I held Cecelia close. I couldn’t remember exactly when in the story I had pulled her close to me. She gave no resistance to me pulling her head into my lap. My arms had wrapped around her, hoping the contact could do even the smallest bit to comfort her. It was a side of Cecelia that felt almost wrong to witness. When the confidence was stripped away, she became almost a different person entirely. A person that felt more like me. If you had told me that this was what lay beneath the mask when I had first been killed by her outside of the church I would have laughed at you.
“Ignalia?”
“Yeah…”
“I thought…” I didn’t need to finish my sentence. We both knew what I was going to say.
“I changed my last name to Sicaria when I left the estate. I couldn’t keep the name of that girl. It wasn’t me anymore…”
I nodded. It wasn’t like I was going to lecture her about the rigidity of names, considering I was currently in between names. It did give me some thought to the idea that perhaps names weren’t all they were chalked up to be. When a name loses favor with its owner, like Xavier did for me, or Ignalia did for Cecelia, they become obsolete. Why attach something to yourself that you care not for?
“Is that how you beat Lucas? You’ve got a God's blessing to use in fights?”
Cecelia looked at me and gave a nervous smile. “Not exactly. No, I stopped using Urlial’s blessing when I-“
A pause. A dark shift on her face faded as quickly as it arrived. “I stopped using it when I stopped hunting Deathless.”
“You stopped? You mean you still have it?”
“Using a God’s blessing is like switching on a light in an inn. There’s a chance Urlial sees the light turn on through a window. There’s also a chance that he doesn’t pay attention, and the light turning on means nothing. In my case, with Urlial being the lazy son of a bitch that he is, it’s not likely that he pays enough attention to when I use his blessing. But it’s also not a risk I’m willing to take.”
“It’s a risk?”
“You heard me explain the deal. I rid the world of Deathless in exchange for his blessing. As you can very well see by the fact that I’m letting you touch me without severing all of your fingers, I’m not ridding the world of Deathless anymore.”
I gave a hesitant laugh. Should I have been scared to become so close with someone so dangerous? Perhaps. I had also spent three long years becoming intimate with who I later found out was a demon. Was there a subconscious element to falling for such dangerous women two times in a row? I decided maybe it was best to confront whatever that might mean at another time.
“So… you broke the deal? I-I don’t understand, wasn’t the trade for your soul? How are you… y’know.”
“Alive? That’s a good question. Urlial is the Sedentary God. He doesn’t have many worshippers, and he certainly doesn’t do anything himself. Which means he gets to do his favorite thing of all. Sleep. I’m sort of banking on the fact that he doesn’t much care to check up on me to make sure I’m still hunting Deathless by the droves. It’s part of why I’ve been trying to avoid using his blessing. Less attention, he forgets about me longer, and I get to live a little longer.”
“That’s insane! You’re just hoping that a God forgets to check up on you? What happens when he takes notice?”
“I negotiate. If he doesn’t care to negotiate then I guess I die.”
A part of me hated how casually she spoke about her own death. I expressed the anger through clenching my teeth rather than tensing the hands that gently held her arms. Sure it was a little rich coming from someone who had sort of lost all will to live for the past nearly two years, but hearing her talk about her own death in such resigned terminology frustrated me.
“There’s gotta be something that you can do!”
“There is. Go back to killing Deathless.” She punctuated her words by reaching up and poking my chest with her index finger. “I’m not doing that though, so the timer’s ticking.”
“Then we find a way to stop it! You made a deal with Urlial once, who’s to say we can’t work our way out.”
Cecelia gave a small laugh and tilted her head to look up at me from where her head rested in my lap. “Sure, bandit.” She didn’t sound convinced.
“What did you even get for the price of your soul?”
“A couple things. The main one was his blessing in battle. Everything gets ridiculously slow for me. Time wise, at least. Makes me a real force to be reckoned with, shame I haven’t been using it recently. Each time I do it’s a gamble if Urlial’s lazy ass will notice. Or if he wants to do anything if he does notice.”
“Sounds scary to go against. I’m glad you’re not hell bent on hunting me to pin on your wall.”
“…I could still pin you to a wall alright.”
