Saturday January 10th 2015

Morning mist wrapped around the campus, turning buildings into gray hulks of threatening stone. Even the birds were silent, only the stillness of plants and the sleeping earth sounding in the dark places. Gliding through the shimmering mist, Cesare made his way across the grass to Elizabeth’s shack.

It hadn’t changed, but it had only been a few weeks. Years had passed to the flesh he called home. They'd known right where to put the daggers, going for crippling cuts, knowing exactly how to maim. For all that, he stood looking at the shack, willing to give her another chance and desperately hoping she’d give him one.

Sighing, he walked lightly across the inset paving stones, careful of the winter flowers poking their heads above the grass. Traceries of steam rose from slick shingles, the rising sun turning them golden with the first rays of dawn. It wasn’t much to look at from the outside, but as he pushed open the door, a flood of memories came to him. Deception turned gold memories into tinfoil and glue, mockeries of the treasures he’d thought they were.

The room was a discarded corpse, its soul gone elsewhere, leaving it a dissected, lifeless thing. Cesare set about getting the pellet stove fired up. Oregon wasn’t the coldest place he’d been, but it wasn’t warm, and there was no telling when Elizabeth would show up. He’d rather be working next to a warm fire, then bouncing around the rib cage of a cold corpse, unwelcome and out of place.

He was sweeping when she opened the door. Hesitating on the threshold, she mastered herself quickly. They'd made up as best they could, but it was little more than a Band-Aid across a torn jugular. Jeans tight in the hips and thighs, hugged her figure with the ease of worked in denim. A forest green sweater wrapped her body in soft folds that blurred hard edges.

“We need to get the gardens ready for spring planting. The weeds shouldn’t be bad, but I want to look over the beds and see what needs to be done. Getting new soil down before the weather changes should be a priority,” Elizabeth said, voice carrying through the small room.

Cesare loaded the cursed wheelbarrow while Elizabeth picked over the tools Cesare had laid out. After this long together, they didn't need to talk about what they were doing. Silence enfolded them like an old friend, equal parts loved and hated, speaking of what had been and everything lost. It was an echo reaching into the future, tainted with the easy companionship they’d thrown away, edged with the bitter reality of the knives they’d butchered their friendship with.

Hefting the bags of soil wasn’t any easier than it had been the first day. The ends came down and slapped across yellowed bruises that ran over his chest and arms. Despite his hate for the unholy bags, he welcomed the work. No one was counting on him here, all he had to do was sweat and hurt.

The sun rose as he raked soil into flower beds. Cesare had stripped off his gray sweater, working in just a long-sleeved t-shirt. Glittering black eyes glared down on him from the branches as the harbingers of death watched with the disdain of the winged. They’d never forgiven him for what he’d done, they might have been his friends, but they were Elizabeth’s family. He was glad for that. She deserved someone in her corner, something there for her no matter what.

Cesare felt her eyes resting on him as lunch came on them. She’d stopped a few minutes ago and stood by the wheelbarrow but hadn’t said anything. After what he’d done, he was willing to let her call the shots.

“Lunch?” The quiet question stilled him.

Leaning on rake, Cesare wiped his face with a dirt streaked hand, looking at the woman that had captured his heart and broken it. She faced him calmly, absently rolling the wooden ring around her finger. “Sounds like a plan,” Cesare said.

They made a quick detour to the cafeteria and gathered up trays of food before heading to their spot on the stairs. Sitting down, Cesare gave a pained groan before asking, “How was Winter Break?”

The tightness in her faded as she studied his face. “I went home for the holidays. My people have a school where our children learn to harness their gifts. My parents are teachers, something like professors in the human world. Masters of their elements, theoretical and practical. I spend the school year here and teach students in Terra over summer.”

He threw a handful of nuggets for the ravens as he thought about what she’d said. The birds didn’t like him, but that didn’t mean they'd turn down food. The processed meat hit the ground like chum in the water, the little black sharks swarming over meaty bits with predatory relish. Squawking and fighting, they didn’t hurt each other; it was how they showed love. Even if they showed it by landing on the back of their friend and stealing a nugget out from under them to indignant squawking.

“Why didn’t you go to school there?” Cesare asked as he watched the birds.

Picking at her food, Elizabeth’s words were low. “You might say, I was an experiment. I came into my powers early, and they quickly knew I'd claim the mantle of Imperatrix Terra when I finished my training. I was a child prodigy, finished high school when I was still barely in single digits, college courses when I was in my teens. I was already one of the greatest minds of my generation and was destined to be the youngest Imperatrix Terra ever. An ideal choice to be a bridge between the Umbrae Lunae and my people.” Staring out at the ravens, her eyes were far away, tracing the scars that had disfigured her heart. “That's what I thought, at least. Instead, I was an abject and total failure.”

