How to Save a Life
A Prince of Persia fan fiction by xahra99
"Why did you do it?" she asked, much later.
The question wasn't completely unexpected. The real issue, he thought as he lowered his cup, was why she'd waited so long to ask.
"I-" he said, and hesitated. "I couldn't imagine not doing it."
"Hmmm," she said. "Good answer. How did it feel?"
He ran one finger around the rim of his cup. "It was easy."
And it had been easy, at the time.
The aftermath was considerably more difficult.
It was the first time in his life that he'd ever done anything that could be considered evil. Morally questionable, certainly. Dishonest, definitely. But never evil. Never actual sin.
Not by the standards of most religions.
He had been halfway through the second tree before he even stopped to consider the alternatives. By then, of course, it was far too late. His sword bit into the trunk with a satisfying thud. Two good strokes and he'd chopped it through. The tree's stump sat reproachfully at knee height. Its leaves turned to ice before they drifted to the ground, and then they vanished. Ice glistened under his feet. It was the merest taste of what would await this land if he continued. But yet he couldn't stop.
He told all this to Elika, who nodded. "Go on." Her hair gleamed in the light of the teashop's copper lamps. It looked like she understood, which was a great deal better than he had expected. He continued.
Four stumps later, he had been just as convinced that he was doing the right thing as he'd been when he started. The air turned icy as the last tree fell, but it did not change his mind. When he tried to push the sword back into the sheath it stuck, and he had to risk the jump onto the cold blue stone with a bared blade in his hand. He was in mid-air before he realized that it was a stupid thing to do. Elika would not save him now, after all. But he was lucky, as he had always been. As he landed, he stumbled, but did not fall. The magical cold stung his arms. Ice cracked under his boots. As he stepped out from the shadow of corruption the temperature soared and he sheathed the blade without any problem
It was a long walk back along the dunes to the temple, and as he walked he thought of the garden city they'd healed and left behind. There were no people there, but they would come. People always travelled. They would hold markets in the squares and bring their grain to the mills once again. Who was he to deny them that chance? Who was he to deny Elika?
A city or a woman's life?
It was one of those easy questions that became deceptively complicated as soon as you stopped to think about it. If Elika died, the city would live.
If Elika died...
If he had been smart enough to realize that she had to die to purify the city, he never would have agreed to it in the first place. She had known all along, he thought as the temple loomed closer. And him...he should have guessed.
"I should have guessed."
He looked up from the table, mint tea untouched. Elika's dark eyes met his.
"I did it to keep you safe," she said, and touched his hand. "Nobody should have to live with that."
"You did."
"That's different."
He had looked back as he walked. Maybe he shouldn't have. The trees were islands of frozen corruption in the desert. The sky was a flawless blue, the color of the ocean Elika had never seen.
You can still turn back, something had whispered in his head. He wasn't sure if it was his own thought, or one of Ahriman's. He ignored it anyway.
When he reached the Temple, Elika was still dead. He wasn't sure what he had expected. Her tiny body looked like a carved effigy, like the statues on the tombs of the Western barbarians.
"It didn't hurt," she said.
"I didn't care."
He had walked past her body to the door, which creaked open as soon as his shadow touched it. As if it was expecting him. The sudden chill was a blessing. It made it easy. He stepped through the door, and then carried on. Every stride was a covenant, a promise. Every step was easier.
The second door slammed open in front of him just like the first. Inside, the room was just as he'd left it, his heart a thousand times heavier than Elika, her body limp in his arms. He had expected his tree felling to have altered the temple in some way, but then nothing had happened as he'd expected ever since Elika healed the white tree and dropped dead at his feet, so why should this be any different?
There was no change.
The air smelt of grass and sunlight. Water trickled from the fountain into a small pool. The reflections from the pool dappled the walls with an ever-changing mosaic of light and shade. He heard music, high up in the roof. It felt like a last chance.
If it was, he ignored it.
The white tree was harder to chop than the four saplings, and his palms smarted by the time the trunk finally hit the floor. The stump remained, like all the others. A pale light nestled within it like a pool of rainwater. It felt as if it would slip through his hands when he picked it up, but it stayed, although it quivered slightly, like a baby rabbit. It looked like any one of the hundred of light seeds he had collected. Familiar, even. A week ago it would have seemed weird and unnatural, but a week ago he would have laughed at the mere thought of mystical lights. Since then, he'd seen things only shamans and madmen talked of. He'd survived. He was a little bit wiser and a little less cynical than he'd been when he entered the desert.
"Not much," she told him.
"Thank you."
