The fortress materialized all at once, hard metal flooring emerging beneath Kalanie's feet, featureless steel walls forming on all sides. Iron everywhere. Her energy reacted as it had not in months, not since she'd last stood in Demon World. It drummed in her veins, burning through her, calling to the iron all around.
She didn't give in to its will.
Her Human World iron had remained behind, shed in those first moments as he spoke to her. Through the haze, her instincts screamed for fresh metal, but something else resisted. Her heart? An emotion she couldn't lay name to?
Clucking his tongue, Masaru released Mazou's hand and withdrew his arm from Kalanie's, then straightened his sleeves until his cuffs fit perfectly around his wrists. "I don't know how you stayed in that wretched place for so long, Kal. Human World is so… drab." A smile split his lips. "Funny that. How the worlds fell to pieces over such a wretched place. I will never understand why demonkind's rulers stand beside humanity rather than revel in our victory."
They stood in a long corridor. The hall extended for ages to her right, finally terminating in a distant bank of windows. Through the glass, she could just make out the ruddy red of the night sky. To the left, an iron door waited, solid, without discernible markings.
Masaru leaned a shoulder against the steel. "Our suite, Kal. Time for a night's sleep, I'm thinking. Join me. But first, kill her. Slowly. Mazou, no teleporting."
Without a word more, he pressed a button on the doorframe and stepped beyond the threshold. The door hissed shut in his wake.
Which left her. And Mazou.
"Nie," Mazou whispered, her dark cheeks leeched of blood, "don't. Please don't." She wavered a moment, her hands raised pleadingly, her eyes searching Kalanie's as if waiting for a sign the unthinkable wasn't about to happen. Then she ran, bolting down the corridor, sprinting for the windows.
Kalanie didn't choose to follow.
She made no choice at all.
The fog had descended in full, and there was nothing left of Kalanie as she bent and pressed a hand to the steel floor. The iron reacted instantly, flowing up her arm, shifting into a sharp blade. When she gave chase, her legs moved of their own accord, her muscles pumping with ever increasing speed.
She caught Mazou thirty feet short of the windows.
Her blade rent the back of Mazou's knee, shredding tendons and muscle alike. The other demon collapsed. She curled inward, grabbing at her injury, but Kalanie didn't hesitate as her sword split into knives, a dozen sharp daggers that she imbedded into Mazou's back and dragged upwards.
The rest of it blurred, lost to the haze. There was the tang of copper in the air and on her tongue. There was blood dripping hot and wet down her arms, splattering her face. And there was screaming. Endless screaming.
It was that—Mazou's sobbing, broken cries as the life left her body—that reached Kalanie, sliding beneath the murky shield risen in her mind and digging deep claws into her consciousness, never to be forgotten. Those cries echoed in her ears, her bones, her heart.
They stayed with her as she left the corpse behind, iron sloughing from her skin. They stayed with her as she walked back down the hall, crossing over the missing stretch of flooring where she had stolen her steel. They stayed with her as his door hissed open and she moved within.
In truth, they would stay with her forever.
Existence became a flimsy, uncertain thing. What was real? What wasn't?
She didn't know.
At times, she stood at his side, watching him gather fresh puppets, binding them to his will, more puppets at once than should have been possible. Seas of hapless minions stretching beyond comprehension. Sometimes, she would move among those victims, culling those too weak to warrant his effort, but usually he kept her close, his words sharp and pointed and always perfectly clear that she was to stay.
Stay.
Remain.
Don't move.
Don't leave.
A dozen ways to chain her in place.
Though why she'd leave she did not know. Her thoughts could never coalesce long enough to remember what existed beyond him and her place at his side.
Yet there were other moments—ephemeral, hard to grasp flashes—of a different world. A shrine tucked deep within a forest. A cache of iron different from that all around her now. A scattered force of fighters whose arms were bare of markings like hers.
Those fractured pieces didn't seem real. They weren't happening. But perhaps they had happened. Or they would?
She could never be sure.
And always, every time she dared claw toward the surface, there was the screaming. The pleading. The sobs. The visceral, animal terror. Without fail, it sent her tumbling back. Into the darkness. Away from the body that was no longer hers. Away from him. Away from the flashing half-moments she couldn't decipher.
Eventually, she stopped trying to come back up.
But there was something out there. Calling to her. Needling her. Pressing at the deepest reaches of who she was. Insistent that she needed to remember.
But remember what?
Or was it who?
She didn't know. And maybe it wasn't anything. Not really. Maybe it was no more real than the false colors she saw painted on the backs of her eyelids when she lay in the dark.
After all, if there was a who, wouldn't there also be a name?