I felt a blush bleed onto my face in a mortifying red label of my embarrassment. The way that Cecelia had mumbled it under her breath made me hesitate to react to it. Surely she had meant to keep that to herself, right? Of course, she was very much aware of my new Deathless ears. Did she mean to whisper it for me to hear? Ugh, the fucking minx she was.
“S-so… back to the story?”
“Do I get your estate when I win?” I smirked
“You won’t.” Ffenton replied, a hint of a smile rising at the edges of his face. He moved towards the rack of weaponry, selecting his favorite weapon, a bo staff. I had made fun of him for using it when I was a kid, but the older I grew, the more I started to wonder if the reason he used it was to prevent injuring me too heavily in our spars. Though he wouldn’t admit his sentimentality, I would use it to finally beat him.
My nerves leading up to this day were intense. When I turned 14, the two of us had a conversation. He seemed to acknowledge how quickly I was improving. Was that due to Urlial’s blessing? Somewhat. But I liked to think it was a mixture of my regular training, as well as adjusting to the new capabilities that I had access to.
Ffenton hated it when I first started to use Urlial’s blessing during our spars. I had first done it around six months after making the deal with the Sedentary God. He was outraged and ended our training on the spot, making me do the grueling walk up and down the stone stairs of the mountain for the next week.
It took some time for him to come to terms with the fact that I had already made the commitment, and how it would only make sense to utilize the new talents to accelerate my training. Since then, I had begun to rapidly improve. It was the entire reason for him making a deal with me when I was 14.
“In a few years, I’m afraid there won’t be much more for me to train you on.”
“Flattery is not your strong suit, Ffenton.”
“It is not flattery. I am worried our time together is drawing to a close. I would estimate two more years before you outmaneuver me.”
“...you’re not joking?”
We had established then that when I turned 16, I could challenge him to a full fight. Not just a spar, but a battle without any restrictions. The idea terrified me, so I had waited for some time after turning 16 to take him up on his offer. Today was that day.
I had come a long way in the 9 years that he had trained me. But had I really come far enough to best him in a fight? I suppose I was about to find out.
I moved to the weapon rack on my side of the dojo, grabbing the weapons that I tended to favor more than any other. Two traditional swords, wielded in tandem. Ffenton had teased me endlessly for my habit of wielding two weapons at a time, but as I got older, he stopped teasing me for such a choice. I knew that it was because he began to notice it was more viable than he wanted to admit.
“Until one of us yields, Cecelia. You may start when you are ready.”
I took a deep breath, readying myself in an offensive stance. Nine years of training came down to this, no stress, right? Right.
I used my knowledge of our previous fights to start in an unusual way. Most of our spars in the past few years had begun with me using Urlial’s blessing in order to close the distance quickly and apply pressure. This time, I wanted to mix things up, instead closing the gap naturally, charging directly forwards to swipe one sword high while the other went low.
Ffenton twisted the staff to catch both blades before they could reach him, using the power of my swing to make sure the blades caught within the wood. Once they were embedded deep enough, he twisted the staff around, wrenching the two blades from my hands onto the ground with a clatter. Okay, bad start.
After disarming me, Ffenton moved in to swing the bo staff in an array of rapid swings. Time for Urlial to help me out a little bit. In what had become almost second nature with the past five years of training, I used Urlial’s blessing to slow our fight to a crawl. The sensation was incredibly strange when I first started to use it. My vision would become caked in purple smoke at the edges, but the tradeoff had always been worth it. With Ffenton’s rapid swings slowing to a manageable pace, I avoided each swipe like I was engaged in a dance. What had started as a joke years ago, had become my signature style. My fighting had developed into a dance-like routine as I flowed through attacks like water would flow down a stream.
Ffenton, of course, was used to this. I was always surprised at how quickly he was able to keep the pressure on even with his strikes moving at a fraction of the rate that they should.
I dipped and twisted around the swipes, taking a brief gap in his assault to back away towards the wall of weapons and fetch a greataxe. Ffenton could see the gears shifting in my head as a new strategy blossomed in my mind. I waited for an opportunity in his slowed attacks before swinging the axe down with such immense strength that it cleaved the bo staff in half as he barely avoided the attack.
