Chapter 17: I set fire to the rain…
"I am sorry, sweetheart. I am so sorry…"
Someone keeps crying in her dream. It's dark and she can't see anything, but sometimes voices filter through.
It's such a strange dream.
She has never had a dream like this before.
Can someone be awake and asleep in a dream?
But before she can ponder much over the strangeness of her situation and the permanent darkness she finds herself in, she… falls asleep, disappears maybe, because frankly she doesn't understand anything.
When her consciousness raises its head again, she hears someone reading.
"In a city by the sea which was once called St. Petersburg, then
Petrograd, then Leningrad, then, much later, St. Petersburg again, there
stood a long, thin house on a long, thin street. By a long, thin window, a
child in a pale blue dress and pale green slippers waited for a bird to marry her… "
She curls up in that darkness, head tucked in her knees and listens to a man read about a girl named Marya Morevna.
His voice is soothing and sounds familiar, like she knows him, but she can't seem to recall his name or how he looks and it's rather nice of him, even if it's dark, she thinks, that he is reading to her.
Somehow, maybe instinctively, she knows she didn't have time for stories before. And so, she keeps sitting in the dark, listening to his tale about Koschei, the tsar of life and Marya Morevna before she loses consciousness.
"She told me you died, Elena. She told me you were dead…"
Is her name Elena? She doesn't know. She might find out if she tries to find her way out of this dark but the silence and the shadow stretches as far as she can sense, and walking yields no result at all.
"Elena, I am sorry, sweetheart. Open your eyes for me, will you?" He sounds desperate, whoever he is.
"You will always have a place here, Elena…"
The memory is sudden and it makes her head ache. A bright room filled with sweet confectioneries of every kind, a man with floppy, sandy hair bent over a rectangular cake with an icing bag in his hand, teaching a young girl of seventeen how to make flowers.
His mouth isn't stretched in a smile in the memory, but his eyes…his eyes are so kind.
Mr. Saltzman.
Her name is… Elena.
A beautiful man with a lush mouth that's always twisted in a smirk…
Her head starts hurting.
She wants to get out of this darkness. It seems to press from all sides and she feels…
"Where is the country of the Tsar of Life? When the world was
young the seven Tsars and Tsaritsas divided it amongst themselves.
The Tsar of the Birds chose the air and the clouds and the winds. The
Tsaritsa of Salt chose the cities with all their bustle and heedless
hurtling. The Tsar of Water chose the seas and lakes, bays and oceans.
The Tsaritsa of Night chose all the dark places and the places between,
the thresholds, the shadows. The Tsaritsa of the Length of an Hour
chose sorrow and misfortune as her territory, so that where anyone
suffers, there is her country. This left only the Tsar of Life and the Tsar
of Death to argue over what remained. For a time, they were content to
quarrel over individual trees, stones, and streams, giving each other
great whacks with that scythe which Death wields to cut down all that
lives, and that hammer which Life wields, which builds up useful and
lovely things such as fences and churches and potato distilleries.
However, Life and Death are brothers, and their ambition is precisely
equal… "
Awareness slowly creeps on her in that dark. Mr. Saltzman is reading to her again.
Is she dead?
Is this hell? If it is, then it's rather kind of the devil to get Mr. Saltzman to read to her.
She can pretend she's sleeping and he's reading a story to her just because she wants him to.
She can pretend in this darkness that he's her father and that if she asks him to look beneath her bed to check for monsters, he will.
She's Elena… and her memories are slowly starting to pierce the unknown and they're not beautiful.
She remembers bits and pieces of a place where beautiful women flit from table to table, clad in feathers and sequins, with smiles as brittle as the thinnest glass.
"Let the truth be told:
There is no virtue anywhere. Life is sly and unscrupulous, a
blackguard, wolfish, severe. In service to itself, it will commit any
offense. So, too, is Death possessed of infinite strategies and a gaunt
nature—but also mercy, also grace and tenderness. In his own country,
Death can be kind…"
A boy… a young boy with dark eyes and somber face, holding her hand as they cut through a dark corner… Jeremy.
Oh, Jeremy!
In the darkness there is nothing to do but shed tears for a brother she's slowly coming to remember, a brother she left all alone, she thinks in helplessness.
"Let's go, Katarina… "
The memory is sudden and it tears a scream from her throat.
No. No. No.
A man dragging her towards a car, pulling with such force that even in memory she sobs from the pain… pushing her inside… the car tearing down a street… the maniac gleam in his eyes…
"I will love you forever. Let's die together, Katarina… "
No. No. No.
There's a dim light ahead, and she pushes against the floor and runs.
"Let's die together, Katarina…. "
No.
"Let's die together…"
Elena bursts through what feels like a wall. Everything hurts. It's all hazy and she needs to run away from here.
"Elena, it's okay. It's okay." She hears someone from the side. She tries to turn her head, but she can't.
"You're okay, Elena. You're okay. Just stay still for a moment."
It's Mr. Saltzman, she realizes when the panic slowly ebbs.
She hears a door open in the distance…he will-
"It's okay, Elena," Mr. Saltzman says as he gently squeezes her right hand. "You're safe. No one's gonna hurt you again. Ever."
He needs to be at the bakery.
