The Immortal One

Chapter Eight - Fleeting Ghosts

 The nation of Saekän was well-known as the core of the slave trade. Mercenaries from both Teldiir and Lekäriiä came to them to sell mages that they had captured by whatever means suited them. As a result most of the world's other nations, especially the elves, despised them.
Under cover of darkness Säyä and Aetós infiltrated Fort Sentinel, which was home to a majik farm, one of many. He had not told her why they had come, he would only say;
"There is something that you need to see."
They evaded the guard patrols with relative ease; Aetós' keen senses alerted them to any and all movements. He led her to the depths of one of their dungeons.
There she beheld a terrible sight. Men, women, and children, had been placed in glass capsules and bound in leather straps. Countless wires and needles had violated their bodies and was draining them of their majikal energy, their lifeforce. Säyä nearly vomited. Most were unconscious, but a few of them were writhing in depressed misery. She wanted nothing more than to save them, but when she tried he stopped her.
"That is not why we are here."
"Then why are we here?"
Aetós pointed to one of the containers and said, "Ask her if she wants to live."
His expression and the feeling in her Heart told her that he was not being rhetorical. She approached the capsule and knocked lightly upon the glass. She felt foolish for asking, and she hated herself for not breaking her out then and there. The helpless trapped mage stared her in the eye.
"D-do you want to live?"
The woman was emaciated. She looked as though she had been starved near to death. Her eyes were bloodshot and Säyä could see her bones through her paper-like skin. She did not reply in words. A single tear streaked down her cheek. Säyä knew the answer.
"Everything has been taken from her," he explained. "She has been trapped here for too long. If you remove her from the machine then she will die."
Despite saying that, Aetós did not make to leave. He waited to see what she would do.
Säyä stared into her pleading eyes, she knew what the mage wanted...Was this her only option?
She turned to her master for help - for another way. He said nothing. She felt a panic rise in her as the choice presented itself.
Säyä reached behind the capsule and detached all of the cables that she could see. The hum that it was emitting ceased and the fluid that was being harvested from her stopped moving through the wires. The mage's eyes rolled into the back of her head, leaving only the whites as she choked out a sigh of utter relief. The apprentice could almost hear the words...
Thank you.
Säyä clutched her stomach as it tightened mercilessly in her gut. The weight of her actions bore down on her like the unforgiving rays of the desert sun. Then, she felt her master's hand upon her shoulder.
"Come."

A few days later...

The village of Darenstown was a modest fishing settlement near a popular river-crossing.
It was founded on the border between Saekän's territory, and the unnaturally cold frozen tundra of Silvä Gädón. As a result, they were vulnerable to Väräk raiding parties.
Säyä and her master arrived right on the heels of just such an event. She felt that the timing was too perfect. Somehow, he had known of the village's predicament. Some of the fires were still burning.
"Look for survivors," was his instruction to her. She followed his command. The pit in her stomach pulled at her awareness. The memory of the majik farm resurfaced and pecked at her resolve.
Dead bodies were scattered everywhere. The people never had a chance, they were massacred without remorse or restraint. Severed limbs were strewn about, and the ground was painted in mingling pools of blood. It soaked into the bottom of her shoes and she wanted to cast them aside out of disgust. She nearly tripped over the charred corpse of a young girl who could not have been more than seven. Tears fell freely from her eyes, and for the first time she felt anger toward Aetós. Anger for making her see this. Why could he not accept her sincerity? Why did he have to torture her like this before she was worthy to be by his side? She did not understand.
The sound of groaning pulled her from her thoughts and into the present moment. She ran into one of the nearby cabins and was horrified at the sight. An entire family had been massacred. A grown man had died after being speared to the wall, and the body of a naked and bloody woman lay before him.
They...they made him watch as they...by the gods.
She bolted from the house, fell to her knees, and vomited in the grass. The groaning continued...someone was still alive in there. Again, she looked to her master for help, and again Aetós said nothing. Fighting a wyvern was nothing compared to the courage that she had to muster to step back into that room a second time.
Säyä saw a third body, a teenage boy whose legs had been severed from his body. The look of anguish was carved onto his face. She did not think the sight would ever leave her, it was forever burned into her mind. The groans were coming from the room in the rear.
With great trepidation she made her way inside, and there she found the youngest of the family, a boy of perhaps eight or nine years.
He had been stabbed, and the knife was still protruding from his chest. The pressure had prevented him from bleeding out and thus he still clung to life.
"Help...me..." He begged her. His childish eyes asking, praying, for a miracle. He looked at her as one might an angel. Salvation had come at last.
Säyä approached him and carefully pulled his clothing aside to get a better look at the wound. The infection had spread into his blood, she could smell death on him. He was not long for this world. But still he asked her with his eyes for good news. Begging her to save him. Behind his desperate prayer she could see the profound trauma that had scarred his soul. He had watched his family die. He watched helplessly as an enemy warrior loomed over him like a demon and plunged the knife into him and smiled with satisfaction. This boy had seen the monsters in the hearts of men, and still he had hope.
Säyä hated herself for not being more. She had studied the arts of majik with relentless passion by means of the tomes that her master had given her. She had learned how to generate electricity and move objects with her mind, but what good was any of it to this child? She was worthless.
Tears streamed down her face and she prayed too...she prayed that he would understand that she was only human, and that there was nothing that she could do to save him. She could not stop death from claiming him. She prayed...that he would stop looking at her like that. She was no angel, and there was no miracle waiting.
Säyä took his hand in hers and began to sing. When she was a girl, Riizä would sing lullabies to her when she suffered from nightmares. In the face of such horror, she wanted desperately to believe that this was all just a bad dream.
"Am I going to die now? I don't want to die..."
She choked, the pain in her heart was unbearable. Unspeakable.
"This..." She couldn't think. What could she possibly say that could make this right? "This is just a bad dream. Close your eyes, you are going to wake up soon."
"Then...papa and mama are..."
Gods...what have I done?
"Yes. They are alright. You will see them again on the other side, you'll see. No need to fear. Rest now."
I am a liar. I am a monster. She heard herself think. The memory of an earlier conversation with Aetós flashed before her mind.
She told him, "You may not be a hero...but you are not a monster either."
The tears did not stop coming, and she did not leave his side. He clung to life until the sun set, and then he passed.

