"If you don't mind, Menye?" Vashen sighed, watching as Iaden and Seyashen wondrously materialized just a short distance from the worn table.
"At your leisure, m'lord," Akmenyn replied, shifting his head to the right slightly to indicate to Iaden that father and son should have a bit of privacy. After a brief, but fierce hug for the father who was much more lightly built than he was, Iaden complied.
Vashen got up from the table and, contrary to the emotion that had begun to surface in his voice, turned away from his son. "Yasha, we made the mistake, your mother and I, of teaching you to fear what was, for you, merely another ability. You were already perceptive, spoke well, and understood written material far beyond your age level, but at your first sparks of your- magical talent, Mei worried about what your adult life would be. It appeared that she knew a few too many necromancers who met unhappy ends at the tips of spikes, or on slag heaps, or tied to great weights at the bottoms of rivers. It is our fear, a stealthy terror that overshadowed every 'I love you' you ever heard, that has planted a well-deserved anger in your heart."
Seyashen, who had expected a much different answer, got up and tried to near his father, who pulled away from him. "But I- you can't blame yourself for my-"
"I must, Seyashen, because the blame is mine," Vashen scolded in a tone that froze his son solid. "But to see you- I don't regret it. I don't regret for a moment giving you the extra meanness in your voice that you will need to fill those incantations, those rituals, those spells that all once seemed much too weighty for you. Your fury, which you nursed quietly- perhaps unconsciously- is now a great weapon. Like Menye's throwing knives, or Iaden's sword or my bow. It is a tool- use it, and then put it away."
Seyashen stood back away from his father, staring at him incredulously.
"What do you wonder at?" Vashen rumbled, finally turning around. "You should know; there are few secrets hidden from the dead. You feared your mother's teachers' judgements, but you also hated them with a passion I didn't think a child your age should have. The neighbors did frighten you, but when they shrunk from you, they sparked in you a desire to destroy them for those timid looks and secret whispers. You trembled as I climbed to the gallows, but you had condemned every single person in that square in your heart long before your magic broke loose of you, compelled to do as you would not even admit that you were commanding. And you were furious with me, too."
"Why would you say that?" Seyashen whispered fiercely, his voice suddenly robbed of most of its tone.
"Because you were, boy, admit it! How I would not stay with your mother. The way I left for days and days and days, either dragging the entire family behind me or leaving you to wonder if I were dead or not. The nights you starved, wishing your father were like the other males, who went out to the market and returned with food. It killed you that not only was I different than every other grown male you saw, I made you different than any of their children. You blamed me and your mother for somehow passing down the curse of necromancy. You hated me, cursed me every night, then hated and cursed yourself for doing so. Yours was a never ending, vicious downward spiral of rage so fierce that you preferred those night terrors to the agony of waking." Vashen stopped, spent and panting, and shook his head. "And I watched you. I feared you. I feared that you were right, that it was my fault. I couldn't bear to face you for a moment more than I had to, barely looked at you, rarely talked to you. I felt the sick, heavy heat of your emotions when you stared at me from across a room, oppressive enough to crush vomit out of my body. There- there you have it. You have it all. Now, what will you do with me?"
Seyashen took a deep breath and turned his back to his father, looking out over the desolate landscape that sported gusts of dusty wind and bare, dry trees. "I have the rest of my life to consider that, Vashen. You should rest, while I think about it."
"Rest? How? Every night you tug at the tether of my soul. I haven't even been assigned to a specific level of Baator, because just the time someone gets around to placing me, I'm having to consciously resist your summons. I've long assumed that that, not any punishment that any demon can think up, is my penance."
"Don't worry. You can go to your appropriate damnation in peace. Unless I need you for something, I won't call. And when I do call, be assured that you will come, whether you like it or not-" Seyashen held up his hand when his father began to protest. "I am the death mage here. Most other spirits can expect me to treat them with some semblance of respect, but you- ah, you. At last, since it's clear that you're aware of more than I had thought to admit to, I will treat you exactly like you deserve to be treated. Like a man so consumed with his own agenda that he could not be bothered to raise his plethora of hapless children- a terrible father, an uncaring spouse and thus, a half-made man."
"I should split your throat through, boy," Vashen growled. But somehow, there was an unmistakable trace of pride in the Tiefling's voice.
"Lift that cursed bow against me, Vashen, and I promise you, I will rot it out of your hand. You'll feel acid sores the like of which you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy's mother in law."
"Acid and rot- you sound like the Barikdral matron." Seyashen whipped himself around to stare holes into his father, who simply shrugged. "She was the only fool in the entire empire who dared to send a shambling skeleton with a message- an attempt to keep me from tearing a hole into the side of the Empire- I take it you've heard of House Barikdral."
