Keladedra sat upon the shores of an ocean, the blue western sea on side and the hazy line of mountains on the other. It was a city of white stucco villas and flagstone streets that wound charmingly around the sprawling estates of its governmental palace. It was most certainly a retreat for the wealthy, for the prices were high and the services geared towards the tastes of people used to getting their own way in every matter. It sprawled about a protected cove, the shores of which were lined with exquisite and private villas, each with a private dock and grounds to match the gardens of Paradise.
It had been taken by the forces of Dark Schneider perhaps fifty years past. He had been so impressed by the Mediterranean charm of the place that he had kept it whole and unblemished by the hand of his army. There had been a villa on the south side of the cove that he had claimed as his own and for some time had used it as a retreat from the rigors of conquering a world. He had not been there in a very long time.
Long enough for some fat merchant to have taken roost in it, no doubt paying a handsome rent to the city managers for the honor.
Arshes and Schneider rode down from the mountain road and into the unwalled suburbs of the city. Brown skinned children ran laughing in the streets. Casual, if well-dressed men and women strolled the sidewalks, fat and content in life. Keladedra custodians patrolled unobtrusively, insuring that their sea side city remained a safe and trouble free haven for their wealthy citizens. There was no standing army in Keladedra. There was little threat of an attack from land, since most of the wealthy nobles of all the continents kingdoms had homes or at least vacationed in Keladedra. There was a navy that patrolled the seas, keeping pirates at bay. Pirates were and always had been a problem to sea side cities, and doubly so for rich ones. But, Keladedra had one advantage to its neighbors up and down the coast. It had a barrier reef of unnatural origins that protected it during all but the highest tides. One had to know the channels to sail into the town unscathed, other wise the sunken skeleton of a city of old would rip the hulls from any ship heavy enough to ride more than a two meters under the waves. Sometimes, at low tide the ragged tops of the few remaining structures pierced the surface of the water, awesome reminders of how great the builders of the old world had been.
They rode through the city and down the colloquial road that led to Schneider's villa. There were ivy covered white walls around it with iron gates locked tight. He corrected that matter with no more than a will and a touch and the gates swung open. The grounds were green with foliage even so late into the year. The flowers were not in bloom, but one could not have everything. Servants saw their approach down the lane and ran to the main house to inform their master of unannounced visitors. A fat, sweaty little ground hog of a merchant wheezed out onto the front porch to reproach their rudeness.
Schneider swung down before his horse had quite stopped and tossed the reins to one of the dark skinned servants who stood gaping nearby. He looked over the facade of the villa. More ivy. More attention to the gardens around it. But, other than that changed very little. It did not make him feel any better at the sight of it. He had hoped that it would do something to lift the black veil from his mood. All it did was piss him off that there was a grotesque little man waving a finger at him and demanding that he vacate his property. He thought about turning the irritating merchant into a puddle of molten sludge, but that would only have to be cleaned off the nice white porch. So he ignored him and stalked up the steps onto the covered porch. A few shy faces peeked out of windows, then quickly retreated when he walked by. Servants who were no doubt enthralled by the upset in their master's life.
The man marched after him, still babbling. He heard Arshes dismount and speak quietly to the almost hyperventilating merchant.
"You are mistaken. This is not your house. This is his house."
"It most certainly is not. I pay a hefty rent for this villa. I will have the custodians on you, if you don't leave."
"Do you know who he is?"
"I'm certain I don't care."
"He is Dark Schneider."
There was a long moment's pause. "Dark Schneider is dead."
Schneider looked over his shoulder, black lashes at half mast. He smiled lazily, a glimmer of white teeth and malice. The merchant's sandals began to smoke. The man shifted uncomfortably, not understanding at first what was happening to him. Then he began to shift from foot to foot and finally looked down as smoke began drifting up from his feet. The soles of his sandals began to glow with red heat and the man screamed, scrambling backwards, falling onto his side and desperately kicking the burning shoes from his feet. The soles of his feet were blackened and charred. He kept screaming until Schneider came to stand over him.
