Within the passing nine months since the day of their discussion on the 32nd of Hijarr, the Alyi gradually hardened her heart towards him. It was no longer through a saddened lens that Dyiij viewed Rollond. She had separated from the love for him, who she had seen to over many affairs, and even directed him away from Mokallai.
Though during those months, she watched him gradually erode. The time came where he paced restlessly at night. He neither ate or slept, and not even Sanci could retrieve him from the indwelling malignance, what now pulled him with an inviolable hand.
Yet in recalling who he was, she knew he deserved different.
His eyes flickered every night. He felt it, a hot-then-gelid sensation that marked whether he was himself or someone else. Someone whom he didn't know, who kept him up, who Rollond feared. He cast his glance at Sanci, remembering the time he tried to kill Amonthe, his xeigon son.
What if he turned on her? How could he live knowing that something evil slithered underneath his skin?
Yet — why should he care? She was a kyusoa, and all he had to do was bring her blood to Mokallai. Yes, it would be so easy.
He strayed into the kitchen and took a knife from the magnetic sharps-rack. How it gleamed in the light of the winding silver streaks of the night sky. That's right. She trusted him. He could easily slit her throat —
He dropped the knife in the sink and clutched the crown of his head. No. He gave her his word. So long ago he swore he'd protect her. Granted that was regarding Rylieq, who really posed no threat since he became the body of the very aelythian one whom he desired to please. And, Rollond imagined, that was deeply pleasing to the Megynsei.
There was only one solution. He splashed icy water on his face and dried himself with a hand towel, then departed the south-west annex. He knew he would return to her arms. Only then, after Mokallai was at least weakened, he wouldn't be conflicted. He could enjoy Sanci's presence again.
There wasn't a wing of the faajhier or an annex that belonged to Ashenzsi. For whatever his reasons were, he chose to remain in the gardens. It was strange. Or perhaps, not as unusual as Rollond wanted to think. Ashenzsi had stayed in the gardens of the Tenchmok. Maybe he had become used to it.
Either way, despite Rollond's care not to make a single sound by his footfalls, Ashenzsi's ears perked and he lifted his head from the comfort of his headrest. Then rolled over and lifted his shoulders, laying like great cats would in the wilderness. "The time is now?" he asked.
"Yes." Rollond nodded.
"I thought you would have arranged with Lucein to go with the empire backing you."
"He's a fledgling nation. Besides, I doubt that there's all that much of the estate left after the planet's expansion."
"Do you know the nature of Aelyth?"
"No one knows about Aelyth."
Ashenzsi glared at him. "You lie."
Rollond shook his head. "Become the beast and let's go, quietly."
Reluctance marked Ashenzsi's features. Still, he changed, only because Rollond wasn't going to let him remain as he was.
The man gripped the kyusoa by the hair of his mane, and hoisted himself onto the scruff of his neck. In abject resignation, the kyusoa spread his wings and lifted into the pre-dawn sky.
Far away in the east, near the heart of Phiiva, a lone, onion domed structure was all that remained, cresting the precipice of the remaining plot of rock that was once the plateau of the Ankuseth Estate.
They were little more than bodies to their god, the people who prostrated themselves before the puppet, once the young man named Rylieq.
Mokallai, the invisible one standing outside of his marionette, faced west. A broad grin marked his ethereal features, as by the farseeing of his golden eyes, he knew Rollond was coming.
"Inviolable, inviolable; the will of our god is absolute!" his followers droned, all those that were within the Tenchmok, and scores of others outside of its white-washed walls. In fact, the people gathered to him stretched on for miles, from one boarder of the former estate's territory to the next.
Thoughts whirled through his maleficent mind: did he want another Oracle? Or should he use the white-haired man as a host? It was more tempting to kill him outright. With the increase of his own strength, there was almost no use for Rollond.
Yet he sensed the rise of a new nation, the one place where his dominance had not spread. The place where those who refuted his influence as if immune to the molding of his presence were migrating, as if called by his arch nemesis, Dyiij.
