Legacy

Chapter 19: The Price of Powers

Destroyer.

The word was always tossed around in my mind: in nightmare, in waking moments, even in the farthest corners of my half-dead times, the word chased me still. I'd never been able to see my own futures before - so I was torn between the possibility of it being true, or it having just been a bad trip. It must have been just a nightmare, nothing more. It couldn't be. I'd never thought I had the possibility to become one of them. I'd thought I was excluded from that. Privileged with less power.

"That is true," he responded. "But whoever they are - some tortured girl or boy - they're not the Malice yet. Even those rising to power... they all slip at one point. The symptoms of such a creature: the nightmares, onset hallucinations and stunning power surges... they're hard to hide. We'll find them. And then we'll kill them."

If it was true, if some drug-addled hallucination was true - I'd be killed. The next booster would expose me, would reveal me - I felt sure of it. There was too much exploding inside of me that the blood would trickle out of my nose and my eyes, colour my cheeks red and brand me as a destroyer.

I didn't know why I did it. Maybe it was the visions of her entangled with my own personal torment, maybe it was the delirium of my mind, maybe it was just plain foolishness. But I was at the door I'd never bothered to enter and knocking: small, solitary sounds that echoed through the wood of my mother's room.

There was no sound but I opened the door anyway, The room was lavish but ruined: grand sweeping silk curtains ragged and ripped, wooden floors with gouges raking through it and tattered white bedsheets. Sunlight filtered in uncertainly, only finding shreds of openings here and there through the broken curtains.

My mother was huddled in her bed, arms around her legs and rocking slightly. Her eyes were wild, her hair was in a cloud of black curls around her face and I knew she was having another bad day.

I sat on the edge of the bed, feeling exhausted beyond belief. Some days, my mother could pass as completely normal. She would act stern and commanding - and in control. But good days were far and few between, and normally my mother couldn't even summon the will to act much more than an animal.

My mother whispered things under her breath, snatches of gibberish, completely oblivious to her daughter sitting just under a metre away. It was this vacancy that made me want her to recognise even more when she was normal - because when she was like this, I wasn't even a part of her strange, shadowed world. I didn't exist to her.

I reached for her, my arms encircling her wrist. She hissed through her teeth and jerked violently but I expected it, yanking her down. When she was lying down, facing the other way - still shaking, I wrapped my arms around her, holding tight. Mother still trembled but she didn't resist, probably not even feeling my touch.

I was thirteen when it happened. It had been one affair too many, I thought. She'd been on the tipping point so long, of course one more affair had been the trigger. And how'd she fell.

She'd held a taser to my father's neck - except this kind would kill him. Mother had been shaking - a premonition for her state now - and she was crying. But it was a scary type of crying: an angry crying. "Fuck you, fuck you, fuck this life just like you've fucked everything else - " So much anger, she couldn't hold herself together with the rage.

He'd disarmed her easily. Telekinetics have that knack. She'd tried to kill him but he didn't order her execution or banish her like he later did to Lasseter. He soul-severed her, cutting off her source of magic and any last strands to sanity she might have held inside her. The soul-severed never lasted long - just look at Ria Stellaire - but that was where the final sting from my father's poison came in.