"Funny. I don't feel dead. You might be, if you're still here when I finish looking over the grounds. Oh and leave the domestics. I'll have use of them." He turned away and drifted down to the end of the porch, where steps led down to a path that led to beach. He heard the muffled complaints of the merchant. The threats of the man going straight to the city council with this outrage and Arshes' quiet encouragement to do just that. Then he was out of earshot and walking down the narrow path to the ocean, a cool wind from the water bringing the smell of saltwater.
There was a pier a ways down the beach, with a small sloop rocking gently in the tide. His boots sank into white sand. He trudged out to where the sand turned dark from the soaking of the tide and stood staring out at the gray sea and the churning, smoke colored clouds that passed over her horizon. The wind whipped at his hair and sent his cloak billowing about him. It had always been peaceful here, at the edge of a sea that seemed endless. It had always soothed his soul. He searched for some hint of the serenity, some small clue that he could find it if only he wanted it bad enough. And found nothing. Nothing but a hard, black knot that coiled somewhere between heart and gut and would not go away. It just lurked there and ate at him.
He gave it a name. Hate. He just didn't know who to aim it at.
He stood there for a long while. He heard Arshes Nei's careful tread behind him. Her measured gait across the sand.
"He's gone." She said.
"Good. I wanted to burn him alive." He shivered. For a moment on that porch he had wanted more than anything to take that blathering life and reduce it to screaming ash. He had wanted to kill for the mere sake of slaking the thirst of that nasty little knot of hate inside him. And he did not want to be reduced to such a relief of pressure. Somewhere along the way, he had picked up a semblance of morality that he had most certainly not started with. Yoko's doing, he supposed. She had the most annoying habit of making him feel guilty or indebted, or responsible --- or miserable and on the wrong side of a matter when he had never doubted himself in all the long years of his life.
"Go away." He hissed at her ghost who plagued him even here on this beach.
"What?" Arshes looked up at him in surprise, her ears trembling in hurt offense.
"Not you. I'm not talking to you." He was able to get only a modicum of apology into his voice. She didn't ask, but he could see the plain question of just who he had been talking to in her brown eyes.
There was a gull in the distance that dipped and floated on the wind currents. He stared at it for a moment, then turned on his heel and stalked back towards the villa. Into the house and its cool, large rooms. A trio of servants, two girls and a boy, stared at him in fear. Together they could not have totaled more than forty years. He stabbed a finger at them and ordered.
"Whatever personal things of his -- I want out of here. Dump them beyond the gates."
They cowered, clutching at each other as if they expected him to cast some dire spell upon them.
"I only turn oily, fat merchants who don't know their place in the world into frogs. Obedient servants are safe, I assure you."
They nodded with superstitious reverence at the veracity of his words, then scampered towards the back of the house where the master bedchamber was to do his bidding.
"Well, we're here. Now what shall we do?" He asked, after Arshes had come back in and he was sitting in the sunken formal room, his boots propped atop a glass topped marble table. There was a stray scarf on the floor that the servants had dropped in their march from bedroom to gates and back again. The merchant had had a fair number of clothes.
"Must we do anything?" she asked quietly. "We used to come here and do nothing but watch the sea and loose count of the days."
"Ah, the good old days when I was out to conquer the world. Do you miss them?"
"Yes." She almost whispered.
He lifted a brow. "What? All the widowed wives and orphaned children we left in our wake. I thought you had an issue with that?"
"I had you. None of the rest of it mattered."
"You don't now?" he asked archly, irritated.
She looked away, frowning and the little knot of hate pulsed, driving him to his feet in annoyance at all the hidden things behind her eyes. "Shall I prove it, Arshes?"
He caught her by the shoulders and kissed her, forcing her backwards with the roughness of it. She did not try and force him back. Her fingers caught at his cloak, trying to pull him closer. He backed her against the wall, tearing at the buckles of her armor, heedless of comfort or hurt in a driving need to release emotion. It worked it way down the hall and into the master bedroom and did not quite make it to the broad bed itself, but culminated on the floor before it, with armor and clothing divested only enough to sate the passion.