–Kalanie.–
The word shattered through the darkness. It cut. Deep into the shadowed recesses where she had hidden. A knife formed of light and brightness. A dagger from above, the far away surface she'd long since abandoned.
She shirked away from it.
But it came again.
–Kalanie.–
She shoved back, dove from its reach. Deeper below. Away.
Always away.
The fractured moments became harder to ignore.
Standing beside him. Tallying his puppets. Three dozen. Then counting those of his fellows, the others who created the markings. Four score. Nearly thirty puppets each. So many nameless faces, wiped of expression, marked in black.
Talking to him. Telling him about places she did not remember, people she did not know. Or did she? Who were they? The fiery one. Who was the fiery one? But when she tried to recall, he batted it away. Forbad her to mention that one. Then punished her, forced her to kill and fight and hurt until she forgot the fiery one existed at all.
Then sitting at a banquet table, watching a beast of a demon on the high stage. He swept his hands wide, encompassing the puppeteers arrayed before him. His echoing voice spoke of fallen cities and upcoming conquests. It heralded victory. Absolute and final.
And at night, in the dark, the word came again.
–Kalanie.–
Fleeing proved useless. The word always found her, cleaving through the depths.
So she fought back. She summoned the screams and she shoved them at the word, building a wall between her and its bright edges. She showed it the blood. She made it smell the copper. She made it feel the flesh rending beneath her hands.
She forced it to see the body. The corpse.
The friend.
Murdered.
By her hands.
For a time, the word retreated. It let her be.
She did not miss it.
But the word came back. Brighter and stronger than before. And it was different now. It was the name she'd been unable to find, the one that needled at her long after she'd forsaken the surface.
–Nomi.–
A new flash came to her, rising in answer to the name.
A boy. A mop of corkscrew curls. Hazel eyes, bright with curiosity, shining with laughter. An over-sharp nose, upturned the barest degree at the end. A round chin.
Then the boy faded. A machine rose instead, a vast chamber flooded with molten iron. But he was there—the boy. Floating in the silver sea. Riddled with tubes.
She grabbed those images—the boy as he had been and as he had become—and she showed them to the word. It answered. –Yes, Kalanie. Nomi. Your brother. Remember him. Remember you.–
And she did.
She remembered Nomi in concrete, vivid detail.
The memory of the last time she'd seen him became her guiding light. He'd been trapped in the Shell, turned into nothing but a cog in their machine. Recalling him that way shattered the shadows she'd cloaked herself in. In moments, she was rising, pushing to the distant surface, shoving aside the screams that still echoed in her bones even now, weeks after Mazou had fallen beneath her hands.
The room around her clicked into focus. It was dark, the curtains drawn over the windows to block out the moon, and the cot beneath her was overly soft, the blankets tangled about her legs. The footboard of a bed pressed against her right shoulder. Beyond it, she could hear his quiet breathing as he slept.
For the first time in seemingly forever, she remembered her own name. Kalanie. With it came thoughts about who she was—not the mindless creature that moved when he told it to, but the girl beneath that. The sister. The fighter. Someone who had lived beneath the Binds for six years and still retained a piece of herself, a sliver of who'd she been once upon a time.
That precious piece had been her anchor. It kept her steady even as his current tried to draw her out to sea.
But when he'd claimed her again, he'd unmoored her. She'd taken Mazou's life and she hadn't so much as tried to resist the impulse. The truth of that had corrupted her will. Even now, weeks later, with Nomi's name firmly in hand, the urge to fall back into the darkness was almost too much to resist.
Maz was gone.
Because of her.
As a sob worked into her throat, the voice came again. –Nomi. Remember Nomi.–
She recognized the tone, though she could not think of its owner. Rough. Smoky. A smoldering coal stoked back to flames. With it came new memories. Her existence in Human World. Living with the detectives. Fighting to figure out a way to get Nomi back.
Faces appeared. Boisterous, trusting Kuwabara. Sweet, gentle Yukina. Brash, dauntless Yusuke. A stream of others. Kurama. Genkai. Touya. Jin.
And another face. One she couldn't bring into focus.
–Hiei.–
The voice brought with it an image. A demon with pitch-black hair and crimson eyes. Vicious and fierce. All harsh lines and cutting angles.
But it was too sharp. Too rough.
She took the image and adjusted it, smoothing out the planes of his cheekbones, softening the line of his jaw. The new face was cunning and proud, but loyalty flickered at its edges, gleamed in the depths of its eyes. The line of its nose was like Yukina's, a near perfect replica.
When she showed the face to the voice, she could have sworn it started laughing.
–Yes, Kalanie. Now, remember. All of it. And watch.–
Watch what?
She didn't know—not really—but when he rose from bed and readied for the day, she hurried to fulfill his commands before he needed to actually give them. It was easier that way. The fog was less thick when he wasn't speaking, and the quicker she acted, the less he needed to speak.