He had stood on the dais in front of the door for a second and gazed around the room. It was beautiful.
"I knew that if everything went okay, I'd never see it again. That's why I waited."
A man in the corner pushed his hood back from his face. "Love makes you do strange things," he said. There were three of them, all travelers, seated round the same table. Daggers gleamed at their belts. Their cloaks were frayed and tattered from years of hard travel.
"Indeed," one of his companions agreed. He wore a red cloak over mismatched pieces of armor, and he looked as if he hadn't slept in years.
"It seems we are in agreement," the third companion said. He folded his arms. Tattoos writhed on his skin. "But I apologize. We interrupt. "
Elika smiled at the stranger. She leant over the table and cradled her cheek in a slender upraised hand. "Go on."
He had left the garden and retraced his steps out of the temple. The air was perfectly still, as if it waited in anticipation, as if it knew just how much hung in the balance. Elika lay framed in the sunlight as the last door swung open. He carried the light over to her and looked down at her body. Her hair traced the curves carved on the stone slab beneath her. Her toes were pointed like a dancer's. He noticed that her feet were dirty, one toenail cracked.
He reached down and placed the light upon her chest.
It wouldn't go in at first, and he had to push it. There was a sensation like bubbling water, and a terrible moment when it felt as if his fingers dipped below the level of her chest. The glow burned brightly for a second, and then it vanished inside Elika.
Elika glowed.
The blue light traced each strand of hair, each toenail, each eyelash. It wrapped itself around her and gleamed from the angles and curves of her body like campfire light in the dark, shadows thrown in sharp relief. Her eyelashes fluttered and he knew he'd brought her back. Her lips quivered and opened.
"Why did you do it?" she asked.
He looked at her, all those months later, and smiled. "'Why did you do it?' That was your first sentence. Thought it was quite rude."
She walked her fingers over the muscles of his arm. "Shows how much attention you pay to what I want. You should have walked away."
"You don't mean that."
"I don't. Not now."
He had picked her up without answering. She was light in his arms –always had been light, despite his bitching-and he descended the steps of the temple without any trouble. He heard a terrible grating noise behind him but did not look back. The scent of corruption was strong on the wind-like raw meat and rotten fruit combined. He knew what was happening behind him. He didn't have to look.
Elika didn't try to see, either. She seemed too stunned to do anything. A sense of peaceful inevitability had settled over them both. He turned and walked away from the temple, away from the city. He had taken no more than three paces before the sky turned black. A roar echoed from behind them, deafening even over the sound of falling masonry. The sand frosted over. He looked over his shoulder just in time to see Ahriman's head sweeping across the sand towards them, obsidian, fanged, and as large as an elephant...
"You're making this up," one of the travelers interrupted.
He glared at the man. It was the second one, the one with the crimson cloak and the medallion. "No, he said, "I'm not. If I was making it up, it would have been much more interesting."
"You do not simply walk away from that sort of foe. That kind of power carries a terrible price," pointed out the oldest of the three.
"I was just getting to that-"
All three men scowled. "Lies," one said.
"Traveller's stories."
"I think you stole them. From the Hundred and One Nights, maybe."
"Our stories are genuine. Real peril. Real monsters, not some elder god..."
His hand went to his sword hilt. As he tugged the blade out of its sheath he heard the quiet, but distinctive echoes of a dozen blades being drawn. Steel gleamed in the lamplight. He did a quick count, and gently slid his battered sword back into the scabbard. He sat down. "Oh? Then let's hear them."
"I think we have outstayed our welcome." Elika said. "Or rather, you have." She rose and held out a slender hand. "And we've got a ship to catch."
He nodded and got up. As he kicked back the stool and rose, he heard the first man start to speak. His voice had already drifted into the traditional storytelling cadence, a kind of singsong rise and fall that paced out sentences like a long distance runner, counting every step. "Most people think time is like a river," he said, "that flows swift and sure in one direction. But one has have seen the face of time, and he will tell you they are wrong. Time is an ocean in a storm."
He let out a loud sigh as he brushed past their table. "Sounds boring to me."
"Hush." Elika told him, and rapped him on the head. Due to the many layers of scarves wrapped around it, the effect of her blow was negligible. Still, the point got through. "You got to tell your tale," she hissed as she swept him out the door.
"Hmm," he said as they blinked in Babylon's noonday sun. "I never got to finish it. Should have made it more exciting. Next time, I'll add elephants."
"Elephants?"
"And djinns."
"Djinns." Elika said disapprovingly as they began to walk towards the harbor. "Won't you ever learn?"