Amor Vincit Omnia

(Love Conquers All)

Part IV: When Angels Weep

Blind, in the deepest night
Reaching out, grasping for a fleeting memory
All the thoughts, keep piercing this broken mind
I fall, but I'm still standing motionless
Far, in the distance
There is light, a light that burns, these scars of old
All this pain, reminds me of what I am
I'll live, I'll become all I need to be
Words that kill, would you speak them to me
With your breath so still, it makes me believe
In the Father's sins
Let me suffer now and never die, I'm alive

- Donna Burke, "Sins of the Father"

Welcome, Dear Readers, to the fourth and final part of Amor Vincit Omnia! If you haven't read the other three ... well, you'd better. ;) For all my recurring readers, it's a privilege to have made it this far with you! I'm looking forward to another year of high adventure!

Prologue: Two Children

Twenty-five years ago …

The boy could barely remember his own name. It had been three weeks since the plague had swept through his village, decimating the small population. It had come from the demons, people said. He alone had escaped illness, but not the starvation that followed like slime in the wake of a snail, day after day of eating rats and toads, picking through empty houses for bits of moldy bread, stripping the bark from trees to chew on. And every day, as afternoon dwindled into evening, he would return to the little hovel by the river where his mother lay dying.

There, he would carefully divide whatever he had managed to scrounge and feed a share of it to her by hand. She never ate more than a few bites, and even that usually found its way back up again. The hut reeked of vomit. He had no time to clean; every spare moment was spent trying to find enough food to survive another day.

The boy knew that he could not save his mother's life. She was doomed from the moment that the town healer died, for inevitably that meant an end to the potions that kept her alive. The boy did not know how to make them. There was a recipe, but he could read only a few of the words – simple ones like 'stir' and 'fire'. The rest were just unintelligible squiggles. He was almost illiterate.

But even though he knew, though he could feel in his bones that her days on earth were running out, he was still shocked when he came back home and found her bed empty. A golden dust lay heavy on the stained and filthy sheets. It was the only remains of his mother, a divine being, an angel who had taken human form.

The boy did not eat that night, though earlier he had found, in a stroke of luck that bordered on miraculous, a stray chicken that had been holed up in the silo, getting fat on the grain stored there. It would be a feast fit for a king, but the boy had no appetite. He sat for a long time, his hand resting on the blankets where his mother had lain. Then he got quietly up and walked out of the hovel and down the bank to where the river, swollen by recent rains, rushed along on its journey to the sea.

Not knowing precisely what he was doing, only that he was tired and no longer wanted to keep struggling, the boy waded into the water. It was freezing, and his legs were numb in seconds. He didn't even feel the sharp stones cutting into his bare feet.

When the water had reached his waist, however, he heard a sound from the far bank that startled him out of his trance. It was a thin wail, almost lost over the roar of the current. A human child.

His curiosity roused, the boy splashed into the river and began to swim across. Even emaciated, he was a powerful swimmer, cutting through the water as effortlessly as a fish. Reaching the far bank, he pushed his way through a thick clump of reeds to find the source of the crying.

A young woman was huddled in a little nest of grass on the bank. She was dead. But she had not been sick when she died. Her skin, pale and shining in the twilight, was free of any pox or boils. Locked in her stiff embrace, held tightly against her breast, was a tiny bundle of rags. It was from this that the sound had come.

The boy moved closer, timidly. He recognized the woman. She was from the village. He did not know her name, but he knew she had recently given birth. Before the plague came, he had seen her sometimes down by the river, singing to her child as she bathed it. Watching from the safety of the bushes, he had thought to himself that she was very beautiful, though not as beautiful as his own mother.

But now his mother was dead, and this beautiful girl was also dead, but he was still alive, and so was the baby in the bundle of rags. It was very cold, though, especially here in the reeds by the river, and the baby was too young to stay alive for long in cold like this, and with nothing to eat. There was food in the hovel, and blankets to stay warm with. And so the boy pried the infant from the young woman's arms and carried it, still crying, downstream to the bridge, and then back up the other bank to the hut where he lived.

Tenderly, as tenderly as he had cared for his dying mother, he stripped off the damp rags. The child was female. She was almost blue with chill. He rubbed her tiny arms and legs until the warmth of life came back into them, and wrapped her in his own spare shirt, because all the blankets were dirty, and laid her down beside the fire that he'd lit.

She was still wailing, plaintive little cries, and he thought, she's hungry. And he was surprised to discover that he was hungry, too, a biting, ravenous ache in his stomach that he hadn't felt in days. He put the chicken in a pot with some water and boiled it, and devoured it all, sucking the bones clean. But the broth he fed to the child with a spoon, little sips, until her cheeks were rosy and her eyes drooped shut.

Holding her on his lap, he felt the sudden need to start speaking. Once he'd begun, he couldn't stop, words pouring out like rain on a parched desert. His voice creaked and rasped, rusty with disuse.

"My name is Kael," he said. "I'm eleven years old. I was born here, in this hut. My father was a fisherman, but he died when I was a newborn, even smaller than you. They made him fight in the war, even though he didn't know how to be a soldier. His name was Erik, so I'm going to call you Erika, since I don't know what name your mother gave you.

"My mother didn't have a name, not like us, because she was an angel. She came down from the heavens and pretended to be a human lady, and my father fell in love with her. In the heavens, she was called Nuriel, and she was the Angel of Storms. She loved thunder and lightning and wind and rain.

"But she's dead now, and your mother is dead too. I'm not sure why she died, but if I had to guess I would say that she starved to death. I think she was hiding there for a long time, with you. Maybe she was too scared to come out and look for food.

"Anyway, we're both alone in the world now. I can take care of myself, but you're so little. You're just a wee thing, Erika. So I'm gonna take care of you, too. I'll be your big brother from now on, and I won't let anything hurt you, not ever. First thing tomorrow morning, we're going to head north, away from this place. I'll find work when we get to the city. I can cook and clean, and I know a bit about animals, so I'm sure I can find some way of getting money. You don't need to be afraid, little Erika. We're going to have a good life, I promise."

On his lap, the infant slumbered peacefully. Eventually, the boy slept as well, dreaming about the future.