So she helped him dress, buttoning his shirt with fingers that hardly felt her own, and she followed him into the corridor. He was talking, but it was useless prattle, not commands. She didn't have to obey. She didn't even have to listen—
Except maybe she should.
Maybe this was what she was meant to watch.
"—Taku thinks it's time to make a final claim on Tourin. This is the moment, Kal. Once we have the half-breed's land, only Gandara remains in our way. Then we'll own it all."
Masaru stopped before the bank of windows at the hall's end. It had been long weeks since a corpse had cooled on this steel flooring, but Kalanie nearly dove into the dark rather than face the memories stirring within her. Only the drone of Masaru's voice kept her present.
"We'll be staying here," he drawled. "I argued for that. No need to dirty our hands in a bloody fight."
She peered out across the rolling landscape. Mountains rose in the distance, and a forest of trees crowned in orange leaves stretched all the way to the foothills. The Woods of War, on the northern border of what had once been Alaric.
Masaru rapped a knuckle against the glass. "The last attempt we made on Tourin ended in disaster. The half-breed's second-in-command caught wind of our plans, and he and the Jaganshi ruined our efforts. But that was before." A pleased smile danced on his lips. "This time tomorrow, Tourin's last stronghold will be besieged, and Taku's got the half-breed's allies so distracted in the Forest of Fools that they'll never reach Tourin before the fortress falls. What a time to be alive, Kal."
Chuckling, he turned from the windows. "Come. We've a busy day ahead of us."
The fog rose.
She went.
–What did you see?– The voice found her in the midst of night, parting the haze and drawing her into the light.
For a beat, its question made no sense. She had seen what she'd always seen. The fortress's featureless walls. Puppets waiting in the courtyard—an army assembled. Their puppeteer masters toasting at a feast. Taku presiding over it all.
Uncertain, she showed those things to the voice.
–Good. All good. We need more of this. More information. Kalanie, you must watch. You must see everything they show you.–
See everything.
Like the attack on Tourin.
She remembered, then, what the smoldering demon had shown her so long ago—how he had taken her into his mind and shown her things he had lived. Fumbling to frame it properly, she grabbed the memory of Masaru standing before the windows, staring toward Tourin in the far off distance, and she played it back for the voice.
Its response was instant. Visceral. Not words so much as feelings. Anger and determination burning like twin flames against her awareness.
Then the voice was gone and she was alone in the darkness.
"How is this possible? How could they have known?" Masaru stalked through the bedroom's sliding door just as dusk fell. His rage filled the room with a tension that raised the hair across Kalanie's arms.
After all, she knew what often came with his rage.
Standing at the window, waiting for him as she'd been bidden, Kalanie didn't turn. "What happened?"
His shoes clacked against the steel flooring as he crossed to her side. "The bastards were ready for us. Our army was decimated before it even reached the fortress's walls." Striking like a snake, so quick she couldn't even think to avoid him, he grabbed her chin. "Those damn detectives killed our people. Tell me you see how horrible that is."
"Of course. Disastrous."
But was it?
Who had died? Puppets? Puppeteers?
Was either such a shame?
He studied her, his eyes narrowed in calculation. Whatever he saw seemed enough to satisfy him. Releasing her chin, he righted the collar of his shirt and turned back for the door. "Stay here, Kal. I won't need your company tonight."
As the door hissed shut, she sank into an armchair beside the window and drew her knees to her chest. Her mind made slow work of what he'd said. Tourin hadn't fallen. The detectives had intervened. Somehow they had known.
As if she'd summoned it, the voice appeared. –We owe you.–
It had never visited her outside the dark of night. He had always been mere feet away, asleep in his own bed just out of reach, but now he was gone. She was alone. So she whispered, "We?"
–Tourin would have fallen today. If not for your warning.–
But how? How had her warning been enough? "Who are you?"
–You already know.–
The words brought with them a simmering heat. It slid within her, filling the last of the shadowed crevices that once consumed her. She welcomed it, wholly and without reservation.
"Hiei."
–Hn.–
Wrapping her arms about her shins, she squeezed her eyes shut. "But how?"
–Watch.–
AN: You know, I tried to think of a million ways that Mazou didn't have to die here, but none of them were right. Masaru wants Kalanie broken, and what better way to ruin her than forcing her to kill someone she cares about. It was heartbreaking to write though.
But at least she's not entirely alone, right?
Also, this chapter title, 'Easier to Just Swim Down', is easily my favorite Hamilton line. Such a powerful, beautiful (in a terrible sort of way) way to capture grief. It moves me every time.
Let me know what you think! I always love hearing from you. Thanks to everyone who reviewed last chapter!