Part 5

I went through the secret Warp gate in my Master's underground lair, and looked upon the Holy City once again. It looked the exact same way I left it ... when I left her ... I looked up and saw the Great Temple in the waning sunset. I knew where I had to go.

After casting a Rune of Cloaking around myself, I walked through the streets, moving toward the cathedral-like structure that had haunted my youth for years. Getting past the Guards, I dispelled my Rune and they moved to attack me.

"In the name of the Almighty Oru, I bless you ..." the words of my father were interrupted as I strode past the twisted corpses of the Guards that tried to stop me and entered the sanctuary.

It was bright in there, the diamond mosaics on the ceiling glittering with amber fire. I saw the people stand up and stare at me from their pews in shock and horror. "Blasphemer," I heard someone say, but I ignored it.

My father stood at the altar with a young boy. He looked older, more bent around the shoulders, but the real change was his robes. I knew with his 'dedication', he would make High Priest someday.

He stared at me, and his cold eyes lit up with something like a combination of anger and unease. He said, "You dare to come back here?"

"Where is she?" I bellowed, not noticing the Temple Guards that came forward with their pikes to block my way. "There is no one here for you!" he shouted back.

"Where is she? Where is Victorie?"

The harshness of my words reverberated through the room. The old man looked at me and gave me a grim smile. "My wife ... is over there."

I saw where he pointed, and the woman rose up from her pew. She was dressed in the conservative, white gown of a clergy member's wife—a Handmaiden. It was much like the dress my mother wore. Her face was heavily lined, and her hair was starting to go white. I stared for a while ...

"Victorie?" my mind went numb in horror. She whimpered.

My father's words came back to me from long ago, as cold and imperious as they had always been. "The firstborn son of Oru's divine servants must take the Priesthood that one's father has passed on," my father had stated to me. "But if that son cannot do so, then his own child—a male child—will assume that responsibility."

"No," I murmured. "Victorie ..." but as I looked at her, I saw the deadness of her eyes, the lusterless quality of her hair. I knew that after he had broken her, my father had lain with her. I saw the bulge in her abdomen. She was carrying his child.

"When you left, we converted her to our cause," my father said, his pride raking across my soul. "We made her into a proper Handmaiden. It took time, but under my ministrations ..."

"Father," said the child, tugging at the hem of my father's golden white robes, "Who is this heathen?"

"I am your father," I whispered, moving closer to the child who was my son. But he moved away from me in fear. "Father!" he shouted, "Father! Help me!"

"No, please stop," I begged, I tried to move closer, but the Guards blocked my way with their pikes. "I'm your father. Don't you understand? Victorie! Tell him, please!"

Tears rolled down her eyes, but she said nothing. I realized then that I had been right years ago. Victorie was dead.

"Oru!" the equally dead child who should have been my son beseeched, "Keep this warlock away from me!"

"Be gone from this holy sanctum, vile creature of the Black Arts," my father shouted, but for the first time in my life, I saw fear in his eyes.

"Damn you!" I roared, and I smashed both my hands together, detonating the runes I had drawn on my palms. The Guards in front of me were thrown into the wall, their necks twisted at awkward angles. The congregation screamed and scrambled over each other. I pointed at the main doors to the Temple—the ones I also put runes on. They slammed shut.

I stalked forward, and threw the altar out of my way. My son simply stared at me as I pushed past him toward my father. I knew that I was going to kill him. I didn't know exactly how. I might have ripped him apart with my bare hands, or made his body putrefy on the spot, or beaten him into a bloody pulp. All I knew was that I would kill him for this.

Then I heard my name whispered in a ragged, hoarse voice. I turned around, and saw Victorie, her tears streaming down her face. She tried to run toward me, but she tripped over the white dress and fell. I forgot my hatred, and I ran toward her. I held her, and she weakly held me.

"I," she looked up at me with her ravaged face, "I always loved you."

"I know," stroking her hair, my eyes blurred by tears, remembering her vibrancy of youth.

She smiled at me. "You have become so strong, beloved. Please, make the pain go away. Make it go ..."

"No," I said, looking at her disheartened face. "No," I repeated, my voice trembling. But then I remembered when we were together, and how gentle she had been, and how open and loving. What passion and fire she had in her ... she claimed she would not call any man master. But as I saw the broken expression on her face, I saw the endless beatings, and abuse, and pain ... watching her child be turned into the thing she hated ... I gently traced a shape on her heart.

