Chapter 14

A Soul In Torment

Nuada made his way through the many corridors and halls of Bethmoora. He was headed for a particular hall, but he wanted to take in some of the places he remembered on the way.

There were many grand chambers, but also many smaller ones, and all had a vast number of different uses in the past. He wandered through the deserted palace, memories echoing in his mind in response to his echoing footsteps. This place had been so full of life, so many sounds and colours, but now it was so dim and shadowy it was hard to recognize it for what it used to be.

He passed doors which were open and others which were closed… A chamber that had once been home to the council of goblin Smiths, where they would hammer out differences of opinion instead of ingots of blast-heated metal…standing silent now…

A small room which would have been a store for the bunches of drying herbs used by one of the Mages engaged in healing, now home only to memories…

A vast hall used when entertaining visiting clan leaders and their retinues, grand and impressive...now echoing to one set of footsteps instead of hundreds…

There were so many of these now empty spaces, all connected by a warren of walkways, stairways and tunnelled corridors. A wall-hanging or piece of furniture, abandoned at the time of an occupant's departure, would give ghostly impressions that just maybe someone was still creeping in the shadows.

At last he came to the area he knew best. This is where the warriors would congregate, whether training, teaching, or just spending time with their comrades. This part of Bethmoora was probably the place in which Nuada felt most at home.

As he grew up, he would spend more and more time here, working hard, trying to earn even the slightest positive response from his father. The older he became, the more often he would come here, until he was practically a permanent fixture. This is where he could vent some of the frustrations he had concerning his father, the humans – and most confusingly for him – the ones concerning Nuala.

He had always loved his sister very deeply. But the love he felt had intensified as he matured, becoming a physical need for her to be close to him. She was able to calm his fevered mind when no-one else could reach him. He needed this like a drug, his body almost aching with longing for her touch…and over time he had, in essence, fallen for his own sister.

Coming back here now brought back some of the most painful memories Nuada had tried hard to bury. This is the place where Nuala was made fully aware of just how deep her brother's feelings for her had become…

She had been called to the training hall by his weapons-master, who was concerned about the Prince's state of mind. For an entire day Nuada had demanded session after session of training, taking no rest or food at all, his sparring partners having to be carried out, one by one, sometimes in twos or threes, all needing a Mage's attention after a more brutal confrontation than normal.

He was almost tearing himself apart, trying to free himself of the rage and anguish that had built up in him to the point where he could no longer function in any other environment but this. At least he could control a weapon in his hand. He seemed to be losing control of everything else, including his mind…

His weapons-master knew that if he did not stop soon, he would suffer terrible consequences. He had seen it happen before, a young, talented warrior burned out because of some kind of an internal struggle. Not many survived for very long after, simply losing the essence of themselves and fading away to nothingness.

He could do nothing to help now. Nuada had gone just too far, too fast…but Nuala may be able to.

She had arrived as yet another casualty was taken away, limping badly. The worry on her face was plain to see, and the weapons-master was starting to think that maybe she was not strong enough to cope with the onslaught of her brother's present rage. But, she did her best to put his mind at ease, saying that she was here to help, and she would be alright…her brother would never hurt her, no matter what.

As such, as she entered the hall, the remaining occupants left the twins alone.

Nuada was pacing around the room like a caged animal looking for a means of escaping his prison. She had never seen him this bad before. He suddenly took one of the throwing spears that were propped against one of the walls and threw it, with a load roar of sheer rage that made her jump in fright. The sweat glistened on his shoulders as he launched the shaft with such violence that it actually penetrated the dark stone of the wall and stuck there as if it had been merely one of the wooden targets…or soft flesh.

She gently called his name, but he seemed not to hear her at all. She very slowly moved towards him, telling him that it was all going to be alright, that she was here to help him, keeping her voice as soothing and calm as she could manage to through her growing fear. Again, she called to him softly, but when he finally turned to face her, she stepped back aghast. Never before had she been confronted with a gaze that so frightened her.

The eyes that met hers were not the eyes of her beloved brother – they were the eyes of a hungry predator, wild and ferocious. She could feel the pressure of his un-vented emotions burning him up, consuming him. It poured from him like blood from a wide open wound

She whispered to him in his mind, telling him she loved him and needed him to be calm, to let go of the rage and to let her help him. But he could not hear her words for the thundering roar of utter turmoil that threatened to push his mind over the brink from which it could never return. All he could do was open his mind to her fully, searing her own mind with all that was tearing at his soul.

Everything.

