Authors: Rain Oxford
That couldn’t have been right… but it sounded nice. I
had never been interested in pushy women, or those who were too docile. But the
creature inside me almost purred with the thought of a woman submitting to me.
This was becoming very dangerous. The creature was becoming less of a
mysterious power over magic and more like a separate life inside of me, capable
of overpowering me. I was feeling thoughts and desires from it, and confusing
them with my own.
“I thought you all had different powers,” I said,
trying to keep my thoughts in the room. The last thing I wanted was for the
girl to overpower me because I wasn’t paying attention.
“We do. Above the simple abilities we all have, I can
control suppression. People come to me to help them when they are suppressing
emotions or memories, or sometimes they come to me to help them release their
desires that they are suppressing. Let us see what you are---”
I backed up, interrupting her and forcing her to let
go. “You can suppress a part of someone? Like part of their personality?” The
entity inside me was snarling and I felt my fingers start to itch.
She looked at me like I had said something shocking.
“Yes.”
“Do that. There is something…” I held out my hands,
which had become clawed. “Inside of me that keeps getting more powerful. Make
it sleep again.”
She was staring at my hands. “You are a shifter. You
want your beast suppressed?” she asked it as if I said I wanted my hands cut
off.
“I don’t know what it is, just make it go away.” My
fire was stirring inside me as the creature became angry. I could almost hear a
growling in my head… it sounded like
Blood
. The girl crawled off me
until she was kneeling by my side.
“I should not do this. Whatever your beast is, he
only wants to help you.”
“He wants to kill people, you included,” I said,
growling just like the creature.
“Lay back and try to relax. Just keep still and do
not attack me,” she said. It was difficult to lay back when the creature wanted
so much to claw her. When she put one hand above my heart and the other over my
head, my teeth started to itch. I fought the shifting, but my fire wanted out.
I felt energy from her forcing its way into me, cold
as ice. My chest hurt with the chill and it became difficult to breathe. All my
energy was spent on containing the fire and anger burning its way out. I heard
her crying in pain, but the coldness kept coming. When it started to overpower
the fire, it stopped hurting so badly.
After a long and painful struggle, the coldness won
and the fire gave way. It seemed like the fire had given up. The cold stopped
hurting completely, and almost felt soothing until it faded away. My fire was
there, but extremely calm and faraway. The entity, such a new addition to me,
was almost gone. It was still in me, but very disconnected, more like a memory
than a creature inside me. Best of all, the anger the creature felt was gone.
The young woman collapsed against me, panting.
“It worked.” I said, looking at the girl and pushing
her back into a sitting position. Her clothes had scorch marks.
“Of course it did. I was wrong, though; you are not a
shifter. You are something different, but that is a real beast inside you, and
it is a real part of you. He will not stay suppressed.”
“Then I’ll return here and ask for your help again
when he wakes,” I said. She didn’t particularly look pleased. In fact, she left
as soon as she could ramble out nonsense words. The bed was covered with burn
marks.
Dylan and Sammy returned a short while later and they
both froze at the door to stare at me.
“What did you do?” Dylan asked. I studied the bed.
“I’m not talking about the burns. Your eyes… They’re both purple.”
I wished I had a mirror. I wanted to see for myself
what I was always dreaming would happen. “Really? They’re really the same
color?”
“It looks weird. Really, you look like everyone else
now; completely boring.”
“Fantastic. I always wanted to look more boring.”
Sammy, who had been standing next to Dylan, walked
clumsily up to me. He stopped right in front of the bed and stared at me with
an upset expression on his face. I reached to pick him up, but he stepped back,
looking unsure.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. He reached up to touch my
hand that I still held out. I jerked my hand away when his burned mine. It
wasn’t enough to blister, but the skin was red. I had never been burned before,
except in dreams. “What was that?”
He started to cry, so I reached to pick him up, but
he ran back to Dylan. Dylan was able to pick him up with no sign of pain.
“I thought we decided it was too dangerous for you to
hold him,” I said.