“You blame yourself.”

Looking down at her tray, she cut off a piece of pizza, slowly eating it before answering. “Our people hate each other, to many wars, too much blood, legends going back for centuries of horror, humiliation, and evil done with gleeful smiles. To expect them to give up their hate for me was a childs dream. People don’t give up hate, you have to take it from them. When I came to Primrose, I knew it wouldn't be roses and rainbows. But I thought I could be a tie between our two people, a step forward. It was a chance to be more that then a caged princess, a way to prove I was more than my mastery. And what do I have to show for a lifetime of working at it?” Her voice turned bitterly caustic with self-loathing. “Nothing but my parent’s disappointment.”

“That’s got to make holidays super special,” Cesare said, smiling over at her startled face. Bitterness and anger broke quickly as she laughed. The ravens stopped in mid-fight, staring up at them suspiciously as she laughed until she snorted.

“It makes for a unique atmosphere; I can tell you that.” A knowing and happy smile crossed her face as she looked appreciatively at Cesare.

“Maybe I’ll get the chance to meet them someday.”

Shrugging noncommittally, she set her eyes on the ravens. “You never know, but I don’t think they’d be your kind of people.” Her tone was just this side of teasing.

“Really, what are my kind of people?” Cesare asked in mock offense.

Raising an eyebrow, her words were dry as old toast. “Young, beautiful, dangerous, with Everest sized baggage.”

His grin turned wry at her words. “I think you can leave off the young part, that doesn’t seem to apply so much.”

They fell gratefully into silence, neither wanting to push the bounds of the truce that held them. To new and untested for them to strain, it was a newborn easily slaughtered by hard words poisoned by malice. Putting their trays away with a fey relief, they headed back to work. It was strange, but he’d even missed this back breaking sorry excuse for a hobby. Say what you will, and he’d curse its faults all day long if someone gave him half a chance. It had one redeemable piece of rotting flesh. It was simple. Dirty as pigs wallowing in shit, but simple. At the end of the day, you could look back and see what you’d spent your sweat on.

They finished as it got dark, walking together back to the shack as night possessed the school. Majestic during the day, the trees turned solemn, twisting into sinister shapes as night clothed them. He liked them like this, hidden in the darkness, true forms only half seen in the deeper shades of midnight. Their mystique pulled at the soul, a truth that they were more than beings of bark and leaves.

Elizabeth kept her back to him as she put away the tools, holding the silence they’d enjoyed since lunch. Silence was easy, safe and undemanding. Elizabeth was willing to call it a night and chalk it up to a win. Too many times he’d let her decide how and when they’d talk, ducked his head as a servant instead of challenging her as a partner.

Cesare loaded the pellets into the pot belly's stove, the rattling cascade savaging the silence of the room. Elizabeth turned at the noise, taking in the stove and him with a single glance. “I guess you’re staying for tea?”

“Since you offered, I’d love some,” Cesare answered with a smile.

Taking a seat, he set up the chessboard as she worked on the tea. Cesare drank in the sight of Elizabeth as she walked to the front of the blood blackened cabinet. Incised deep into the wood, the runes were a darker shade, slices in the threads of reality, bleeding into dimensions of blessed madness. At the edges of his eyes, where real became illusion and truth only another word for lies, he felt their turning, a gut-wrenching twist as they rotated on an unseen axis. Nothing more than the tip of a blade, their roots drank deep from places anathema to man.

As interesting at the cabinet was, his eyes focused on the mistress of the runes in front of it. She was art in motion, a being that danced through the world, making it better than it had been. The kind of person people dreamed of being before the scars got too deep, the pain too heavy to bear.

He’d failed in becoming anything more than a boy who was her friend. He’d never get another chance to bridge the gap between friendship and something more. And he'd face that when they pulled his dead heart from his chest.

Smiling to himself, his eyes settled on her wide ass as she measured out the herbs. There was something delicious in a fat bottomed woman that skinnies just didn’t have. He averted his eyes as she turned around, quickly focusing on the chess pieces.

Setting his tea down, she gave him a knowing smile in the way of a woman who knew they’d caught you perving. Wrapping his hands around the cup, he luxuriated in the scorching scales of the snake as they rasped along his calloused hands, knots he didn’t know he had unwound at the familiar setting. “I missed this.” His words brought Elizabeth’s eyes to him. “I’ve never told you how much I enjoy this. Not so much the working, but the nights …. When it’s quiet and still and just us. A warm cup of tea and nowhere to go, nothing to do but play chess through the night.” Sharing a smile with Elizabeth, he raised his cup in salute.

Flushing, she looked at the pieces for a long minute before moving a pawn. “I never told you how much these nights mean to me either.” The candlelight turned the brown of her eyes into heart's wood. “Making tea for yourself gets sad after months and years of doing it. I missed sharing my herbs with someone who wanted nothing more than to be with me. Someone I could talk to about the small things. When it’s the time together that makes the night, everything else just wind.” She brushed a finger across the back of his hand. “You brought that into my life.”

