The Children of the Lake 12
Holly watched as her father lowered himself back into the waters.
He approached, only stopping when she retreated. Waiting a beat, he tempted another step, and she suddenly didn't know if in the next few seconds she would tearing her way through the apparitions behind her or her own family, but the way her muscles coiled it would be one or the other. A storm of emotion raged inside of her, and she was in no moo to indulge.
"My Mariwa." Her father said through Will, sweet and adoring, though his bared teeth and wriggling claws spoke of another story. No, how could she say that when she might look exactly the same to others? The uncertainty hurt."You fear the Blood."
There were a thousand things she wanted to say, but discomfort ultimately won, her Will talking with all the love of a warning growl. "Stop calling me that. My name has been Holly Seneschal since I was a kid, and that's what I want to be called!"
"What are you saying, my Mariwa? You reject your birthname?" Her dad said with startling coldness. "Could your mother have denied you your origins?"
"Mom died before I ever met her," she said.
His eyes widened for an instant, lips pursing over his teeth, and he grew quiet. She tried to read him thinking, hoping, that she had shocked him in some way, even hurt him, but she couldn't.
In the end, her suspicions became true, and his next words were affectless."I see. As expected, in truth. Despite her lacking birth, she had some potential in her giving blood. A shame to see it so impudently squandered."
"I don't understand?" Holly said, and she wished she could meant it. "Let us dwell on more pleasant topics." The sweetness returned, failing to wash away the bitterness between them."If you never knew your own given name, I assume you did not know your family's." She slowly shook her head, and her dad bent into a strange bow, arms and hands spread as he got on one knee and pushed the other back. The next words he spoke were not through Will, and she struggle to understand them. "W-what?" she asked. The featureless curve from his mouth to his forehead creased, which she knew meant a frown. His voice was gruff yet sharp, booming with crackling highs, distorted and uncomfortable to listen. He spoke again, clearer, though his strong accent and its strange pronunciation still made it awkward to both her ears and tongue. It almost sounded... Awinian? "Glaashee... Glashii?" She finally managed, drawing a head splitting smile from her dad. "Glashii. Glashii Di Aila." His voice warbled with sheer delight, a hand resting against his cuirass. It moved, pointing to her. "Lisi Mariwa Di Aila." My Mariwa, couldn't have been anything else. Another time, she might have pondered how different the word sounded from how Hazel used to pronounce it, how odd it felt to hear the name of a family that should have been hers paired with what her sister used to tick her off, but her patience was wearing thin. "Holly!" she said, not bothering with Will. "Holly Se-nes-chal!" Her father recoiled, quivering with visceral repulse. "No. No! No! Taste the ash in your tongue! That is the language of savages, of backstabbing animals, of forsaken crumbs! "It's my language, and my name! It's the name Elder Seneschal gave me!" "An Elder! An Elder among Dashi is an infant among Children! Was Gaiwa victim to this humiliation or did she take to it like a fish in the pond?" It was not the dismissive tone of his words alone that made her flinch. Holly hadn't thought of her sister very much these past few days, had she? It was cruelty, responsibility or not for her death, after everything she did for her in the end. And now, she was forced to break her father the news. "Dad... Hazel, she..." Holly swallowed dry the hesitation and the sudden grief. She didn't want to think about this. "Hazel is gone. I'm sorry. She wanted to save us, to... to protect me." He listened to her in silence. As his Will replied, she felt a strange tension crossing their connection. "She manifested the Blood?" "...What?" "You refer to Gaiwa, I assume. Had she manifested the Blood later, as you now have?" "What are you talking about? What even is this Blood?" she said."No, what does it even matter? I'm telling you your own daughter has passed!" In one lunge he crossed the distance, forcing a whine out of her throat. For all her indignation weighted, it crashed into his fury like a sapling into a landslide. "Revile me, curse me, do not ever blaspheme the Blood! It is the inheritance from the First Mother, First Lady, to our Old Vetara and his Brave kindred, the divine lineage that promised us her lands! Without it we are below