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“You mean, the monster covered in your blood?”
“I mean the only hero I ever had.”
“You don't even know what you’ve been saved from,” he tells me in that sneering tone. “You could be a thin smear across time right now if it wasn’t for me. You could have been turned into space dust. Instead, I caught your soul before it completely disintegrated. You owe your existence to me. I begat you, and now I have claimed you for your rightful place.”
“And this is?”
“There are many names for it,” he says. “I call it home.”
“I never will.”
“Dying has made you bold, little one,” he says. “But wait until your body goes cold. Your lover leaves. Your flesh is consumed by biting mouths big and small. Your bravery now is nothing but a remnant of the world you no longer belong to.” He lets out a sigh. “I did not want to argue with you, my girl. This should be a happy day. You have finally arrived.”
He does not understand. He thinks that the life I had before this moment was nothing but a fleshy irrelevance. But he’s wrong. My life with Vulcan, short as it was, was everything. There is nothing else to care about, nothing that matters.
“Please,” he says. “Sit down. It will be over soon, and you will feel better.”
Sitting down sounds good. Dying is tiring. I feel drained, as if my energy isn’t all in one place. Part of me is here, but part of me is still somewhere else. At the faun's behest, I sit down in a fur lined chair and take the weight off my barely existent feet.
“Yes,” he says. “Get comfortable. It won’t be long, one way or another.”
“What is your name?”
“I cannot tell you my name. It is a word of power too great for you to contain. If I told you, and you spoke it, it would tear you apart instantly - and you are already in delicate enough condition, my child.”
“I have to call you something.”
“Call me Lykar.”
“Lykar.” I wrap my tongue around the word and feel it buzz against it. He’s right. My voice has always had strange power, enough to unsettle Trelok and the villagers, but here it is unfettered. It is as if the safety protocols have been stripped off my true nature. I suddenly know words, like protocols, which I know I never knew when I was nothing more than a girl covered in painted handprints waiting to die in a cave.
He brings me a chalice of water from the back of the cave. It spills over the edge of a golden cup, coating his fingers with a light green tinge.
“Drink,” he says. “You will feel better.”
I shake my head. Instinct tells me not to take food or drink from a creature like this. Untrustworthiness dances in his eyes. I see a multitude of meanings in his gaze, a mischievous villainy which might end everything.
“I’m not thirsty.”
“This doesn’t slake your physical thirsts, which you no longer have. It helps ease you into this new realm. You belong here, Tres. You were made for this place. When you are ready, I will take you from this cave and I will show you an entire realm of such incredible beauty you will never tire of looking at it. You will be among family. You will be surrounded by friends…”
“I never had friends,” I say, putting my hand to my head. It is pounding terribly, getting worse by the moment. “I don’t need them now.”
Vulcan
Blood. There is so much blood. It runs everywhere, over my fingers and dripping through them onto the sandy cave floor.
I think I have done this wrong.
I have never cleaved the skull of anyone I loved. I never knew it was possible to save a life this way. I never thought about saving life at all, only taking it. Now I see her essence leaking from her and I feel the most pure despair possible.
She is lifeless. The spirit which animated her has fled. She is just flesh. The injury to her head was too much for her to sustain, and I have not helped. If anything, I hastened her end.
“Tres,” I say her name, knowing she cannot respond.
I lie her on the bed of leaves I made for her, and I face the fact that I could not save her. All my power, all my strength. It meant nothing in the end. Fate wanted to take her, and now it has.
The communicator buzzes. I know Krave’s voice is about to come out of it. Maybe he’s going to tell me I’m saved. Maybe he’s going to tell me I’m still stranded. I don’t care. Before he can speak, I pick it up and crush it in my fist until it becomes nothing but dust. I no longer wish to be rescued. I know where I am bound, somewhere where the heat of molten rock will claim my body and take this pain from me.