Shrugging, he kept his eyes off Elizabeth. “Let’s call it even.”

The only sounds in the room were the sipping of tea and the night outside. Elizabeth hadn’t suddenly lost any talent at chess, and Cesare certainly hadn’t gained any. As she breezed her way to another win, her eyes gained a familiar twinkle of pleasure. “How are your lessons going?”

It felt weird setting up the game for his own thrashing, like a masochist getting the whips for the beating. “Good, they’ve been working me hard.” He stopped as he set her king and queen back in their places. “I tried to go to school whenever I could squirrel my way in. Free food, a warm place out of the cold, and easy pickings for quick fingers, but I never managed to stay long.”

Rolling a bishop between his fingers, Cesare tried to find the words for something that was empty space. “You know something is missing, that you don’t fit, that everyone else knows things you don’t. But you don’t know what it is or how to find it.”

She nodded, moving her pawn into an opening gambit as she gathered her thoughts. “Knowledge is the key into the collective consciousness of the world. I’m not talking about Umbrae Lunae or humans. Math, science, history, it’s where we came from and where we’re going. The conversation of our existence, past, present, future. Everyone has a place if they can open the door.”

“The world is wide, and we've explored most of it. We’ve walked the earth and seen her secrets, the deep caverns that call to ancient rites, wide silent deserts more cathedral than wild, the strangeness of the rain forest, and the quiet beauty of the mountains. Philosophers have dug into the mind, traversing the hidden trails of your soul, mapping the ways of love and empathy, evil and savagery, and the shadows between. Science has studied and probed reality, touching its boundaries and uncovering secrets only goddesses have known. Knowledge is a door that opens the world, a path to anywhere and a road map to self-discovery.” Elizabeth’s words trailed off into an almost reverent silence.

Pieces changed hands as her words hung in the air. “You love knowledge,” Cesare stated as he looked across at his teacher.

A quiet smile crossed her lips, the special kind you only share with a friend. “I think every teacher loves knowledge. A philosopher is a lover of wisdom, I think a teacher should mean a lover of knowledge. Learning changes a person, makes them more, something better than they were. I’ve cried after reading a poem, cheered and sobbed on watching history play out on the pages of a book. Knowledge, learning, it’s our greatest treasure, no matter what flesh we wear.”

It didn’t matter what he learned; he’d never fit in with the students. There was too much between them. He couldn’t empathize and they couldn’t understand. That was the gulf that stretched between him and the others.

Even if they had the ability to understand his past, he didn’t have the time to give them. He lacked the simple give a shit to keep up with their lives on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. He only cared for a few, and even that stretched his bitter soul to its limits. His greatest fear was that for all his talk of love and friendship, that he just didn’t have it in him.

In the hidden darkness of his heart, did he really care about any of them or was he like so many others, just a liar that saved the best lies for himself. He didn’t know, his feelings had always been sharks swimming in stygian waters, hidden in the depths, unfathomable even to him.

He believed it wasn’t about feeling love, it was action that defined your feelings. Even if he didn’t have any love in the diseased carcass he called a heart, he could fake it. Pretend he felt something besides corrosive hate, and icy sadism. Smile long enough until it hardened into the planes of his face, he hope his heart would follow.

“Where did the Thagirion come from?” Cesare asked.

Elizabeth’s brown eyes lit with warm approval. “Not many your age care to find out the why of something, content with knowing a thing exists. But knowing the birth of a thing, is seeing the truth of its life.” Her eyes drifted away as she looked back on her own memories. “The Thagirion are a lot of things, bullies, fighters, leaders, evil corrupted by threads of good, but everything they are started with Primrose.”

Taking his cup, Elizabeth headed back to the rune blessed cupboard. Mixing the herbs with tea, she moved with an elegant, simple grace. It was utterly domestic and irresistibly bewitching.

Great Hestia of Hearth and Home,

Bless this elixir,

From my soil, they were birthed,

Through my loving care, they have reached the harvest,

And from my own fingers where they taken on the Mothers Moon

Bless them with your love, Great Mother,

Blessed Be

On the edge of sight, where truth was less than a dream, the wall rippled, becoming more than wood and plaster. Ancient rock and earth, an ancestral cave from a time when the world was young, and predatory things stalked the land. It was a fortress as strong as the bonds of love between the people who called it home. Snapping and hissing, the flame threw shadows across the wall, grotesque things of passion and family, untamed truths of untainted people. Physically nothing changed, and yet reality twisted into something sacred under the touch of the fey.

