The duelist 10, p.25
The Duelist 10, page 25
Shay. Glowing like a light. Like a goddess.
I grinned at her even as I squinted against her brightness. She probably wasn’t actually that illuminated, but after about half an hour of pitch blackness, it was almost blinding.
“Is this better?” the phoenix-woman asked me, and her smile was radiant.
“I can see you,” I said with a small laugh. “But everything else is just pitch black. I guess the Savior is allowed inside, but he’s not allowed to get a proper look.”
“It’s not very exciting,” Shay admitted. “The chamber looks basically identical to how it looked outside. There aren’t any carvings, and it’s really wide, but rough. Whoever carved this was more concerned about function than appearance, unlike the main temple further up.”
“You know where to go, then?” I asked her, and her glowing form nodded.
“I can still feel the pull of the Heart,” she said as she turned away from me and continued walking. I felt like a dead soul being led to Heaven by an angel, or Scrooge being guided by the Ghost of Christmas Past. “And its song is getting louder. Can you hear it?”
“I can’t,” I confessed, and a few moments later I heard Shay begin to sing quietly. She had to be singing along with the Heart so I could hear its song, and it was beautiful.
The melody was slow and melancholic, like the tone of a woman grieving her lost lover and a mother mourning her child. It was a song of pain and loss and heartbreak, but most of all, a song of enduring love. Unending love. The love Mercedes had for Aventoll, and for Aventoll’s people.
And then, after a while, I began to hear a second voice join Shay’s.
It echoed, not just around the cavernous hallway that I couldn’t see, but inside my head, my heart, and my soul. I was filled with the tragic music, and it harmonized so perfectly with Shay that I knew no one else could have been the Incarnate, because no one else’s voice could have naturally fit so perfectly against this song.
“I can hear it,” I whispered softly to the phoenix-woman. “Shay. I can hear the Heartsong.”
Still glowing, Shay turned back to smile at me. There were tears running down her cheeks, and when I raised my free hand, I realized there were tears on my own face, too. The Heartsong was so sorrowful that it had literally moved us to tears. My heart swelled as the melody began to build slowly, and Shay dropped my hand. I knew without her needing to say anything that I had to stay put, and I watched her step away from me until she stopped, raised her hands, and pressed them to something.
The cavern exploded with light.
The music in my head continued to build, and my heart stuck in my throat at the raw, tragic emotion running through me at the sound of the song. My eyes were transfixed as I saw Shay, glowing brighter than any star, glowing brighter than the sun itself, begin to lift off the ground.
She hovered in the air on wings made of light while still singing. Her hands stretched out, and I watched shards of swirling light fly around her and the Heart, which somehow emanated that same sense of tragic beauty, of pain that was so intense, but it didn’t matter because the love would endure no matter what.
The song continued to build and build, and I wondered if my heart was going to explode in my chest from the sheer emotion of it all. Shay’s voice became louder and louder, and it matched the Heartsong for every beat, every heartbroken note.
And then, I noticed the melody wasn’t heartbroken at all. It was joyful and righteous and triumphant. Shay continued singing, and I could feel the healing energy rolling off her. I dared to tear my gaze away from her, just for an instant, and I looked down at my arm to see one of the cuts from my fight with Teivel disappearing before my very eyes.
I looked back at Shay, but I couldn’t see her anymore. The light was so intensely, blindingly bright it was just gold on white. I swore I could see a silhouette of some spirit, maybe Mercedes herself, a flying woman with magnificent wings. The song swelled to its final crescendo, higher and louder and stronger--
And then there was silence and darkness.
My breath caught in my throat, and I remembered how to breathe after a few seconds.
“Shay?” I asked, and my voice sounded so rough after the wonderful Heartsong, but I couldn’t see a thing. “Shay?”
“Here, Alex.”
I blinked a few more times, and I realized the cavern was no longer pitch black, it was just that after the intense brightness of the healing, my eyes needed a few seconds to adjust.
“Shay!” I cried with relief, and I sprinted toward her. She was still glowing faintly, and as I got closer, and my eyes adjusted more, I saw the Heart itself was glowing softly, too.
It was enormous and shimmering. It resembled a piece of stone, or maybe glass, that had a light deep within it. I held my hand out over it, but it wasn’t hot, or even warm. It was pure light. Pure life.
“Shay,” I breathed. “You… you did it.”
Even someone like me, who’d never had any connection to any of the Islands’ Hearts, could feel the difference. Sickness had been purged, heartbreak had been repaired.
Aventoll was safe from demons.
“You glorious creature!” I cheered, and I took Shay’s face in my hands and kissed her deeply.
She melted into me, and when we pulled away, we grinned at each other so widely I knew my cheeks would be painful later.
Then the smile dropped off my face as I gaped.
“Shay,” I breathed, but I didn’t look at her heart-shaped face, or her green eyes that now had thin rings of gold around her pupils. I was looking behind her, over her shoulder. “You… you have wings.”
Sprouted from her back were two enormous, magnificent, feathered wings. They were every shade of scarlet and orange and shimmering gold, more beautiful than I’d ever imagined, more beautiful than the strange memory I’d had. Those had been kaleidoscopic, as if they were made from glass or jewels. These were so much more real, made from the light of a goddess, from the Heart of Aventoll.
