Author's Note: I don't know and don't care how old Nicnevin is, but I suppose this chapter gives an outside boundary. For the record: 5000 years ago— when the 'Prometheus' tree first sprouted from the soil in Nevada— the British Isles were transitioning through the late Neolithic (specifically the Meldon Bridge Period, if it ever comes up in a trivia game) and they were just discovering metalworking.
Kinda hurts my head to think about it.
Anyway, with Uallas' previous comment about Nicnevin having lived during the first Roman foray into Scotland we know she was alive around 71 AD, so she could be anywhere from just under 2000 to just under 5000 years old. The point is she gets a senior discount at the movies, either way.
So she's got that going for her, at least...
.
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"The Candles or the Moon"
Trenton – 1984
Diùlt paced the wide, unfinished hallway, his shoes leaving tracks along the dusty floorboards. The windows on either side of the place bore thick weathered tarps over the glass, letting through only a strange yellowish-orange light. It reminded him of the growing light of morning, or even the falling light before evening.
More the latter, he thought.
The place was like its own dimension, perennially locked in the 'golden hour'.
"We should call it the 'Sunset Lounge'," he mumbled.
When they were all packed up and gone— when the cathair was moved to Manhattan— workmen would swarm the empty Aurelia and finish it in short order, turning this otherworldly, chaotic hall of exposed pipes, strange light, unfinished floors and cocooned windows into a bland, unremarkable hallway, just like a billion other bland, unremarkable hallways in a million other low-rent slum buildings.
Diùlt knew them well-enough; he'd lived in such surroundings for the first six years of his life. It seemed a lifetime ago, but then immortals aren't the only ones that can marvel at the passing years, are they? And Diùlt's childhood—his residence in a certain Athens slum-house called the Chrysós Court— was now so distant a memory that it might as well have been from another life.
That place was another 'fine' Monarch property, and one day it received a visit from the company CEO, herself, as she was wont to do. The ancient, wrinkled lady— with two black-suited bodyguards in tow— visited up and down the floors all day, paying particular heed to the apartments with young children, doting on them. He remembered her thin-lipped smile, and those pale blue eyes burning with grandmotherly warmth. She'd spoken softly to him, going so far as to caress him, pulling back those curly brown locks on his head to pet him like a beloved little dog.
And when her cold, withered hand touched the warm, soft skin of his forehead she hadn't found what she was looking for; she hadn't found that 'spark'. Normally that would've been the end of it.
But she did find the bruises around his eye, the teeth that hadn't come out of their own volition, and the timid trembling of a little body used to a great deal of cruelty. She'd met the half-drunk father (one of his better days) and seen the pathetic, wary way the small boy acted around him, like a trembling Chihuahua at the mercy of a frothing pit bull.
She'd seen all that— the least of it— and she could sense the worst of it.
For she had a keenness about her.
And when, one month later, there was a violent 'robbery' of their apartment in the middle of the night that left his father butchered in bed and the boy nowhere to be found it was folly for the authorities to even try looking for him.
Turns out that not only immortals can suffer a 'first death', and this was his.
The boy was gone.
Diùlt was born.
Those little speakers dotting the ceiling of the hall, more used to broadcasting the rarified pomp of classic orchestral pieces, now shook with a synth pop beat. The Eurythmics belted out 'Sweet Dreams' and Diùlt matched his footsteps to the meter.
He moved all the way to the end of the hall, staring down at his feet all the while. Through the unfinished floorboards a pipe junction drew his eyes. Its green cap and two bolts resembled a face with eyes. A gash in the metal beneath it almost resembled a frown. To his left a cabinet held the Aurelia sound system, buttressed by all the power of that giant antenna shielded in a cloak of drop cloths at the building's summit. To his right was that massive metal door leading to the 'ritual room'.
The man's lips curled a bit at the euphemism. He could still smile at such contrivances, at least a little. Most of Nicnevin's cult would not, or even could not.
As if on cue a great muscle-bound cultist stormed into the unfinished hallway, his dark African face a stern stone wall at the best of times. This was not the best of times.
"Mac na galla!" He roared, moving for the sound system. He flipped off the music and glared back at Diùlt, eyes filled with hateful scorn. "This sends sound throughout the whole of the cathair, you fool!"
"More a Tears for Fears fan, are you?" Diùlt smirked.
The black man grumbled at Diùlt's snarkiness, setting his immaculate white teeth on edge. He trundled to the other side of the hallway, motioning for Diùlt to follow him without bothering to look back.
"She wants you," he said. "Down to the ampulla. Now!"
X
X
X
He walked through the finery of the cathair's heart, all the while passing his fellow men in their black suits.
