Darcia History (pt2)
Sunset finds him stalking the boulevard of Jagura's too-clean and too-whole city, toward the high spire of the Moonlight Crucible. Her desire to take paradise for the Nobles, and to forever ruin destiny for Kiba and his ilk, is his fault as much as it is her sister's for falling for a cursed man.
Both of them sunk too deep in myth and alchemy, he in his experiments and her in her magecraft. He wonders if her vendetta against every wolf has base in a spurious legend. No wolf bit him or his grandfather, however. Murdering the beast that cursed his line will not cleanse them.
But the curse within him stirs and bristles at the thickness of the air, the scent of magic and blood coating the walls like paint. Copper and ozone. Burnt almonds and hot metal.
He barely notices when the blonde woman joins him once more. Cheza charms the wolves from the mountains and the sick back to health, so it is little wonder at all she calls mortals to her path. He doesn't even try to listen to her prattle.
He needs to understand. He needs to learn why she would end Hamona's life, when he was so close to bringing her back. But the vivid pain flares in his chest once more, and he squashes any thought of his wife out of sheer necessity.
Darcia finds his sister-in-law in the midst of one of her great gatherings of nobles, celebrating the her iminent victory. He would leave them to their joy, but the desire for closure consumes him like sharpest fangs.
She spins like a top, dancing in perfect grace that is too much like her twin were it not concealed so in wolf-proof armour. Her courtiers only withstand a barest glance of the burning golden glow, and all fall like string-cut marionettes.
Jagura's long cloak swirls around her as she turns to look, and the smile that curves those familiar lips is nothing at all like her sister's. They are alike as clones, but different as a hunting hawk and a caged songbird.
I've been waiting for you.
Her voice is much the same, but the tone speaks of someone so much colder and crueler, a fierce warrior's heart like his own. He casts off his headress and mask in a single movement, desiring to look her in the eye when she admits her crime. Unlike all besides her twin, Jagura may look upon the mark of his curse and remain concious.
She casts off her helm in much the same move, and for an instant he cannot breathe.
It was easier thinking of her as only a sister of the same womb, but Hamona's hair ripples in a wave from that helmet and Hamona's face gazes upon him with unfamilar serenity, and her loss claws his heart for the hundreth time, no less painful than the first.
He has not spoken to Jagura since he married her twin. Nothing of his pain is bared to her, but she seems to sense it anyway, even if it is not acknowledged. Surely the death of her sibling at her own hands cannot have gone unfelt.
Her younger sister, by some hours, from memory. It hurts to speak to that face and know that the other owner of it is long gone. She always did believe Hamona unsavable, as did everyone. But belief does not make a fact. It was his fault, so he would bring her back.
And finally she explains the reason of her sin. "I wanted to release you from that terrible burden."
Released from his burden... but it was a burden he would have - and did - walk over red hot knives and swallow deadliest poison to bear. He would have done anything at all for Hamona's good health, for her revival.
I did it all for you, beloved.
White-hot rage suffuses him, and while his face remains inert, for the first time in his life he actually longs to split his skin with fur and crunch this imposter of his beloved between his teeth. How dare she call him thus, having robbed him of all he lived for.
In that instant he hates her with everything that he is, and he knows that her declaration will never be returned, Hamona's face or not.
She calls him an unrivalled instigator, as though her supposed love is his fault as much as everything else he brought down upon the three of them. She invites him to dance while the world crumbles, and he realises only then that she has gone insane.
The air crackles and he feels the hair on the back of his neck lift. To his dismay, he recognises the scent of the spell she is calling forth - it is the very same incantation which obliterated his grandsire and blasted his line with wolfsblood taint, centuries ago.
Jagura's expression is blissful, and she approaches him with open arms as though he might abruptly change his mind about her hateful words and replusive attitude. She embraces him, and he forces himself not to react, for any reaction at this point might be taken as acceptance.
He hears a distant howl, and realised that the rage and pain he feels is not all his own. The gateway to paradise recognizes not one wolf, but two, and he and the chosen one begin to overlap.
The world goes hazy-golden and then he is standing on a green hill in the shifting twilight with Kiba at his side, the both of them younger and whole. They look down upon the fallen civilization of the Nobles who were then indisgingusable from humans. Neither of them suffer pain or illusions about this place that Jagura would slice open with her talons.
It rushes towards him silently, like an owl on the wing and he is eaten up by brilliant orange-gold and the shattering sense of wrongness. This not-place is like a cut flower in a vase - lovely but a fallacy, soon to be washed in dust and decay. He does not wish to be caught forever in this moment, as peacable as it may be.
This is false, this is-
The moon is full and red as infection, and the lake is endless sparkling blue as the sky.