One shadow was more than a shadow, alien and menacing in its basic difference. Flowing across the walls, it danced around Elizabeth, playing peek-a-boo along the strings of reality. Brushing its umbra across the cups, the old one left wisps of darkness behind.

The shadow pooled around Elizabeth, stripping her of sweet lies, revealing the horrific truth of an eldritch life raised under blessed madness. The face he loved was transformed by the touch of a goddess into a thing of monstrous beauty. Softness of face worn away like sand, leaving an ancient and ageless creature in its place. A being of mysteries, a priestess of womanhood, possessing all its blood-soaked wisdom, and crackling, menacing power. It was gone as quickly as it had come, like a flash of lightning it left only its burning mark of truth across his soul to mark its existence.

The room was transformed with the shadows passing, from a small shack alone on the edge of the wood, into a protected cave in the heart of a mountain older than time. Sealed in a way true only in the way that love was real. A specialness in the air, a wonder caressed along the skin, the feeling was a sister to Elizabeth's sacred circle on Yule. This space had been moved outside, into a timeless void both part of reality and yet not.

Taking the cup, Cesare traced the scales of the serpent as it wound around rough clay. “They like you,” Elizabeth said quietly as she sat down. “They never fail to show for you.” Her words became little more than a whisper. “And I have no idea why.”

She pushed the thoughts aside with an almost physical effort. “Back to your question. Like I said, they trace their creation back to the beginning of Primrose. In those times it was a War College. The world was different, everyone either joining a side or fleeing the fighting. The Umbrae Lunae were splintered into dozens of armies with a powerful few leading faction’s intent on devouring the others. There were no alliances, only temporary truces. Humans, Umbrae Lunae, Illuminati, and a hundred other names only history remembers fought for supremacy. The shadows gorged themselves on human and Umbrae Lunaeblood. Some turned humans into holy armies to throw at the Christian war machine. The Order of the Dragon and the Illuminati pushed further and further into the homelands of the clans. The killing fields bloomed red for days as they raped across the land.” Shadows warped into menacing shapes as she spoke of a time when carnage ruled the night.

“No one needed scholars or teachers, but everyone needed killers. People had tried to set up schools were Umbrae Lunae could learn to kill. But we hate each other almost as much as we loath humanity. They turned into abattoirs of butchery. No one was strong enough to hold back the clans from attacking the schools or stop the schools from cannibalizing themselves from the inside. That’s when the Mistress came forward. Amoral and despised by the factions, she birthed Primrose from her sterile womb. She created the Thagirion in her first year, naming them after the akatharton who led it.” Elizabeth sipped her tea, studying him over the edge of her cup. “She trained them, molded them into killers without peer. Elite soldiers with one purpose, keep the peace through any means. They were relentlessly tested, clan after clan attacked the school in a mad race into the meat grinder the Thagirion had become. They decorated the walls, rotting flesh marking the school as inviolate.”

Cesare let the words settle as he tried to make sense of the history. “All their power comes from the Mistress?”

Playing with her cup, she nodded. “It’s not unlike humanities police. They wield the power the government gives them. Only here, all the power rests in one person’s hands. She gave them sanction to keep the school from tearing itself apart and free of outside threats.” Elizabeth’s eyes narrowed as she watched him take the information in. “You’re going to do something stupid, aren’t you?”

“I don’t do stupid.” Leaning back, Cesare sipped his tea as he gathered his thoughts. “Violent, dark, evil, hateful, and savage, but rarely stupid. Anastasia will win her fight. She will ascend to power over this school. For that to happen, the Thagirion must be broken beyond repair. Each member must submit or be shattered.” The words were a spreading stain violating the night with their passing. Malevolence was the air they breathed, hatred skittered in the corners of the room and rage looked down from the rafters with greedy eyes.

“Why?” Elizabeth asked into the stillborn silence. “Leave aside everything else, and tell me why? No bullshit of friendship or other justifications, tell me why she means so much to you? She left you to die, watched as her boyfriend cut you open. She’s never stood by you, and she never will. Tell me why a pampered princess that’s never had a bad break rates going to war over?”

He almost left before he caught himself. He wasn’t upset that she asked, no, it was that it hit on things he didn’t understand himself. If he loved anyone, then he loved Anastasia, and maybe that’s why he did so much for her. Maybe that was why he did what he did for any of them. Or maybe the reality was that he wanted to love them and thought if he fought and bled for them, he’d fool himself into believing he was more than a hollow thing gutted by life.

Because she was one of the women he was basing his life on, he gave Elizabeth the truth. “I don’t know.”

Searching his face, her eyes softened in realization. She couldn’t understand, not when it was woven through the darkness of his soul, jagged pieces of shattered dreams strung along rusty, barbed wire. But she could understand enough to know it wasn’t a choice. It was a compulsion; one he couldn’t dig out without tearing out the only good he had left.

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