Alisiyad Chapter 35 ~ Facing the Light

Russ fell into the deathly gray stillness of the Edgeworld.

He sat up and shook sand from his hair, thinking that it felt more like ash than sand, when you got right down into it.  A disgusted shiver ran through him at the idea of falling into a sea of ash, like drowning in a great big funeral urn.  He reached out for Liseli beside him and gripped her hand; she sat listlessly on the ground, wearing that same eerie look of waking sleep that Alisiya had when they came through.

Reminded of that, Russ looked around to see if the others had made it through behind him.  He saw Leeton standing a few feet away, holding his daughter.  Ricalli was walking past him, a little to the left, but it was not the usual purposeful stride Russ had seen the god use.  He wandered aimlessly, as if his legs remembered that he wanted to be going somewhere but the rest of him wasn’t sure.

Russ stood, pulling Liseli up beside him.  The gray road seemed crowded and strained, as if the presence of five bodies threatened the hill under their feet, and Russ had an unsettling vision of the sand falling away into the infinite darkness, carrying them along with it.  The light hovered just over the edge of the hill, as if shy to show its face.

“So what’s the plan?” Russ asked boldly, and Leeton turned to look at him blankly.  “Come on.  You’ve had ‘plotting’ written all over you since we left the temple,” Russ prodded.  Then he added, “I didn’t want to say anything around Ricalli, though.”

Leeton regarded him silently a moment, then set Alisiya gently down in the sand.  “Very well,” he said.  “What do you propose to do about it?”

“Depends on what ‘it’ is.”

Leeton walked around them, giving Russ a wide berth, and Russ turned cautiously, keeping Liseli shielded.  Leeton paused and bent down, picking something up from the sand.  Russ cursed under his breath when he saw what it was — a knife.  The knife, which Liseli had been carrying.  You moron! he berated himself.  He should have realized she would drop it once she fell into the half-awake state induced by the Edgeworld.

Leeton looked at the blood stained blade for a moment, then up at Russ.  Then his eyes, taking on the same pale shade of gray as the sand, locked onto Ricalli.

“I was born a weak child,” he said, unexpectedly, and walked toward him, past Russ, still keeping his distance.  He turned his eyes to Russ, as if daring him to make a move to stop him, but Russ just made sure he kept himself between Liseli and the King. 

“My father was not a healthy man,” Leeton shook his head, frowning a little as he remembered back.  “Thin, pale . . . not that I remember much, of course, he died of consumption when I was very young.  That should have been my fate.  I spent most of my young life in bed or bound to the indoors with nothing to do but read and dream of being strong.  It was only a dream — I should have died young, like my father.  Do you know why I didn’t?”

He had reached Ricalli, and put out a hand to stop his wandering.  It was a strange sight — Ricalli, the tall, muscular god being held still by the lank man.

“Magic?” Russ answered the prompt.

Leeton glanced at him.  “Magic?  I suppose.  As a means.  But I escaped my fate through determination.  I learned how to thwart mortal illness, aging, death, because I was determined to live.”

“I see.”

“Look at him.  He thinks he is a god.”  Leeton held Ricalli with a hand on his shoulder, and the god, or whatever he was, just stared uncomprehendingly back.  “He’s not a god.  Surely he is something other than human, but he was born that way.  He is what he is because his parents made him that way.  He did nothing.”

Leeton brought the knife up and with a quick, savage motion, slit Ricalli’s throat from ear to ear.  Blood, shockingly dark and red in the dead gray of the Edgeworld, poured from the thick neck.  Ricalli wavered, but his expression remained unchanged.

“In the Gateworld he is not a god,” Leeton said coldly.  “That is the one thing he was born without, the only thing that matters in this place.  Now I am the god, because I was born with the power.”  He turned back to Russ.  “Why is he going to die?”

“Because,” Russ stared him in the eyes, challenging, “I’m not stopping you.”

Something like a morbid imitation of a smile crossed Leeton’s face, as the light intensified behind him on the hill.  With one hand he pushed Ricalli, almost carelessly, over the edge of the road.  Powerless, Ricalli fell backward into the darkness.  Leeton regarded the blood on his hand, then wiped it on his pantleg.

“I spent my life searching for something,” he said.  “When I was a boy, only seventeen, very young, I realized that the world where I was born was not the only world there was.  But that’s not what saved me from death, that’s not what gave me the determination to fight my body’s weakness.  Do you know what did?”

“Stubborn cussedness?” Russ said the first thing that came into his mind, though he suspected it was a line from a John Wayne movie.