nothing, less than corpses, and your manifestation excuses not belittling!" Stunned, she backed away, lost for words. She had known there was no cure to her condition. She couldn't say she had accepted it quite yet, no, but so long as nobody treated her any different, she could forget about it. Eventually, as all things, she would learn to live with it. And yet. This was what she was supposed to become? This was what she was supposed to care about? All this horror, this loneliness, for the sake of an inheritance she never wanted, to impress an old man who didn't bother hiding he didn't care about his daughter's death. She had bitten her way out of her own carcass for this. To reassure him Hazel had suffered the same way. "Of course not! And thanks goodness for that!" she said, laughing. "She lived and passed like a human, as she should have! As she was meant to! I don't want to imagine what would if she grew deformed like me, or—" She would have wanted this so bad if she knew, regardless of the consequences. Holly felt a horrible chill. Had she known? Hazel always used to tell stories about the strange men with stranger shapes who used to visit their home, scurrying beyond her sight yet leaving undeniable trails. Curse of her memories, of being connected to a home she had been so connected to but whose existence she held nothing of. And now, her father solemnly nodded. "Then she did right." "Don't say that." "My Mariwa, she—" "I told you to stop with that word already!" She bristled. "How could you say she did right? She is gone!" "I do not blame her for her birth. The Blood chooses but it cannot be chosen, thus disgraces should not be guilted for weakness. Yet a disgrace a disgrace remains." She was too shocked to speak. "That she knew the value of her life, compared to your own, speaks of her worth, earns her great praise! To think I had no expectations of her, but she made such good use—" "Shut up." They both froze. He cocked a head to the side. staring at her intently. She was left unsure were, exactly, that cold feeling was rising from, but it was about to breach the surface, contoured in sharp hatred and vicious disappointment. "Your disrespect is understandable, even forgivable—" "Shut up!" she repeated, teeth bared to his face. "Do you know how much she dreamed of our old home? How much she dreamed somebody would come rescue us and bring her back?! I didn't believe Skawla was real but... she wanted to risk it all to see it again. Dying to God scared her less than the possibility she never would!" Her father scoffed, an ugly sound if she ever heard any. "All clamor for the City of the Brave! It is only natural, its beauty eternally unmatched! Fear not my child, once our rightful place is retaken and affirmed, her name shall be placed among our ancients, let no other criticize! Her services to the Blood deserve no less." "That's it?" she said. A deeper crease. "It is an honor." They stood just over a palms length from each other. Over the islet, the luminescence of the great flower a halo at his back, she had imagined an immense monster, herself twice as horrible, but the reality is that even with her head down her father was still the shorter one. She met his eyes without fear. "Why?" she asked. "Why did you never come?" At first, he didn't answer, evenly matching her gaze. The sudden rage stained grief struck like punch to the gut, forcing her to gasp, lash with her hair, hold back phantom tears that would never fall as he looked away. "We Aila were esteemed. Powerful. Prestigious. Ancient! Our bloodline ran as far as the brood of the Second Lady! And yet we were culled like some pitiful cattle, by that wretched scum sucking taint, the standing tyrant! "The current Lady is blinded by greed and hunger. We were accused of abetting treachery, sham trialed by our very executioners, hunted by peers! The slaughter began before we could think to react. "I fought it. We all did! It was hopeless. What could one family truly do? The Lady's very will is that of the Blood. Repentants were vassalized, resistance was erased, us few escaped." She resisted to the best of her ability, but it was pointless. A howl of anguish escaped her mouth as her mind was filled with foreign misery. She could almost see it, the holy bodies of her family left to litter the hallways of their ancestral home like rupture sacks of meat, the blood of servants and aristocrats alike mingling in between olden marble floors and four times restored art, neither the young nor the old spared. "We were found, defeated, then humiliated!" She fought against the images in vain. She tasted the blood of every beating, the sting of every