Redemption
Chapter 4: A Guardian Is Born
Back in the dark, dank woods, stalking my prey, using the senses I was born with and the demon senses I had acquired. The Elder wanted me to have a balance between the Dexter and the Sinister, and a compromise had been reached. I would have the ability to orb, sense my charges slash comrades, heal, and produce protective forces fields. But...
I would also have the ability to use energy and fire balls, not to mention use my demonic sensing ability. Of course, the downside of that had been established a long time ago. If I could sense them, then THEY were able to sense me. A trade off that had to be, must be allowed.
There were other powers, not spoken of, but understood. The way that good could subdue and extract information from someone or something was an unknown quality, but I was assured that the ability had been placed inside of me.
The training was vile; more horrible than anything I had endure during my demonic school years...
Except for one instance.
Each High Level demon had a human and a demonic persona. One had to be able to assume their demonic side in an instant, but so far, I had been unable to change from Cole Turner into Belthazor, my demon half...
Raynor sighed, and rubbed his bleary eyes with arthritic fingers. " You are not listening, Cole! " He grumbled wearily.
I stood before him, my dark grey robe an affront to his and my eyes. I was almost one hundred human years old, and still, STILL wore the robes of a lesser demon. For I could not, had not yet found the very trigger necessary to make the transformation.
I bowed my head, mostly to hide my gritted teeth than from any false respect. Raynor and I had walked too many miles together to even pretend to have a Master and Pupil relationship anymore. Still it pleased me to please him occasionally, so I thought I'd take the road of humbleness just for amusement purposes.
" I am listening, Sir and I am trying! "
Two hands pounded the old wooden table into toothpicks as Raynor came roaring out of his chair...
" Then, WHY?! Tell me what I am to tell our Master THIS YEAR? So sorry, Your Lordship, but Turner just hasn't gotten all the humanness out of his thick skull?! "
So much for humble.
I knelt and kept my head down, silently absorbing the abuses that rained down upon me. I hardly listened, as they hadn't changed for the last ten years.
" A trigger, Boy! " Raynor snarled and then grew quite still and silent above me. A moment passed, and then another...
Finally, I dared to look upwards, only to see Raynor staring off into the distance; his mouth was moving but no sound issued forth, and I wondered if I had given the almost six hundred year old master demon a stroke. No such luck.
" Trigger...human...think, think, think! " Raynor muttered, slowly lowering himself back into his chair.
I watch him closely and saw, for the first time in many years, the true demon who lived within my mentor. He had the solution, and I felt cold dread wash over me as those black eyes danced with an unearthly fire.
" You will meet me with your Clan in the Proving Grounds in one quarter of an hour. " Raynor said in a relatively normal voice, although the glowing eyes bore into my skull.
I rose, bowed and went to gather those of my clan as I had been instructed. What else could I do? I was stuck in this no-demon land, stuck...
But...perhaps not for much longer?
I was there, on time, my Clan members surrounding me in a half circle. Vornac whacked my back and Klea, a lovely and seductive demoness in training, whispered an encouraging word. We waited, but Raynor did not arrive.
It was then that I heard the noises, muted at first but becoming more and more horrible as the volume slowly rose. I saw the red velvet robes shimmering in the torchlight, which also reflected the shine of the twin golden soul vials held with contemptious amusement in a claw-like hand.
They spun and twinkled, the voices inside calling to me to help them to release them from their torture. My parents. Their souls. I remembered little after that...
I can back to myself in my small cell. I was lying on my pallet, an anxious Klea and Vornac on either side. I saw the crisp black robes but didn't care how or why I was wearing them, but I did notice that my friends robes were scorched and they appeared bruised, cut and generally disheveled.
I had done it. The " Trigger " had been found and applied and I was now a full-fledged Upper Demon. It was then that I saw Raynor in the corner of the room. Our eyes locked and although I heard Klea chatter on about dead and wounded demons, a destroyed Proving Ground, my wonderous and flawless performance, I stared at my Mentor, one question in my eyes...
