Oathbreaker: A Dark Fantasy Web Serial-Chapter 24Arc 8: : Renascentia Sanguinis

I stared at my squire in muted shock. Of everything she might have said in that moment, this strayed far from anything I might have expected. She didn’t look guilty or emotional at the confession. She didn’t look like anything, really, like she’d just informed me about some tiring chore she’d completed.

A long moment of uncomfortable silence passed before I managed to find words. “You told me your grandmother died of grief after the death of your parents.”

“She was the daughter of Astraea Carreon, and her mother’s disciple.” Then, after a moment’s pause Emma asked, “Do you understand how our Art works?”

“…You have power over your own blood,” I said slowly, not sure what the purpose of this aside was. “You can conjure phantasms from it.”

“Our magic,” Emma explained in a much calmer voice than before, “our Blood Art, stems from memory. From death and domination. It is not just our blood, but the blood we’ve spilled over the centuries as well. Echoes, my grandmother used to call them.”

Necromancy, I realized. Blood Art was a forbidden magic for good reason, though there were still some noble families who guarded them. It was a generational magic, not something one could simply choose not to be host to.

“Blood begets blood, she used to say…” A faint smile quirked the corner of Emma’s mouth. “We did not cover our ancestral castle in so much horror just for the aesthetic of it. There was power there, and we Carreons were its masters. My technique, Shrike Forest? It is but one of an arsenal of abilities branching from my true magic.”

She placed a hand to her chest, as though feeling her own heartbeat. “I can feel it all in here. Just like your magic, I presume? Only I was born with mine. I’ve heard the whispers of my ancestors from the moment I opened my eyes… I knew the true name of the Carreon Blood Art before I even knew the name of my mother.”

She looked up at me then, and was that a swirl of crimson in her eyes, eating through the golden-brown? “There is one technique, taught only to the daughters of House Carreon and only taught once. You see, once you learn of this spell, you only have two options; to kill, or to die. My grandmother taught me the day she died, her final lesson.”

“What is this magic?” I asked, feeling a creeping dread even as I asked the words.

“I think its name explains its purpose well enough.” Emma spoke in a strangely cheerful voice, though her face looked more ashen than usual. “Renascentia Sanguinis.”

“Rebirth in Blood?” My archaic Oroion wasn’t the best.

“A means to obtain a form of immortality,” Emma continued in that same horribly light voice. “At a certain cost.”

I thought I understood, but the idea of what she implied struggled to emerge in words. “Emma, are you telling me that your grandmother tried to—”

“Steal my body, yes. The ritual transforms you into a homunculus of sorts, a hemophage made entirely of ichor, which then attacks and replaces the circulatory system of the host. A recurring practice amongst my ancestors, though the tradition mellowed many generations before even Astraea’s time… You see, the abominations created by the process weren’t exactly human.”

“Your ancestors were vampires,” I said in realization.

Emma nodded. “Some of them, at least. The process is messy and has many unpredictable side effects. After more than a few conflicts within the House itself, a new practice of transferring just enough blood to an heir to impart memory and power became more commonplace. My mother did that with me not long before she died.”

She lifted her hand up, studying that gauntlet which so resembled a stylization of a skinned appendage. “When I tell you that my ancestors live inside my blood, that I am Carreon to my veins, that is not just poetic drivel, but a literal truth. My mother lives within me, as her mother lived in her, and so on down through the centuries… This was our loophole to avoid having our souls interred in Draubard per the God-Queen’s law.”

She closed the gauntlet into a fist. “They’re all in here. But my grandmother wished to go a step further, to become me.”

I found myself pacing as I took this in. My boots crunched over rotten leaves for a minute before I paused between Emma and the cave, and as one detail struck me I found myself speaking it aloud. “Emma… If you only learn this ritual by performing it or surviving it, then—”

“Yes!” She gave me mock applause. “You realize the truth. It wasn’t the first time.”

“Then, your grandmother was…”

“She wasn’t Astraea,” Emma said darkly. “But she might have been. Anastasia Carreon survived my great-grandmother’s attempt to steal her body in her youth. Astraea sought to live eternally young, you see, to indulge in her tragic and hateful romance with Jon Orley through all time. A way in which she might escape her own death and damnation, I believe now, and so she would stay youthful for her scorched lover.”

In a more musing tone she added, “Astraea was considered a great romantic by the standards of my family.”