“No,” Leeton said, unamused.  “The first time I passed through a Gate, she told me something.  Her name was Alpyli and she was a beautiful creature, the most beautiful and frightening thing I had ever seen in my short life.  She told me I had a choice, turn back and live out my life as it was, or travel onward and never see my home again.”

Liseli spoke from behind Russ; “And I, I chose the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”

Russ, shocked, turned to look at her.  “Liseli?”

She stared back, eyes blank, and he thought for a moment he had imagined it.

“It’s nothing,” said Leeton.  “She is aware of everything as if it’s a dream, it is the same way with most without our gift.  They cannot fully believe what they are dreaming is real, and afterwards they remember little or nothing of it, except in their dreams.”

“How do you know?”  Russ was skeptical.  “You’ve never been one of them.”

“I have lived a very long time and traveled many Gates.  I have taken many non-Keys through Gates with me.  I have studied them, in the pursuit of understanding everything I can about the way the worlds work.  It isn’t enough to have talent, Markson.  You must have knowledge to survive as a Key.”

“Don’t forget determination,” said Russ evenly.

“Yes.  And a reason.”  Leeton took a step towards them.  Russ held his ground, because behind them was the nothingness of the abyss.  Leeton continued, “A reason to learn, a reason to strive, a reason to live.  Alpyli gave me those things when she told me my future.  She told me that if I chose to leave my home and everything I knew behind, forever, I would find love.”

“Love,” Russ echoed.

“Love.  And love is not simple or safe.  I didn’t quite understand that then.”  Leeton shook his head ruefully at the boy he had once been.  “She told me that I would fall prey to a deep, controlling love as I had never imagined possible.  A love that had the potential to destroy me.  I could not foresee what that truly meant, and naturally I was intrigued; I was young.  I wanted to find adventure and love like I’d read about in books.”

“And did you?”

“I found her.”

Russ looked at Alisiya, lying dead in the road, and swallowed nervously.  Now he saw where Leeton was going with all of this.

“When I met Aysha, decades after first entering the world of Gates, I thought I had finally found the great love Alpyli promised.  But then she was born and I realized I was wrong.  I loved Aysha deeply but it was not all consuming.  How could it be?  We were two separate people and never could be anything else.  But my daughter was part of me.”

“Leeton,” Russ said flatly, “I didn’t try to stop you from killing Ricalli because I didn’t give a damn about him.  He wasn’t a good man, and I never for a minute planned on going along with our ‘deal.’  I don’t need his protection.  Or want it.  But if you think I’m gonna step aside and let you kill Liseli, you’re just insane.”

“I know you will protect her to the death,” Leeton said with a measured shake of his head.  “And I understand.  But I see that you don’t understand why I would avenge Alisiya, monster that you think she was.  No one has ever been able to understand why I do the things I’ve done.  I am going to die soon . . . I have no reason left to live.  Perhaps I am trying one last time to show you that I am not the villain.  I am a father.”

“You’re gonna die soon?”  Russ raised an eyebrow.  “What’s with the sudden confidence in me?”

Leeton smiled disquietingly.  “You will not kill me,” he said.  “You are younger, and stronger, yes.  You were able to better me before, but now I have the knife, and the determination.  I will defeat you, and take my revenge for my life’s death, and then I will erase my debt to the Gate, and it will all be over.  That is all.”

Russ snorted.  “So are you gonna try with the stabbing or just talk me to death?”

“I have nothing against you, but as long you protect her, you are my enemy.  I am sorry.”

“Right.  And I don’t really want to kill you, etc.  Let’s get it over with.”

“Very well,” said Leeton, and rushed at Russ, knife flashing in the Gate’s light.

Russ’s instincts told him to duck out of the way, but that would only leave Liseli exposed and vulnerable.  So he met Leeton head on, reaching out in an attempt to deflect the knife as he tried to knock the King off his feet.  He succeeded in the last part, ramming his shoulder into the older man’s chest and propelling them both toward the ground.  Leeton’s knife scraped across his side, ripping his clothing, but missed the flesh.

They tumbled to the sand, coughing and blinking away the blinding ash.  For a few moments it was a jumble of limbs, rolling down the slope, no advantage to either.  Then they came to a stop and Russ clenched a hand around Leeton’s wrist, straining to keep the blood-stained blade away, hoping to weaken him into losing his grip.

Leeton seized Russ’s neck with his free hand, holding him at arm’s length and squeezing his throat.  Russ tried to peel his hand away without letting go of his other wrist, and felt himself growing dizzy from lack of air.  He pulled back and ruthlessly dug one knee into Leeton’s groin, simultaneously twisting his knife-hand.  Leeton’s grip on his neck weakened slightly, and Russ let go of that arm to punch the King in the face.  He blindly pummeled away, and Leeton was finally forced to release Russ’s neck in an attempt to protect himself.