Aetós was sitting beneath a tree polishing his sword when Säyä finally emerged from the cabin. Her eyes were wide and she did not blink, a sign of the trauma that the experience had inflicted upon her. He said nothing.
She stood there in silence for a long while.
"His name..." She did not raise her head to look at him. Her gaze was fixed upon a small insect that crawled atop a nearby tree stump. "His name is Märkis...was...Märkis. He...he liked sweet cakes."
She fell to her knees and pressed her palms against her face. Blood smeared across her cheeks and mingled with salty bitter tears. Aetós continued to stroke the blade.
"What did he want? At the end." He asked her.
She did not lift her gaze from the insect. What was the point of its existence? It had nowhere to go, its life was pointless and insignificant. It was ignorant of the world beyond its little insect kingdom. She hated it. She hated its existence.
"He wanted a miracle. He wanted to cheat death. He just...he just wanted to live."
"Why?"
Her rage flared. "I DON'T KNOW! How could I know?! What do you want from me? Haven't I given you everything? Haven't I bled for you? Haven't I been willing to die for you? What more do you want from me?!"
Aetós sheathed his sword and rose to his feet. He approached but made no attempt to comfort her.
He asked her again. "Why did he want to live?"
Her gaze was still fixed upon the bug, it had entranced her. She was raw and vulnerable. She felt her heart breaking.
"Because!" All of the sudden the rage dissipated, like she had sprung a leak. The answer had been right in front of her. "Because he was afraid to die."
Her master nodded, and gripped her shoulder. In a swift motion that she dared not resist, he pulled her close and embraced her. She broke down completely in his arms, losing herself utterly in the torrent of her emotions; feelings so intense that they were beyond labels and explanations. They were beyond thoughts and reason. They just came - they simply were. She had not the strength for anything more than that.
He did not let her go. He held her until she had cried out every last drop of resistance and fell asleep.

In the morning, the sun rose like any other day. When Säyä awoke and beheld its light, she felt betrayed. She felt insulted. Time kept moving forward as if nothing at all had happened. These people suffered an agonizing and abominable death, and who would know about it? What would be done? They would end up as nameless statistics in some file on a magistrate's desk. No one would know the atrocity that took place here. She had seen no Gods come down and carry their souls away to a better place. No miracle came to save the day. There was no salvation.
They were just gone. They suffered pointlessly, they died pointlessly. What had they lived for? What was the reason for their existence? They had lived to survive, and then one day they just failed.
Her gaze turned to the animal pelts that hung from one of the lines behind the cabin. How many animals had they killed just to survive for another day? How much death had they inflicted upon other creatures just to save themselves from it for a little longer?
Life inflicted death to save itself from death, which would inevitably come and claim them anyway. In one way or another. Everything was dying.
Two brief experiences was all it had taken to break her. She could never see the world the same way again. She saw death everywhere. She saw Life's frantic and pointless struggle to secure its own existence. It was futile.
"This...this is what you see. To you...to you we are already dead aren't we? We are just fleeting ghosts in your eyes."
Aetós said nothing. Säyä rose to her feet and caught sight of the insect that she had been staring at before. It was still sitting upon the stump - resting upon the carcass of what had once been a beautiful and proud tree. She raised her foot, and killed it.
She had been naive. She had been a fool. He had tried to tell her.
There are worse things than death.
She thought of the mage that had begged her for death, and the boy who had begged her for life.
Could she give it to them? Life and death? Who was she to do such a thing?
She thought of all of the animals that she had hunted for food, and the wyvern that she had killed for the simple reason that someone she loved had died while pursuing one.
She was no better. She lifted her foot and studied the dead bug on the sole of her shoe; she observed how its crushed body and fluids had mixed in with the human blood that her shoes had absorbed.
Life and death were not the territory of Gods and Devils, she realized. Life and death were dealt out every day by the most average people, in the most mundane ways. How many people would think of squashing a bug as murder? What was to stop some higher being from coming down squishing them for just as pointless a reason?
Her mind twisted in knots as her reality was rewritten in the face of her morbid revelations. She had been a child. Death had aged her. Death was teaching her...and she had no idea what she was becoming. She had lost control...no...she never had it to begin with. Her entire being was like a fleeting thought, her body was just dust in the wind. She felt her sense of Self dissolve. The reality of death...in a way, just knowing it...meant that death had already claimed her.
The whole world died in her mind then and there. This was the loneliness that her master had warned her about.
There are worse things than death.
She answered him in her thoughts. Yes...like living with this truth.