“That’s… sick.” I couldn’t find any other word for it. To take the bodies of your own children, over and over, and use those bodies to…

Emma only shrugged. “That is what it is to be Carreon. My grandmother did not perform the Renascentia on my mother, because she had no desire to repeat her own mother’s crimes… But when my parents died, her mortality bared its fangs. We Carreons never die easy, you see. Our blood starts to rebel as we age, to become volatile and devour us from within, a consequence of the tampering we do to our own vitae. Grandmother recalled that in death she would go to Hell due to Astraea’s pact with the Zosite, and she panicked. And besides…”

Emma paused and turned her face to the side. “She never loved me like she loved my mother.”

I closed my eyes for a beat, getting a grip on the disgust I felt in that moment. Why did she tell me this now? To make some kind of point? Did Emma want me to know this bleak history so I would see her in a different light, or did she want comfort in her way?

The look on her face did not welcome vapid reassurances or support. Emma watched me with a calculating intensity as she waited for my response. And I thought I understood.

“That drama last night with Lillian and Ildeban…” My mind worked furiously as this new information set some of the puzzle pieces in place. “That wasn’t about intimidating me or trying to pick a fight, was it? Lillian Rue was Astraea’s handmaiden, and…”

And she thought it would be Astraea herself shadowing me, not Emma Orley. Some of the old woman’s choice of words made more sense as I recalled them with this new knowledge.

“You understand.” Emma nodded sharply. “Good. I’d never met her before, but I sense that Rue witch is more clever than she seems. Had it actually been her mistress lurking inside my veins, that confrontation would have gone quite differently. Her story about not believing Ildeban that I lived was hogwash. That appearance was calculated.”

“She gave up and left right after realizing you weren’t who she thought you were,” I said in further realization. “Damn. I completely missed that.”

“It would not have been obvious without this dreary little intermission,” Emma noted with more of her usual dryness.

Studying her another moment, I lowered my voice and spoke softly. “You never told me any of this.”

She shrugged again. “What would be the purpose? It’s not a point of pride or shame for me. I defended myself, and whatever respect I may have held for my grandmother, she was a wicked old crone. Her only redeeming quality was that she loved her daughter enough not to repeat history long before my birth. My mother had a sweet temper for one of us, suited neither to war or conquest, a great part of the reason we abandoned Liutgarde in the end… But I had more in common with Grandmother, and her affection for her only surviving child did not extend so fiercely to me.”

She trailed off a moment before adding, “It was my fourteenth birthday when it happened. Had it not been for Nath, I would have died that night. She intervened in her way and provided me the means to protect myself. And so began the path that led you to me.”

How different would things be, I wondered, if it were actually Anastasia or even Astraea behind that now-familiar face staring at me then? Would circumstances have still caused our paths to cross? Would Emma Carreon have become yet another of the Headsman’s victims?

Or worse, would everything have played out the same, save that a mad old sorceress walked beside me all this time, only revealing her true nature in the most opportune moment to put a blade in my back?

“You defended yourself,” I said with fierce insistence. “You were a child. This doesn’t make you evil.”

“That’s not the point!” Emma sighed in exasperation. “The point is that I cannot simply choose not to… Iron Wheels of Hell, what I’m trying to say is that I do not need your protection! If you’re going to send me away, then be honest about why. Are you doing it to protect me from whatever cursed fate you think you’re barreling towards, or because you are afraid that you will fail again?”

I couldn’t meet her eye. “I already said it. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry about what happened to you.”

She spoke in a small but fierce voice. “I do not seek your pity, Alken. I may have adopted the name Orley in defiance of them, but I am also Carreon and always will be. And yet… I have seen what my ancestors are and have no interest in it. At the end, my grandmother was something less than human, a creature of fear and impulse. The thing she transformed into when she used that secret technique was a wretched creature. It whispered with a hundred voices and mewled for my body like a starving infant. That is no true power, not in my eyes. But this, on the other hand…”

Her eyes rolled downward, and with a single sweeping motion Emma flung her cape back and drew her sword. The heirloom blade of House Carreon gleamed crimson and gold, its basket hilt inlaid with precious rubies and its blade reflecting a bloody sheen like it was cast in firelight. The horned cairnhawk stretched its wings on the guard, its talons reaching for prey.

“Mara’s Talon.” Emma named the blade, the first time I’d heard it spoken aloud. “Forged from blood and blessed gold by Mara Carreon, the founder of my line, in the very year when the Oroion Empire sunk into the sea! Isn’t it a beautiful thing? This is power. Not castles and armies and legends of fear, not dark rituals or monstrous blood. My arm is strength. This talon is strength!”

She pointed at me with the sword then. Not a challenge, though its tip glinted razor sharp as it hovered near my collar bone. “You showed me that. You showed it to me when the very angels of Heaven heeded your call and you challenged Hell itself for my soul. You showed me that day you cast the head of Leonis Chancer down before the feet of the Emperor of the Accorded Realms, and earned a place by his side. With the sword, I can be mighty.”