Sun/moonlight glows on the luna flowers that nod their heads in the grass around them, and for the longest instant he wants to give in, wants to pretend that Jagura is her sister and he succeeded, that Hamona is with him once again-
Why would you waste your life on a lie? Kiba asks him sadly, and it occurs to him then that maybe the wolf understands loss better than he thought back at the ruined keep. The witch coaxes him with visions of paradise, but without Hamona it is meaningless, no matter what the wolf in him craves. And as the wolf beside him agrees, this thing of Jagura's is no paradise.
You're wrong, he and Kiba say in total unison. Jagura recoils with a gasp, denial plain. Perhaps failure simply never occurred to her, like it never did to him before she came and ruined it.
He and Kiba are one in this place, and their feelings on the matter are completely clear. Jagura stumbles back from Darcia, and when she turns it is Kiba's fangs-
Darcia's hand-
(the world goes white and shatters around them once more)
That rips the wolf-collar from her throat. She still bears the imprint of teeth in the physical world, as she shrinks from him, cowed. Her bewilderment is plain, and he nearly pities her.
The backlash from the failed spell shudders around them, and the nearest wall explodes outwards from the pressure. Jagura's confusion turns to rage, and she raises her head and shrieks, as close to Cheza's scream as any human throat can produce. She draws a dagger, and in the same smooth movement, plunges it into his chest. In her fury, she slips and misses his heart by a wide mark, but it is a mortal wound all the same. Even if it may take months, he knows in that moment she has killed him.
The spell finally dies completely, and Jagura's keep begins to crumble.
The shock wears off a little, and he pulls the dagger out. Jagura cries out with her denial, and attacks him. They always were well-matched in the blade, and although his sword is heavier by far their duel is one of equals. They clash and clash again, and in a lull where they both draw back to circle, she says, “I love you, Darcia.”
The tone and voice are her twin's exactly, and for an instant Hamona stands before him like a vision, armoured but perfect and alive once more. Such cruelty would never have occurred to his beloved, but for a single instant that lasts forever he wants so badly for it to be true.
“It's alright,” Jagura purrs, lovely and beguiling, “Come with me, come to paradise.”
“Stop it!” the illusion passes, and his grief crashes down with it like a wave, disarming him and forcing him to his knees once more. It's not her. It's not her. She killed her. She killed her.
His vision swims and his head is filled with sliding pain, and he realises however distantly that it is not only the mocking memory of his wife that is forcing him to bow to her murderer. Jagura laughs and speaks to him in her own voice once more, but everything is spinning too fast for him to rightly make out her words.
Poison. He's been poisoned. The world spins on like a top with the clatter of a wolf's claws upon the marble, and he finds it nearly impossible to rise from his slump upon the floor. The wolves come to his unlikely rescue and it is Kiba - Kiba and the tawny part-dog who lead them here - who ultimately assist him in his vengance.
He has strength enough to run her through, at least, but with her throat in shreds it he only speeds her demise.
Afterwards, he looks upon Kiba's golden-black eyes, and finally, finally he understands.
It is not merely that we search for paradise... but that paradise is calling for us.
The wolfstone will guide him to paradise, and the cursed beast within him must be the one to spill the chosen blood. No base machines will construct the true End and Rebirth.
He turns away, and begins to walk again.
Ice creeps over the skin of the earth like white mould, killing and freezing. Humans sense it, and riot, instinctively rage against the dying of the light. Animals sense it, and those few not already brutalized by man and Noble's avarice wither and waste away like the plants shattered by the bone-deep frost.
Wolves sense it, and keep running toward their destiny.
For so long has Darcia fought and raged against the Fates, the Wolves, the cruel forces which cleaved him from his beloved and buried her deep within her own heart, and finally made it so he could not ever protect her when she was at her most vunerable. For too long he has raged against the heavens and the slow decaying skulk towards the ending of this desolate world. It seems that part of the curse set upon his clan is the fate to fail at all they try. He is so tired of fate.
He is so tired.
A part of him knows that it is Jagura's poison that chills his heart, numbs pain, both emotional and physical, but all his attention is now focussed on his final goal. The canker in his veins slowly twists his mind, a clockwork key, until he can think of nothing but Kiba and the store fate has set for them both.
Perhaps, if this is indeed his destiny, after everything, perhaps it will be kind enough to grant him passage to wherever his beloved's soul has now fled. After Jagura's keep, he no longer believes that Hamona is trapped in paradise. As good and pure as she was, she was Noble as much as her sister and soulmate, and there is no place for their kind after the world is reborn.
The sky is iron-grey clouds, yellowish with eternal twilight, and the sickened moon hangs low at the horizon, fat and bloated as a tumor. Stars fall from the heavens and the ice-riven earth rumbles with the impact, far away and unimportant.
He does not know how long he walks, only that he is close enough that when some other's automated system destroys the Tower of the Seal, he is close enough to see the mountain of the Gateway before the dust cloud consumes him. The hot air blasts his face, and he cares not. But there are others in this cloud.