Finally, when he was spent, she did push him off and rolled to her side away from him, clenching her fists to her breast. He lay on his back, staring sightlessly at the ceiling, having gained little satisfaction from the sex act.
"You vent your frustration on me." She finally said. Not an accusation, there was no tone of that in her voice, but there was rancor and that he was not used to from her. "I don't mind. But would you do the same to her? Or is she too pure to mar with violence."
"Don't go there, Arshes."
She said no more. She rose, shedding the last of her armor and dropping it on the floor. She picked up an undergarment here and there, and donned them. Found her belt and her pouch and said.
"I'm going to buy some clothing. I've sore need of it. Would you come?"
He didn't answer. Just lay there on the soft rug looking at nothing. So she left and the only other sounds after she had gone were the servants trying to quietly creep about their own chambers.
The Keladedra Custodians did not come barging down the gates at the merchant's request. A trio of town councilmen did, bearing gifts and a conciliatory and abject apology for any inconvenience. Schneider stared them down with an sardonic cant to his brows and an intimidating silence while they babbled on about how if he had just let them know he was coming they would certainly have made his villa ready. They had not forgotten what was his in Keladedra, after all. But, it just wasn't good business to let such a lovely house go to waste. Surely he could understand that. Was there anything they could do for him? Anything at all? They would be most happy to accommodate any of his wishes if only he might refrain from injuring any more of their prominent citizens.
He agreed to think about it.
The eldest girl of the three servants was a passingly good cook. They took their meals out of the verandah more times than not, with the sea as an ever changing backdrop. The weather was good on this side of the mountains. Winter brought cool air and water too cold for swimming, but true cold weather never marred the city. Spring time was a marvel here. He remembered it well. He took the sloop out into the cove, past the arms of land and the dangerous waters of the channel. It was an insulation of sorts, with nothing but the sea surrounding a body. Nothing but water and more water and land only a strip of solidity in the distance. He spent hours out there, drifting, trying not to think at all, just riding the swells and loosing himself to the motion.
Sometimes Arshes went too, but he preferred to be alone and she knew it. She would cast him dark, unreadable looks from her her thick fringe of hair when he came back in, but never commented. He was bored by the end of two weeks. The knot still pulsed at his core. He slept with Arshes, but his dreams were plagued with images of Yoko and he woke cursing his subconscious. When had she gained such power? He supposed when he decided that he couldn't have her. That was generally the way of things. The forbidden fruit always being the most coveted. He tried to reason it out that way, but self-analysis had never held much allure for him. He was what he was and for the most part that was astoundingly good. He was doing an incredibly chivalrous thing here, he had to keep reminding himself. She was so much better off without him. She would find happiness elsewhere.
Which got him thinking about how and with who. Happiness for a woman generally involved a man. The image of Yoko with some other man sent fingers of cold rage up his spine. He much preferred the thought of her becoming a Holy Sword and remaining a virgin in service of her goddess. Of course the virgin thing was out of the question now, but every one knew Holy Swords were not on a whole completely pure. But, considering her banishment from Meta-Rikan and her holy order, that was no longer an option. Which left her wasting away a lonely spinster or finding a man to claim her. She wouldn't have a problem there, being Yoko and young and lovely and desirable in every way. She would find a husband very quickly, which meant he would have to kill a man. There was no way he could stand by knowing another man shared her bed and not destroy the brigand who invaded his territory. Of course one would have to do this without her knowing, which raised a whole different problem. His head hurt with it.
One afternoon, after drifting in the sloop for hours, doing nothing more ingenious than staring at the movement of clouds in the sky, the boat drifted past the jutting, much corroded remnant of one of the channels ancient obstacles. Arshes, who had elected to come out with him today, leaned along the boat rail, looking down into the blue green depths at the dark shadows of a long sunken city. He moved to stand beside her, staring at the rusted, pitted shape of an I-beam. He tried to recall what the name of this city had been and the memory eluded him. He wasn't certain he had ever known. He thought he should have, but so much of the time before was shadowed in uncertainty. He crossed his arms over his bare chest, shivering of a sudden, unsettled by a change in the wind pattern. His hair blew across his face. Arshes' locks tickled his arm and back.
