
became rigid, and he started to fall forward. Jovian gripped for
the nightstand, to keep himself upright, but all he managed to do
was knock the things off the top.

The candle was extinguished with a hiss
as water met fire when the mug of water spilled over the floor
beside the candlestick.

Water slipped across the floor, ringing
Jovian’s blond curls. His body lay limp on the floor, his lifeless
eyes staring up at the ceiling, no longer seeing
anything.

CHAPTER TEN

_A
feeling of cold mist
on his
face brought Jovian back to
awareness. He was no longer in pain, no longer worried. He had no
care in the world as he drifted through the sweetest air he had
ever known.

Suddenly Jovian’s eyes were flooded
with silver light, and he smiled at this light, for he was sure
that it was the source of this comfort, this love that he was
feeling. Dimly aware that he could no longer feel his body, he
realized that he felt more complete now than he had ever felt in
his entire life.

Jovian looked ahead of him, and as far
as he could see there was nothing but soft, silvery-white light.
There was no rushing, no hurry, everything that ever was, would be,
was happening at the present time. In fact, that very feeling
ensured Jovian that there was no time here, that time was now a
foreign concept.

No, Jovian, not that way,
not into the light. It is not time for you to go there. Within that
light there is a process that needs to be followed, and that
process would not allow you to do what needs to be done at the
present time.

Suddenly Jovian knew pain once more. He
was sorrowful, longing to enter that light, be one with it again.
For he was sure he had been one with it before, and that he would
be again soon, but he wanted it now. He wanted to enter the
Goddess’s Kingdom, her Ever After.

“Then that is truly what the Goddess
looks like?” Jovian asked the voice he knew to be Aramaiti. But the
farther he traveled into the light, the weaker Aramaiti seemed to
become. “I am looking upon Her Holy face?”

Yes,
child
,
Aramaiti
whispered, her voice growing dim.
That is
what she looks like, for she is everything and nothing at the same
time.

For the first time Jovian was able to
understand how such a thing could be possible. He could comprehend
how the Goddess was both everything and nothing. With eyes fixed on
the light, he knew that everything that ever was, or would be, was
a product of that light, that energy, and that at the same time
that energy was nothing more than light. It radiated, it shined, it
illuminated, but that light was nothing physical or substantial. It
could cover the entire universe, yet all of that light would not
even fill the smallest container.

Jovian, come back to
me,
the Aramaiti begged weakly.

Darkness was at the edge of his vision,
and Jovian turned his face to it.

He saw nothing but a large expanse of
blackness before him. Behind Jovian the silver light still shined,
and far off to his left there was a violet haze, as if there was
yet something more to see along that distant horizon.

“I suppose we are headed into that
blackness?” he asked, his consciousness somewhere between the dark
and the light. He knew within that darkness that he would be faced
with horrors.

It is into the blackness we
must go, Jovian.

He had a task to carry out, and with
unwavering determination he floated toward the darkness.

Sweeping his eyes over where the silver
light had been, Jovian saw that it was gone, and all around him
there was only blackness as if the decision to enter the darkness
was all it took to commit him to it entirely. He was alone,
reviled, and hated. He felt the darkness slide over his skin as if
he was no longer traveling through mist, but instead through
oil.

He felt dirty. The loathing upon him
left him exploited and exposed. He hated his own vulnerability, and
he felt somehow compromised. He was suddenly scared, like he didn’t
want to go any further, all the while knowing that he
must.

What had once been peace and loving in
him was now shame and dishonor as the blackness consumed
him.

Suddenly there was a familiar presence,
and Jovian looked around himself, though he could see
nothing.

“Jovian?” he heard Angelica ask. “Where
have you been? I have been so worried and frightened. I want to
leave.”

“We can’t,” Jovian said reluctantly.
“Aramaiti says Baba Yaga is here.”

There came a rotten feeling, slimy and
wet. The sensation pressed into their feet; decomposing fleash over
brittle bones.

Jovian shivered as the inky void
cleared, and they saw themselves in a dark, lifeless forest. Old
skeletons of trees clogged the area around them—white, withered,
and convoluted, like deformed bones reaching high up into an
unforgiving sky.

Everything was deathly
silent.

“Jovian, I do not like this place,”
Angelica pleaded beside him.

“Look over there; you see that
light?”

Angelica squinted, and once she saw the
strange blue flame she wondered how she did not see it before. The
flame intensified brighter and brighter the longer she looked at
it, and soon they drew near the flame, though their feet were not
moving.

They were traveling through that
unwholesome forest much like they had traveled through the
darkness; they did not move with their feet, but with their minds.
They desired to examine the blue flame, and therefore they were
being drawn toward that eerie fire beautiful and completely out of
place in such a revolting wood.