But then they weren't his 'fellow' men, in fact. Never really would be. Almost all that remained in Nicnevin's Trenton lair— almost all that remained of her operatives, these days— were the 'old guard': men bound to her through distant blood. Some could trace their line's service to her back ten generations or even more. Measan could trace his lineage back twelve.
Diùlt and those like him they called the 'fuadain', or strays. That he didn't mind too much, nor did he mind the cold scowls and haughty looks he got as he walked through the grand marbled halls stretched out before him: a sauntering alley cat walking amongst blooded pedigrees. And most of them really thought their blood was somehow better than his. Diùlt knew the truth, of course.
All their blood was equally inferior to the Grande Dame that led them.
One final hallway brought him to a narrow door. This was the entrance to the 'ampulla' itself: Nicnevin's personal quarters. Two cultists stood guard; at Diùlt's approach they demanded he consent to a search.
That he minded, but he kept his tongue still as they frisked him for weapons.
After that it was down another unfinished little hallway— more a tight workman's corridor than that, even— and then his feet met a well-oiled sandalwood floor. The cloying musk and spicy scent of the wood ruled the small hexagonal room stretched before him, lit only by the capricious flickers of myriad candles along the way. Two diverging walls extended to either side, making the room larger and larger all the way forward until the end, where the walls came back in sharp angles before reaching the end of the room, which by then was little more than six-feet across.
At this far wall a rustic bed rested beside an unremarkable wooden nightstand. The bed's frame was hewn of spindly, uneven lengths of crooked deadwood, all harvested from the White Mountains in California, taken from the leavings of its great bristlecone pines. One large, tortuous length of pine comprised the backboard of the bed and Diùlt knew this particular cut very well: one of his first 'missions' for the cult was to accompany some of its more seasoned members out to the University of Arizona and negotiate its surrender. All told the university got a few new research buildings out of the deal, and the cult got a long piece of gnarly wood from a dead, ancient tree.
The tree in question had some fame about it— hence the price tag— including a name: 'Prometheus'. The thing had around 5000 years of life behind it when some idiot graduate student cut it down, ignorant of the fact that he'd just destroyed the oldest (known) living thing on the planet. Word spread of the blunder and the story amused Nicnevin, who greatly desired a length of the tree for her bed. Though she treated it as a capricious lark the significance of her wish didn't go unnoticed by the cultists: the woman kept only a handful of personal items with her between cathairs— largely as unchanged as possible— and the bed was one.
It was Diùlt who had the courage to eventually ask her about the tree limb. The others found it rude to even contemplate, but a 'stray' needn't show the same social graces, need they?
"It makes me feel young," she confessed, smiling one of those impossibly thin smiles on her withered lips.
Those words would be shocking to her cadre of blooded loyalists, who took it as a point of pride to know as little about Nicnevin's life as possible while still serving her with upmost loyalty. Prying into such matters, they thought, was as sacrilegious as Thomas demanding to see Christ's palms. They'd sooner immolate themselves than dare ask the woman such questions.
It was always different for Diùlt.
He was never swayed by the religious devotion of the others, deifying a woman who— while incomparably wise and powerful in ways that went far beyond the physical— was still a woman. Nor was he swayed by the vaunted promise of sharing in her immortality, at least not enough to turn all his devotion to her. That was a common trick for most religions, really.
Not that he wouldn't take it, if he could get it.
So why did he turn all his devotion to her? Why did he commit to her cause, scouring the globe for evidence of juvenile immortals, then bringing them kicking and screaming to her blood-soaked carving board of an altar?
The irony of his situation was not lost on him— an adopted alley cat grown up to work in 'animal control'— nor did he have any illusions that his work was anything other than horrifying. But still he did it, and gladly too, in the sincere hope of one day seeing the woman accomplish her goal. And not because she promised him eternal life.
For him it was more basic: it was because she'd given him a life, period.
To him she was no queen, but a force, and she represented the best idea of 'destiny' he'd ever known. Diùlt's work for her, he reasoned, was no more a 'choice' than a water droplet's falling out of a thundercloud. It wasn't analytical; it simply was.
So really, by his reckoning, Diùlt had never really made a choice in the matter.
He probably wouldn't know what to do with it were he to have one.
Nicnevin sat with her back to him; she was perched upon a black granite stool decorated with strange runic carvings. Before her a large floor-length mirror rested in a brittle wooden frame, its glass smudged with grease stains. She worked at braiding her hair, expertly fitting the whitened strands into tight formation, paying no heed to the fact that all that was visible of her from the mirror's greasy surface was little more than an abstract blob: the idea of a human body, more than a body itself.
