"There is no such thing as fate. That should be self-evident. Why would something exist whose only purpose is to compel people to do things they don't want to? If all it had was one purpose, and that purpose was against the way that things ought to be, what would be the point of its existence?"
-Attributed to Chamel, warrior of the Dawn Children.
His head hurt.
Merls stirred slowly. A pounding headache wasn't the best way to return to consciousness, he conceded, but, given the ferocity of the pain, he supposed that he should think himself lucky to wake up at all. He touched one hand to the lump on his head, winced, and opened his eyes.
The light flooding in made him shut them at once, and turn his head away. He clenched his free hand in the dirt and levered himself to his feet. He kept his other hand hovering above the lump on the back of his skull. It might hurt less if he could put pressure on it. On the other hand, it hurt to touch it at all.
Slowly, Merls stood upright. Glancing around, he tightened his lips in bewilderment. Nothing was familiar.
He had just risen out of a clump of blue-flowering bushes on the bank of a small, fast stream. The grass was smooth and short around the bushes, as though the teeth of sheep-or something-kept it clipped regularly. It also shone dazzlingly green in the fierce sunlight, much greener than Merls was used to. On the other side of the stream, he could see a tall bunch of purple flowers unfamiliar in shape and form as well as color. The heat everywhere he turned was nearly as oppressive as the light. Already he could feel himself sweating under his clothes.
Clothes?
Merls looked down swiftly. Yes, he still wore the same silver formal tunic and hosen he had put on the night before to attend a Feast of the Lady. Crumpled and stained with dirt it might be, but it was his. His fingers rose, tracing the emblem of the dark rising eagle.
"Why would they leave me these?" he asked aloud, and then winced. The words made his head pound still more strongly.
The question remained, though. The cloth alone was worth more than the money he had carried in his pockets, which did seem-yes, he thought, as he turned them out quickly-to be gone. Thieves should have stripped him bare, at least as he understood the rules.
He stooped over the stream, studying himself. His deep purple hair was dark with blood in the back, but his blue eyes were the same as ever, not bloodshot. He hadn't gotten drunk, then, and the headache was definitely from the lump he had been given, not from a hangover.
But then, why couldn't he remember being hit? His last memory was of arriving at the party and talking quite calmly with a priestess he knew slightly. Nothing to suggest he had been doing something dangerous. And he'd even had a glass of water, not wine, in his hand.
"I'm not even allowed to have fun before-"
Voices.
Merls suppressed his immediate response, to run towards them, and listened carefully. Outside Rallarkikes, his own city, darkness Elwens had to be careful. There were too many people who didn't understand that not all zorkro ate souls.
He nodded to himself after a moment. He recognized almost nothing about this place, but he did recognize the voices' accents. They were lukalia, or light Elwens. They would probably attack him on sight. Nothing to do but hide, and hope that he could learn something from listening to their conversation.
His body misted and rolled into darkness, and he hid under the bushes. The voices grew nearer, and then splashing almost muffled them for a moment. Two golden horses were fording the stream, tossing their heads as if they disdained the water. Their riders clung to their backs gracefully, without benefit of tack, chattering to each other at high speed. And yes, they were lukalia, golden-skinned, brilliant-haired, with swords glittering at their sides and haughty, arrogant faces.
"It hasn't worked. I can see that. You can see that. Why can't the Council see that?"
"They aren't as intelligent as we are."
"Of course, I knew that, but they ought to realize that it isn't working. Anyone could see that by now, even people as dumb as the ones on the Council."
Merls followed them, floating under the bushes, listening intently. This didn't have anything to do with him, likely, but if there was something important happening in the vicinity, he wanted to know about it so he could avoid it. And it might tell him where he was.
"There are no darkness Elwens coming to Valara," said the second rider decisively, slapping his horse's neck. The mare snorted, but didn't seem upset. Of course not, Merls thought. All the animals he had ever met had the most disgusting regard for light Elwens. "We know that. I think that I will speak to the Council, and carry my concerns to them, and yours. Someone must deal with this."
Merls barely heard the first rider's thanks. His mind was reeling.
Valara?
He was more than nine thousand miles north- he was a whole province away from-
He formed back into himself, and then shuddered as the pain of his hurt head returned. He couldn't spare much time for it, though. He stared blankly into the stream and tried to convince himself that the riders- who were almost out of sight, now, splashing out of the stream as they started some sort of patrol circuit- had been speaking about something else, some city named Valara.
Not the country called Valara, Merls thought. He would have prayed if he knew what to pray to. The whole nation was swarming with light Elwens. Making it out would take more luck than he had ever been blessed with in his life.
But he had little choice other than to move, if he was stuck in Valara or not. He wouldn't learn anything by staying here.