“That isn’t the lesson I meant to impart!” My throat felt tight as the words burst out.

“No…” Emma studied me thoughtfully and lowered the sword. “You have, at every turn, held yourself back from true strength. I’ve seen that as well, the chains you fetter yourself with. I understood myself to be one of them quickly enough.”

Emma stepped forward, turned the sword point down, and jabbed me in the chest with the hawk emblem on the hilt. “I am not a burden,” she spat. “I refuse it. And neither will I become some kind of monster because you weren’t guarding me close enough. Do you think so little of me, you ass?”

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

The girl — a woman now, in truth — was almost a foot shorter than me, a difference more apparent as she stepped so close and glared up into my face. I stared at her, at a loss for words. Whatever look I wore, it made Emma snort contemptuously and step back.

“This partnership isn’t some test. It isn’t some labor or curse upon you, and if I’d known you thought that way I’d have knocked you in the skull much earlier. I chose to lash my ship to yours because I thought you believed in me, Alken.”

Her voice lowered into something less angry and more uncertain. “When did you stop believing in me?”

I started to deny it, but paused as I felt a prickle in my throat warning me against the lie. I realized I had been wary of her. How many times had I convinced myself that it was my responsibility to keep Emma away from the lefthand path, warning myself against what she might become if I failed as her mentor and guardian? At some point, I’d decided I was already failing, that all my own mistakes and compromises had poisoned the well too much. I made the determination to form more of a distance between us, even if only subconsciously.

How arrogant. And all this time, she’d seen through me. It must have been infuriating to be in that position, to wallow under the weight of my ambivalence.

“I don’t know what to say, Em.” I showed her my burnt hands. “I don’t know what I’m doing more than half the time. I told you at the start that I might be a shit role model.”

“It is the prerogative of heroes to blunder about and still win at the end,” Emma said philosophically. “And I will be a hero. Every lord and angel who saw me and believed they perceived a nascent monster will eat that thought.”

Her voice dropped its edge of humor. “I cannot achieve my dream with clean hands.” She showed her hands to me, along with the ghoulish armor that encased them. “They never were in the first place. So stop shielding me and let me show you what I’m capable of.”

“I won’t stop protecting you,” I told her, feeling a sudden wash of stubbornness. “As long as any of you are in the reach of my blade, I’ll kill whatever or whoever tries to take you and the others from me. Even if I were to dismantle the lance and keep a distance, that would never change. I’ve lost too much, Emma. The moment I become the kind of man who’d sacrifice you for some kind of goal or ambition, then I will have truly lost myself. The Accord is just a word. I’m fighting because that word includes you, and Hendry, and Lisette.”

Because it was Rosanna’s dream. Because one day, her children would inherit it, and they would have enemies too.

Something very like fondness passed over Emma’s face. “I know all of that, you big fool. I’m not asking you to stop fighting for me — I know that’s a battle I’ll never win. Just let me participate in those struggles, pretty please?”

I bit off my laugh and coughed. “Alright. Fine. But Emma, the Briar has been doing this a long time. If they offer you the strength you’re seeking…”

“They can’t,” she said with cold certainty. “I seek no kingdoms. Should any devil offer me one, then they will only succeed in enticing me to slay them and prove I didn’t need what they offered after all.” In a lighter tone she added, “Now, I’ve divulged my feelings just like you asked. May I please get on with calling up the evil faeries?”

What was with this day? First Vicar admonishing me, then Emma. And before them, a long succession of broken assumptions and bittersweet realizations. Was I doomed to misunderstand everyone?

I blew out a breath and nodded. “Yes, we can. You can. But before that, there’s something I need to tell you.”

Emma had started to turn back to her briar circle, but paused and quirked a dark eyebrow at me. I hesitated but a moment, and decided it was best to do this now instead of waiting for the worst moment when the truth might reveal itself without my consent. She’d revealed her uncomfortable truths to me, and now it was time for me to do the same.

Not all of it — we didn’t have time for all of it — but at least the parts she deserved to know.

“Someone else has been listening to this conversation,” I admitted, steeling myself against her impending anger. “I haven’t been wearing this fur because I’m afraid of catching a chill. I should have told you earlier, and I’m sorry for that, but you see…”

When Emma was done laughing, she walked in a circle around me and inspected the pelt, wearing a huge grin on her face the whole while.