“What do you suppose it is?” Angelica
asked, but Jovian did not have to answer, for soon they saw that it
was a torch. When they reached it, they found it was not just one
torch, for off in the distance they saw yet another blue flame,
wispy and insubstantial in the gathering fog.

“Do you suppose it is a path?” Jovian
asked, and Angelica shrugged. “I guess there is only one way to
find out.”

As they desired to see that next flame,
they were drawn forth, being pulled by an unseen force.

“That light is so beautiful,”
Jovian.

The wood of the torch was much like
that of the trees around them, and Jovian reached out a hand to
touch it. With horror he suddenly realized that it was not white
wood that supported the flame, but bone.

Jovian gasped and drew his hand back.
“It’s bone,” he said, looking around at the trees surrounding them,
suddenly wondering if they were not also bone as they appeared.
Jovian did not want to find out.

“Where are we?” Angelica
asked.

“Is this the Realm of the Dead?” Jovian
wondered aloud. If he had been traveling toward the Goddess before,
was he now in the Otherworld?

“Of course,” Angelica said as another
flame flickered to life in the distance. “Baba Yaga is supposed to
be a Chaotic spirit, right? Where else would she be other than the
Realm of the Dead?”

“Are
we
dead?” Jovian was suddenly afraid.
They had died and the Aramaiti had brought them here.

“I don’t feel dead,” Angelica
responded, looking around with wonder.

“If we are not dead, then what are we?”
Jovian asked..

“I feel very much physical here,”
Angelica said, lightly pinching her own arm. “And besides, you just
touched that torch; if we had been dead, you would have passed
through it.”

“That may be if we were still in the
Holy Realm, but if we are dead and in the Realm of the Dead,
shouldn’t we be able to touch stuff?”

The frown on Angelica’s face told
Jovian that she did not like his response, and she shook her head
refusing to believe they were truly dead. “Come, let’s go to the
next flame,” she urged, changing the subject.

Before long they were at the next one,
and the fog had grown so dense that they could not see the flame up
ahead that they knew must be there. They were pulled, though,
toward that flame they could not see.

Five more flames they passed and
finally they stood before what appeared to be a fence. The fence
was tall, standing well above their heads. Jovian figured the fence
must have been three times as high as he was. But while they were
small before the fence, there was still no way for them to pass
through it, for the holes were too small for them to crawl
through.

“This is odd,” Jovian said looking up
at the blue flame high above on a fence post. “How do you suppose
we get in?”

“I guess we will just have to walk
around it until we find a place to get through.”

So they started to walk. Every so often
they would come across a post sporting a blue flame high above
them, but they still did not find an entrance.

As they continued to walk, a strange
creaking noise penetrated their ears. The sound of a large metallic
wheel being turned with rusty gears creaked and moaned wickedly.
The noise made them shudder.

“I don’t like it,” Angelica said again,
and just as she said that a gate came into view.

The gate was huge and framed by bones;
it resembled more a doorway than an opening in the fence. Skulls,
both large and small, adorned the entrance, and from the gaping
mouths of the skulls hung spider webs, husks of dry snake skin, and
strange black vines. The skulls at the very top and to either side
of the gate supported blue flames.

“Now that we are here, how do you think
we get in?” Jovian queried, finding no handle or latch.

“I don’t know,” Angelica said, finding
that she had to speak over the strange, creaking noise. But when
they stopped before the gate, the rotating noise also
halted.

“Open?” Angelica said with a
smirk.

Surprisingly that worked, and the gate
slowly swung open, obscenely silent. Angelica and Jovian looked at
each other, not wanting to step inside, but knowing if they did not
they would not find what they had come looking for.

As they stepped forward the fog seemed
to lift, yet the fog was still thick outside the fence on the other
side of the clearing. It eddied and swirled as if there were
figures within the fog that meant them no good at all.

Angelica’s eyes, however, were not for
the dead clearing of charred grass and human remains, for she had
spotted something more horrifying than all of that. Before them
stood one of the largest houses that Angelica had ever seen, and at
the same time she had the impression that it was somehow
small.

It was made of a black, rotten wood,
and it stood haphazardly tilted to one side as if the ground it sat
on was uneven. The roof was high, almost as tall as the trees
around the fence, and there was a hole in the top in place of a
chimney. From the hole smoke was rising up, and both of them
suddenly realized that it was not fog that surrounded the fence; it
was smoke from some malicious fire that burned inside.

Upon closer inspection, Angelica
realized that the house did not rest on the ground, but instead it
seemed to be hovering above the ground. They neared and saw a
massive, weakened porch that surrounded the whole house made from
the same damp wood of the structure it surrounded.

“Where’s the entrance?” Jovian
asked.