Her smile was genuine as her eyes rolled up into her head. It was beyond grief. I screamed as I lost her again. Then I saw something in her hand. I moved it and saw the symbol there. I smiled grimly. Now I knew her last wish. I touched the rune. Her body began to change—her arms multiplying, and her legs forming together. She stood up, and began to brown, and her once red hair began to lengthen into leaves.

This was what her whole life had amounted to. She must have invested her whole life force into this Altering through the years she had been captive. Her branches smashed through the domed, crystal ceiling and a razor-tipped shower began to fall upon the wailing congregates. As I looked up, I saw that her face still existed on the tree she became—a serene, and beautiful visage that rose into the heavens where its beauty had always belonged ... away from me.

"Witch!" my father bellowed. "Accursed witch!"

"She will never burn now," I hardly recognized the cold, cruel laughter until I realized it was mine. My fingers crackled with flame. "A fitting place." My father backed away from me, his old face slack in horror as I smiled, the feelings I had kept back for so long beginning to resurface in a combination of pleasure and pain. "A fitting place for a funeral pyre—the pyre she will never need. But what has touched her must be purified." I began to sketch my runes in the air.

"No," my father fell to his knees, madness in his eyes. "Please, I beg of ..."

He was the first. A stream of flames burst from my hand and struck him. He screamed as the flames enveloped him, charring through his finery, his flesh, muscle, sinew, and bone. Then I looked at the child, the child who looked at me in hatred ... the child who was no longer mine. I killed him quickly. Better that I killed him than to let him become a lifeless, empty drone. Then I unleashed the full power of the rage within myself. I saw the people burn—the people who had stood by, who had blindly followed the Theocracy, who destroyed a work of beauty out of superstitious ignorance. There was also beauty to the crystalline flames I had unleashed—their shade akin to the sunsets I used to watch with her. I turned that beauty into a tool of my vengeance.

The light of many colors exploded everywhere; searing everything in its path ... it was so beautiful that it seared my eyes, my heart, and my mind. There was a raw gush of feeling within my chest as something gave, and after a time I wondered whether or not the screams I heard were entirely those of my enemies. I knew after seeing that energy, I would never see anything in quite the same way.

Somehow, I mustered the strength to teleport out of the building before it collapsed into the hollow ruin I had always foreseen it would become.

Even though my eyesight as I had once known it had been destroyed by the blast of power I unleashed, I could still 'see' what was happening. No longer did I see things in simple opaque colors, or surface texture. It was as though the rainbow fires I wielded had scourged my naked eyes and allowed them to see as the flames did. The carnage I created seemed beautiful as I saw the energy within matter pulse and expand with an almost ephemeral luminescence.

The city was now in eternal sunset—as if some crackling celestial serpents from the waning heavens had come to envelope the bleached white bones of the corpse-like buildings below. That Book of Chaos the Guardians showed me inspired me to do exactly what I had needed. Only the great tree was untouched by my vision of revenge, its roots fertilized by the ashes and blood of its tormentors. I hoped that Oru was ready for the vast number of souls that I had sent him.

"Victory is mine!" I shouted shrilly as they all died in hideous agony. "Do you hear me! This is my ultimate triumph!" I shouted madly to the Supreme Deity that had never heard my childhood pleas. "On the eve of my Victory!" I broke down and sobbed bitterly, screaming her name over and over again in vain as her visage smiled at me in my mind's eye, forever lost ... forever lost to me.

If my eyes still existed, I don't think I would have even been aware of the City of Light being consumed by the fires of my Words. But now I could visualize it—reduced into ash even as the Great Tree remained untouched. She would forever be untouched. And then it burned. They burned. And so did I. When I looked up, I was barely aware of the change that transformed my eyes, but when I saw the charred pillars devoured by the multi-colored flames I summoned, I began to laugh—a mad, cackling laugh that scared a distant part of myself even as it satisfied the rest of me.

"A tribute," I spoke softly as my laughter died down. "A tribute to my Victorie."

What occurred next was more or less a blur to me even now. Something had happened to my eyes after I drew upon that beautiful flame ... Yet in the darkness of my Master's lair, a pale imitation of my old sight asserted itself through my blurred eyes.

"So ... you have returned," my Master remarked.

"There are three rites," I remember speaking, feeling hollow and beyond horror.

"Oh? Rites?" she put some puzzlement into her tone.

"Yes; three. The Rite of Sacrifice," the first word squeezed out of my throat painfully, "Succession, and Betrayal. They are for full initiation into the Dark-wryters. But of course, you would know that, wouldn't you?"

"Those are some powerful accusations," my Master stared ahead, not even checking behind her to see me there. "You passed the First Rite."