He raised Rylieq's hand, lifted the dark-skinned corpse's chin, and opened its eyes.
At once, the lot of his followers went silent.
"Rollond will arrive on the back of a kyusoa," he began, through the puppet's voice. "None of you may lay a hand on him, because he is coming to me. As for the Kyusoa, kill it."
"Aye, lord!" The ones within the Tenchmok raised their voices unanimously. They began filing out of the building by twos, until the temple was empty.
Alone in the temple, Mokallai could see the perplexity in Ashenzsi's features, when he and Rollond arrived.
The beast perched on the very edge of the precipice, its back arched high, suspicious of the people around it. Yet the man dismounted without so much as a second thought.
It didn't at all seem strange to him that the group of human bodies, dressed in dingy, tattered robes, cleared from before him with his every step, and enclosed around him the same way a body does an infection leading to an abscess.
Leaving his brother behind, Rollond climbed up the remains of the crumbled bridge that used to connect the Tenchmok to the estate. The doors opened, he set foot within the temple, and the doors closed.
The moment his brother vanished behind the doors, Ashenzsi was alone with millions of people. They turned and faced him. When their scleras uniformly went black, a cold, oozy sensation seeped into his belly, and his skin crawled as if billions of tiny insects crept along him.
Mindful of the edge of the rocky precipice, he shifted, his body becoming like a viscous liquid until he took on his regular kyusoakin shape. He flattened back his ears, bared his teeth and hissed. There were too many for him to take on all at once. Yet their numbers were so high, he was confident they couldn't all swarm him uniformly.
He'd dealt with an Iisae before. The lot of them couldn't be that much different.
The first wave of them lunged, hundreds at once from nearly all sides, except from behind. Deftly the kyusoa climbed onto the shoulders of the man nearest him, and with some reservation, leapt. Numerous arms reached for him, to seize him and jerk him into the mass of agitated bodies bent on spilling his blood.
Yet with a quick twist he smacked the heads off of two of the cursed humans by the whip of his tail, and as they thudded to the ground, he landed on their corpses. He caused his aelyth to surge forth, thrusting the mass of humans behind him over the cliff and into the abysmal depths of the gorge.
Still there were more of them, and more yet coming. As far as he could see, from what few glimpses he got of the horizon, the land was a motley of bodies, dark, pale, and in-between; all sorts of people from every kind of place. At once, he lamented coming here. As the mounting stress of confrontation piled on him, and his aelyth flowed from him, he couldn't handle them all.
He reached out to his brother, with a cry so desperate he knew the white-haired man couldn't ignore him. 'Rollond!'
There was nothing in return.
Only one voice filled Rollond's ears, aside from the arrhythmic thrash of his hearts.
"Here we are," Mokallai said, through the brown lips of his flesh-puppet. By the corpse he displayed a narrow-eyed grin, and opened its arms as if to embrace Rollond.
Instead he stood a ways away from the dais, a fist balled before him, just below his chin. He glared at the body that represented Mokallai.
The corpse lowered its arms. "And I had trusted you were coming on peaceful terms, seeing as we are often of the same mind, you and I. Such as we
have been for awhile. Yet, as Fylus tried to tell you, that She-Alyi was only diverting you from your destiny."
"Don't you preach to me about that," Rollond growled. "I'm here to sabotage your plans, to cause you pain and suffering just like you've disrupted me from my life."
"Have I now? To me, it seems that your grief comes from disregarding your fate."
"I don't have a destiny."
"Oh ho ho!" Mokallai chuckled. "Has she filled your mind with that 'Choice' garbage? That's just like an Alyi to do. My former Mastress, Naeyr, the Sister of your Alyi, would've spewed some cocksucker-nonsense like that. Yet if it were true, the entirety of her domain wouldn't have been mine.