Diùlt went to the ground, forehead to bent knee.
"Banrigh," he said.
The ancient lady turned her head, gazing at him with those infinitely pale eyes as she finished her braid.
"Get off the floor," she commanded. "You look ridiculous."
Diùlt smirked, getting to his feet.
"Well, you look old."
Nicnevin's nearly invisible eyebrows furrowed and she squinted at the man. In an instant she was off the stool; she picked up her sword from its resting place against the nightstand and thrust out the point of the blimpy blade, setting it snug against Diùlt's neck. The sword's liquid-steel banding glowed like full moonlight under the candles while the gold bands separating its segments burned like fire from the sun. She held that fat, ungainly sword up with one outstretched arm, showing no effort in keeping the overweight thing aloft with her reedy limb. The blade didn't move a millimeter.
"Care to rephrase that?" She demanded.
Diùlt's smirk widened.
"'Distinguished' is what I meant."
For a time there was total silence in the room. Eventually Nicnevin's wrinkled face twisted with a smirk to match Diùlt's. Almost anyone else in the room who saw that cadaverous face— with the uneven candlelight creating moving shadows against its wrinkles— would've cringed in terror. Diùlt, however, only chuckled.
Nicnevin returned her chrysalis-shaped sword to its place against the nightstand, indulging in one amused grunt before again sitting upon the obsidian stool.
"I see your time scouring the backwaters of Europe has had an effect on your musical tastes," she said.
Diùlt shrugged.
"I only pay attention to such things when the hunting is scarce."
The woman again looked back at the man; a wan little smile formed on her face.
"And of late you've had ample time to pay attention to the music scene, haven't you?"
Diùlt looked as if he would answer, but the words caught in his throat; he sighed instead. Nicnevin widened her smile in that grandmotherly way.
"You needn't be afraid, nor sugarcoat the truth, Diùlt."
He nodded.
"There's nothing," he whispered. "There's been nothing, and for some time now. No news; no stories; no tall tales; no legends; no leads."
"The garden's grown fallow," Nicnevin spoke as if offering her opinion on the weather. "And elsewhere the Source is finished planting. Now's the time for reaping."
"Measan said it was time," Diùlt said. "That, after Penance—"
"I don't see past Penance. Not for now, at least." The woman's voice was cold and mechanical. "He's the edge of our world, presently. The final 'fix', Diùlt. He's everything..."
Again she looked at the greasy mirror, staring at the Gaussian blur of a figure before her.
"Do you know of this mirror? Have I ever told you about it?"
Diùlt nodded.
"You have," he said. "And who it belonged to, originally. I can imagine your satisfaction: finally getting the child that killed your student."
Nicnevin did not respond to this statement in the slightest. Instead she closed her eyes and drew a halting breath into her threadbare lungs.
"The next time you feel like commandeering the sound system, Diùlt—"
"I won't. I promise—"
"—play 'Here Comes the Rain Again', if you really must play the Eurythmics."
The man tilted his head, blinking. His big black eyes glowed with confusion under the candles' soft light.
The woman reached out for the mirror, letting her gnarled and veiny fingers rest a mere centimeter from that blurry, undefined figure lurking under the smudged glass. For all the seriousness of her face she was Adam reaching out to touch the hand God, Himself.
"'I want to walk in the open wind. Breathe in the open wind'..." Again she drew a long breath. When she looked back at Diùlt her grandmotherly smile turned to a rueful smirk of self-deprecation. "I want to have raindrops fall on a skin that doesn't threaten to tear apart under the stress, at the very least."
Diùlt craned his head down towards the sandalwood floorboards, hands clasped awkwardly behind his back.
"I've never known your equal in strength, Banrigh—"
"'Strength'," Nicnevin scoffed. "Depends on how you define it. I knew a girl, Diùlt, and she danced by grand bonfires, hearty and robust, her body framed by the stars of an unpolluted sky, in an unpolluted world. I knew her, and she'd dive into cold waters on a dare, scale peaks and run hills. She'd..." Nicnevin hesitated, but only briefly. "She'd take lovers in the tall grass, and stain her skin with the scent of earth and animal instinct..."
Diùlt craned his head down down towards the sandalwood floorboards even further, hands clasped even more awkwardly behind his back.
The woman stood and approached Diùlt; she tilted his head up with her decrepit hand, a look of desperate longing burning in her pale eyes.
"I knew her, Diùlt. I do not say I 'remember' her, for I can't even say that, anymore. I know that she existed, and I know that she's all I still dream of. But I cannot remember her." She moved to one set of flickering candles on a stand near the mirror. "The light of those bonfires and the cold glow of the moon set her smooth skin alight; they revealed all of its tight and youthful vigor. The healthiness of her. What do they reveal, now?"
