A Pirate for the Dead Goddess (Legends of Rahasia Book 2)

Chapter Twenty-One

Kaliya looks at me and giggles.

Giggles.

I'm dying, and the girl giggles.

Tiny, with her earth-toned skin, the manic eyes, red-black and gray. The hair like silver, a wolfish pelt running down her back.

"You're turning purple." She snickers. "Whole face like a balloon."

"Kali!" Ali runs to her, falling to her knees in front of the child. "Help him."

"Oh, alright. If you insist. I did like those candies you gave me back on the ship." Her eyes start glowing then. She raises her hands above her head, clapping. "Stop!"

My whole body freezes. But it's not like I can take a breath either.

It's just... paused.

I can't even move my eyes as Kali walks calmly out of my eye-view, heading towards the leader of the witch coven.

I hear her murmur a few words in that eerie-wise voice of hers, much too wise for a ten-year-old. Almost cruelly so.

"You will let him down." She begins, as though she's the one talking down to a child and not the other way around. "Or I will reverse time for all of you so that you were never born."

"Why can I still speak?" The shrill, panicking voice of the leading witch. "Why are my sisters all frozen?"

Kaliya sighs.

She. Sighs.

Little demon.

"Oh, Malika, Queen of the Witches." Another sigh, the wind rattling through an empty field at night. "I only respect you because my mother's mother, my nicer grandmother, was also a Witch Queen once." She claps her hands, as though cleaning them of dirt or blood. "But my patience is wearing thin. Free him, or you cease to exist."

"Who are you?" Malika hisses, voice trembling in fear. "You look like a child, but you speak like an elder."

"I speak like a child only when it's fun. I exist outside of time. I was born to life and death. I am a contradiction. Thus, I am time." The child's shadow lengthens, as though she grows taller. And, though she's outside my vision, I hear her voice strengthen, deepen. I see the few, escaping curls of long, silver hair, running past her bare feet. "I am Kaliya, daughter of the General, Goddess, and Champion Ode Ngayoh, granddaughter of the Witch Queen Ahava. I am the one who your goddess, the Matriarch of Truth fears. I intend to put her in these chains for tricking me into setting her free, so she can get revenge on my lovely parents for trapping her greedy, vicious corpse there in the first place." At this point, I hear clanking as Kali raises Farzaneh's manacles and bangs them together. "Now, you will let that pirate go, or I will get very upset."

Time resumes. Shuddering, shaking, and still believing I'm riding one hell of a drug from what just transpired, I lay flat in the sand for a bit. I look up, at Kaliya, who's resumed her normal, ten-year old child form.

Time. I was carrying the embodiment of Time on my back.

No wonder she was so heavy.

"Kaliya..." I start, noting the cowed, bowing Witch Queen Malika behind her. She is shrouded by her veils, but nonetheless, I can sense her and the whole coven's unease, the silence left in their wake, like corpses. "Are you alright?"

She wrinkles her nose. "No more potatoes." She whispers menacingly, a flicker vanishing in her silver-red-black eyes.

"Yes," I reply, too quickly. Ali and Kura stare at the little, starch-hating goddess, slack-jawed. Xander hides behind me. "No more potatoes."

***

Hey Pirates~!

So, Kaliya's a complete and total badass.

Wonder who she took after.

-Sophia