"Yet your Alyi and this entire realm is filled with irreverent stupidity. Everything is wrong, defiling celestial laws, off-track, uncentered; bereft of the logic on which the very pinions of the universe are established!" The corpse dug its nails into its palms. "The real reason all nine of them want me dead isn't because of what I did, it's because of what I know, that they are m-o-r-t-a-l."
It was a concept difficult for any Flesh Being to wrap their minds around. That something divine could also be subject to death. Rollond didn't want to think — he couldn't think — of Dyiij in that way. To try gave him a smashing headache, as if someone took a chisel to his skull and struck it with a sledge hammer.
The corpse grinned. "I know I will be the death of at least those two She-Alyis —"
With speed greater than that of a viper, Rollond took his fist and struck the corpse's jaw. A gut wrenching snap filled the air, as the bone broke out of socket and the flesh, being delicate due to its being dead, tore away from the rest of the body.
In one fell swoop his fist sunk into the dead flesh just below the body's ribs. He could feel the ridges of each lumbar of the corpse's spine, and the body snapped backwards at a 90 degree angle.
It was impossible for the flesh puppet to gurgle or flail. It just thudded to the ground like a gigantic, cold, dead boomerang.
Rollond grunted. That was that. He turned and set foot for the exit.
? You trust in your strength too much.
His hearts stopped.
? I had hoped she would've given you some kind of aelythian power. It would be against Celestial Law, since you are half human, therefore making my case against your Alyi easier; how she's not that much different than me. But, no… It's never that simple.
The doors of the Tenchmock drew back from Rollond, and the whole interior seemed to swell and grow. He stomached a sense of vertigo, only to turn around and see what his enemy really was.
Megynsei were beautiful, yet terrifying creatures. The very fingers of his enemy glistened like diamonds, though Mokallai's aelyth flowed like sticky clots of blackened human blood. His face was a peerless palladium mask, with three indentations instead of eye sockets. In those sockets hovered golden wisps of aelyth.
He wore a robe of darkened crimson. Rollond didn't want to know what was beneath it, too awed by what he saw that his legs trembled and he nearly cowered in fear. The power of the Megynsei was intense, worse than the pull of the most potent passions; more consuming than the fiercest ire.
Yet in that very moment, something like a warm embrace touched him. The sensation he had experienced once before, of being drawn out of his body, abated the intensity of Mokallai's presence.
He looked up, no longer recognizing the Tenchmok or the Megynsei of Fate that was determined to overreach him. For a brief moment, he sensed the fringes of Dyiij's realm.
Then Rollond, the stalwart, headstrong, faithful and mighty, gave one last breath and expired.
The whole world slowed as if to a stagnating halt. Though there were humans piling up on Ashenzsi, clawing and biting at him, eager to tear chunks from his flesh, he could only feel the sharp, nigh-endless pain in his heart.
There was always this sense of connection, this presence that belonged to him and his brother. An inescapable and intimate knowing that he'd become accustomed to. Then it was gone.
He became the beast under the swarming heap of bodies, and with a loud cry, twisted and writhed, snatching them in his talons and throwing them this way and that, until his way to the building was clear. He spread his wings and lifted out of their reach, and with one fell spew of aelyth from both his maws, blasted the onion dome into nothing.
Coiled around the side of the structure, Mokallai's presence didn't matter to Ashenzsi. Although his skin rippled because he, too, sensed the pull of the Megynsei's influence, he didn't care. He plucked Rollond off the floor, careful not to gore the white-haired man open.
Now to a human mind, the concept of a beast whose vision was obscured by the tears of grief may seem odd. Truth of the matter was, though, that Ashenzsi couldn't fly straight to save his life, and flight itself wasn't prolonging the probability that somewhere within the remains of the man, his brother was still alive.
That the aelyth that had invigorated that man, that made Rollond everything he was, was still operating inside the body that was white like cornsilk. Perhaps his spirit was just stopped up, or he was comatose because he had encountered the Aelythain One, Mokallai.
Yet, as the mid-length of his body caught the tallest turret of the faajhier and the delicate structure shattered like glass, while he tumbled, clutching the body in his talons, into the high waters on the other side of the waterfall, that foreboding that his brother was dead wouldn't leave him.
