Villains (19 page)

Chapter 1

She was in the dark for a long time, a tangible, slick darkness that made her weightless. Cold lived in her bones, turned her blood frozen and stole her breath.

She didn’t fight.

Not when footsteps crunched the snow, not when ice turned to metal and everything she used to be became small and insignificant. She regarded the sky—a tumultuously white and gray churning above her, as a clamp came over the small contraption and she felt snuffed from existence.

Juddering through the expanse of time and space inside a tiny golden pocket watch was disorientating. Kaliel found herself ticking out the beat as though it were her own nonexistent heart—the only thing left to comfort her in her non-corporeal capacity. The steady rhythm of the watch only amplified all the grief of her betrayal, something she couldn’t change if she wanted to. Part of her felt like the blizzard was far away, ice stretching across rocky surfaces of land, a full onslaught of retaliation against her. The silent sonic boom she had created before being stuffed into a home of metal made it a hundred times worse, took a hundred thousand more lives, erased every living thing from one end of Terra to the other.

She was only trying to hold onto the boy she destroyed.

She felt like a misfired gun shot at close range. She was the aftermath of a nuclear bomb and whether or not the cold struck the wind out of lungs, the wave of pure Amethyst Flame was sure to rot bodies from the inside out. Kaliel couldn’t hide it anymore; she couldn’t deny it or run from it or change it or pretend it wasn’t true.

She was the enemy.

Whoever had affixed her to the small metal prison lived on the wind and in futuristic dark spaces and in places that were so silent she wondered if sound existed. She was interrupted periodically by the splash of rain on stone, the pound of hooves through trees, the unfamiliar babble of rubber on concrete, crackle of fire and the din of voices speaking all at once. She felt drowned by their acidic tones and their bellowing grunts, the idea of shrinking into the contraption effervescent against the braying noise around her.

Muffled voices cut out by scuffles between her captor and their opponents ensued, the pocket watch jostling, making Kaliel dizzy. She wanted to reveal herself and make the fighting stop but the memory of Cassareece’s syrupy sweet voice forced Kaliel into the undertow. She was an unnatural thing. She heard the contact of limbs on limbs, sword against sword, grunts and guffaws of a fistfight. There were words but Kaliel couldn’t make them out, spoken in some language she hadn’t been old enough to learn. That was the worst of it. This wasn’t the first time darkness ensnared her in its heavy arms. There was a time when she found the sky behind a wall of liquid fire, and as she hit the horizon, her essence winked away from the land, drawn into the safety of comforting arms and velvet cushions. The time alone had been excruciating until Krishani opened the box and unable to speak she glowed. He was always home—she would always belong to him, but he was dead—destroyed and there were no rocks heavy enough to crush her.

The scuffle came to some dead halt as a voice Kaliel did understand cut through the wind.

“High … King … Tor?”

Kaliel’s heart would have stopped if she had one. She waited with bated breath for the villain to speak again but there was a snickering through a crowd, followed by the sweeping of something across grass, like hands feathering fingers through tall strands. Kaliel imagined her captor standing ramrod straight as the smell of the Valtanyana came closer. Kaliel hadn’t met this one, but the way his body clicked in awkward sequences made Kaliel think of him as an insect.

“Zion,” Tor sneered, seeming completely unruffled.

Tor.

Kaliel sunk. She didn’t realize that of all those who could have stuffed her into a pocket watch it would have been Tor. The High King of her battered youth, the very king she should have served in a war against the Valtanyana. The First Era was a fuzzy string at the edge of her essence and while she tried to pull it closer all she succeeded in doing was unraveling herself more until it was as though she was locked in her own self created spider’s web. Tor should have hated her for the betrayal. He shouldn’t have found her—a last tiny relic—all hope of shoving the Valtanyana back into their deadly prisons dashed. She heard Tor gulp as the putrid scent of Zion hit her.

“You must forgive us, Toraque for being very confused,” Zion began, an enchanting lilt to his melodic, clicking voice. “Is it truly necessary for us to fight for what is rightfully ours?”

Tor took a step back, and Kaliel felt his hand close around the little chamber she was in. So he knew as well as she did what they wanted most. She couldn’t blame them, in a single breath she decimated everything on Terra and for that there was no better punishment than shame and consciousness. Thousands of microscopic quiet hours to relive the look in Krishani’s eyes, the feel of his thumb brushing her cheek, his lips on hers as the Vultures folded him into their ranks.

“You’re not here to negotiate,” Tor spat. Kaliel couldn’t help but think Tor was all brawn and muscle, something she hadn’t really thought of before. She used to believe he was a benevolent leader, regal and noble. The High King Tor in all the stories was a gentle creature, bound to the land. He instigated the Lands of Peace movement, cared for every Lord and Lady under his protection. Kaliel couldn’t help but scoff at the tales of grandeur that followed this scrapper. Tor was nothing but a coot, well dressed and clever.

The snickers resumed throughout what Kaliel sensed to be the others, nine resilient, thoroughbred members of the Valtanyana, the original tyrannical and insane rulers of the Lands Across the Stars. Around them were the staccato bursts of squeaky laughter that Kaliel didn’t recognize. Creatures from the Lands of Beasts maybe, Kaliel couldn’t make out what they were, but their laughter filled her with dread, as though they were already celebrating their victory.