"I am a Tiefling, and I am a necromancer. Anybody who knows anything about necromancy assumes that I'm of House Barikdral- and until this moment, I'd thought them all mistaken."
"Well, they may not be. Although, since your father was a bastard, abandoned on the doorstep of a front for a pair of ruthless Human crime lords, you may be one of the few shreds of proof that he's of that house at all. So, perhaps you're not the only one who dislikes his parents- at least you know who to curse."
It was as this point that Seyashen noticed that a stream of dark water had pushed its way up the peak and was now cutting an obvious circle around himself and his father.
"We'll come back to this, Vashen," he breathed, and although it was almost more for himself than it was for his father, he could see his father nodding out of the corner of his eye.
"Put some power in that voice, boy. You may not think so right now, but I look forward to getting my bow melted into goddamned acid. Can stay that way, for the good it did us all."
Seyashen turned back around and found that he was standing in the low ground by himself- the table, his father, and the distant images of his uncle and cousin had disappeared. He was alone with the circular swirl of dark water, which began to reach slender fingers out toward him. Now having a solid idea of what precisely he'd been following, Seyashen simply moved a hoof outward to touch the stream, and was instantly transported to the center most peak. There, on a table-like slab of black stone, stood a battered fountain that sucked in the dark water. Acidic clouds that Seyashen was sure should have choked him to death brushed harmlessly past his shoulders, and dribbles of the liquid seeped through the vein-like cracks that made the ivory white fountain seem as though it would fall into pieces at any moment.
Seyashen moved forward and reached out his hand to see if there were any way for him to replace the ivory fountain controlling the dark flow, but just as his fingers touched the fountain, he heard a strikingly familiar sound.
It was his own laugh.
He retracted his hand for a few seconds and cautiously looked around himself, but when he saw no one, he shook his head clear and returned to concentrating on the fountain.
"And so you continue to pretend? Bravo."
Seyashen stopped moving and crushed his lips together to ensure that he himself was not talking. After a few moments, he noticed that the waters had again begun to make a ring around the area in which he stood- a circular flat space not unlike the peak that he had just left behind. But this time, instead of reaching hopeful trickles out, the dark waters seemed to really be intent on claiming him, quickly pushing itself toward him.
"You think you know what's going on? Got all the pieces to this puzzle, huh?"
Seyashen got up and backed up, his lips still mashed together between his teeth. And there, floating in glory above the weakening ivory fountain was a horned image made entirely of the dark water. Even without an identifiable face, there was no mistaking who this creature was. Even the self-satisfied way in which it twitched its tail was utterly familiar.
"Your attempts to control me are pathetic. They're not even real," the image proclaimed, alighting on the fountain and walking down on the water. "You need me to stay precisely as I am, and you know it. Who here are you acting for?"
Seyashen blinked, crossing his arms and maintaining his silence. I'll be damned if I'm crazy enough to talk to myself, he thought simply.
"Define me, and you define your limits," the image continued, flicking his hands at the waters to encourage them to flow freely toward the fountain. Small waves began to smack against the ivory, visibly widening the cracks. "Control me, and you have touched the bottom of your power. You will have discovered precisely who you are, exactly what you are capable of. And while you sit and ponder what a terrible, wicked, heartless sociopath you really are, I'll feed off the open wound of your self-loathing and bitterness. Then, I'll break through you and hurt whomever put us in this giant mindfuck. I'll rip the skin off their bones, pull their insides outside and melt their muscles off, you know I will."
Alright, I'm crazy. Seyashen pursed his lips, then flicked his arm outward. Dark water rolled back with it, momentarily allowing the still-parched ground beneath it to be seen. "There are no limits," he said simply.
"Oh, I love it! Do tell! If you haven't got any limits, why do you keep holding me back? I'm the best and strongest part of you!"
" 'Darkness is endless and eternal; there can be no limit to it. There is likewise no limit to the power of those who study the darkness but that limit that they place on themselves through fear-' "
"And I've loved all that negative fear energy- all these years! Just makes me stronger, all of it!"
"-or self-restraint,' " Seyashen finished, consciously deciding to stare his faceless opponent down.
"What are you, reaching for sainthood? I made those townspeople live their fears. Everyone who looked at me was terrified of me, and I made their worst nightmares true. They wanted to burn us- they did! You know it! But they were too scared of me to pick up a single brand. You love me for that, always have. You adore my raw power- and be honest, you've kept me this way on purpose. So that you could always know for sure that I was the real deal. No cultivation. No practice. No help. Nothing but pure, unadulterated dark power, straight from the blood of Asmodeus!"
