As a young child, Vantra’s outgoing personality annoyed the Sun acolytes who ran the temple’s pre-school. She raised her hand to answer questions more than other children and happily provided the answers. The inevitable happened, however, and she answered wrong—and the priests mocked her. The other children mimicked them, and the ridicule lasted for days. By the end, she had pulled into herself, ashamed. Unwilling to chance another wrong answer, she never volunteered her words or her help again, and her trust in others spiraled into a dismal ocean, where it badly weathered the storms.
The same shame curled through her as she sat in a small, miserable ball in the dimly lit, chilly mist room, only this time, everyone else knew the correct answer but her. And Laken.
Shudders raced through her essence, and she could not stop the flood of self-loathing and inadequacy left behind. How they must have laughed at her, for believing them ghosts.
She dug her forehead into her arms, which crossed over her raised knees, a poor attempt to stifle her misery. Tears leaked from her eyes and splatted against her torso, wetting her dress at her waist. The dress—the purple one with a petal-like skirt someone had bought her on the island stopover as they sailed for the Snake’s Den, one that perfectly transitioned between Physical and Ether form. The ease with which it followed her lead meant it cost a lot of money—and now she wondered why they bothered. Appearances, maybe? Perhaps they didn’t want to travel with a ghost who wore an outfit next to rags.
Distressed, she sucked in mist, and energy filtered through her essence, tingling along the way. The haze had a sweetness to it, one that blended with an earthen undertone. It puffed out of a stone fountain in the center of the room, a plain object with a shallow pool and a hollow cylinder rising from it. She had no idea how it made the mist, but her curiosity over its construction broke apart before she could focus on it.
Her humiliation obliterated everything else.
“Vantra.”
Could she curl into a small, unnoticeable puff of essence so Jare could forget about her?
“Vantra, please.”
His sincere plea to acknowledge him batted at her like a cat’s paw. She raised her head and peered over her knees at the two ghosts sitting on the other side of the room. Laken looked resigned, but she knew, through their bond, concerned confusion swirled through him. He did not share her gut punch of shame, but he did question why syimlin took such care with him. Qira—Talis—made him the floating base so he could move without needing someone to carry him. That thoughtfulness did not seem very syim-like to him, and how the mini-Joyful oversaw his comfort, helped him . . .
She pondered whether he soaked up her emotions as she absorbed his. She thinned the link; why burden him with her feelings?
Jare leaned over his knees and studied her, his blue eyes as intense as a simmering midday sky. “It’s not that they wanted to cause either of you pain. When they’re in the Evenacht, they’re Qira and Katta, not Talis and Veer. Most mistake them for avatars because they can’t hide their power like mortals, but otherwise, their nicknames serve their purpose. They can walk among the living and the dead as themselves and no one’s the wiser.”
As themselves? Vantra snorted, reburied her face, and glared at her chest.
“You know them that well.” By Laken’s skeptical tone, he did not seem inclined to believe him, either.
“I was the one who crowned Talis after he defeated the Final Gauntlet by killing Skerezahn,” Jare said, his voice as soft as the mist. He was? She did not recall any name given the Light-blessed who crowned him, and it saddened her that the religious relegated his defiant, rebellious act to an unknown companion. Without him, there would be no Talis, Syimlin of Light. “High Priest Vicas expected him to die like all the others who ran the last trial, and shock petrified him when he succeeded. That ass thought his position and influence would remain unchallenged, and another Light-blessed would be sent to the Evenacht for his pleasure.
“I snatched the crown before he recovered his wits and placed it on Talis’s head because he needed the power within the jewels for his final act as Light-blessed. It’s why so many of us stood in attendance with Joila during his trial. It was agonizing, to watch him battle the creatures and monsters, overcome the puzzle traps, bleed, suffer, and finally take down Skerezhan, but we knew what he meant to do and needed to be there. It was obvious, his plans after Resa died—well, to us, at least. We understood the silent but potent promise to end the suffering and destroy the temple causing it.