Nicnevin extended her veiny hand and set it over the candle's flame. Diùlt thought to stop her, but this was merely foolish instinct, and he banished it from his mind, choosing to say nothing. Thus he had to watch as the candle's flame smoldered against her wrinkly skin, at first merely smoking the flesh, then outright burning it, melting away the skin over her gnarled digits; in the growing flames he could see the silhouette of her finger's bones.
Eventually— after seconds that seemed like hours— she pulled her hand back from the flame and extinguished the smoldering appendage with one commanding blow from her mouth, as if putting out the candle on a very macabre birthday cake. She let the smoking thing drop to her side as she approached the mirror once again, waiting for her hand to fully reform before again reaching out to that grease-stained creature lurking under the mirror's surface.
When she spoke her voice was little more than a ghostly rasp.
"I knew her, and I will know her again." She looked over her shoulder at the man. "I will not stay on this side of the mirror forever, Diùlt."
"No," he said. "Of course you won't."
"You've met with the FBI agent? This 'Noirbarret'?"
He nodded.
"And what did you gather from the meeting?"
"He distrusts your ideas entirely," Diùlt said. "He believes the plan cannot work, and this greatly frustrates him. What's more, he appears to distrust you entirely, as well."
The woman's lips twisted up into a very unhealthy looking grin, this one nowhere near 'grandmotherly'. This one was more vulgar, and more 'hungry'.
"Excellent," she said.
"But of Penance we've found no trace."
The ancient woman waved her newly-restored hand.
"That's of no issue," she said.
"I've been told that once the plan is in motion, things will move very quickly." Diùlt walked over to the stand by the mirror, removing a white kerchief from inside his suit jacket. "Is that true?"
"Everything but this: the plan is well in motion, and has been for some time, now."
He nodded, unsurprised, then went to work wiping down the candlestick and the top of the stand, cleaning up all the 'leavings' from Nicnevin's dramatic little demonstration.
"You needn't bother with that," the woman said.
Diùlt shrugged, looking back at her with a teasing smile.
"I'm well-enough used to dirtying my hands for you, you know."
Nicnevin reciprocated his smile.
"Do they haunt you, Diùlt? The screams? The sobs?"
He stopped wiping the stand, carefully considering his response to this. He knew the woman was so far beyond such pity as to stagger the mind. Not out of malice— she was beyond even such a notion as that, too— but simply out of practice. The millennia could certainly do that to a person, after all.
But she also knew, he reasoned, that he was not, entirely. She had that keenness about her, after all.
So he told her the truth.
"No," he shook his head. "Not the screams or the sobs. The eyes, maybe."
"Eyes?"
He nodded.
"The realization in them," Diùlt explained. "The dawning knowledge that they're caught, and the understanding that grows in them: that they know they're about to die. They get a certain look in their eyes, and it's worse than a deer in the headlights."
Nicnevin again sat upon her obsidian stool, hands genteely set over her kneecaps, clutching the bony protrusions tight.
"When you think of Penance being the last— potentially— does that give you comfort?"
Diùlt shook his head.
"That wouldn't be the right word," he said. "Relief, maybe. Secondary to the comfort of you being able to 'know' that girl, once again."
The woman sighed through her nose, nodding appreciatively.
"Me, I can't look back far enough to even see that girl," she said. "When you look back, Diùlt, on that microscopic little thing one such as yourself would call a 'life', do you regret the choices you've made?"
He didn't take offense at her words; she meant none by it. It was only the truth, after all, from her perspective.
"I would say 'no'," the man answered. "I'd say the decisions were made for me. I didn't do the choosing; I was chosen."
Another appreciative nod from the woman, this one followed by a dark smile.
"Perhaps we're both just creatures of different curses, then."
It took a good few seconds for Diùlt to understand the significance of those words, and they were words that any of the woman's other cultists would be horrified to hear. The mere thought of listening to them would be as blasphemous as eavesdropping on Christ in Gethsemane.
But for Diùlt it was different.
It always was.
"Well," he said, "it seems that Penance is an end to both our curses, no?"
"I don't know," she whispered. "All I know is that I can't see past the child, and I'll see nothing else until he's dealt with."
"In that case I'd do something about this Noirbarret," Diùlt said. "He's sure to cheat you in this little partnership, you know."
That dark smile returned to Nicnevin's face; her cloudy eyes narrowed until only black slits remained under the wan candlelight, as if her body were an eerie scarecrow lording over a field.
"Do I 'know' this?" She chuckled. "My dear Diùlt: I'm counting on it!"