I fell to my knees as I lost myself in the madness I had so willingly embraced.

She turned slightly from her chair at the desk. "Yes, yes you did. Your eyes have changed, haven't they? It seems that you will wear more than one mark this day," she got out of the chair and stared at me for a long time. Then she opened her arms to me, and I rushed forward, embracing her tightly. After a time, she broke the embrace and asked, "Do you know what a Rune of Unfeeling is?"

I shook my head. "Does it remove emotion?"

"Well, yes and no," my Master looked thoughtful for a moment. "Tell me, my dear one, do you feel pain?" she clinically watched my trembling with an unreadable expression on her face. "I expected as much. It wasn't easy, was it? Destroying all those who tormented you for so long?"

"You ... you are a Dark-wryter, aren't you? They were the ones who hunted down Chaoscrybes. Those the Guild exiled when they became corrupt. That was why you let me do this."

"Need I state the obvious?" she sighed. "Yes, but there is so much more to it than that. Haven't I taught you that everything has a double meaning? Yes, we hunted them down. They were Chaos incarnate, power uncontrolled. Look at what their power did to your eyes," she chided. "Too obvious and blatant a power they had. They would have brought too much negative attention down on the Guild. What you do not know is that the Guild unofficially gave us the task of infiltrating the Chaoscrybes and destroying them. But then, one day, the Guild got rid of us when they used us to more or less kill our intended targets."

"You mean when you started taking Chaoscrybal knowledge and 'destroying' it."

She smiled. "You amuse me with your dedication to research. The Chaoscrybes were disgusting. They were raw power without any real focus. In fact, the power ruled them. But the Dark-wryters managed to do something no other Scrybe had done—we manipulated the powers of Chaos and translated them into Runic. After all, we had manipulated them, befriended them, and learned their secrets. You see, we tamed this power, gave it focus on a microcosmic level as opposed to the blatantly obvious. We realized that it was more effectively used in subtle ways ... in the insidious manner we adopted when we hunted the Chaoscrybes down. And no one questioned our existence―until the Guild developed a 'conscience'. Or maybe when it was revealed to the non-wryter masses that we existed."

"Or perhaps they were afraid of the new horror they created," I hissed, beginning to realize a lot of things about my Master that were starting to make a twisted kind of sense.

"False morality is rather unbecoming of you. They used us and abandoned us. And now we use them—manipulating them behind the scenes. A shadow play, if you will. They like to say Chaoscrybes died out by themselves, and that we were only a bunch of renegades long since killed—although there are rumors that we still have a presence in the Guild. The Guild is like your Theocracy in its dogma and paranoia. It didn't stop you from destroying it and those who worshiped it!"

I didn't say a word. My head was turned away from her piercing, probing, heartless gaze. The shadows of her laboratory hid the tears in my eyes. Then, she smiled and put a gentle hand under my chin. "I know. The Rite of Sacrifice wasn't easy for me the first time either. At least you hated your father," she chuckled, a silvery bell-chiming sound that would have ordinarily been a pleasure to hear. Now it seemed eerie and out of place in those dank surroundings. "I think ... Yes, I think I will tell you about the Rune." She went over to her desk and showed me a piece of paper with three partially enmeshed circles crossing over each other.

"That is a heart," I immediately felt foolish for stating the obvious and the raw guilt assailed me anew.

Instead of commenting, she nodded. "Now, watch closely." She held out her wrist palm upward and removed her Pen from the wrist-pouch. "If you draw a line through this symbol like ... so," a sideways line was drawn into the left of the heart-construct, "You neutralize most raw emotions so that you can think more logically. This was a common Rune used in the old days—before my sect was officially banished from the Second Circle of Guild Masters—until they realized that another line," she added another sideways line, this time from the right, "would make the heart stop. Remember, only one line in either direction."

She handed me the paper, which I held in trembling fingers damp from holding them over my eyes. "Does ... does all emotion go away?"

"Most of it. Only your triumphs will affect you, my dear one," she cooed. "However, although it will last a long time, and believe me, we Scrybes can live for a very long life, eventually it will pass and all your feelings will return."

"When?" I was almost gagging from the sheer emotional agony in my heart, doubled over.

"When you are dying ... or when death is imminent," there was a strange light in her eyes. "There is another task for you to complete, Apprentice." Her voice suddenly became cold and formal, walking away from me, she added, "A task in which I think you might need this."

I listened to her mutely as she explained what I had to do. Suddenly, my chest became hollow and void as though I had already used the Rune on myself. "No," I said, "No, I will not use it; not yet."