“We helped him reach the throne room. We protected him from the priests and guards who wanted to stop him, and we defended the throne while he shot into the sky, recharging the crown’s gems with Light on his way up. So many of our brothers died, but they sacrificed because they knew once Talis gathered enough energy, he would destroy the temple and avenge them.
“The priests and guards knew that, too, and they did everything they could to get through us and stop him. Magic-wielding, desperate acolytes who had trained for decades made for challenging foes.” He raised his fingers to his lips. “You could taste their desperation, as sour as the darkest red wine. You could smell their despair when we returned what we suffered, and we ripped them apart, leaving corpses to leak fluids that made the tiles slick and treacherous for their siblings at arms.
“Maybe it would have ended differently if Talis hadn’t realized why the other Light-ascended failed. The priests bragged about the Light-infused crown and its power, but the jewels were empty when the high priest placed it on a Light-ascended head—a precaution against the newly anointed getting ideas. After the Final Gauntlet, with broken bodies, drained Light gems, and sometimes shattered minds, when they tried to cast their last, destructive spell, they easily fell to the Light priests and guards. They failed because the power they expected wasn’t there.”
“They should have waited until they recovered,” Laken muttered.
“They couldn’t. The priests wrapped the Light-ascended in so many binding spells right after the Final Gauntlet, they could barely function afterwards. Depleted, sometimes so injured or senseless they could not walk out of the arena, they were easy prey to wrap up. The priests and Aristarzian rulers, when faced with Light’s avatar, refused to give any of their religious power to such a creature. So they made him an impotent figurehead.”
Laken lifted his lip while Vantra clenched her hands, her emotions wavering and flickering. Sympathy warred with the deep sense of betrayal; what Talis and the Light-blessed went through was unconscionable, and to make certain the agonizing deaths continued because influence and wealth were more important, nauseated her. Hiding his identity from her seemed a minute act, compared to that. Maybe that was Jare’s point?
“What are Light gems?” Laken asked. “Something that stored magic?”
“Yes.” Jare raised his right arm to a vertical position, showing the tooled side of the blue, fingerless gauntlet. He slapped his left fingers over the top and ran them down the wavy design; it disappeared, revealing gems glowing with golden light. Judging by the positions, he had several rows lined up by threes, until they reached the back of the hand, where they shifted to a single file running up the middle finger.
“You have a full set?” she whispered.
“Not quite. We have fifty-three because Talis refused to accept the last gem,” and he pointed to the space between the second and third joints of his middle finger, “and none of us want to have more than he did. Right after his ascension, some of us thought we could better protect him if we had access to more stored magic power, so we had them embedded. It felt like cheating, since we didn’t have to win a gauntlet trial to receive them, but the extra energy was worth it. A few ghosts like Resa figured out how to do the same thing. Once he recovered, the crown and the mantle made him powerful enough that those who faced him, eager for revenge and his title, ended up in the Evenacht.”
“But didn’t the crown disintegrate when it hit the throne?” She had never read a retelling that stated otherwise.
“Not in the way you think. Talis, as he rode the rays into the midday sun, recharged his Light gems and his shields, not just the crown’s jewels. Once he filled them, he zipped back to the throne. It was so fast, a mere breath . . .” He laughed, a guttural, disbelieving sound. “I doubt Vicas would have continued the rituals to saturate the sacred chair with Light if the king had not expected a yearly devotional to prove how religious he was, but he did. Talis used the collision of energy in the crown and the power in the throne to obliterate everything around us—the temple, the hill upon which it sat, the surrounding city. The physical crown disintegrated at impact; the remaining energy didn’t, and he absorbed it.”
“And you lived?” Vantra asked. Oddly, she did not think she had read anything about the immediate aftermath of Talis’s ascension, just that he destroyed the temple and its corrupt reach.
