48. “What lies in darkness.”

48. “What lies in darkness.”

Kaspias

Skylenna’s maniacal, stormy green eyesslide to a space over my shoulder for a couple seconds before she spears me with that cold stare.

The vicious, rabid energy in her expression has changed. No longer murderous, vengeful, and somewhat empty. She’s pinning me with a glare that says she’s never seen me before.

How is she still standing? Her balance should have her on her ass right now. I’ve never seen a prisoner fight this. I’ve never seen them stand so effortlessly for this long after it’s taken effect.

“You want to fight?” I taunt with a challenging smirk. “Let’s fight. I know you’ve been waiting to see if I can do it like my brother.”

My jibe falls short, not even coming close to affecting her stoic face.

“For all you’ve done, I should make you suffer with Masten.”

I can’t help but glance down at my mentor passed out on the floor, trembling slightly with his eyes rolled back in his head. What did she do to him? If I had been raised and trained to know fear, I might back away from her.

But she’s nothing.

My brother’s weakness.

An uninspiring distraction.

“But Sophia wants something different for you, Kaspias. And after all your mother sacrificed, I owe her this much,” she says with wet eyes and puffy cheeks.

The name Sophia used to get a rise out of me. It was used to trigger an emotional reaction, the need in a child to see their mother, to be loved by a parent. But every time I’d react, the beatings would get far more creative and eventually unbearable.

I had to stop thinking about her.

Had to stop imagining what she looked like. How she would take care of me. If the rumor of a mother’s love was fact or fiction.

The concept of a mother eventually infuriated me. Made my lip curl and my stomach ache. I developed an irrational hatred of all mothers over time. I’d watch my fellow students walk their mothers on a leash to get some fresh air on nice days, and I couldn’t stop the irrational fits of anger that I’d spiral into from seeing it.

I’m not stupid enough to not understand that it was a conditioned response. Of course, it is. But it doesn’t matter because that is the price of winning wars. That’s what Vexamen must do to stay on top. To dominate our enemies.

“Don’t say her name again,” I snarl.

I hate the sound of it. I hate the way it makes my heart stutter in my chest. The way I try to picture her face. It forms a ball of fire in my gut.

“For your sake, I hope this works.”

I can’t help but flinch and attempt to deflect as she slides a hand along the side of my face until she reaches my temple. Skylenna’s pupils stretch wide, appearing demonic and comatose as the whites turn bloodshot, filling with scattered blood vessels and black clouds of smoke.

And it’s like she’s strapped a collar around my soul, dragging it away from my eyes as I sink, sink, sink into the darkness of my body. Sounds of wind, of water whooshing, of stars and planets shifting in the universe. It feels like being injected with the most powerful of drugs, ones that send you on your ass and detach you from your body.

I go limp as I flounder through the empty space, traveling at an otherworldly speed. I don’t see her around me as we move, but I can feel her ethereal presence. Something about it makes me feel weak, like a little boy, like a prisoner unable to fight back.

I try to yell, to throw my arms around, to attack whatever force is controlling me like a doll soaring through this unearthly air. But I’m at her mercy, watching as pinholes of light break through the ongoing storm of endless night around us.

And suddenly I’m standing, shielding my eyes with my hand as a blinding stream of light burns my retinas, blanketing my whole body with warmth. I’m gasping for a single normal breath, fighting the light with watering eyes and quivering hands.

Where the fuck am I?

“Your brother showed me this place when I was a little girl. He taught me how to recreate it in my mind.” Skylenna’s voice travels to my ears from behind my shielding hand. “But I think it’s more than that. I think your brother taught me to reach my hand to the skies and cut a slice from heaven, an oasis just grand enough to help me in this war.”

I part two fingers to see her standing in the sunlight, surrounded by a meadow, tall grass, and swaying trees of purple flowers.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. What have you done to us?” I ask, finding my voice in a scratchy throat.

I was told her brain was different, just like my brother’s. But hers was far more complicated to understand. Female subjects don’t last long in this particular experiment that Crow Ivast created. The Mazonist Brothers were looking forward to studying her.

“Ambrose Oasis,” she says quietly. “I think this has always been the place where I can do what’s always needed to be done.”

She’s fucking insane.

“I know you didn’t choose this life, Kaspias. And even though you should suffer for everything you’ve done to my family, I want to give you the memories you deserved as a little boy before this country corrupted your heart.”

I glare at her in stupid confusion. Mouth open and eyebrows raised. Her nonsensical sentences are making me feel like I’m having a goddamned aneurysm.

Before I can insult her, a mirage of my childhood spins around us. The sight is gruesome, bloody, full of every lesson I was taught, even in infancy when the human brain isn’t even formed yet. It’s all here. The time I was forced to watch the meat carnivals that go on in the villages around our base. How I cried when my best friend, Creed, died of infection from getting a finger cut off with a rusted blade. The many sessions our instructors trained me to feel happiness at the sight of decapitation, at a person screaming in pain.

Skylenna watches it all in silent revulsion.

But I’m not fazed. Did she think I’d cry? Show even an ounce of emotion? This is nothing. It was necessary to build me into the unstoppable commander I am today. I see others go through these exact scenarios every single day.

However, Skylenna sees a memory of me crying for my mother in a dark cell at the age of four. I look away, avert my eyes to anything else. It’s the only memory that makes me furious, hateful, resentful.

As she tightens her jaw, the images change drastically. She shows me a cottage in the woods. It isn’t until I see my mother on a kitchen table that I realize what moment in time this is. I watch Sophia die, slowly, with small whimpers that escape her full lips. I watch as Arthur bleeds to death while he clutches his toy rabbit to his chest.

It’s one thing to hear of these stories.

It’s another to witness them play out before me.

And Skylenna closes her eyes, gripping my hands before I can yank them away. Without warning, every memory we just watched play out begins to drain from my mind, funneling down a black hole Skylenna created. And just as I panic from the loss of everything that’s made me who I am, I’m blinking through new moments of my life.

Sophia holds me in her arms as a toddler, picking me up from my crib to kiss my wet cheeks and warm forehead.

Sophia scolds Kane for pushing me into a trench of mud before dinner.

Sophia hands baby Arthur to me to hold for the first time. Kane and I gaze down at him, making a pact to protect him no matter what.

Sophia cleans my scraped knee, dresses it with a bandage, and kisses it with a smile. Kane asks to go next, even though he wasn’t the one to fall.

Sophia sends Kane and me to our room after we bring a goat into the house, and it shits all over her new carpet.

Sophia holds me.

Sophia sings to me.

Sophia loves me my whole life.

It all hits me like an earthquake happening inside my body, inside my aching soul, splitting everything I know apart. I watch my life play out with Kane—the times we’d play pranks on Arthur or the days we’d take him on adventures through the forest. I even meet Skylenna as a little girl. I watch them fall in love.

With an abrupt gasping sob, I fall to my knees in front of this strange, gallant, all-consuming phenomenon of a woman. How long have we been here? Decades? Centuries? Time has no beginning and no end. She’s crying, too. Holding my face in her hands, seeing my life play out in front of her own eyes as well.

And I’m suddenly not the man I was before. I’m the man that Sophia raised, because everything else was drained from existence. Everything else was obliterated. And all that’s left is the love I have for my two brothers and the mother who gave me everything.