Reborn

The witching hour.

The great city slept, for the first time in weeks, thanks to its warchief, who unfortunately could not join them.

Through silent streets, watched by sullen stars, she was carried. Melora walked the entire way, her stricken sister in arms, neither asleep nor awake, trapped between life and death, but beginning to tilt over the edge.

A few nite owls saw the procession, and joined in solemn silence. Some walked by candlelight, a few by torch, and many by their own keen eyes, attuned to the darkness. Her vigil grew, and Melora prayed it was not her funeral procession.

Through the long drag between valleys she carried her, soon joined by Rekhan, then sniffed out by Jericho. Elise had perhaps always been there, in the shadows. Rekhan had to hunt her down, and pester her awake, but Callista joined the midnight parade, rubbing sleep and stale merriment from her eyes. Even the Maw found his way into the fold, silent, but reassuring.

The Three stood in silent waiting, encircling the Witness Stone. Weary, but determined, Melora ascended the valley floor to the Circle of Honor. Her sister Rhea, returned to stone, watched her in silence. The woman's legs shook with exhaustion, her arms turned to jelly, but she forced each step after the last, finally reaching the threshold of the rotunda.

Ariadne stood ready, lit by brazier and star. Her lover looked pale, and afraid. He had everything to lose, and he knew it. But the siren stood firm, a surgeon at the ready, awaiting her patient.

Melora reached her Golgotha, tendering her fallen sister onto the waiting stone. Her tears were all but spent, staining her face. She couldn't know if anything was left of Selina's mind, and even her mothers could only do so much.

It has to be me, Ariadne thought, echoing what the witches had told her. She understood the risks, and they did too. They had asked her to place their daughter's life above her own, above even...the other. They dared to ask, but she was free to refuse.

It was sort of her fault. Well, not at all, really, but she was closer to the one whos fault it was. In a twisted way, she could see their point, but also, they can suck it. All of this was because of the secrets they kept, the mind-manipulation they insisted upon, the kind that would blanche a Quori--one of the mean, Sarlonan ones.

But it was for him, as much as for her. And he had saved her life. Well, more than that, incalculably so. She owed him two lives, maybe three...maybe four?...and this one risked only one. Or two. Depending.

And it wasn't as if she'd never done this before. She had...once. Exactly.

"Witches," she called out. "Close the circle."

Had anyone ever given them an order, especially on this spot? But it mattered not, they were keen to heed her words. They chanted, and earth and sky did abide. The magical energies captured in the circle were suddenly aware of their predicament, wistful spirits that found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. But she wouldn't be gathering any Vitae, any latent Mana. Not her style.

She needed energy to do this, a lot of energy. Last time, she'd had an entire ship, with terawatts of stored power. This time, no such fortune. She had only what she brought with her--an admittedly potent psionic battery, albeit one that had been drained constantly in her effort to calm her draconic rage, and acutely as needed in battle, especially today, where she hadn't given a toot about spending her last modicum of strength to buy one more second of lead time against that...Nightmare.

Was there anything left in the tank? Was she about to kill her friend and herself, leaving Tyburn alone? More alone than he would realize until the funeral?

Those thoughts weren't helpful or welcome. There was only the task.

"I need power."

She didn't know what they could provide that would connect with her, if anything, but thankfully they did. At her words, but not her bidding, the sky boiled. Dark clouds spun from nothingness, and a charge built up. Soon, lightning struck--directly into her body.

Not a single zap, not a close call, but a continuous plasma stream, a standing wave of power. She was connected to the Earth and Sky, and the Fire and Water below. She was attuned to the elements in away she'd never felt before, in a way she didn't know she was capable. The energy was there, and it was so much less ordered than psychic power, so chaotic, so natural, so shamelessly aligned with its purpose and nature. And yet, so right. For between those elements was a transition, where fire meets water, where earth meets sky, where all elements become each other, and everything, and nothing. Pure energy flowed from the center, quintessence, purified through a manifold of elemental mastery that surely wasn't her own.

But energy is energy. And it was plenty.

A mind swap is a simple thing, in the same sense that a heart transplant is simple. Insert heart A into chest B, sow it up, go have a drink.

Obviously, not so simple. The parasite was feeding on her thoughts, her memories, what was left of her perception and emotion. Not its fault, poor thing, it only obeyed its nature. It wasn't meant to grow in such a vessel--hell, she wasn't sure if the intended recipient was any better than the donor in this regard, none of this was normal or precedented. And Selina's mind had already taken such abuse, it was already so vulnerable thanks to certain witches and their schemes.