“Yes, because Joila was there. Other Light-blessed were supposed to get her away from the temple because Talis didn’t want her caught in the explosion. She refused and ran to his side.” Jare slammed his fingers through his bangs. “I expected to die. I waited for the brief, horrendous agony before blessed silence. Instead, Joila raced into the room and screamed ‘QIRA!’”
He dropped his hand and clasped both together between his knees, nails digging hard into the backs. His melancholy smile held more tears than regret. Pain rode him, and guilt washed through Vantra that he recounted the story. Why did he see it as important? He focused on her, so he thought she needed to hear it, but who was she, but a nobody ex-Finder who could not even tell a syimlin from a mortal despite being the daughter of Sun’s high priestess?
Her anger at him wavered under confusion.
“Talis cast shields around all Light-blessed, even those who weren’t in the throne room. We and Joila lived while every other being associated with the temple and the surrounding city died in a rage-fueled explosion. He obliterated the core of the corruption, and the long rays of justice shot through the country. The king and his court fell, the families who sold their red-haired, blue-eyed sons to the temple shattered, and the influential Light temple acolytes and priests either died or lost their positions. New adherents rose in their place, and they rejected the corruption of their ancestors and looked to redeem Aristarzia, rather than continue its bloody course.”
He rubbed at his face as if to wipe away sour memories, leaned back, and stared at the ceiling.
“He didn’t protect himself, though. He wanted to die in that explosion, but he didn’t. It was probably because he absorbed the crown’s power, but that’s just a guess. The only certainty is that he blew everything into the Evenacht and lived.” A pathetic laugh escaped his lips. “We should have realized Light passed his mantle when Zibwa arrived to heal him, but, well, we didn’t. All we knew was that he lay at the bottom of a smoking crater, broken in too many ways, and we panicked.”
“Broken.” Vantra’s lower lip trembled. Listening to Jare was far different from reading a book that reveled in Light’s blessed act but skipped the emotional epilogue.
“We didn’t see Talis, destroyer of the Light Temple. We saw Qira, our shattered friend.” Thick misery clogged his voice, and he paused before continuing. “Qira means beloved. Not in a passionate love sense, but in a deep, consuming friendship sense, where you would do anything for the other person, no matter the outcome. Qira was our qira, willing to destroy himself to free us. It’s why, after Zibwa healed him, we remained at his side. We needed to be his qiraph in return.
“We protected him from the fallout, the rejection, the retaliation, and himself. Joila helped him the most, though. She, Talis and Resa had a bond that surpassed even the concept of qira. When Resa died, she supported Talis’s bid because she saw not only retribution but salvation in him. They shared that dream, and afterwards, she gave him everything she was, and brought him into his mantle through willpower and love. He recovered to the point he accepted his station—but it was decades. He hated Light, he hated his power, he hated himself. He felt he should have died after killing so many others, because while necessary, he was still the villain, the destroyer.”
“So Joila’s his lover.” As Vantra expected, their relationship had a deep, sentimental commitment.
“Was,” Jare corrected. “When she entered the Evenacht, she found Resa. When alive, they had the loverly vibe, and they reknit that bond after death.” He laughed and rubbed at his chest. “Then again, who knows. Katta and Kjaelle made it work.”
The simple statement took Vantra’s shock and tossed it into a violent, crackly abyss of stunned disbelief. Veer, the Syimlin of Darkness, had a ghost for a lover. That . . . that . . .
Jare waved his hand, a distraction from the unexpected diversion. “When Joila died, Talis broke again—but her death prompted him to visit the Evenacht. He located her, and she had already found Resa, so the three reunited. They introduced him to Leeyal, who founded the Dark Light shortly after. It attracted Light-blessed from across the Evenacht, and he experienced what his act meant to those from ages previous. It settled something in him, to know others honored his sacrifice and understood his difficulties. Resa gave him the motivation to visit the Light temples and make the title his own, which he did. And whenever he needs us, we stand with him, either in the evening lands or on Talis.” Jare winced. “Another reason we call him Qira.”