Ashenzsi lay sprawled on his back, twitching in pain. When he finally opened his six eyes, he spotted Gnyovante, whose typically stoic expression was soured the moment he pulled his father's body from Ashenzsi's grip.
The one thing they all established before putting the white-haired man in an enclosed life support unit was that Sanci should be the last one to know about it.
Lucein pressed his palms to the pristine glass of the capsule-like structure. Those cobalt eyes, what were abysmal in their depth of thought, were nothing but empty rings of dark blue on backgrounds of white.
He closed his own eyes and bit back sobs. "We should've gone with him," he said.
"He didn't want that." For the first time, Ashenzsi's voice was low. "Even if he had waited, it would've been years, and Mokallai's strength would've been many times greater than what it was. Even with the might of a thousand nations, backed by tens of millions of kyusoakin and the inventions of millions of xei, we do not have the means to kill a megynsei. We don't have the means to stop Mokallai."
"So in some way, we all suffer a similar end, because there's nothing we can do." Years had passed since something had deeply disturbed Lucein. Like the days of his childhood, he wanted someone to comfort him; he wanted to find his place between the strong arm and side of his father.
In fact, they all wanted Rollond to reassure them with his headstrong, stouthearted attitude. For him to tell them that this wasn't the end, and all they needed to do was…
"What do we tell mother?" Gnyovante asked.
"The truth," Lucein sighed.
Quiet swept through the lot of them.
"She's not going to take that gracefully," Yonathael said. "This is the second mate she's lost — and kyusoas tend to spontaneously combust when laden with too much grief."
They gave him arch-browed, curious glances.
Yonathael shrugged. "Autonomic suicide, I guess. A phenomenon not even we, who engineered them, can explain."
"Let's sit on this overnight," Lucein said. "Leave him where he is, for now, and decide what to do with him in the morning. At some point, mama will have to know… And if she bursts into flames, well. I don't suppose I'd blame her."
Most of them kept their gazes to the floor, but with solemn nods, they agreed.
Perhaps it was for the better to be rid of the body. Rollond was a corpse, and he was only growing colder.
It was late into the following night when Ashenzsi and Lucein finally departed. Then only Amonthe was left.
He approached the pod-like machine, what was now a te
mporary casket, rose on his hinds and supported the bulk of his forebody on the glass. He peered into Rollond's absent face, and studied his blank features.
§ I thought you said he was to adjoin himself to Mokallai, he said.
— Truth be told, I couldn't bear to see him waltzing about as the Oracle of the living dead, spewing bile like Fylus had done before him. So I took him.
For awhile, Amonthe was quiet. So Alyi's were given license to take the spirit from persons for personal reasons. That it was okay to kill someone according to their own volition, and not on account of the one that lived. His blood almost ran cold.
— There is something Rollond never knew he was protecting. Aside from all that he did, the greatest secret was within him since the beginning, because I put it there, for you. I wanted you to arise out of his lineage, regardless of whether we agreed to work with one another or not. So, put your hand over his chest, and take what rightfully belongs to you.
Immediately, he thought, that the one thing he was going to get out of the corpse was a heart, or some kind of organ. What good a hunk of flesh would do, he didn't know, unless he was supposed to eat it. Yet when he put his hand to the glass over Rollond's chest, a dense darkness welled up between his ribs.
Gradually, white and cyan rose out of that concentrated dark, forming a polished sphere about as big as an orange. It was a stone, a little bigger than the one he'd seen his brother wearing as the socketed centerpiece of that necklace. It exuded a black-silvery Aelyth, a kind of mist in the colors of human blood. At once he knew what it was.
A Ra'ol stone.
His skin rippled. Though he hadn't yet learned the importance of these stones, he had a feeling that they were key to something. Perhaps Mokallai's undoing, or the restoration of all things, the Cessation of Torment.
Appendices & Whatnot
Ritual Sacrifices and Aelyth