Ffenton took the two halves of the staff and launched them at my neck and my head with frightening speed. Had it not been for my ability to visualize the projectiles in the slow passage of time, they might have incapacitated me then and there. Urlial’s blessing gave me the time to dodge out of the path of the staff halves. When I regained my footing, I could see that Ffenton had already fetched a new weapon from the wall.
In the next minute, the two of us traded blows between different weaponry. He countered my greataxe with a spear that nicked the side of my stomach. I responded in kind by wrapping a kusarigama around the length of his spear, kicking the spiked counterweight into his chest before he could move out of the way. He caught the bladed edge of the kusarigama with a hook blade, yanking it from my hands and nearly planting the blade into my chest as the momentum carried me towards him. I leaned back to avoid the stabbing motion, wrapping my fingers around one of the swords that I had started the fight with that clattered to the floor where we currently fought. As I rose from my artful backbend, I did so with a kick and a slash. With my enhanced speed, at least from his perspective, my kick had launched his hook sword into the air as my sword carved across the front of his chest. Before he could respond, I caught the descending hook sword in my off hand and slashed a second sword strike across his chest, joining the earlier slash in an ‘X’ pattern.
A brief flicker of concern seemed to cross his face as I moved in to finish the fight. Strange, he never showed hesitation within a spar. Did he know he was about to lose?
I put Ffenton’s training to use, embracing the lesson to never relent until you knew the fight was yours. He easily could have been showing fear to cause enough hesitation in my strikes to disarm me. He had done that before.
I swiped my two swords across the sides of his chest, cutting his shirt to useless ribbons as it fell to the floor. With my slowed perception of time, I could afford to note the fact that in all nine years of living with Ffenton, I had never seen his bare chest before. For someone who had presumably been in decades worth of fights, he had not a single scar or wound on his chest. Other than the ones I had just caused, of course. He was strong, but was he so strong that he had never been scarred in battle?
I could almost taste my victory on the tip of my tongue as I closed the distance between us with a drop kick directly to his chest. With the four slashes I had just managed, combined with the full force of my body weight slamming into his chest, he had to yield.
I let Urlial’s blessing fade as my dropkick connected. The purple smoke in my vision faded, and time returned to its normal passage from the slowed down perception I had just fought in.
I quickly scrambled back to my feet in case Ffenton had yet to yield. When I looked at my adoptive father, however, I saw that he had yet to move from his prone position on his stomach.
“So how about it, old man? Does this mean I get the estate?” I joked, crossing across the room towards him. Despite my relaxed demeanor, I was ready for him to retaliate at any moment. He had trained me well enough to know not to let my guard down. When I crossed the room, stepping across the torn remnants of his shirt, my eyes drifted across my mentor's body. More specifically, his back.
The tattoo.
I saw a black circle surrounding the letter D. The curved edge spiked with lines. A closed eye sat in the center of the D, with the beginnings of a tear collected inside of the eye. Ffenton was a Deathless. He was one of them.
The beast turned to look at me, its face twisted into one of fear. Ffenton was never afraid.
“You…you’re one of them.”
“Ignalia…”
“No… no no no! YOU DON’T GET TO SAY THAT NAME!”
I felt like I was underneath my bed, watching my mother’s choked sobs as life drained from her face. I could see my father raised off of the ground by the monster, his body ripped in half by the twisted monstrosity in the doorway.
My hands gripped the hilts of the swords harder than I had ever held anything in my life. Hate. Anger. Wrath. They broiled in my eyes, tearing burning tears from my eyes as I screamed at the monster before me. Every part of my body shook. The hate writhing through me like electricity, vibrating every atom of my body in a horrific symphony.
“I TRUSTED YOU!”
The swords rattled in my palms, the white hot fury that made me nauseous needed an escape. I needed a release.
“I FUCKING LOVED YOU!”
“Cecelia, you don’t understand!”
“WHAT DO I NOT UNDERSTAND? YOU’RE THE KIND OF ANIMAL THAT TOOK EVERYTHING FROM ME!”