lash, the horrid peeling of her own hardskin, before her wounded body was paraded, naked and bleeding openly in front of a gallery of twisted abominations. "S-stop! Please!" "They promised atonement. For a simple show of submission. I accepted and was married to a regal wretch!" A petite shape, only made human and much less a woman by her dad's knowledge, was escorted by a ridged, transparent noble, face blank and posture elegant, proper if unassuming. Dark, save for a blotch of hair shaded like rich wood, typical to those bearing lineage hailed from the barbarous Bear. A vile omen, spawn of animals— No! Those weren't her thoughts! But they wouldn't stop! "Of Blood yet bearing no Blood. I believed my line so strong, strong enough to overcome her curse I earnestly hoped, for I had not grasped the Lady's boundless cruelty! Impurity was not so easily cleansed." "No!" Holly screamed against the torrent, for revenge and for salvation, intertwining with her father more and more. She saw a child, a disgusting failure and reminder of his lack. "Disgrace no higher than a Dashi! Yet I trusted the spawn she bore to me, inkling of hope, slowly smothered before my very eyes. How utterly craven." She saw Hazel. She was Hazel, Hazel and nothing else, no matter the pond grime flowing into her Will. She recognized her even as a baby, lovely huge eyes staring wide from the woman's arms both defiant and curious, cradled so tight it was like she was about to be stolen away. "I know better now. When you were born my hope was renewed, but so was my disquiet as weeks passed. You failed to manifest the Blood in time, and thus I overreacted. If only I had known then, I would never have pursued you." The memories were nothing but haze, further clouded in pain, regret, and distaste. Not at his actions, however. A lingering sensation from those times, a faint disgust remembered too keenly to let go of. Yet, the meaning felt clearer. How had they reached the Lesser, all the way from Skawla, or better, why? Her stomach churned. "Your keeper's Domain was too strong. I could have breached its borders, but as patriarch I had to make hard decisions, some which haunt me to now. Will you forgive me?" There was sincerity there, she could feel it. It only made her worse. At this point, she didn't know if she really wanted to hear it, and yet she needed to, so her Will acted. "What hard decision?" "You understand, don't you my Mariwa? I just didn't know. We scrounged so little, how could I justify wasting it in the recovery of potential disgraces? My position, my goals, my very honor was put on—" To say instinct made her jump him would not be entirely accurate. In that very last moment, when she had just enough time to restrain herself, she clenched the open handed slash into a fist, so only her knuckles hit her father square in the jaw, knocking teeth loose and pushing him back several paces. In the aftermath of her attack, even the apparitions seemed to go quiet with shock. Her father spat blood, rubbing at the bruise who would not so quickly fade from his skin. When he looked back at her, there was no kindness left. "You dare strike your own progenitor, using the Blood?! Beyond a crime, a magnificent sin! I should—" "You should nothing." Her Will crashed against his, ruthless with hostility. "How dare you! We were your daughters, how could you think of us like this?! Elder Seneschal wasn't even our real dad, and he still did as right by us as he could!" "Oh mind yourself!" He fought back, easily overcoming her offensive through sheer evasion "Do better than such crude Sentimentality!" "Sentimentality?!" "What else should I call it? I have showed as much repentance as dignity allows, I belittled our divine lineage by judging Gaiwa faultless, yet I'm struck! For recognizing the truth of things!" "We were your kids! You chased us out of our home over nothing, and you talk about your own daughter like she is trash!" she said. Not in her worst nightmares had she imagined she would have to hear this, but she wasn't close to done. "How dare you call me sentimental for defending her?!" "Open your eyes, you petulant moron!" He bared his teeth, venom pouring from him. "Stop ignoring the Blood! It should have taught the value of failures, why refuse it? If allowed in the seat of a True Child, they would spell the degeneration of our noble family!" "We were children." "A child but not of us Children Mariwa. She had no place in the Old Dream." And that was that. What would be the point of arguing? "Forget your beloved wretches. Gaiwa, your mother, her manwhore who shamelessly aided in your abduction, they served their purpose, but their