Merls stood, warily, keeping an eye out. Near home, lukalia often rode accompanied by Dawn Hounds. Those damn dogs were trained to sniff out zorkro. He moved tensely forward, fording the stream himself, alert for a shout or a bark like a whipcrack.
Nothing.
Relaxing a little, Merls faded into darkness, like heavy smoke, and moved upward. He would find some place, a cave or other darkened hollow where he wouldn't show up so much. He would hide until nightfall, and then fly out. Always assuming that he wasn't flying in the wrong direction, of course, and going deeper into Valara instead of getting out-
"There he is!"
A heavy net fell upon him, tangling him. Merls roared in surprise. That was supposed to be impossible.
What was more, the net seemed to be forcing him back into Elwen form. He fought it for a long moment. Then someone swore, and a powerful hand seemed to grasp him and seize him, folding his curls of darkness into arms and legs against his will.
Merls fell heavily, groaning as his head bounced off the ground. A rider-it might have been one of the pair from before; it might not have-bent over him from the back of a golden horse. The horse snorted and shied, not wanting to be anywhere near a zorkro, but the lukalia controlled it well, staring at Merls with greedy eyes. Then he drew back, and nodded.
At least this time, Merls thought sarcastically, he felt the blow that crashed into his head, sending him into a void more complete than anything he could summon.
______________________________________________________
He woke and glanced around, nodding grimly. They had put him in a wicker cage, in the middle of a ring of lamps. The lamps didn't appear to be anything more than ordinary glass, but the extraordinary purity of their light told him the truth. They burned fulma, which would keep him from taking darkness form at all anywhere near it. And a drifting haze of smoke suggested that the light Elwens were burning near pure fulma. Merls studied it suspiciously. It might make him sleep if he wasn't careful.
"Soul-eater."
"That isn't true," said Merls calmly, still studying the haze. He couldn't see anyone beyond the ring of light. If they weren't going to show themselves to him, then he wouldn't deign to look around. "I have never eaten a soul."
"Then you have no fangs?"
Merls parted his lips in answer. His fangs, he knew, would gleam white against his absolutely black skin. He closed his lips again, and said, "I was born normal for one of my kind. But we can make other choices if we do it young enough, before the longing to kill takes hold of us. I made that choice. I have never eaten a soul."
"But you have the ability to do so."
Merls blinked in confusion. It was with an effort that he kept staring straight ahead; he found that he automatically wanted to see the face of someone who would think such ridiculous things. "Of course I do," he said. "Just as you have the ability to roast someone in fire. Does that mean that you've ever done it?"
He grunted, a moment later, as his head rocked with a powerful blow. Another thing that fulma smoke could do, Merls thought as he picked himself up. It had been years since he had read up on the fuel, though. He wasn't sure that the light Elwens couldn't just use magic from a distance to hit him.
"If you torture me, you will be doing something more evil than I have ever done," he said, rubbing his cheek and sitting up.
"Be quiet, dark monster."
Merls raised an eyebrow, but was quiet. Someone had at last stepped into his circle of vision. The man was tall, lukalia of course, his red hair hanging almost to the middle of his back. Merls studied the hairstyle carefully. It was the first thing he had seen that was considerably different from the way things were back home. The lukalia there all kept their hair confined to about their shoulders.
Merls didn't really see any way this could help him, though.
"We have endured the presence of your kind in our world for long enough," said the man, spitting every word. Merls subtly wiped some of the spittle from his face. "You have eaten souls. You have laughed as your victims died. You have feasted on reth, the drug that dulls conscience, and then sold it to others so that they acted without the weight of morality, either. You have done all this. You deserve to die."
"We look at it rather differently," said Merls. He kept his voice as mild as he could. "Especially those of us who have never done anything like what you described. Take me, for instance. I-"
This time, the blow coming out of nowhere shattered his jaw. Merls writhed on the floor of the cage, in more pain, suddenly, than he had ever been. It didn't help that he couldn't see the strikes coming, and so had no time to brace.
"Killing is evil," proclaimed the lukalia man. "Killing is wrong. Always. Except when we put someone like you to death." He leaned closer, flashing a grin that wouldn't have looked out of place on one of the hunting zorkro he had talked about. "There can be no mercy in the world without justice, and if we did not defy evil, there would be no goodness. We will defy you, monster. For every soul that your kind has tormented and taken, for every child you have left without parents, for every parent you have left without children- for all of them, you shall suffer. We shall take back what we have given, turn you into what you once were."
Merls stared at him, incapable of saying anything now, not knowing what the hell he was talking about.
"Darkness Elwens were light Elwens once," said the man, his voice low, sweet, almost a croon. "They were trapped in a cave, some of our ancestors, and forced to accept evil into their souls to live.
"Better they had died!"
