The Flame of Wrath (57 page)

             
Angrily, Autumn expelled a violent breath. The fierce heat of smoke raced stingingly over Aurea's face.

             
The Empress screamed and turned her head. She staggered backward, breaking herself of their entanglement.

             
“You hurt me first!” Autumn growled with heated blooms of smoke accentuating each word. She drew back, slipping away from the sword's reach.

             
“Olivia!” Aurea screamed.

             
Startled by the snapped sound of the Empress' voice, Olivia rushed forward. She responded with blind loyalty to her sovereign, needing only a word to act. She was what years of servitude had conditioned her to be, an Enforcer of Virtue, a slayer of darkened souls. 

             
With righteousness teeming through her, she thrust her sword into Autumn's torso. In her mind, she aimed for the beast she knew this woman carried. She fought to kill a pagan abomination and its unholy mother.

             
Autumn momentarily lost sight of the world. Her vision blurred with tears. They trickled down her face, ridding her of a day's battling in a single line upon each cheek. She fell toward the ground with all the might of a crashing giant.

             
Autumn's eyes were steadily losing their strength as her blood spread like liquid fire to scorch the earth. Her eyes darted from the sky above to the thing she saw protruding from her body so morbidly. It did not belong there. She struggled to breath around it, feeling it rise and fall with each painful breath she took. Her trembling hand reached down to hold the hilt when a shaken Olivia staggered backward.

             
The Queen focused her eyes upon the Knight. Her gaze sent the young woman quaking.             

             
“No other way,” Olivia muttered again and again. Her blue eyes stared hauntingly to her feet as she clutched her head.

             
The Empress clutched the scalded left side of her face. It throbbed with pain. The heat which emanated from its surface all but burned her palm. In that moment, she did not realize that the monstrosities of her soul had manifested themselves upon her skin. Instead all she could do was shake with rage as she stared to Autumn's collapsed body.

             
The woman Aurea saw laying upon the earth was a traitor. She had not betrayed the crown. In that instant, Aurea cared nothing for her title. All that mattered to her was that Autumn had spurned her, spurned their love for one another only to have Aurea find her with child months later.

             
Aurea hated her. She hated all that Autumn represented. The only way to be free of her spell was to rid herself of the woman who had cast it.

             
Aurea's voice called Autumn's eyes away from the woman who knelt huddled against the mountain with her hands clutching her swirling mind.

             
“I promised myself that I would hold you one more time,” Aurea admitted. She limped forward with hatred in her eyes. That emotion suddenly fell away. Sadness prevailed instead. “One more time.”

             
Autumn hated herself for feeling the pain she did when she looked into Aurea's tortured eyes. She wanted to damn Aurea. She wanted to angrily snatch the life from her body. She wanted to hate her with every fiber of her being, but too much of her still loved Aurea. No matter what had happened, no matter how their fates had been twisted, she remembered the woman who had held her in her arms on a dreamy summer night.

             
The Empress in gold lowered to the ground. She straddled Autumn's hips. A lump welled in her throat as her knee felt the touch of hot blood washing against its soft shore. Her trembling hand reached out. Her fingertips ran the length of Autumn's paling cheek.

             
As they peered into each other, they realized that they would forever be locked together in love and hate. Their eyes could not and would not look away from the others. This was their final embrace. This was the bitter end to something once so sweet.

             
Aurea lowered her hand lovingly over a proud jaw. She felt the awkward position of her body as something existed between them. Something had always existed between them. Now that something was the sword which stole more of Autumn's life by the moment.

             
Her other hand tenderly caressed a sweat-lined arm then up along its tense shoulder. The fluid actions of her caress came together. They met at an elegant neck. She held her trembling hands around the throat she had once lavished in loving kisses. She tightened her grip relentlessly as tears streamed down her face.

             
Autumn whimpered. She clawed at the hands around her neck. A fire of will stoked itself inside her eyes. She remembered her baby.

             
Ash and bloom. My life to ash so that my child's might bloom
, she prayed to her ancestor Djidjiga and to the Goddess Mother whom Djidjiga loved so dearly. She had struck a mother's bargain. To prove her determination to honor this pact, she fought for the baby she believed in.

             
Her balled fist rose desperately. Autumn pummeled at the temple she had so often smoothed. Her assault was filled with such malice that it could scarcely have come from one who had once been so in love.

             
Die!
, Aurea's eyes pleaded. She tottered and swayed. Her world blurred violently with the last hit to her head.
Why wouldn't she die?

             
A flash of color and a shadow came. Aurea watched as hands possessively grasped hold of Autumn's struggling hands. For a brief moment, she glanced upward.

             
Olivia pressed down on Autumn's wrists. She weighted them mercilessly to the ground on either side of the battling woman's head. “Finish it!” she commanded. In her voice, in her glassy blue eyes, there appeared to be a desire to kill Autumn quickly. Was it a sense of mercy or simply a desire to prove herself to her Empress?

             
The Empress growled loudly as if to push the last of her strength from her body. That summoned strength was inside her hands as they clasped hold of a bloody sword. She rammed forward, stopping only when she heard the piercing sound of the sword embedding itself into the stony earth below.

