Chapter 468: Before The Battle
Two Days Ago...
Malz felt like she was on fire.
The gem she’d swallowed had done nothing at first. Just long enough for her to feel foolish before she suddenly doubled over as fire tore through her nerves.
Everything that happened next was a blur of pain and small bouts of lucidity. She remembered being carried. A brief glimpse of the portcullis at the front of the Chapterhouse. A sensation of heading up, not down to their quarters. And then being dropped into a bed.
And then there were the nightmares. Most of them featured Maledict, but a lot of them involved Rain and Cassiel. In some, they were dead or being tortured and killed. In others, she was made to kill them by Maledict. And in the worst of her dreams, they became her torturers, replacing the nigh-faceless blur of demonic faces and bodies that had inflicted so much pain upon her.
In so many dreams, she saw her veins opening and her bones exposed. She saw dark blood seeping from the cuts and from under her fingernails. She heard Maledict’s amused chuckles and the shrieks of her loved ones. Their eyeless faces staring at her, telling her that it was her fault for being weak. For not being enough. For being just a copy of someone better...
And then the nightmares ended and she found herself in a vast, white expanse, with thousands of versions of herself. The same face. The same raven black hair, but with subtle differences that showed her they were not the same person. A scar here, a broken nose there. Eyes with subtle inflections to their looks and colors.
She walked amongst them, as quiet as they were, as they looked upon each other. What could she say to her selves that they did not already know? That they did not already experience in their own ways, through their lives and each other’s lives. There were gaps in the crowd of Aikos. Places that felt like missing memories and denied experiences. And at the center of the formation was a gate of dark iron, before which an onyx pool was carved into the shape of an eye, with a golden iris at its center.
The waters of the pools churned, and the gate creaked with every inch it opened, its hinges straining against their posts. And sitting at the edge of that pool was a woman. One whose visage filled Malz with a sense of ancient timelessness. She was wearing a lab coat over a suit not unlike the one Malz owned in the real world. Her hair was black but streaked with pure white, and her golden eyes stared at the pool as if she saw something other than the bottom of it.
Malz came to sit by her. By the woman she knew was the origin of her bloodline. She said nothing, simply staring where Aiko stared, trying to see what she saw. A storm in the water, of movement but not light. Malz thought she saw glimmers past the surface. But it felt impossible to be sure, and so she reached out and touched the surface. She felt its heat, and the depths of the pool suddenly seemed so much more vast than before.