His voice went up in a soaring cry at that, and was echoed by cries from beyond the ring of lamps. The man went almost obscenely calm at once, though, and smiled at Merls.
"Zorkro are nothing more than perversions of the lukalia. We should have accepted your ancestors back, long ago, and taught them to be good again. But we didn't, and the whole world has paid the price."
Another mingled cry answered him.
"Now, we have discovered how to purify you," said the lukalia, his voice exultant. "The darkness can be turned to the light. The evil can be turned to the good. We can remove your fangs, make golden your skin and brilliant your soul. We can turn you into a lukalia. There is something in you that fate destined to be light Elwen. It is just a matter of reawakening it."
Another exultant cry went up.
"And you have no choice," said the man, his voice sharp and pitying all at once. "We know what you would choose, had you free will. You would choose evil. That is understandable. You have been evil all your life, and never known anything else. You have been blinded by the darkness that descended on your ancestors. But we will remedy that, and after your rebirth you will thank us."
Concentrating as best as he could through the haze of pain, Merls managed to focus his mind well enough that he could reach out and touch the lukalia's mind. ^I don't want this. I have never eaten anyone's soul. I don't even know how I got here. Please, let me go.^
The light Elwen shook his head. "No. You don't understand. It really doesn't matter if you haven't eaten someone's soul or not. The possibility exists that you might. And while you might, then we have the responsibility to do something about it."
He turned to the others Merls could not see. "Bring forward the knives and salt," he said. "It takes pain to do this the right way." He glanced back at Merls. "I know you think that we're being unreasonable," he said softly, "but it really is for your own good. The light will welcome you back, once you become what you were meant to be."
He strode away. The lights of the lamps wavered for a moment at his passing, and Merls tensed. Pain or pain, he meant to turn himself into darkness at once if they went out. But they firmed, and the fulma smoke settled more heavily into the air. He dropped his head.
Lukalia walked forward into the circle of light. They carried knives, and salt, and pious expressions. Merls drew himself up, ignoring the aching of his jaw and head as best as he could, and watched them silently.
He had read the stories that lukalia wrote about zorkro; all of his people did. Darkness Elwen spies stole children's books written by the light Elwens and smuggled them into Rallarkikes, so that zorkro children could see what their enemies really thought of them, what they were taught to hate. Almost all the stories were wrong. They portrayed people that Merls couldn't recognize.
And, looking into these lukalia's eyes, he saw nothing that would indicate they had been taught to believe something else. They thought what they were doing was right.
All of them.
At that moment, he almost wished that he had learned to wield the magic of his people beyond turning himself into darkness, the soul-eating and the spirit-singing and the raising of the dead that most zorkro practiced. But he never had, and he could not force himself to change his mind in the instant before the lukalia were upon him.
It was bad.
And then it got worse.
________________________________________________________________
Merls lay awake in the circle of light when they had left him, staring at the roof of the wicker cage and the ceiling beyond that. The ceiling told him nothing. It had been stone once, but had been carved and fretted within an inch of its life. He could see no way of escaping.
He closed his eyes. The light Elwen woman who had been the last to leave had told him they would come for him at dawn, and had suggested, with all the gentleness that a hypocrite could manage, that he should try to get some sleep, if he could.
As if I could, Merls thought in bitterness, his wounds aching with something fiercer than pain. The lukalia had done their work well. The cuts were carefully placed in all the major areas of his body, and had been even more carefully rubbed with salt. He could not escape the agony, though he had learned long ago how to make himself ignore most kinds of pain. He lay there, and ached, and burned.
He stared at the ceiling.
And thought.
What he had said was not a lie. He had never eaten a soul, though he bore the fangs for doing so in his mouth, as did all darkness Elwens. It had, on occasion, been a useful threat to make a visiting ambassador from another city back down. But even then, it didn't take real intimidation. No threats. Bare his fangs, flash and snarl a little, and the man or woman would be backing away, eyes wide in fear.
That fear.
Merls closed his eyes. He could just imagine that fear on the faces of everyone outside his people's cities, whether they were light Elwen or not. Too many Elwens, and corame, and unicorns, and dragons, and all the rest of them, were used to thinking of themselves as zorkro prey. They would probably cheer on the lukalia in their efforts to destroy the zorkro race, whether this "transformation" they planned to work on Merls actually worked or not.
Merls rubbed the side of his face, not opening his eyes. Was he really going to let them do this to him?
He had chosen never to eat souls because he did not like being compelled to do anything. The hunger was ever with him, constant and gnawing in his belly, whispering in his ear. He didn't care. He controlled it, and because of that he had had a freer life than many zorkro driven to hunt had.
How could he submit to this transformation, letting the lukalia do what they liked to him, when he was who he was?
