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I cannot be saved, because there is nothing of me left. The scythkin stranded on this planet was a creature of relentless destructive power. I don’t know what the word is for what I am now, but I can no longer lay claim to being scythkin. I have been changed so thoroughly. I have gained my wings, and lost my hope. All this power, and it means nothing because I cannot put this girl together again.
A pointless, senseless accident has taken her from me and there is nothing I can do. Except join her in death.
Tres
POP!
I feel a sudden release, as if pressure I didn’t know was squeezing me suddenly went away.
“My head doesn’t hurt anymore,” I mutter to myself.
“Ah,” Lykar says. “It is done.”
“What is done?”
“You have died, dear girl. Don’t look so surprised. You felt it coming for you, didn’t you? You heard it whisper your name on the soft winds. You were ready for it until the brute came for you.”
I stare at Lykar, and I wonder if what he is saying can possibly be true.
“I don’t feel dead.”
“You’ve not been in your body since you fell back out of the fire. What you felt then was your passing, or at least, the beginning of it.”
“I didn’t know it would be that easy.”
“It’s not, for everybody. But you are not everybody. You were never truly of the Earth. That song inside you kept you tethered to the other side of physical existence and all its indignities. I am sorry you suffered, my child, but you have to understand that to me, all the things humans do to one another are like the battles of gnats. They are meaningless.”
“It wasn’t meaningless being an outcast my entire life.”
“No. It was correct. They sensed that you were better than them, more than them. But you should have known better, Tres. You should have felt the enormity of creation in your song, every time you looked at the stars or saw a flower open, you should have known you were forever part of something so much larger.”
“I didn’t. I only knew that I was outcast, that I would be sacrificed when the tribe needed me to be. I was born to die.”
“All things are,” he says, reaching for a quill and twirling it between his fingers. He looks at me with those laughing auburn eyes and I want to scream.
“I found someone I loved. And I was taken away from him.”
“That is often the way,” Lykar muses. He sounds bored, as though it is not his concern how upset I might be.
“This is not where the ancestors are,” I say, suddenly. “I am not in the right place.”
“Your ancestors are not human. Well, half of them are, but they’re not the important part. One drop of faun blood makes you ours - and there is much more than a single drop in you, Tres.” He smiles at me, and there is pride in his eyes, but it is not pride in me. It is pride in himself. All he sees in me, likes in me, are the parts he recognizes that come from him. And that, is not love.
“I hate you,” I tell him. “I want to be with Vulcan.”
“You can want all sorts of things. You can have many of them. But you cannot live a life with a beast from another world. That creature defiled you in the world of the living, but you are home now, where you belong.”
“I don’t belong here.”
“Of course you do. Look at yourself.”
“I know what I look like.”
“Do you?” He cocks his head and gives me one of those knowing smiles which drive me mad. “Look down, Tres. Look again.”
I look down. And I scream.
My legs are gone. My feet are cloven hooves. I am not human anymore. I am naked to the waist, my hair cascading over my breasts in an auburn flow, but everything below my hips is a sheen of white fur.
“What have you done to me?!”
“Nothing,” he says with that same irritating smirk. “This what you are, Tres. It is what you have always been.”
“I have not always been half goat.”
“You’ve always been the daughter of the faun king,” Lykar smiles. “You’re only just taking your true form. You should embrace this. It is proof that you are no mere mortal, that death does not touch you as it touches pathetic humans.”
“So I’m not dead?”
“Not in the way you think you are,” he says. “Tres, it is time you were introduced to society.”
“Nobody can see me like this! I’m a monster!”
“You are no monster. You are a great beauty. You just don’t know what it means to be beautiful, here in this place.”
“Give me my legs back! I want to be human. I want Vulcan! I want…”
“What you want will change when you realize who you really are,” Lykar says. “You don’t know yet. Your human life was confusing for you, and it has not been long enough for you to understand otherwise. Embrace your nature, Tres, it is the only way to be happy.”