             
Aurea blinked in disbelief. The world around them roared with deafening silence. Her wide eyes looked down. The silence shattered with brittle sadness.

              Autumn's body bowed upward. She was rigid with pain. Her eyes were far away as if voicing that her soul had gone on to the constellations she loved so deeply. Her breath choked past her lips in sputtered rasps. Then slowly, very slowly Autumn ceased moving. Her eyes closed as her head lolled to the side. She was the picture of stillness. It was then that she finally became the motionless statue Aurea had likened her beauty to the first night she had laid eyes on the woman, her fallen angel.

             
Olivia shakily released the woman's wrists. She sat back on her heels, staring heavily upon the woman. Autumn appeared to be sleeping peacefully, but the sickening feeling consuming her heart knew the truth. Autumn would never wake.

             
Aurea stared down at the beautiful woman beneath her. With hands still loosely enveloping a graceful hilt, she leaned forward. She touched her lips to cooling lips for one final kiss. The lips were soft and yielding but they gave no comfort.

             
Tears streamed down Aurea's face. They fell to pale cheeks, granting her the semblance of her last tears.

             
“I loved you,” Aurea breathed. “Oh how I loved you.” Her voice was a rasp of sobs and rage. She let loose a growl. “I would have given you the world! The world, Autumn! Why didn't you just listen to me?”

             
The Empress sat up abruptly. Her left hand drew back to bestow a stinging slap to the serene face of an angel. She quickly brought her hands to her mouth, crying violently. The horror shown across her face as realization sunk in.

             
Autumn was dead. Her beautiful Autumn was dead. She had not fallen to a Lucidian upon the battlefield as Aurea had feared. Autumn had been murdered by Aurea’s own trembling hands. She had killed her.

             
Aurea released a sound which rattled the rafters of the sky. It was a monstrous sound, birthed of one's own bestial demons, fed by self-destruction. Tears left her more forcibly as she cried all the more. Her head turned. Her eyes widened.

             
Olivia scrambled to her feet. She scooped up Autumn's fallen sword. She roared as she charged toward the snarling beast raging forward.

             
Angry froth hung from vengeful fangs as Soren's herculean jaws snapped open.

             
Screaming, Olivia slashed at him. This was the monster that had killed her brothers and sisters. Their blood still stained his fur. Her sword clanged loudly against his dagger-like teeth.

             
Soren snaked out his massive paw. His claws pierced through her armor before she was batted mercilessly into the mountain.

             
Olivia slid down to the ground. Weakly, she mouthed what little warning she could, but her voice was little more than her last breath. “Run.”

             
“Aurea!” Soren bellowed in a menacing thunder.

             
Aurea rose up from her dead obsession. With wobbling legs, she spirited herself over the cliff's edge. Above the winds of her plummet, she whistled loudly.

             
A giant owl having heard the whistle swooped down from the clouds. Upon its proud back, it caught its mistress.

             
A bestial Soren snarled as he sped forward. His cardinal eyes burned with hatred, but more than anything they glistened with tears. He could smell the blood in the air. He could see the waning lights of the aura which had once been there.

             
Aurea looked beyond her shoulder. Her eyes burned all the more zealously as the wolf drew closer to Autumn's body and released a haunting howl of lament. She knew that sound. Her soul had made that sound the instant she had realized what she had done.

             
An odd sort of accomplishment filled her.

             
I've done it, Aurea thought.

             
The Empress had finally hurt Soren more than she had ever dreamed possible and all it took was the sacrifice of her own heart.

             
Aurea's fingertips traced the skin scarring with each passing moment. For the first time in her entire life, Aurea wondered if perhaps she was the monster Autumn had come to view her as. She exercised that thought from her being.

             
No, she reminded herself. Autumn had been the traitor. Autumn had been the threat to her rule, to her virtuous world.

             
Aurea closed her eyes listening to Soren's cries morph from beast to man. She released a soft moan from her lips, savoring his pains while denying her own.

********
             

             
Zahara had entrusted the army to King Frost. He was a very good man and she knew that he would lead them to safety. However, she could not leave this place without Autumn.

             
Echo and Myth had felt the same. They had all started this day together and the old friends were determined to see it through... together.

             
Why hadn't Soren returned with the Queen?

             
Together, they maneuvered through the flaming field. They moved in the direction that the wolf had last been seen when they heard the wolf's mournful scream. It was echoed again by another painful howl which raged on into a man's raw cries.

             
Zahara's brown eyes welled with tears. Her face blanched sorrowfully. She scanned the horizon to see Echo sinking to her knees. Echo angrily punched at the earth as tears streamed down her face.

             
Standing apart from them, Myth's haunting eyes closed. “The Honored Mother is dead.”

********

              Soren's head was lowered in defeat. He had failed. What good had it done to fight as hard as they had, if this was how it would end? Where was the fairness in it all? Where was the justice?

             
When good people like Autumn died and the wicked thrived, surely there could be no justice left in the world.

             
Soren wrapped Autumn inside his arms then stopped. He had felt the cold reminder of something obscene. A determined hilt shoved against his body as if to put an end to consolation.

             
His bottom lip quivered as his chin dimpled with the onset of anguish. His hand clasped around the hilt. “I'm sorry,” he whispered before his hand pulled the sword from Autumn's body.