Through the howling gale, he hears two voices - human voices. The thought of man so close to such a holy place fills his greyed, unthinking heart with a slow rage. This is wrong. No human should ever come near this place. He is so far gone already that it does not occur to him that he, himself, was once a man as well.
The first human he encounters is the old man that interrupted he and Kiba's first conversation. He growls as much as a human can and aims his shotgun, claims to know his wolf-eye. The smallest wolf of Kiba's pack snarls at his side, copper fur on end. Once upon a time, he might have admired such bravery.
Darcia remembers only distantly the incident of which the old man - Quent Yaiden - speaks. Soon after Orkum had stolen Cheza away from him, he had given himself into a rare fit of utter despair and rage, warping his bones for the first time to run fourlegged and mindless, hopeless across the countryside. Other wolves had followed him, and Jagura, Jagged Jagura the Wolfsbane had sent her troops to deal with and cover up his folly.
Hungry and unthinking, he and his temporary pack had feasted on the corspes of the dead in the town that her soldiers had trapped them in. Apparently there had been one suvivor of Curios, but there would be none at all shortly - he could smell the reek of a mortal wound upon the old man.
The gun he always carried as reserve (his sword was still somewhere in Jagura's keep, preferably still pining her corspe to the floor) would only speed his death.
Darcia is not a wolf, and he is not a man. The only thing he knows now is what he is not.
He draws his pistol at the same moment Yaiden aims his rifle, and the wolf leaps to the old man's aid, poorly timed. Shot from both front and back, Toboe crumples between them like a discarded rag toy.
For all his talk of hating wolves, Yaiden's shock is as though he had murdered his own child. He stumbles toward the mortally-wounded creature, blind to the danger, and Darcia's pistol cannot miss at such a close range. But the wolf is not yet dead, and the force of Toboe's snarling lunge swings his shot wide and saves the old man's life for a little while longer.
The wolf's teeth dig deep into his foream, spurting blood, but the only thing he can feel is the weight of a half-grown canid hanging from the extended limb. He feels no pain, no anger, only a vague sense of irritation. A flick of his wrist dislodges his attacker, and the half-dead creature crashes to the ground in a fountain of ice chips.
He looks into the old man's eyes and pulls the trigger, and then leaves the two of them to their death to find the other interloper.
Dust sweeps over him again, half sand and half grains of ice, and he knows that he must seem like a wraith to the man, passing through the swirling dark like a shadow thing, foreboding. Bullet and blade both gone now, he aims to squeeze the life from the pathetic creature with a single hand upon his throat.
Kiba senses his presence and comes with slashing jaws and hackles raised between Darcia and his prey. All understanding is swept beneath his snarls and the misdirected rage at one not meant to be so close to centre. Paradise requires three things to open - wolfs' blood, a flower maiden, and the wolfstone. Kiba does not understand.
Darcia realises in that moment that he hates him after all, resents that the chosen wolf should keep all that is precious to him when Darcia has lost everything. All that the white wolf values must be torn and cleansed from his hide, so that he may know true suffering. It is most likely the poison seeping to his mind that makes him think so selfishly, but in that instant he wants with every fibre of his being to ruin Kiba, ruin everything that he stands for, rip it up and salt the ashes, leave it to rot.
If the world would have him cleaved from his most beloved things, then may the world decay and crumble for its sins, without hope of rebirth or redemption.
Cruelty and mirthless joy takes him then, and he can feel his teeth warping forward as the first part of the charge takes him. He stalks off into the howling gale, away from Kiba as his bones crack, his skull warps. Jagura's poison takes even this agony from him, and his skin slashes open, clothes tear, fur bursts forth in the how-wroaw-howl of the most impressive aspect of his grandfather's curse.
When it is done, he takes a moment to lie there, panting, then snatches the paradise stone up between his massive jaws and throws his head back, swallows the golfball-sized gem whole.
It burns in his gut like a star and blights the sight from his human eye, but wolves smell better than they could ever see, and besides, the gate to paradise sings to him now, a sound no human ear could ever tell but the loveliest and most horrifying thing he has ever heard.
Darcia lifts himself on four madness-strong paws and lopes toward the mountain. He pauses at the Tree of All Seeds to scent the remains of the seal, and hears, far behind him, a communal howl go up, mourning. They are fools, to think that they have time to weep for death well spent.
His new form wants to howl back, mocking, but instead he shuts his jaws and bounds up the mountainside so lightly it is as if he is dreaming. He reaches the long dead and frozen caldera, then doubles back and finds a place to lie in wait for Kiba and all of his worthless mutts. He can already hear them approaching, far below.
He can feel the last of his sanity thawing away, ice in the summer sun, until all there is left of him is the desire to rip and ruin the white wolf and all who would stand with him.