Were they real? The soul vials? Perhaps an illusion?
WERE THEY REAL?!
Raynor nodded once, coldly, and turned and walked away. I had succeeded, yet in a peculiar way I had failed him. My human distress over the fate of those two souls was the only trigger that worked.
I had made a mockery of his years of training and teaching. He had wrapped his evil hands around my soul, yet could not dislodge it.
So be it. Upper Level demon I would be, but now more than ever, I was determined to cling to what little humanity I had left.
In a breath of time I was back in the black night of the woods; my NEW Proving Grounds, and the Elder, whose glamoured image melted a bit more upon each meeting, appeared.
" Fascinating. " He murmured. " That Evil taught it's co-horts with the same precision and care as Good has done for it's own side. That the very thing they tried to take from you, they finally had to use to acheive what they wanted. Most interesting. "
I turned towards the gentle voice and the golden robe but stopped. A flicker of movement, a change in the feel of the air. A Trap!
I moved back with my newly re-awakened skills of grace and stealth. Soon, I was undetectable from the trees, the rocks, the water. I smelled the air, tasted the scents swarming around me, strained my sight and hearing to the upmost.
The Elder...
In a blur of motion I was behind him, his body frozen, his will mine for the taking.
As long as he remained still, no harm would come, but any reactive movement...and all bets were off. I forced him to turn, to confront me.
Hot blue met cool green as our eyes locked and the rest of the glamour fell away. Leo Wyatt stood revealed to me; stood in MY powers for once.
I grinned, probably not a pleasant sight, but I wasn't in a pleasant mood. " You know, Leo, first as a Whitelighter, then as an Elder, you always remained so fascinated by the making of demons. Our craft, our clans, our ways. Can't be very healthy for one such as you, correct? "
Leo grinned back in an equally unpleasant way, and flashed out a hand. I was able to throw myself to the side just in time to avoid the sting of the poisoned dagger that had been raised behind me back.
I was able to finish the demon off myself with a mere flick of the wrist, then I pulled myself to my feet. Once again, defeated by Good.
" No, Belthazor, that is where all your problems past and present flow from. The duality of YOU, the Dexter and the Sinister MUST always balance! If they are not..."
The cool voice trailed away as I wiped a shaky hand across my sweating face. I no longer cared what they did to me, they could put me back in the nothingness of Limbo and I would thank them!
" Ready to give up? Again? " The voice was devoid of expression, but I heard the mockery.
I straightened up and faced The Elder...Leo. My one-time friend. I shook my head, and then sank down on a rock. It was time, and he knew it. He occupied a fallen log, and there, deep in the Proving Grounds, we made our peace.
" If I have no knowledge of what I must face, how can I ever be ready? " I asked, a geniune note of frustration and fear evident.
Leo nodded, and bowed his head for a moment. He appeared to be having an inner conversation with himself, or some force unseen to me, but he finally nodded again and looked at me.
The placid and gentle Elder was gone. Leo Wyatt sat across from me, the Leo I had known, fought with, worked with and cared about.
" I'm suppose to let you find your own path. The rules of Redemption are strict, and bound by time and tradition, but..." His voice trailed off.
" I can't help if I don't KNOW. " I reminded him, but in a gentle voice. Leo had broken his share of rules in his day, but now it was difficult for him to stray too far. Too much had changed.
Too much was at stake.
" Piper and I had three children together. " He began, slowly, then appeared to lose himself in the land of memories.
" Wyatt, the Chosen One. The most powerful force of good ever born, or so we thought at the time. Yet our second son, Chris was also powerful and between the two brothers they possessed all the powers that Good ever dreamed of. "
" After the final battle, Piper and her sisters felt safe. We struggled, we fought, and we had triumphed. Paige and Phoebe married, had children, and we finally had that daughter that the future had fortold. Melinda Prudence. Our life was good, we thought we had won. Oh, the odd demon popped up now and then, but they were no more than pests. They were disposed off in the same manner as a pest would be. "
Mistake number one, I thought. Yes, the Underworld was destroyed and all the demons in it, but those above ground, the Shadow Beings, Shape-Shifters...some of the deadliest and most cunning survived...I jerked my attention back to Leo's story.