And as the waters touched Seyashen's hooves, filling him with seemingly boundless energy, he nodded. "You're right. I do appreciate- even love- lack of control, at times. Sometimes I don't care who I hurt. But I shouldn't have to blind myself to keep myself from razing entire cities to the ground."
"I don't see what the problem is," the image laughed. "We've worked successfully like that for some time now."
"No, no 'we' haven't. I've been scared of 'you' for some time now. But I don't need to get rid of 'you' or cover 'you' up. I will use you- like a sword, or a bow."
"You're limiting me," the image growled fiercely, circling Seyashen like a predatory animal. "I'll only take it for so long, and you know it. You'd be watching an hourglass for the rest of your life. Why not just let me free? Let me expand, punish the ones who hurt you. It's my pleasure to put the big bad bullies in their graves, then pick them up when I want to play with them again."
"I punished them. I killed them and resurrected them to kill others." Seyashen extended one hand out and watched in patient silence as the waters lovingly wrapped themselves around him. "This power is mine. All your abilities are mine. You are mine, because you are me."
"I'm stronger than you," the image responded in a tone close to that of a jilted lover. "I'm a fearless and remorseless destroyer. I am all I need. I don't give a shit what anyone says about me. You won't catch me crying in mommy's lap when I'm offended. You have always wanted to be me."
"Just once more," Seyashen sighed. "I covered my brothers and sisters in acid blisters when they pissed me off. I brought those buildings down because I hated the way Eiko was treated. I killed every weakling that looked at me with fear in his eyes until the Dragonborn priest literally died to stop me. And I kept wavering between offing myself and everyone else because I wasn't sure who I hated more." Seyashen looked up from his arm to the dark image, and slowly, the water around him began to form into tentacles that encased his arms, then split until he had about twenty tentacles branching from his back. "But this day, this very day, I will finally admit that there has never been a separate you. It has always been me, and I am singly responsible for hundreds of deaths. I will stop beating myself up about it, stop blaming somebody else for it, stop pretending like it wasn't really me and that I can't really control it." The tentacles wrapped themselves around the dark image and lifted him high above the ivory fountain. "I can be a fearless and remorseless destroyer, yes. Want to try that out?"
The ivory fountain collapsed entirely, but instead of shooting up from the ground without control, the dark water simply flowed directly to Seyashen, who effectively became the fountain.
The focus. The source. All this power is mine.
The dark image, choked, managed to beg, "What will you do with me?"
The question, although somehow expected, still caught Seyashen by surprise. "What? What will I do- with me? With myself?"
And Seyashen awoke, naked and alone in the dim candle light of a stone chamber. His arms and legs were tied, and on a table a few feet away sat a pair of black metal horns.
"Ah, there you are." The Master Inquisitor got up from a meditative position in a dark corner and lit a few more candles. In a few moments, Seyashen could see that he was clearly in a torture room. As he looked at the various implements, he could tell that a few of them had been used recently. "Did you find your answers?"
Seyashen closed his eyes again, feeling the cold stone slab beneath him, and eventually the tugging at his wrists and ankles as he was released from the table. "Where is the Axis of Afflux?"
"Where is the breath of the gods? And again, traveler, where is your the threshold of your greatest pain?"
Seyashen opened his eyes again, but didn't try to sit up. "What is one's greatest pain but their best teacher?"
The Master Inquisitor, whose mohawk had been laid flat and bound behind his head, had decided to go without his bandages this day- or night. The candlelight exposed him utterly, but Seyashen found himself unperturbed by what he would have previously believed to be some sort of perversion. Bringing a chair to the side of the stone slab, the Master Inquisitor sat down and laid his arms on the rests, palms upward. "I give you a statement, Questioner, for I sense now that you are ready to hear it."
Seyashen shook his head, turning his head so that he looked straight up to the ceiling, which was lined with mirrors and sported two candelabras that were obviously missing the catches for dripping wax. "I'm listening."
"While other gods may not, Afflux indeed delights in torture. But it is not always merely for his entertainment, or even for mine or yours. It is instead for enlightenment. For the greater good of all. The answers are in the bone, in the flesh, in the blood." The Halfling leaned his head back and sighed uncomfortably, a strange sound for him. "Yet, did you find your answer?"
Seyashen shook his head again, then allowed it to fall to the side so that he could see the Master Inquisitor again. "What is the question?"
Rolling his head to one side so that he could catch the weary eyes of his newest initiate, the Master Inquisitor whispered, "Exactly."
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