I tell you now the words of Red Moon.
From the Great Spirit was born the wolf, and man became his messenger. The beast lives his life in silence, abiding where the blessing of the blood of the Gods is bestoed upon him. The white flower, after winning the favour of the Lord of the Night, will share her scent.
Preordained and eternal in counternnance, her form is that of a lily-white supple maiden. She distills and condenses all of time, until it becomes a precious, frozen mass.
Kiba and his pack are only just below him now, and he steps onto the edge of the spur that hid him previously from view, high above them. The white wolf starts like a scared pup, and the twisted thing he has become takes cruel joy from it.
Only then will appear... the wretched beast.
He knows he does not quite look like a wolf - his muzzle is too tapered, his skull to narrow, the joints of his legs are too long and too loose. Above all, he is three times larger than any born wolf that ever walked this earth, and he smiles like a human's nightmare of the cold and snow and hungry howling in the dark.
The wolves rush to meet him as their death, and stand between him and Cheza. The black halfbreed, the blue-eyed bitch is the first to die - foolish enough to think wolfhunting tactics would work in mid-air, his greater weight bears her down and he rips her throat out too easily.
The injured one, Jagura's mutt, is the next to go. Stupid and angry enough to bite at his leg like a terrier, his remaining blood fountains out over the stones while Kiba stares in shock. Perhaps it has not occurred to the chosen wolf that any who stood between him and the flower maiden were already dead, in this form.
Cheza's wooden bones crunch and splinter in his jaws as he runs back toward the caldera with Kiba in his wake. But the white wolf is still too whole, and so he casts the maiden aside to dance with the chosen one once more upon the mountain, snarling and slashing and crashing and biting in the clear light of the red, red moon.
He is a breath from tearing out Kiba's throat when the last of his pack, the scarred one, leaps at his face and nearly removes his blind eye. It brings him twisted joy to know that the grey one understands their destiny, and he fights well, takes a good piece from his shoulder, before the wretched beast finally shakes him from his back and unseams him from the navel to the chops.
Kiba's cry tells him that Cheza has leapt to meet her own fate, falling like a flower to the darkness of the pit at the mountain's crown. Unhindered now and spiraling from lucidity, he leaps to join her.
On the shores of the ice-bound lake at the bottom of the hole, the moon seems to fill the entire sky. He goads Kiba, gives into his despair, and brings up the spell-drained wolfstone as evidence. The white wolf denies his destiny, and he wants to laugh at his denial.
The snap and snarl and spasm of their bloodshed, the white fur that was more now shades of pink and red now, and still Kiba will not give up, will not despair. He turns each blow around and rips holes in his unfeeling blue-black pelt.
He flinches and snarls as tendons are ripped asunder, but still he feels nothing. He feels just fine.
Once upon a time he might have admired such determination as he now saw in his foe, but that part of him had been left far behind. It was still screaming and sobbing in the room where he was mere hours too late, minutes too late to save her, to scrape her lost soul back from whence it had strayed, to protect her from her twin.
Jagged Jagura, with Hamona's face but none of her soft edges, none of her sister's gentle acceptance. Jagged Jagura the Wolfslayer, wolfeater, with her blades of poison and hate.
When he has beaten Kiba hard enough that the white wolf can no longer rise to defend his maiden, Darcia sinks his teeth into Cheza'a side once more and flings her down across the snow. The fragile roots that spider from her knees tear like weeds from paving stones, and her skin pops under his teeth almost like flesh.
He stalks to toward where she lies crumpled in a heap. Kiba's final whines and pleads only make him laugh. Had Hamona pleaded, somewhere deep inside her silenced heart? Had anyone listened to him when his world and home were torn down, razed and shattered?
Something deep inside him wrenches violently, and he heaves, spewing green-black bile from his jaws. More poison. More attempts to end him before he ended all else.
Awful death-rattling mirth shakes him once more. He gazes upon the gate, where the flower maiden's blood spilled down to the frozen lake. He can see the diseased red moonlight gleaming on it. His mind bucks and twists further, skewing his thoughts with deadly drug.
He was full of the flower's sap, was he not? And he held the essence of the paradise stone in his very self, in his shape. He can still open paradise, even if his would be wrong. He can still ruin Kiba and this world that would see him wrecked and alone forevermore.
He staggers down to the icy shoreline, weaving like a drunkard.
He can still... could still... the entrance to paradise...
He takes one step upon the stillness of the frozen lake, and then blinding hot flame of a billion colours sear his flesh from his bones and turn his bones to ash, agony and ecstasy and purest feeling-
The world goes white, and that is the last thing Lord Darcia the Third, late of his House, ever knew.
In the silence after the pillar of fire, a single wolf's eyeball plops into the half-thawed lake, seeping poison, before it freezes over once more.