He had the urge to see what the centuries of decay hid below reef growth and silt. He wanted to see the bones of this city to absolve the sense of morbidity that he could not seem to shake. He stepped up to the side of the boat and Arshes demanded to know what he was doing.
"Nothing." He told her before he stepped off and into the water. The cold enveloped him. The darkness did. He closed his eyes and sank, enthralled by the feeling of drifting downwards, pressed by the weight of the water. He did something similar to a healing that staved off his lung's cry for oxygen. He was comfortable at the newness of water surrounding him. Water was not his element. The ocean was not an easily controllable force. That much water, so unfathomable a power, tended to overwhelm magic. There had always been the old legends that water and witches didn't mix. There was some truth in it.
He summoned a witchlight, that hovered over his head like a greenish spotlight, casting the world in an eerie, lurid glow. He sank past a great ridge. A barnacle, coral covered vertical drop regularly interspersed with cavernous openings. Windows. Row and rows of windows, all leading into blackness. Fish swam in and out of the openings, schools turning and fleeing from the sudden light that had invaded their world. He expanded the light and moved away from the ridge. They spread before him. An endless panorama of decay. Of bones, mostly broken and crumbled, but some still standing in one form or another, of what had once been a city vaster by far than the tiny resort town that sat on the edge of land where this metropolis had broken off from.
A shark swam by him, interested, but not threatening. He watched it momentarily, fascinated by the sensuous rhythm of its movements. A pair of pilot fish swam in its wake, hoping to feed off the scraps of its kills. He sank deeper. The bottom was an uneven mass of coral reefs and sand covered secrets. All the bodies had been washed away long ago, picked to pieces by all the hungry denizens of the sea. All that was left were the things that could not be eaten so quickly, but were eaten all the same, but corals and barnacles and all the living things that needed surfaces to grow on and thrive. Something stuck perpendicular up out of the silt, so rusted and wasted away as to be almost unrecognizable. One section of a train, he thought. It was too large to be a bus or a trolley car.
A vision flashed behind his eyes. Fire, and booming explosions. Sirens blaring in the background. Cars, trucks, buses, all manner of vehicles crashing into one another in their efforts to escape the destruction. The screech of metal as a train tried to stop in time to avoid a section of track that had been ripped away and being to late. Buildings crumbled. People died by the thousands, killing each other more efficiently than the biological monster that had been released upon them. But only for a while. The monster caught up.
He forgot the spell and sucked water into his lungs. The witchlight faltered in his surprise, in his sudden disorientation. His ears rang. Out of the depths it seemed a thousand, rushing voices called for vengeance. He shot to the surface, breaking through the waves and into the air above, hovering above the mast of the sloop which rocked not far away. He coughed water, blinked it out of his eyes. Arshes Nei stared up at him, her dusky face drawn with concern for him, when it was she that floated over a graveyard.
But they hadn't called out for her. He thought he was going insane. It wouldn't be the first time.
There was a round, central fire place in the sunken formal room of the villa. It was seldom used, since the weather stayed so fair. It roared tonight. He had caused it to blaze without benefit of fuel and sat before it, unable to shake the clammy coldness the sunken necropolis had left him with.
"I don't understand you." Arshes said, leaning against the doorway of the bed chamber, a goblet in hand. He said nothing, staring into the flames.
"You have your moods. How well I know them. But never this self-aimed morossness that you cannot seem to shake. What eats at you, Darshe? Is it her? Why did you leave her if it is so? You never denied yourself anything you wanted in the past. Far from it. You took what you want and the world be damned. Why is it so different with that -- girl? All you've done since we left Gara and Kall is to moon over her."
Still he wouldn't speak. She moved into the room, her shoulder against the wall.
"Did I ever make you feel this way? Did you ever torture yourself over me, while you were sleeping with every woman that caught your eye?"