Ffenton moved from its stomach, turning over onto its back to push itself away from me. The monster retreated like a coward to push itself against the wall, as if it could escape from me. When the beast turned over, I could see the slash marks across its chest already healed.
“We aren’t animals, Cecelia!”
“Tell that to the freak that slaughtered my village!”
“The capability to cause harm does not equate to the inevitability of it!”
“I will not listen to the whimpering's of a dying dog.”
The rage had become too much for me to handle. It begged to be released, it ached to envelope me. Whatever it took to kill these beasts.
With a guttural scream, I plunged my two swords into the monster’s chest, using the leverage of the handles to throw the beast against the wall to my left. Its human costume slammed into the wall, dropping the array of weapons that were suspended on hooks and shelves to the ground. I closed the distance between the two of us once more. The heat from the burning tears that trailed down my cheeks stung like fire was licking my face to congratulate me for embracing the fury.
“Cecelia please! Don’t let your anger consume you!”
I ignored the creature’s pleas. Deathless were known to deceive. I wouldn’t listen to a word it uttered. I kicked one of the swords that stuck out of its chest hard enough to lodge it into the wall behind it, pinning the beast to the wall for my following plan. With visceral cruelty, I began to grab every single bladed implement that had fallen to the floor in order to push it into the monster’s body and keep it nailed to the wall like one would display a caritune’s head on their wall.
I cried out in agony as I did so, as if the pain of my attacks was in some way being felt along my body. Notably, the monster that pretended to be my father made no attempt to move or resist, and made no sounds of pain. The blood of the beast splashed across my face as I tore into its form, pushing sword after spear after axe into its body, like if I could somehow kill the beast, it would kill the pain that was crushing my heart. If someone were to have watched the scene take place, it would be difficult to decipher which of the two were the real monster.
I hated it. I hated this monster for taking me into its home. I hated this monster for teaching me like it had any right to tell me what to do. I hate this monster for manipulating my trust for nine long years. Most of all, I hated this monster for tricking me into loving it like a father. I was disgusted by myself for ever having let this beast work its way into my heart despite being everything that I hated in this world. Everything hurt so much. I needed to rid myself of this pain. I needed to rid the world of Deathless. I would start today.
When you make a deal with Ulrial, he will make sure you have the capabilities to fulfil your deal. I promised him I would rid the world of Deathless, and he granted me the ability to kill them. Instincts that I had never had before floated around in my mind. I let the blessing of Ulrial wash over me, my vision growing cloudy and purple at the edges. The beast was forced to watch as the girl it raised, wreathed in a heavy smoke from the God it prayed to reach towards its chest with an incorporeal hand. I push my smokey hand into the animal’s chest, wrapping my formless hand around the ever beating heart that pumped blood despite the several weapons that impaled its body. Before I moved to crush the beast's heart, I heard words escape the lips of the dying creature.
“Revenge will rip you apart, Ignalia. Promise me that you won’t let it kill the girl I raised. You are so much more than the hate you hold.”
Lies. Lies. It’s just begging for its life.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t better for you… I’m sorry that I couldn’t take on enough of your anger…”
“I’ll make you sorry.” I hissed at the pleading beast. I tightened the hand around its heart.
“I’m sorry I never told you how much I love you… You were the best thing that ever happened to-”
I crushed its heart with my hand. I let Urlial’s blessing fade from my body. The monster’s body began to crumple into a kind of ash as I sat and watched. The tears never stopped flowing out of my eyes as I watched the monster’s body fade away, like it had never existed in the first place.
I had killed my first Deathless. It would not be the last.
I stood up and looked around the dojo. Weapons were scattered aimlessly around the room. It brought far too many memories to my mind standing in this room. I ran out into the courtyard of the estate, where dark clouds gathered in the sky. Everything about this place hurts to look at. I needed to leave. This wasn’t my home. Not anymore. Each memory of being taught to nourish the garden by Ffenton, reading his books about the Gods until I fell asleep beneath him, they all ripped at my heart like they wanted something inside of me.
I ran from the estate. Not long after I had begun to flee, rain started to pelt my body. My tears blended right in. The torrential rainfall lasted for the rest of the day as I ran through the woods. It was as if my actions had caused one of the Gods to cry.