She had to take care not to spook it, not to make it thrash about, destroying more of what precious mind remained. And, to an extent, she wanted to avoid harming it, as much as possible. It couldn't survive long outside a host, so she had to transplant it, but she had no help, no colleague to take over while she attached the parasite. While implanting it, she also had to close the wounds it left behind, aid the healing process, and offer what relief she could.

I'm of two minds about this, she thought to herself, and her last thought as a single-minded woman was that she should've said it out loud, because Tyburn would've thought it was funny.

She split her mind in two.

There was room in there for a friend, after all. Psions have plenty of extra living space in their heads. Not knowing which would survive, which would be "her" when all was said and done, she split his consciousness evenly, so neither could be proven to be her, even by herself. Hard Problem? Gordian solution!

Or is it the Wisdom of Solomon? her other self offered.

Neither is appropriate in this Universe, no?

No, but in the Dreamtime, they're both real, and so are we.

I was always real, one of them retorted.

For this first part, they may as well work together. The parasite was a little slug-like thing...not that it had a body of any kind, but it evoked that thought. Like a slug with tiny legs. A trilobite? Sort of.

It had no concept of what was happening. Yet even in its infant state, its mind was too powerful to simply compel. Instead, she soothed it with emotion, distracted it with thoughts, feeding it like a trail of candies, working into her trap.

Snap! The jaws closed, and it was inside. And two Ariadnes together, with the power of a lightning bolt, could barely contain it. The shriek reminded her of the Nightmare, if it could have a baby. Maybe it could. Did it?

There was no time. One had to transfer it to the new vessel, while the other ministrated to the fallen witch. And we'll follow the second one, because there's no way of knowing which she was, is there?

When a space slug eats your brain, it bleeds. This shouldn't be surprising, even if the slug is metaphysical. Metaphorical? Anyway, her mind had been savaged, the creature long since burrowing beyond her dream-mind and into other, more sensitive bits.

Some harm was obvious. There was a plan for the brain written into DNA. There's a right way and a wrong way to wire up a human. Repairing this nerve will make her feel heat again in her lower leg. Healing this axon will make yellow stop looking like blue. Et cetera.

But the memories? Her thoughts? Her opinion of gazelles? That wasn't in her DNA. It was her life, her soul. And psions don't do souls. There was no blueprint. She didn't want to guess, nor fill her mind with random chaos, nor leave it full of holes. But how does one fill in that which can never be replaced? Her very identity?

The answer, it seemed, was as poetic as it was tragic.

"Kaius of Karrnath!" shouted the witch, in a voice few, even among the Coven, had ever heard. There was no uncertainty, no ambiguity. She spoke the laws of nature. "If you cross this circle, your life is forfeit. We cannot break this magic now! You cannot endure this threshold!"

"Then it is is forfeit." He stepped forward, to gasps from the crowd. Ariadne feared for him, for what it would mean for her friend, but she could only press on. Even the witch seemed genuinely to want to spare her this, but she could not but concentrate on the ritual.

He stepped forward. And violated the witches' circle.

A few had done so, and none had survived.

Ruined, his foot struck earth, and be it broken, be it stripped of all life and unlife, he simply would not accept its failure. So it did not fail.

And so, his other foot. Burned and scarred, his armor melted to slag, his flesh, tougher still, yet charred and depleted. Somehow, he carried on.

Collapsing to his knees beside his love, he laid a hand on her, and offered his other to Ariadne.

"Selina, my love. You set me free. You gave back my soul."

His Vitae, by his command, manifested within him, a burst of radiant light.

"And now I give it to you. You are my soul, and I yours. Return to me, and I will be content."

In that energy was all he was, but also all she was. He was the last receptable of her soul, her Truth, all this missing pieces Ariadne couldn't fill. With that order, and boundless psychic energy, and Ariadne's skill, she could be restored.

She could be reborn.

...

Had it taken the rest of the night? Was the hour later than imagined? Or had the witches' ritual pulled the moon out of the sky, and bade the sun to rise? The sky began to burn, and sunlight began to blossom in the east.

"Kaius," was her first word, and almost immediately she sat up, looking for him. He hadn't moved, still on his knees at her side, his hand in hers, their engagement rings touching. "Kaius?"

Nobody spoke. There was nothing for it. The next, and the last words, were his.

As the sun crept over the mountain, it fell upon his face, for the first time in over a century. And he did not burn.

"It's...beautiful."