“I’m sorry,” she giggled, unable to contain her mirth. “You’re telling me that’s the mighty Renuart Kross slumped over your shoulders? That is the dreaded Vicar who’s been dogging the both of us ever since your fight with my great-grandfather?”

“The very same,” I confirmed, feeling more than a little unbalanced by her reaction. It was only then I realized I’d never heard Emma laugh before. Truly laugh. Not just a snicker, or a snide chuckle. She’d all but howled with laughter for several minutes after I finished giving her the brief of what happened in Osheim.

I hadn’t told her everything, but I’d given her a rundown of how the Priory was subverted by the Crowfriars, how they’d tried to use the Zoscian — a scrap of the God of Hell’s own flesh — to open a portal that would allow the infernal angels of that realm to flood our world. I explained how Lias stole the artifact, how Vicar joined forces with me to protect himself from the Knights Penitent and the angel Chamael, who believed he’d helped Lias and been half right. I told her the short version of our final confrontation beneath the grand cathedral at Baille Os, where we’d dueled only for the abgrüdai to appear and try to claim the prize for themselves.

I did not tell her about the succubus, and I was vague about Delphine, but got her mostly caught up with why Vicar was in the form of a scrap of skin and hair that I wore as an accessory. I’d expected her to be furious that I’d taken the very devil who’d tried to claim her soul for the Iron Tribunal as a confidant and ally, even see it as a betrayal.

Instead, she’d found it hilarious.

Stepping closer, she inspected the pelt and flashed her teeth in a wide smile. “Oh, this is just perfect!”

“Perfect?” I shook my head in bewilderment. “I thought you’d be furious.”

“Why?” She blinked at me. “You turned one of our most dogged… heh, dogged…” She snickered at her unintentional jest. “You turned one of our most persistent and dangerous enemies into an asset. I would have done the same, and not been nearly so half-hearted about it.”

She reached out to poke at the silent visage on my right shoulder, only for it to suddenly flash its fangs and let out a ripping snarl.

“Touch me, little witch, and I shall take the hand.” Vicar’s hoarse voice emerged with as much threat as I’d ever heard from him.

Emma leapt back, startled, but recovered quickly and grinned even wider. She ignored the talking pelt and looked at me. “Does he do tricks?”

“He can breathe fire,” I admitted. “And grow wings.”

“Excellent!” She exclaimed, still trying and failing to stifle unsettlingly girlish giggles, something I hadn’t even known her capable of until the last several minutes. “We should take him to carnival. We’ll make a fortune!”

“I take it all back,” Vicar told me. “Telling her was a bad idea. If I’d known Mara’s Heir was such a vapid thing, I might not have tried so hard to defeat you both.”

“Alright!” I shrugged my shoulders to get Vicar to focus, and Emma managed to stifle her snickers long enough to pay attention. I pointed to her ritual circle. “Time’s wasting. We’ve had our heart to heart, now let’s get on with it.”

“Right, of course.” She all but skipped over to the circle, her black cape swishing as she stepped lightly into it. I shook my head, perplexed at the transformation in her mood.

“What a sinister little creature,” Vicar said musingly while Emma was focused on her spell.

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“You mean you missed it?” If Vicar had an eyebrow to raise, I imagine it would have then. “Come now, surely you felt the movement of energies?”

I frowned, trying to sense what he was referring to. Something did feel different, had for some minutes now, but I’d been too preoccupied with the argument to notice.

“Briar magic is nuanced,” Vicar explained, “but its core tenants are quite visceral. The thorn that pricks, the barb that bites into the flesh and refuses to be pulled, the vine that creeps and strangles. She understands the crafts Nath taught her well, I see.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked in exasperation.

“The tension between the two of you had been building for some time,” the devil whispered. “It could have very well destroyed your rapport with one another, set you towards conflict and resentment. A slow poison, one in which the pain is relatively light yet lasts long… which is worse in some ways, and close to the Briar’s aspect. It fuels the negative energies involved in turn.”

A creeping sense of unease came over me as I began to understand what he implied. He paused a moment, letting it sink in, then continued.

“This location is also close to the Briar. You see how the light shies from this spot, how rot sets into the trees and parasites bloom so vigorously? The girl chose her location well… and her catalyst.”

“She goaded me into that conversation on purpose,” I said in quiet realization. “Gave herself an excuse to say a lot of things she’d been keeping inside, and manipulated me into doing the same.”

“Hard words and bitter truths spoken aloud can be cathartic, if painful. Like plucking a barbed thorn from your flesh. It bleeds, and hurts, but afterward there is healing… and an opening through which the poison can be drawn out.”