“Well, my powers are weakened here, so I thought it
would be alright.”
“And what all happened this morning?” I asked.
He shrugged. “A chandelier broke and nearly killed
us, someone lost the grip on their knife and stabbed me in the shoulder, and I
tripped over a broken chair. Not so bad, really. Looks like I had better get
used to it, because he’s not going to let you hold him till you get your dragon
back.” I opened my mouth to respond. “Save it. Whatever you did is between you
and that thing inside you. If you don’t want to call it a dragon, so be it. If
it is what gave you that eye thing and your fire, you were better off with it.
You are what you are, whether you are half asleep or not.”
“What are you talking about?”
“That thing was always in you, always a part of you,
which is why your eyes were always the way they were. You somehow got rid of
it, but you’re still the you that you were before, just half asleep.”
“But that creature was angry and powerful and it
wanted to kill.”
“Did it want to kill you?”
“No.”
“Me or Sammy?”
“No. When you two were in that cabin, it wanted to
kill Davsi,” I said. Him, those people who were standing too close when Dylan
healed the land tribe, and the girl who suppressed it.
“Sounds to me like it wanted to protect us. Believe
it or not, you have a lot of protective instincts. I’m afraid you may have just
killed something that has always been a big part of who you are.”
“I didn’t kill anything. One of the girls said that
she could suppress parts of a person, so I had her suppress the creature.”
“Why did you want to suppress it so badly? Was it
because it just woke up and was so new to you, or because it was so powerful
and could take over you?” he asked.
I could have said either one… but when I thought
about it, it wasn’t that new. I had always had my fire, I had always been
protective, and I had always felt like I was searching for something. Before I
could say that it was the second reason, I thought about that, too. When it
first woke up, it was extremely powerful, but it did not take over. Yes, I had
felt the rage and desire to destroy and I had shifted my claws, teeth, and
eyes, but that was in defense, and I would have let them go if they
surrendered. I never actually felt like I was out of control, more like me and
the beast were the same. It was only when I was fully in control that I felt we
were two different beings.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I might have made a
mistake.”
“Well, if you can’t undo your mistake, you will just
have to live with it. When I healed a boy who was injured by the chandelier,
that was apparently an act of mend magic, so I was able to heal the tribe.”
“Why didn’t you wait for me?” I asked.
He shrugged. “You couldn’t have helped; you were too
busy getting your dragon sucked out. I doubt you can even shift your eyes or
claws anymore.”
My friend was making me seriously doubt my actions.
“Since when did you rely on my freakishness to help you?”
“Remember the day we met on the ship and I accidently
spoke in English?” he asked. I nodded. “I relied on your freakishness that you
wouldn’t rat me out. I have been relying on it ever since then. I was an alien
from another planet and you were freakish enough to befriend me,” he said.
“That was another mistake I made.”
Emrys came in then and said we could go to the final
tribe and the world would be healed. Then he stared at me like I was the
weirdest thing in the world. “I liked the eyes better before. Now you look
quite boring.”
Those were his parting words before he left the room.
Dylan and Sammy trailed out behind him. “That’s what I told him. He should buy
a blue contact.”
I sighed and followed after them, running back only
to grab the baby bag.
This time, we had to walk, and it was just as grueling
a trip as the first. Making it worse was that Dylan had to trip over everything
and get stung by several poisonous plants. I tried again to take Sammy, but the
baby refused and wouldn’t even speak to me, so Emrys held him.
Our trip took us through massive forests, wide
valleys, and over mountains. It was far from enjoyable, but at least it was
warm.
When we reached the shiny white castle, I was sure
that we had gotten turned around and were back at the mend tribe, but Emrys
insisted this was the ken tribe. Apparently that was like the magic of the
soul. I argued that all magic was from the soul, but he said it was the magic
of
the soul, not magic created by it. I didn’t get it, and neither did Dylan.
“What do they do?” Dylan asked.