"Why should I have?" he said without turning, a low seething voice. "You were always so accommodating as to turn the cheek."
"Oh, should I have cried and showed you and the world the hurt so blatantly? Would it have made a difference, other than to make others pity me?"
"No." A whispered honesty.
"No." She cried in agreement, throwing the goblet past him and crashing into the fire. The flames roared with the addition of wine to swallow. "So you know why I didn't. But she does and -- lo, you can't stop thinking about her."
"You don't know what I think."
"Why should you care? You left her. Your choice. What did she do to make you yearn for her so? What virginal little lies did she tell you? Was she even a virgin?"
"Shut up, Arshes."
"You shut up." She hissed at him. "I don't know what you see in her. She's not that special. Just another little pale skinned religious whore."
"Shut up! She's pure. In a way that you or I can never be. Don't slander her."
"I wish she were dead. I wish the child she carries were dead." She stopped suddenly, drawing a horrified breath.
He stopped breathing at all. The rushing in his ears that had persisted since the ocean graveyard pounded to a crescendo. He whirled to face her, eyes blazing, fists clenched, a pit opening at his feet that seemed to want to suck him bodily into it. He fought the vertigo.
"What did you say?"
"I didn't mean it." She shook her head, some slight fear entering her eyes.
"What did you say?" He rose and stalked towards her.
"It was said in anger. I wouldn't really ---"
He grabbed her arms and shook her so hard her had snapped back and forth.
"What did you say, Arshes? What child?"
She cried out in half anger, half pain and tried to wrench out of his grip. "Don't think you can bully me." She screeched, and an explosive force erupted between them, staggering him backwards a few steps. She fled towards the porch, tears streaking her face. He roared a word and the front of the house went up in a wall of raging fire. She skidded to a stop, and turned to face him, back to the flame, eyes wide with dread.
"What do you want of me?" she screamed past the inferno. "Couldn't you guess? I half thought you turned away from her because of it."
"No." The breath shuddered in his chest. The flames went out. The smoke remained. His eyes went hollow and shaken. He felt as if all the power, the magic, the strength and breath had been stolen from him. The knot in the center of his being pulsed, laughing at him maniacally and he knew who the hate was pointed at. Himself.
He had perpetrated those cruelties on Yoko and she had already been impregnated with his seed. Had that bitch Mother known? Of course, nature would. He had thought he was so smooth in distancing himself from her, and protecting them both, even if it hurt. And all the time -- all the damned time, it had been too late. Small wonder she'd looked so tragically disconsolate. Carrying his child and him snubbing her as harshly as he knew how. And hiding it from him. How had Arshes found out?
"Who told you?"
Arshes's hands were shaking. She clutched them together to stop the trembling and lifted her chin proudly. "Kall. She felt the need to tell him and not you."
"Kall?" Oh, beautiful. Not only did he criticize Schneider's action, he hid the fact that Schneider's woman was pregnant. The fire in the hearth roared up so violently it licked the ceiling.
But indignation only lasted a breath, drowned by the notion of Yoko having that child and loosing it to a bargain he had made, all by herself. He sat down on the back of the couch, stunned by the enormity of what he had wrought. No other monumental act of his had quite left him as drained and empty as this one. He had left her; driven her away to protect her and get out of a bargain he hadn't wanted to make in the first place.
Arshes came up beside him, and he hardly noticed her presence. She stood with her fists clenched, her wrists crossed over her breast, staring at his profile.
"So she's carrying a child. Why does that change anything? Why do you suddenly give a damn about anyone but yourself? You never have before." She was trying to sound reasonable. She was trying to control her voice, but there was fear in it.
"You knew this and didn't tell me." He glared up at her from under his lashes. She drew a shaky breath.
"Don't place the blame on me." She threw her head back and laughed desperately. "I can't even convince myself you should place it on her, though she should have been the one to tell you. Its your fault, Darshe. Nobody else's. Blame yourself."
He did. And to some certain degree, he would fix it.