Zion sniggered, a grotesque kind of sniffling and slurping sound that sent shudders through Kaliel. “No, I’m impartial to the capture and kill method.”

Kaliel felt cold on the inside, the kind she couldn’t ignore until it wore off on its own. Tor flinched backwards and she felt them behind her, the laughing beasts nipping near the pocket where Tor concealed her.

“Another time perhaps,” Tor said, and she felt him bend over in a cordial bow before the dizzying sensation hit her and they catapulted through time and space aimlessly afoot in all the in between places Kaliel was unfamiliar with.

Kaliel held onto the shards of what Cassareece had said. She couldn’t stop them from awakening, couldn’t stop them from hunting Tor, but she could take herself out of the equation. Tor must have thought he’d sweep in, whisk her away to become his champion. She never thought long and hard about why Crestaos had come for her, and why Tor didn’t. Perhaps he was waiting for her to pledge her allegiance to him, appear on the battlefield at the height of the war and help him as she once did.

Make the stars fall a second time.

This time she brought the apocalypse upon herself. She let it worry itself into her bones and let it destroy all the things she loved. Tor lived on the other side of the frozen tundra she caused and not once had he spoken to her. Not when he put her in the watch and not when he traveled through the darkest spaces between the Lands Across the Stars. It took her awhile to realize why a man of his stature, a man who could do unthinkably heroic things would refuse to speak to her, and it was with undiluted clarity that she understood.

It wasn’t her betrayal.

It wasn’t the war.

Tor thought she couldn’t feel, think, see, hear, or act.

He thought she was unconscious.

She wasn’t—and harrowingly—she was able to do one thing.

Watch.

Rain on slick stone, honking but not from birds, the squish and squeak of leather, footsteps clacking up wooden steps, a hollow feeling to the tap, tap, tap, as a fist hit wood. Startled gasp, crackling flames and the smell of hazelnut. Kaliel warmed at the thought of safe places and Avristar, roasted hazelnuts in a cast iron pan, wrestling them open with slim, nimble fingers. The urge to gasp, choke, vomit and cry hit her, but she tamped it down as a voice left them and Tor set the pocket watch on a flat surface. In Kaliel’s mind it was a tree stump, but it could have been anything. The face fell open and light poured in, an ivory ceiling speckled with odd little bumps and winks of silver. She couldn’t see anything else, and Tor’s ability to pace was like that of a mad man’s.

She heard his footsteps move to the door and back again, ensuring they were in fact very alone. His face loomed over parts of the pocket watch, a silver gray blur against the peripheral of the curved edges.

“I’m sorry,” Tor began. He sounded truly distrait, sincere and fragile. The Tor she thought she knew was never fragile. She went to speak but he barreled on. “I shouldn’t have listened to Avristar—to the Great Hall. I shouldn’t have granted their demand.”

What demand? Kaliel felt like she had been set upon the dance floor and spun too many times by too many partners and left with a dizzying sense of perception. She tried to let out a pip but it seemed Tor didn’t acknowledge her.

He sighed. “I never thought you’d do it again, Aria. And if you did I thought it would be as it was in the First Era. Victory. I thought you’d destroy the Valtanyana once and for all.”

He paced and she felt sick, the urge so strong she thought there was bile in her essence. There was of course nothing. She was all Amethyst Flame and nothing more, a prisoner to High King Tor, the failure of all the Lands Across the Stars and murderer to her soul mate. Thinking about Krishani made it seem like swords were stabbing her clean through, and she spasmed at the feeling, darkness covering her even before the lid of the pocket watch was pushed shut. She wanted death, or the epitome of something like death. She wanted to be erased because how could Tor allow something as volatile as her to exist?

He had to find a way to destroy her.

“I’ll fix you.”

No.

Kaliel heard his scarce whisper and if she could have blanched she would have. He couldn’t have said it, not in any sane capacity would he have wanted to help her. She hurt him, just as much as she hurt everyone else. He couldn’t sit in his fortress and wait for them to attack. He had to disappear and he had to destroy her. That was the only surefire way the Valtanyana would never get what they wanted from her. She was too dangerous, too unstable, too melancholy and too willing to erase the Lands Across the Stars. She had to die—it was the only way to rid her of the weight on her chest, the memories flickering across her form, and the gnawing, stringent feeling.

Death in the snow was all she wanted.

To be lost and never found.

“I will fix you, Aria,” Tor said, his voice roped and thick. Her vision clicked in again, the defined line of his jaw covered in tiny gray scales and horns. He flexed his jaw as though determined, and she wanted to scream, bat her arms against his strong chest, cry and bray and beg him to kill her.

Kill me
,
kill me, kill me, kill me,
she thought with as much strength as she could muster, all the while envisioning herself on the floor at his feet, a stark, helpless expression across her face.

Footsteps approached and like a fox he swiped the pocket watch off the smooth surface, stuffing it into his breast pocket. Kaliel listened to the labored beat of his breaths and the steady
lub dub
of his heart muscle as the ticking in the pocket watch rose to a crescendo. It cast a measuring stick over all the other sounds, from the startled young woman who entered the room and fainted, to the older woman apologizing and telling Tor he needed to leave because there were bobbies on the doorstep. Kaliel didn’t know what a bobby was, but she couldn’t protest and that jarring feeling returned as Tor transported for what seemed like the thousandth time since that sparkling snow covered day.

Fix her, he was going to fix her, and she wasn’t going to let him.

***