"...on the day of Melinda's thirteenth birthday, I appeared from above to join in the family celebration. Instead of my wife and children, nieces, nephews, I was greeted two hysterical boys in a ruined mansion; every room filled with carnage, the walls dripped blood. I found what was left of my precious daughter, but the Charmed Ones were just...gone. Their blood was there, but no bodies, no sign of them. The Book of Shadows was found in it's hiding place and I took it and my sons and fled. "
" I must explain that we had all been uneasy for a while. In fact, for three years before the attack, a growing darkness chilled those of us who had fought the final war. Evil was on the move, witches and whitelighters were disappearing. And, demons..."
" Were reappearing. " I finished for him. " Explain about this " Darkness. " You have alluded to it before. "
Leo sighed, " I cannot add much. It was a feeling, a growing certainty that while we had been celebrating the victory of what turned out to be a minor skirmish, our enemies were winning the war. The World...changed. You could see it, feel it. The manor that I had abandoned vanished from normal sight, but Wyatt could see through the demonic shielding. Evil had a new home. Soon Martial Law was imposed, and the " Cleansings " began. " He went on to describe the events in pedantic detail, but I was already thinking ahead...
Evil had gained a foothold in the Upper World, a feat my Mentor and Master of the past had waged a war of particular ferocity for many centuries.
I dimly heard that Phoebe and Paige's husbands met their ends in a " Cleansing " while my old friend Darryl Morris lost his family and a good part of himself before being rescued by the Halliwell Brothers. What happened to Phoebe and Paige's children, I wondered?
I heard the emotional pain enter Leo's voice, and help up my hand to stop the flow of horror.
" I know enough now and I thank you for reliving the pain for my benefit. " I said in a very somber and gentle tone. This Elder had seen horrors and suffered wounds that even I shied away from. I got to my feet and he followed, standing in placid patience again, his arms crossed, hands folded.
" What now? " He asked, and my response brought a smile to his face. A smile of relief and something akin to respect.
" Now? Now we truly begin. " I answered him.
Chris knew where Wyatt would be. They were creatures of habit, always aware that the loss of one would doom the other; and all other members of their kind.
The cemetery was still intact, as if death itself forced a truce between Good and Evil. Neither side thought of the area as a place to consolidate power.
Wyatt was where Chris knew he would be, sitting on the ground by Melinda's grave, wiping clean the small headstone. Silently, he joined his older brother, absentmindedly pulling weeds and overgrown grass from the area around the gravesite.
" Do you remember why we couldn't save her? " Wyatt asked in a low voice and Chris thought carefully. Finally he shrugged and shook his head. " No, I don't remember anything from the time Mom took the cake out of the oven until the time that Dad arrived. "
Wyatt nodded, " Me, either. Something happened to us that day. Some force stopped us from saving our baby sister, and protecting our Mother and our Aunts. "
Chris nodded, but Wyatt didn't even look his way...
" I'm going to find out who did this! We've hid in the shadows long enough, and what good has it done us?! " Wyatt seethed through clenched teeth.
Chris opened his mouth to calm his brother. Since Wyatt was young, extreme shifts of mood had a bad habit of making things explode, and dusk was already drawing near. They were vulnerable.
Before he could utter any words, though, a voice sounded behind them. A cool voice, with a slighly taut diction. A voice that brought to mind many things, one being...
Safety?
Wyatt was already on his feet, deploying his exploding power, but to their amazement, the tall man in black jeans and a brown bomber jacket just gazed at them with sea colored eyes.
" What good has it done you? It's kept you alive to fight another day. Now..."
" We Begin...Together. "