Oh.
“Officially, he is Talis, Syimlin of Light, namesake of the continent Talis. But the person behind the mantle? He is Qira. He will always be Qira. So what you consider a lie isn’t. You’ve traveled with Qira, not Talis. You’ve spoken with Qira, laughed with Qira, got annoyed at Qira, glared at Qira, stomped away from Qira. That’s Qira, not Talis.” He rolled his head over and down, a small smirk drawing his lips to the side. “Believe me, when Talis rears up, you’ll know.”
Vantra had the feeling Jare spoke from personal experience.
Laken huffed with sardonic laughter and looked askance at him. “Like when he talks about Machella?”
His wince deepened. “You learn pretty quick, he isn’t fond of the oracle. She predicted his ascension, predicted his friendship with Veer, predicted Kjaelle and Vesh and Mera and Tally. She’s learned to brag about it out of his hearing because he gets nasty in turn.”
“So he’s met with her.” Laken’s tone, his face, darkened.
“Many times. You can’t proceed through her special prophecy gauntlet without her showing up and inserting herself into your life. Just because she likes the attention her unexpected arrivals attract doesn’t mean her pawns do.”
“Are those predictions part of the Recompense?” Vantra asked. Katta said she had thousands of correct guesses to build the foundation upon, and what Jare said struck her as things she could easily proclaim if worded vaguely enough.
“Yeah, and neither Qira nor Katta enjoy that, though Qira’s more outspoken. They feel like she’s leading them to a cliff and expecting them to jump off when she tells them to.”
“That doesn’t seem like them.” She could not picture either one accepting a leash and waiting for the inevitable demand.
“It’s not. I know, because we’ve been friends for millennia.” Jare placed his hand over his chest. “Qira introduced Veer to us right after he became the Syimlin of Darkness. We Light-blessed nicknamed him, unintentionally, but it stuck. Katta, in Aristarzan, means ‘friend-shadow’. We used it as slang for someone who blocked another from the intensity of Light—a shield, if you will. Veer became Qira’s friend-shadow by protecting him from himself. And since Qira happened to be Light, the name worked on several levels. We found out katta is a word in his native Ba tongue, too. One of its meanings is ‘unselfish’. So he’s the unselfish shield for Qira in the Evenacht. I suppose that’s a play, too.”
“What do you mean?” Vantra asked.
“Do you know how Veer really became Darkness?”
She squinted at him, and he raised his eyebrows. Laken’s puzzlement reflected her own, so no help from him. She shook her head, bitter resentment stomping through her. “I’ve read stories and the mini-Joyful’s said a few things." Why were the religious tales she absorbed as a child so wrong?
Jare hmphed. “The religious like to warp their sacred tales. Look how Talis’s has changed. His priests regard him as a healer, someone who cleansed the corruption from the Light priesthood. Believe me, no one at the time saw him that way, whether mortal or syimlin. He was Light the Destroyer, and most feared him.”
That made sense. Living through a syimlin’s recompense was not a comfortable thing—if one lived through it. Those trapped by a deity’s wrath rarely survived to tell tales. The few who did became syimlin themselves.
“Anyway, Rezenarza targeted Veer because his use of Darkness reflected a cool, misty grey morning, rather than a deep, moonless midnight. Talis saw this as foolish and pulled Veer into Light-infused shadows, which effectively hid him from the encroaching Darkness. Rezenarza beat at those shadows until he drained his power, and the mantle switched hosts. Why did it choose Veer?” He shrugged. “But it did. Suddenly, the acolyte became the syimlin, and he had no idea what to do. Talis guided him, gave him the introduction to mantles and titles he wished he’d had during his first days as a deity, which cemented their friendship. They, too, are qiraph to one another. It’s to the point now, I don’t think one can survive without the other.”
“The religious aren’t the only ones who shine up the ugly.”
Vantra jerked back, the spell Jare’s dark tale wove breaking on Navosh’s sarcastic words.