“Some can read the lessons of the past, some can see
the future, some can speak to the gods, and some guard the void. There are so
few ken-users and they all have different powers. As I am a Noquodi, I have the
same abilities the other Noquodi have, but I am called a master ken-user by the
Malta people. While all of my children are powerful magic-users of a tribe,
most of them are in the mend tribe.”
When we entered the castle, we were welcomed again,
and everything was looking very familiar. I still didn’t understand the
difference between the mend and the ken tribes. Oddly enough, no one here had
ever learned Sudo. Dylan asked Emrys what he should do to use ken magic.
Emrys looked at him as if it was obvious. “Contact
your goddess.”
“She’s probably busy and doesn’t want to talk.”
“All you have to do is make a psychic connection, not
engage her in conversation.”
We sat at the table in the empty dining room. Sammy
snacked on fruit while Dylan tried to contact Tiamat. He had never tried to
contact her specifically this way. Apparently, it worked because his head
pitched forward and I had to stop him from whacking his face.
Emrys frowned. “That only happens when a person
actually travels astrophysically. This is skill far beyond his age.”
“Yes, but I’m pretty sure he meant to stay upright.”
“Mama!” Sammy cried. He looked panicked. “Itai!
Hurts!”
“What hurts?” I asked, picking him up. He put his
head on my shoulder and shook, unable to talk. I was absolutely clueless as to
what was going on or what to do.
“Hide,” he finally said.
Then I understood; the demon was here. I wanted to do
something… but I didn’t know what. Dylan was defenseless and Sammy was
terrified and I had no ideas. I reached for my fire and felt empty. It was
there, but it was so weak and sluggish. I tried to shift my eyes, to see the
demon’s arrival ahead of time, but my eyes remained the same. My claws wouldn’t
shift either.
I was just a wizard among Guardians and demons and
gods. Before, I had my fire, so I was useful. I think I had never felt more
mortal and powerless than in that moment. Even with Emrys there, I was useless.
“His magic will free yours,” a small voice said
behind me.
I turned to see a little girl; the same little girl
that Dylan and I had seen in the forest on Dios. Dylan said he had seen her
dead, but she was very much alive now. She shoved something into my hand and
vanished. I opened my fingers to reveal the iron pentagram that Dylan always
wore and it practically vibrated with energy in my hand.
I had no idea how to free my fire with this. The
energy in the air stirred and crackled and before it could settle at all, I
felt pressure. It was the same pressure as I had felt on Earth, but this time,
it was getting through. The moment I lost control of my body, I hit the ground.
Emrys used his magic to try to force the demon out, but the demon was too
powerful. I had never known anger or hate like the demon felt. I realized that
the creature I pushed aside really did want to protect me and my friends; this
demon wanted to kill everyone. It would use me to kill Sammy. I needed my fire.
I needed Dylan.
“Dylan…”
I tried to call to Dylan, but we were
disconnected. Another thing that had never happened before.
I needed the entity back. The little girl said that
Dylan’s magic would release my magic, but how? Getting no messages out, I tried
to call to the lost creature inside me.
Help. Wake up and help me. Help
Sammy.
My thoughts started to blend and become confusing. My body filled
with a suffocating heat that made my skin ache, but it wasn’t my fire… The
demon would burn me from the inside as he killed Sammy.
I need you to wake
up.
Perhaps it was waiting for the moment I gave up, or
maybe my will to survive was stronger than I had thought. The pentagram pulsed
and filled me with more god energy than I thought my body could take. The rest
was fuzzy in my mind, but I knew the instant the creature inside me burst free.
It overpowered the demon in a heartbeat and forced the horrible thing out of
me.
Regaining control over my body took a few minutes,
but I could see that Emrys was checking on Dylan and Sammy. When I knew they
were both fine, the creature settled down inside me. He was very pleased at his
victory. I could feel him more now than before; I could feel him move under my
skin, his thoughts, his emotions. He was proud of himself, not just for
defeating the demon but for waking completely.