When she finally felt the true depth of his feelings for her, the true pain he was in, she was shocked and too terrified to look any deeper. She turned to leave, not knowing what to do. But before she had taken a full step, he was there beside her, seeming to tower over her like a predator about to take the final bite of the throat…

He grabbed her arm and turned her to face him again, spinning her round roughly. She tried to pull away, but he pushed her backwards against the wall, almost knocking the wind out of her. His hands gripped her upper arms tightly as he pressed her hard against the cold stone. His eyes were the deepest red amber as he stared at her, through her, his breathing shaky and eratic, and his whole body tight as an over-wound spring, beginning to tremble before it shattered under the strain.

She could hear his desperate pleas for her to help him, deep in the abyss of his mind, and tried one last time to reach out to him again, but he was like a drowning man grasping for anything he could hold on to.

And her love was all he wanted.

The next instant she was completely enveloped by his feelings of desire, and his dark lips were pressing hard upon her own in a passionate kiss that seemed to her, never ending. She desperately struggled to get out of his grasp, but it just served to make him more forceful, his body pressing hard against her own as the physical manifestation of his desire rose. He kissed her over and over again as she screamed to him, mind to mind, to stop, to see what he was doing, but he was deaf to her words.

With all the strength she could muster through her sheer terror, she reached up as far as she could and dug her nails with as much force as she could manage into his cheek, eventually drawing blood which ran in four tiny dark rivulets down his face, to drip down onto his chest like poison rain.

Finally, he felt the physical pain as her nails gouged his skin, and her internal screams cut through the deafening roar of emotion that had filled his mind as if she wielded a white-hot knife. As the awareness of what he was doing crashed in on him, he pulled back from her sharply with a look of total, abject horror on his face, his eyes wide, now back to their usual yellow-gold. Nuala was looking up at him with silver tears streaming down her own face, mingling with the blood from the nail marks that mirrored those on his own.

He suddenly realized he was still gripping her tightly and let her go with a shuddering gasp, pulling his shaking hands away as if he had been burned. Nuala could feel the new surge of turmoil that her brother was struggling with, and though she was herself reeling with shock and horror of her own at the revelation of all that he was desperately trying to deal with, she still wanted nothing more than to heal his pain, to tell him it could all go back to the way it had been, before this, before she was afraid of her own brother.

But he knew it would never, could never be the same between them ever again. His throat was tight with emotion, rendering him totally unable to speak, if there had been words he could say. But there were none to express what he felt. He looked at his sister with eyes filled with utter sorrow, anguish and complete self-loathing, and the sight of her tear-stained and bloodied face cut through him like an ice-cold blade.

He stumbled backwards, unable to see through the mist of his own tears, and he turned away and ran from the hall. He kept going, out of Bethmoora and on into the wilds that surrounded it.

No-one saw him for days. It was as if he had just vanished into the Earth. But Nuala knew he was, at least, still alive. She could hear him crying out to her, pleading for her forgiveness and saying he was sorry, repeating it over and over.

Nuala had kept to her rooms after Nuada disappeared – and her father became concerned. He rarely came to visit her in her own quarters, so when he came to see her, she was very nervous. He called her to him, eyeing her suspiciously as she approached with her head bowed, hiding behind a curtain of hair. He put a finger beneath her chin and raised her face up so he could see her properly. He scowled and brushed her hair away from her face. The marks had almost healed, but it was obvious to him what they were. She had tried to laugh it off, saying she had stumbled into some wild dog roses on one of her walks. He didn't push the point, but left her alone, being sure of how the marks had come to be there, but not absolutely sure why.

When Nuada finally returned he managed to evade Nuala and his father for a day or so. But the time came when they were both summoned to attend a formal reception for a visiting clan.

Not a word had been spoken to Nuada since his return. Nuala had managed to coax him home with calming words and promises to keep what had happened to herself. But when they set eyes on each other, they couldn't bear to hold each other's gaze, looking away, embarrassed and unsure as to what to say to each other in person. And Balor saw it all. He saw the healing scars on each of their faces, and the furtive looks between them.

He decided to act before anything else could happen.

He kept them apart all evening, and when everyone retired for the night, he kept Nuala back. He talked to her for a long while, about nothing of consequence, and she was totally unaware that he was tightening the barrier he had woven around her, one designed to keep her brother from her heart, to shield her from the son he could not feel as close to. He would not allow him to taint her with his dark spirit.

Though Nuala was not aware of what was happening, Nuada could feel the shield strengthening. And when he next saw his father, the cold look that greeted him told him all he needed to know.

Nuada spent every day in the training hall after that except for meetings called to discuss the wars with the humans. This is when he managed to convince his father to have the Golden Army constructed. In this arena, Balor seemed not to see a son, but just another warrior, and as he held the rank of Silverlance, he had to take his words seriously.

But in such a short time, their relationship, and the one between brother and sister were damaged beyond all repair, and Nuada left Bethmoora to live in exile, alone with his thoughts of love and hate, rage and desire, until they brought him full circle, back to this place.

Back to where the fateful exchange had taken place.