Inside her circle, Emma lifted up a metal-shelled hand and made a beckoning gesture towards the cave. She whispered words I could not quite make out, yet the withered trees around us, the creeper vines and the fungus, all the sickness that lay in that patch of forest, it all shuddered.

Inside the cave, something moved. The cords of plant growth bursting from within quivered and began to shift, writhing from the purposeful randomness of natural growth into something more like a pattern.

Plucking a thorn from flesh so that poison could seep out. I understood. She’d used our pain to draw the Briar close, our mutual anger to give it strength, and then the relief of airing that resentment to complete the ritual. Now all she needed to do was coax what we needed out, the hard part done.

My chest felt heavy. “Was all of that just to get a result, Em?”

I hadn’t been speaking to Vicar, but he answered me. “No doubt she meant everything she said, as did you. But in this, she is very much Carreon. If you wish to resent her for it, then take her example and turn that into an asset. If you don’t, then the Briar will.”

A blast of air escaped the cave. It stank of mildew and decay, a sickly sweet gust that made me cough and lift an arm to cover my face. The vines growing from the darkness were moving with even more life, their animation growing in tempo by the second. On the second burst of putrid air, I understood what I was looking at.

A maw.

“Something’s wrong,” Emma said. A bead of sweat formed on her brow. “This ritual is meant to call a noble of the Briar forth. It’s hardly different from how I summon Qoth, I don’t—”

The trees groaned. They were moving too, their branches turned liquid and tongue-like, their roots bending upward like the legs of some dirt-dwelling spider.

“Beware,” Vicar rumbled from my shoulder. “Something dangerous has decided to heed our call.”

“It’s changing the environment,” I observed. My hand went into the folds of my cloak, seeking the shadow there and reaching into it. My fingers sank into something like water and grasped the oaken hilt of my axe, where it waited patiently in that warmthless place where only the dead are meant to walk.

“No…” Vicar’s eyelights flashed brighter. “It isn’t changing. Their domain is emerging.”

Another blast of breath cascaded out from the cave, and this time it was powerful enough to kick up grass and leaves, to make the trees creak as though in a storm. I stumbled to one side, my cloak whipping in the gale.

Emma also lost her balance in the blast, and fell out of her protective circle. Something emerged from the cave, the mouth, and darted towards her.

I only caught a glimpse of it through the curtain of blowing leaves. It was fast, just a blur of motion from something solid, almost like the hill had become a huge, bloated beast and spat at her.

That’s exactly it, some dark insight informed me even as I lunged forward.

I slammed into Emma and shoved her out of the way just as the shape whipped past. She fell back as the wind kept howling, tripping on her cape and spitting a curse as she rolled into the fall. Part of the thing hit my arm, mostly my gauntlet, and I heard a hissing sound.

The thing that came from the cave landed on a tree behind us, and in that very moment the wind stopped. I got a good look at what had come out.

It was… slime. Just as I’d imagined as it happened, the groaning hill — which still let out labored gasps of breath even then — had spat something foul from its depths into the woods. It looked like a glob of phlegm coughed up by a plague-ridden giant, a viscous mass of black ichor that stuck to the side of a large oak. It sloughed downward with a lethargic motion, dripping its own mass down into the undergrowth.

Some of it was on my gauntlet. It hissed and steamed like acid. Gritting my teeth, I clenched my fist and summoned aureflame, causing the ichor to burn away. It left the metal disfigured as though by years of rust. I helped Emma up, and cast a weary glance back at the cave.

“Burning Wheels of Hell,” Emma cursed. “What is that?!”

The mass of black slime melted from the tree, leaving a stain there like a burn mark. It bubbled and oozed, pulsed once.

“That,” Vicar said with a wariness I’d rarely heard from him, “is one of the Sidhe of the Briar. An elf tainted by qliphoth.”

It wasn’t the only one. There was movement in the forest. The shadows had grown deep, the scant daylight in the canopy vanished as though night had fallen prematurely. Whispering voices came from all around us.

“This shouldn’t have happened!” Emma sounded more annoyed than scared. “I provided all the proper offerings for one of their nobles to treat with us!”

“You succeeded,” I told her as I rested my axe on one shoulder. Vicar growled from the opposite side of my skull, his pelt heating up as he readied power, and Emma brandished her own sword in response to the congregating threat around us. “You called them, Em, just like we wanted. We just got more than we bargained for.” To Vicar I asked, “How many?”

When he remained silent, I spoke more intently. “Vicar?

“…All of them.” The burning lights that passed for the devil’s eyes grew larger. “They have dragged us into their domain.”

No sooner had he said this than the bubbling mass of liquid darkness settled into a pool, and something began to rise from it.