fate could only ever propel yours. They had no place mingling among the divine! But rejoice, for the City of the Brave soon awaits!" "No," she said. "My Mariwa—" "Never look for me ever again! Never even think of me! Or I'm going to be really mad!" she glanced across the apparitions, searching for some gap she could take to leave. "If this is the way you're going to treat us, I don't want any part of it!" "... And just where are you planning to go?" The shift in tone reached her before the words could, cold yet triumphant, a well planned ambush about to spring. She went numb. "What did you do?" "I may be flawed, but not an idiot. Eccentric as they acted, I know not to skirmish with faceless alone." He chuckled out loud, dragging himself deeper into the depths of the lake. "Your parasites were felled! soon you shall meet the Aila's final bastion." For as much as she hated that animal thing inside of her, she didn't hesitate in listening, throwing herself at him, holding nothing back. How unfortunate, then, that he was expecting her this time, sidestepping the punch with such ease he might as well have predicted her down to the timing, quickly diving underwater. She tried to give chase, grasping hand lunging into the murk laying beneath the surface but finding nothing, their grip lost. The Lake was silent, save for the gurgling audience singing in distress. She knew the trick by now, coiling her Will around herself like a snakeball, ready for her father's touch. The once mirror surface had become disturbed, waves surging in such perfect motions they could be nothing if not controlled, creating phantom figures that rose at the corners of her eyes, only to disappear as she looked. The first caress came. "I know my mistakes." Her first strike missed entirely, too sluggish. "You reject yours." The second caress she caught, but was too weak to hold in place. "Thank Old Vetara then." The third she held for an extra blink, but it too wriggled itself out. When the fourth came, she closed into it like a mantle, ready to pull him. She was enveloped whole. She panicked, squirming tendrils binding her Will tight as she tried to rip them off, and so didn't notice the shoulder tackle until it crunched her face, sending her reeling as another blow pulled her right off her feet. A hand closed around her neck, pushing her underwater with enough strength to crash her against the sediment beneath and choke her windpipe bruised. "That your father makes for a great teacher. There is much to be corrected in you, my Mariwa, but do not worry, we have the time." She struggled desperately against his grip. Her nails found no purchase on his arms, her legs found no proper leverage to kick him away; her Will coiled back around his, only to learn her hostility had found its match in her father's. The hand crushed her, almost popping out her head before relenting. "The Blood needs not breath Mariwa. Leave behind such dull mortal notions." She had not a second to comprehen as a foot met her in the ribcage, a sickening crack resounding under her skin as the world spun. She felt herself dragged out of the lake's comfortable embrace then falling back, bouncing off her back in the shallow of the shore. Agony flared across her body, and worst, beneath it too, deeper than flesh and bone. Her Will had been wounded. Bruises that should quickly close remained fresh and leaking, and though she might not need breath, she realized with some horror that words no longer left her throat. She didn't dwell for long. A looming presence sent her scrambling away from the glowing flowers, a dozen pulsing, boneless appendages reaching for the spot she had just left, bubbling hoarse screams of fear and irritation left in her wake. "I'm human." she said. "I'm human. I am!" "... You poor, broken thing," her father said. "This shall take longer than I initially believed." "I won't let you take this from me! Not you!" She screamed through her Will, already focusing on revealing him through the connection. To her surprise, however he disappeared right under her touch. No, that wasn't accurate. It was as if he didn't exist, as if she had been holding a figment of her imagination all along and was suddenly brought back to reality. The only reason she didn't let go was one undeniable reason: that nothingness was clashing against her power to power. "It is time for you to grow up. Playing in the muck no longer befits you." The words warned her of his emergence, just in time for her to evade a slash that would have gouged her shoulder. She dove into the waters, instincts guiding her arms and legs as she sought distance, and the battle began in truth.