Sacrifices

  Chapter Addendum - The Secret Sorrow of Saints

  Uncertain

  I have seen Elisa’s dreams enough to know that this meeting took place, but I cannot tell you if it happened a week before she died or three hundred years prior. Nor can I tell you if the parties met in person or via some as yet unknown gift of Elisa’s to psychically convene disparate parties across time and space in some form of virtual reality. I do know that the scene took place on the same corner where Elisa, Henri, Chase, and Zi often met to break bread and drink wine. While the details of this dream are different each time it comes to me, what follows is the most coherent summation I can derive.

  Henri and Chase stood up as Elisa arrived at the table. Zi nodded at her mentor with the sly smile she saved for her friends which were few and far between.

  Henri poured Elisa a glass of wine, “Madam.”

  “Thank you, Henri.”

  Elisa took a sip before speaking again, “I guess we all know why we are here and, certainly, I may be out of line for doing this, but I just wanted to give you two the opportunity to walk away now.”

  For a moment there was silence before a boiling Chase erupted, “How might I do that? This is me. This is what I’ve become. This is what I have lived for the last three hundred years. I know nothing else. I am nothing else.”

  Elisa said softly to him reaching out to touch his hand, “Surely you realize that you won’t survive this regardless of how this works out. There is no happy ending here for you.”

  “Was there ever?” a tearful Chase replied.

  “And, your love would not want you to go on…?” Henri asked

  “My love would understand that I have no choice,” Chase replied.

  Elisa squeezed Chase’s hand before turning to Zi.

  “Darling, are you sure you want to do this?”

  “Yes,” Zi answered before continuing, “Every way I turn I see evil. When I look upon the Elders, who seek blood and profane love, I see evil. And, when I look in the mirror, I see evil, for in my struggles I have become the very thing I despise. It has to stop.”

  Elisa stared deeply into Zi’s eyes trying, out of respect for her, to resist the temptation to read her mind.

  Again, she asked her protégé, “Do you really want to go through with this? You’re not doing all of this just to support Chase because he helped you, are you?”

  In the years after Elisa was cast into The Pit, Henri and the Nightwalkers also worked to keep Zi hidden from the Elders, but it was Chase who shed blood on her behalf. As the Elders dispatched Circle Knights to apprehend Zi, Chase often fought at her side. In the early years after Elisa left, he worked to protect Zi as she came into her own power.

  Chase’s face took on a look of concern before Zi answered, “Perhaps, at first, but after considering how I have been literally stripped of everyone and everything I loved, isn’t that reason enough? And, what about you? Hundreds of years in The Pit suffering on some level of Hell that most could not imagine in their worst nightmares and, still, you are here holding up the cause? I don’t understand how you can still believe that this battle is worth fighting. If Armageddon is inevitable, why go through all of this to preserve this wicked age if it will still all be ash one day anyway? Why not work instead to usher in that day?”

  Elisa realized that the years of isolation while she was on the run had taken a toll on Zi’s mental stability.

  She decided to try once more to reason with her, “Zi, do you remember paradise where I keep my dragon?”

  “Of course, I do. Who could forget that?”

  “What if you could live there forever? Would you forget all of this and go? In fact, I’ll give you that whole world and throw in the dragon, too, if you’ll just walk away from all of this today.”

  For a moment, the woman was a little girl again. She fought back a smile. She looked at her hands and thought about the blood, innocent blood she had shed to pave this path in her life. Zi shook her head no.

  Elisa suggested, “If it’s the Elders you’re worried about, I’ll ask them to leave you alone. I think they’ll listen. They will owe me for what I am about to do.”

  Zi saw the Elders as an inflexible, unforgiving lot and simply could not accept what she believed to be false hope. Tears filled Elisa and Zi’s eyes. So, too, did water pool in Henri’s eyes. He had known Chase well before he ever met Elisa or Zi.

  Henri stretched out his hand towards Chase and simply asked, “Brother?”

  Chase took Zi’s hand in his own and said to the others, “I think we’re done here.”