She turned back to me. "Then you are brave, my dear one," her voice quavered as she briefly brushed her chest with one hand. "Braver than I ever was." She came toward me. I didn't resist.

We made love that night. It seemed to last forever as our bodies enveloped each other with tumultuous feeling and sensation. As she did with me, I traced my fingers down her smooth, white back and stroked some Runes upon it that I learned. She gasped in ecstasy, almost mewling as their power took shape through her flesh ... her spine arched backward as I myself felt the same pleasure explode and reverberate through my manhood.

Once we were finished, we lay in each other's arms for a while. Then, she inserted herself between my legs again into a position where we were more or less sitting. "Do you want to know my name?" she leaned forward, a lock of her silken black hair moved down over her eye, and I brushed it aside. I nodded. Her whisper in my ear was akin to a kiss.

"It is Sakeri."

Sakeri. It was a beautiful name. In Runic, it means Black Widow.

I barely acted in time when she traced her own Runes upon my chest, and my body erupted into pleasurable agony. It was as though all the pleasure she had given to me had transmuted itself into pain. Have you ever noticed that while pleasure is temporary, pain seems to last forever? That was one of the thoughts running through my fevered mind as I willed my hands to stop shaking and trace my own Runes upon her soft breasts.

Through blurred eyes, I saw and felt her writhe in my grasp. With a shaking breath, she continued her pattern upon my flesh with her fingers. As did I continue mine on her. Now that I think of it, it was a combination of pleasure and pain that we both experienced. I dimly knew in the back of my mind that the Runes we were using had the potential to boil the blood of a living creature through intense stimulation of nerve-endings.

It felt so good. It felt as if I were burning up inside. After a while, my sense of discipline began to assert itself. Flesh became Paper, and my fingers became Pens ... my body now an extension of my will ... as I sketched out a series of Runes. The combination of ecstasy and agony became secondary as I remembered that flesh could be controlled ... it could be manipulated ... it was malleable ... it became a litany in my mind.

Flesh can be controlled ... flesh can be manipulated ... flesh is malleable ...

There was a shriek. And then it was over.

I was panting heavily on top of my Master. She was paler than usual, her thin black hair a tangle, fine beads of dew-like sweat giving her naked body a glimmering sheen. She was breathing shallowly, and I saw blood from the corners of her petal-like lips. But she still lived ... for the moment. My Master tried to raise her arms and pull me closer to her. She needed to talk to me. I knew it was no trick.

Her voice was husky with blood. "I-I knew you could do it," her eyes shone brightly, "The ritual is ... complete," she coughed, more red staining her lips. "The ritual was different for me ... years ago ... when I first killed my own Master. But I thought ... I thought we could make it special ..."

I was wordless, but I stroked her face. She smiled, one that was neither calculating nor shrew. "You know my true name ... now for the Third Rite. I will tell you everything ... everything that I can ..."

There were many things that I found out about Sakeri. What she did to survive her childhood on the streets, what sacrifices she made, and the people that were dead by her own hand and manipulations ... many people. I always wondered how the Priesthood found out where Victorie had been hiding ... and where Sakeri had been that day. If she had never died, I might have stayed and never become Sakeri's true Apprentice. She said that Victorie had been too weak a wryter. She needed a strong successor. Like me.

When I looked at her chest, I saw that the Rune of Unfeeling on her chest was dissolving. I knew all what she said to be true. She grasped my hand at the end of her confession, and looked into my eyes. "You know that I love you."

"I know," was my only reply, and with that she smiled contentedly ... and closed her eyes.

When it was over, I sketched the Rune over my heart, drawing one line through it.

I had passed the Rite of Sacrifice. I had passed the Rite of Succession. And now I had passed the Rite of Betrayal. I was one of them now—a Dark-wryter—an adept at both creating and understanding double meanings. And I did understand.

My Master had been my mentor, my friend, and my lover. Sakeri was the second person that I loved ... a person I trusted more than even myself. She was a person who tried to kill me. She was another victim of my power—the second person I loved who died because of my ambition. From then on I knew that I could not trust anyone—especially not myself. Then, I realized what she had tried to teach me—that absolute power was absolute. Whoever had the most power could use the lust of power in others against them and for one's own singular purposes. Through her death, she finally released me from my illusion of moral-superiority and finished what Victorie had done many years ago. She released me from the guilt, from the fear of my own power.

When I put her Rune of Unfeeling over my heart, I felt nothing.

"My destiny," I recall saying, "Is death ..."