On the other hand, he was now convinced that they had picked him very carefully, because of who he was rather than in spite of it. He had no idea, still, how they had watched him or how they had gotten him here from Rallarkikes. But that didn't matter. The lukalia cutting him with knives had worked without fear, no matter how he flashed his fangs, because they knew that he wouldn't break his vow and try to eat their souls. A single strike would have been fatal, anywhere on their bodies, but they hadn't feared that.
They knew him.
Merls snarled, clenching his hands, then winced as a flash of pain ran through his jaw. If he didn't eat souls, there was no way that he could make them stop the transformation. His only hope of escape was to change into darkness form and fly away, and they wouldn't leave him free from the light of the fulma lamps to do that. So, he couldn't escape, and he didn't want the transformation, and there was no way that he would break his vow and eat their souls.
Condemned by his own honor.
They had indeed chosen their victim well.
But...
There was another choice, one that he hadn't thought about before, because of how badly he wanted to escape. But if freedom was worth more to him than anything else, then he had no reason not to take it.
Now, if only they hadn't guarded against it...
Merls paused, then very carefully opened his eyes. He had no mage-senses, as some Elwens had, that would tell him these things automatically. He shot his eyes from side to side, hoping that the guards who must be watching him wouldn't guess what he was doing.
No wards, as far as he could see.
And wards were the only things that would prevent the use of that most basic Elwen magic, the magic that all Elwens were born knowing how to wield.
Merls closed his eyes, a painful smile stretching the cuts on his face, and fell asleep.
____________________________________________________________________
"Come with us."
Merls opened his eyes, watching calmly as the door of the cage was opened and the lukalia came inside. They pulled him to his feet. He let them do the work. Nothing about this was his will, and so he was not going to come willingly, either.
They manhandled him out into the light of the fulma lamps, and again the flames seemed to waver. Merls felt his heart bound with insane joy. Of course, if the lights did go out, then he would not object to the chance fortune had granted him.
But the flames steadied again, and Merls nodded. He could accept this, as well. He had done all the planning that was necessary last night.
They led him out into another ring of lamps, and then another, and so on, until they were out in the brilliant light of day. Merls was conscious of the presence of a great many silent, watching lukalia, but he ignored them, looking about him carefully instead.
They stood on a stone dais raised above a wide, green lawn, the grass cropped as closely as the grass by the river where he had awakened. The dais as well as the lawn was crowded with people. Lukalia in shining robes gazed at him with what they probably imagined were kind expressions, though he saw only condescending ones. Light from fulma lamps shone and rippled on their robes and their skin, sometimes exploding in a blinding flash. The sun poured down from overhead.
In the center of the dais was a pyre. Merls looked at that attentively as well. The logs were piled and soaked with oil. He would have no chance of escape once they put him inside it, especially if they employed the ropes that were lashed to it.
"You're wondering how the pyre works?" said a voice near his ear.
Turning his head, Merls saw the red-haired lukalia who had told him about his seeming fate yesterday. He managed to shrug, wincing as some of the salted cuts pulled. The light Elwen smiled at him as though pleased by his interest.
"It's quite simple, really. The flames enter your being through the cuts in your skin. The salt guides them, since salt is such a pure color and the flames are the essence of purity. They touch your soul, in much the same way that a darkness Elwen can eat souls. Then they begin to rework, re-build you, re-create you." The lukalia lifted a hand, which was trembling slightly, and laid it on Merls' chest. "You will be a light Elwen when all is done, and you will never be able to imagine being anything else."
Merls smiled at him, and decided, regretfully, that he should wait a little longer. They were leading him towards the pyre now. Better to do it in the middle of the dais, where everyone could see.
He looked around as they walked. Trees were out beyond the crowd, and Merls focused particularly on them. Their leaves seemed to cut the air, so sharp and bright were they. Birdsong trembled and soared, in a place where no one had ever conceived of transforming someone against his will, or of fate. The sun beat down on him. Sweat was rolling down beneath his dirty clothes again. The faces of the crowd were watching, expectant. Light was everywhere, and cool shade under the trees.
Merls closed his eyes. Too bad that his jaw was broken, and he couldn't make a dramatic speech of defiance- but he didn't need one.
He reached inward, with that old magic, the oldest magic of all, and found his heart. For a moment, he held it as though in the palm of his hand, watching it beating. His mind was full of peace.
Couldn't escape. Didn't want to transform. Didn't want to break his vow.
They did think that they had thought of everything.
He stopped his heart- last resort, last refuge of all Elwens.
Pain, one final crushing pain, gripped his chest. Merls gasped aloud, and sagged in the hold of his captors. They reached for him- he could feel them reaching- and then the darkness behind his eyelids became the final darkness, greater than that which had ever filled the heart of any mortal Elwen. He did have time for one more thought, though.
He was free.