Russ gasped in air, but could not relax, because Leeton was trying to force the knife point closer.  But then, as he was intent on the blade, Leeton caught him off guard by bringing one foot up and kicking him squarely in the stomach.  Russ let go and fell backward, his neck snapping back as his head hit the ground.  He sat up, expecting Leeton to be coming for him, but instead saw to his horror that the King had leapt to his feet and was heading toward Liseli instead.

Liseli had been standing in her own little world on the road, not even watching the men fighting over her.  Leeton reached out and put a hand on her shoulder, twisting her around to face him.

She slapped him.  Hard.  Leeton’s head snapped to the side, and he wore an expression of shock when Russ’s fist met his face.  He fell back, slowly, and landed without any effort to break his fall, in the unmistakable fashion of the knocked-out.

Liseli stared at him disinterestedly, as if she’d swatted a fly that was bothering her, but when Russ said her name she didn’t respond.  Her eyes wandered off to some other point, looking into the nothingness beyond the road with as much awareness as she had focused on Leeton.

Russ picked the knife up from the road where Leeton had dropped it.  He hesitated for a moment, then tossed it into the abyss where Ricalli had disappeared, muttering, “I’m really getting sick of people trying to stab me.”

He noticed then that the light at the hill had formed into the shape of the woman, same as before, and was watching him placidly from its eyes of light.  He didn’t know how long she had been hovering there, waiting.  When she saw his eyes on her, she said, “Mortals.  I do not understand you.  When last I saw the Gatebreaker, he bargained with me to spare the life of the red-headed girl.  Now he attempts to kill her.”

Russ glanced between the inert forms of Leeton and his daughter, and replied succinctly; “Stuff happened.”

He thought she smiled.  “You survived.  I did not expect you to.”

“I’m harder to kill than I look.”  He returned her smile, faintly.

“You are a resilient mortal.  Your endurance is your strength.”

Endurance, determination, a reason . . . or dumb luck — whatever it was that was the key to survival, Russ didn’t much care at the moment.  He’d seen Liseli do what Ricalli could not; gather enough presence of mind in the Edgeworld to save herself, and he didn’t know if it was a stronger will to survive or just a trick of fate.  It didn’t matter in the end, what mattered was that they were the only ones left standing.

“I’m ready to go back, if it’s possible,” he said, remembering the danger the Gate itself presented.  He wasn’t much looking forward to the eviscerating pain going through, or the puking and exhaustion as an aftereffect, but that was bearable if he could at least drag himself and Liseli through alive.

“Yes,” said the Gate.  “Leave the Gatebreaker and his daughter behind.  His life is forfeit to me.”

Russ glanced at Leeton.  He had tried to kill Liseli, but he still had to think twice about leaving the man to die. “His life belongs to me,” the Gate prodded, noticing his hesitation.  “Even if you attempt to bring him through with you, I will take him.  It is my right.  He himself knew the minute he entered this Edgeworld a second time that he would never leave.”

“His debt to you,” Russ remembered the King’s words.  “That’s why he said he was going to die soon.”

The light pulsed a little in silent affirmation.

Leeton stirred, then, and Russ couldn’t help but utter a little groan.  He really didn’t want to resume their fight.

But Leeton just sat up, shook the sand from his hair, and gazed at the Gate.  She looked down at him, shining light over him.  “My time has come,” he said, half stating, half questioning.

“Yes.”

The Gate said nothing more, as if all discussion and explanation had already passed between them.  Leeton lowered his head for a moment, then stood.  Russ took Liseli by the arm and moved away from the King, watching him closely.  Leeton did not pursue them, however, instead walked over to where Alisiya lay.

He picked her up, and looked at her as if he no longer saw the blood and death, only the child he loved.  “Go then,” he said to Russ.  “You may have your love, and I am left with mine.”

Words failed Russ; he felt as if he should say something to Leeton before he left, but knew he couldn’t match the King’s eloquence.  “I’m sorry,” he said, meaning he was sorry that Leeton’s life was to end like this.  He’d admired the man, despite their fighting over Liseli at the end.

Leeton looked at him and said, wearily, “Go.  Go and leave us to the Gate.  You have won, I am defeated.  May you never know the pain of failing your child.”

Russ simply nodded to him; there was nothing he could say to Leeton that would suffice.

He turned toward the Gate.  “I’m ready,” he said, leading Liseli up the hill toward the light.  One last glance back showed him Leeton standing on the road watching them go, Alisiya in his arms.  Then light swallowed everything.