People start crowding around her bed. "Where were you?" Mr. Saltzman snaps.
She has never heard him speak like that.
The doctors say something she can't concentrate on. She is so tired and everything hurts.
Her lids start drooping.
"I will feed you your hands and your tongues if I find you've been a second late next time around," Mr. Saltzman snarls.
She's… alive.
And Mr. Saltzman doesn't seem himself.
She's woken up in a strange world…
~UV~
He can recall the times he has cried in his life. The infallible Rhen. The cruel, elusive prince. The shadow that hunts other shadows.
The first time he cried was when they butchered his parents in a hail of bullets. He had been seven.
He swore vengeance like every hurt child does, but he… he rained wrath on the world of the rich and entitled.
Slaughtered the pricks who had ousted his parents from their diamond mines in Botswana. And then, killing and collecting depositories of shiny rocks became a habit.
Assassin clad in a business man's suit. That was what they called him. The Boogeyman.
Rhen.
His days and nights were filled with mindless entertainment. Cards, casinos, strippers, lines of ivory on crystal tables.
And then one day, Isobel Petrova burst into his office and screamed that she was pregnant with his child.
He cried like a baby.
His child.
His family.
He had no love for Isobel Petrova but the child in her womb, Rhen wanted it with every fibre of his being.
Nine months he did what Isobel asked for. Put the world at her feet. Covered her from head to toe in diamonds.
The third time, he cried while holding his daughter. His baby girl. His princess.
She was so tiny and perfect. He counted all her small fingers and tiny toes, marvelled at her long lashes and rosebud mouth.
He named her for his mother.
Elena.
He had never once felt anything after his parents demise, but this tiny human, she resurrected his dead heart.
He doted on his daughter, carried her in his arms night and day, lulled her to sleep, put a gun on Isobel's head when she refused to nurse the baby, changed her diapers, cooed songs at her and talked to her about the world he would gift her when she grew up.
And then, one day he left her in Isobel's care and went out to hunt the bastard who was smuggling diamonds out of his mine.
Euphoric, high on the adrenaline of the kill, he got wasted and came home, picked up his baby daughter from the cradle and decided a long drive in his Lamborghini was what made sense.
They cut him out of the wreckage of his car, he remembers being told, and that his daughter, his Elena was no more.
That Rhen had killed the one person he loved most in the world.
He remembers his screams, the grief that followed it. He remembers Isobel crying and saying over and over again, "she's dead, Rhen. Your daughter is dead."
They told him he wouldn't be able to walk, and he, he walked because he wanted to visit his daughter, wanted to kneel where she lay in eternal rest and beg forgiveness for what he had done even when he knew he didn't deserve anything.
Even now, sometimes he thinks it was his karma that came for his daughter. The price of all his bad deeds compounded and extracted from her.
His Elena.
His baby bean.
His leg that hasn't ached in years hurts today even as he leans more on his cane. She was so close and he didn't know.
He didn't know that she was his, that he was supposed to keep her safe.
The guards open the warehouse door and his chief executive officer comes jogging from inside. Kol knows how to be the face of the company. And he also knows how to follow Rhen's command word for word.
"Mikaelson is secure. They were sedating him when I took my leave. He won't even remember his name let alone the fact that there is a world outside the walls of his cage. No one will find him. Ever."
Rhen doesn't say anything and continues walking further in the darkness, Kol on his heels.
"They are both here. We had to gag Petrova, she was making too much noise. Morsedale is out cold."
"Good," Rhen says absentmindedly as he thinks about the cast on his daughter's body, the bruises on her face, the stitches alongside her thigh.
His daughter.
They hurt his daughter.
"If I may, Mr. Rhen, Lord Morsedale…"
"I don't pay you to question me, Kol," Rhen says mildly, moving behind the chair to open the blindfold on Isobel's eyes.
It takes some time for her eyes to adjust in the dark, but when they do, he is rewarded with a face that he has seen all of his victims make.
Her eyes widen and she starts struggling fruitlessly.
He lowers the gag from her mouth.
"Alaric, please…"
"You told me my daughter was dead, Isobel," He remarks softly, moving to prod Morsedale with his cane.
"Alaric… "
"My daughter, Isobel. My Elena. You took my daughter from me," He states. "You told me she was dead. How come she's lying in a hospital with broken ribs and fractured limbs?"
Alaric Rhen turns swiftly in her direction, his deadly eyes boring holes into her skull.
He will write Isobel's fate, and that of her husband, of everyone who hurt Elena in blood.
He's Alaric Rhen and he has killed people for merely breathing wrong in his presence, but the offence of hurting his daughter, that deserves the kind of punishment that made him the Boogeyman.
~UV~
Finally, the dad is here! And we have got the banner for the story, made by ever so lovely Carol. In fact, she made a banner for Taozi Xiatou too which is going live in a couple of minutes. The italicized bold are the excerpts from Catherynne Valente's Deathless. I don't know why I love that book so much, but I do.
And guys, thank you for the love. I know I say this in each and every chapter, but your words overwhelm me. You guys are the kind of superheroes that every storyteller needs. Thank you, you ray of sunshines and moonlight. You guys are the best…
And have you heard "Salvatore" By Lana Del Rey? The song suits the mood of the story. Check it out if you haven't.