“I have wings,” Shay agreed with a small laugh, and she flushed deeply. “Do… do they look alright?”
“Alright?” I echoed with a laugh. “Shay, they-- you-- are gorgeous. Incredible. Absolutely wonderful. You healed the Heart of Aventoll! You’ve saved Aventoll from demons!”
“I had help,” the Natavian woman pointed out shyly. “From you, and Zoie, and Horus.”
“You did,” I said. “But that doesn’t make it not your achievement. Look at what you just did!”
I gestured delightedly to the healthy, glowing Heart, and my wife flushed a little deeper.
“It was pitch-black when I first came in here, but now even I can see the Heart’s light,” I said. “You did that, Shay. You’re the Incarnate, and you’ve saved everyone in Aventoll. No one will ever have to worry about demon attacks ever again!”
Shay laughed, and the sound was giddy and relieved. She then threw herself at me and wrapped her arms tight around my neck, and I wrapped my hands around her waist but was careful to go under the joint of her beautiful new wings to her shoulder blades. I kissed her like I, too, had been heartbroken, and she was healing me, and when we parted, we just stood there for a moment with our foreheads touching.
“Magnificent,” I said quietly. Her smile was as bright as her healing light had been.
“Let’s go back,” she said, and she threaded our fingers together and began to lead me down the passageway. “The others should know we succeeded.”
“You succeeded,” I corrected her, and I caught her chin with my free hand to give her another quick kiss.
Sure enough, when we were within eyeshot of the doorway, Zoie and Horus both let out cries of delight and shock when they saw Shay’s wings. The darkness that had cloaked the inner chamber was gone, and maybe the barrier was too, but Zoie and Horus didn’t descend upon us until we’d walked out of the inner chamber, and as the doors slowly closed behind us, they both pulled the phoenix-woman into a fierce hug.
“You did it!” Zoie peppered kisses over Shay’s nose and cheeks until the Natavian woman giggled. “You incredible thing! You healed Aventoll itself!”
“And you got your wings back!” Horus cried out, and he outstretched a hand to gently stroke over the edges.
So these weren’t just any wings, they were identical to the wings Shay had been born with.
“They’re beautiful,” Zoie said in a softly awed tone. “You look like a real goddess now. Like the old carvings of Mercedes that depicted her as Natavian.”
“Will you have to get them Culled again?” Horus then asked. “Did… did Mercedes give you another chance to become a mother?”
Shay looked at her brother, then at me, and she smiled softly. It was a gentle, knowing smile, and as she looked back at the falcon-man, she shook her head.
“No,” she said. “Something tells me I don’t need to choose between my wings and having a child.”
“Mercedes,” Horus breathed quietly before he pulled his sister into another hug, and he was so overcome with emotion that he couldn’t talk. He just clung to Shay, and when he pulled away, I clapped him heartily on the shoulder.
“You’re alright, man,” I told him, and he nodded quickly.
“So,” the falcon-man said at last, and he cleared his throat to get rid of the last of the tearfulness from his voice. “Can we-- can we go back now? Back to the surface?”
“We can,” Shay said. “I can feel it. This place… it’s at peace now. The Heartsong is joyful.”
“Incredible,” I breathed, and Shay blushed again, but our happy expressions faltered slightly when we noticed Horus was looking over at Teivel’s body.
“Horus?” Shay asked, and she stepped toward her brother. “Are you okay?”
“Huh?” he said distractedly and looked up at us. “Yeah. Sorry. I am. I was just… thinking.”
He looked back at the dead Councilman and frowned a little. Shay stepped away from me to put a comforting hand on her brother’s shoulder, and Horus held it there in silence for a moment.
“You’ve stopped the demons,” he said at last. “But that’s only the beginning. The Council will still want to keep its power. Alem still controls the Red Skies somehow, and the Order wants power through the Prophetess. None of them wants Aventoll to remember the ways of the Old Religion.”
“They will, though,” I said. “We can remind them of how things were. Before the Order and the Council. When people devoted their lives to Mercedes because they wanted to serve her, not to get power. When Ashers were warriors for good and not aristocrats.”
“But it’s so corrupt,” Horus sighed, and he looked over at me. “Is it even possible to save it? Will we really have to burn it all to the ground?”
“Maybe not that extreme,” I said. “But it definitely needs a serious reshuffle. Seats passed down through bloodlines tend not to be very progressive. Sooner or later, they fall behind what the majority of the population actually wants.”
“The Council has always preached tradition,” Shay said, and I wasn’t entirely sure if she was just thinking out loud, or if she was explaining to me. “It told everyone that traditions need to be respected, our pasts have to be honored.”
“There’s a difference between honoring your past and never moving forward into the future, though,” I told her. “And traditions don’t mean shit if you’re hurting people.”
A tradition was a family recipe handed down through generations. It was watching the same movie every holiday, or singing a certain song at a wedding. It wasn’t sacrificing innocent lives and letting a world be overrun by demons just to hold on to an antiquated system of power.
“The Council is ancient and powerful,” Horus said. “It was only about a century or two after the second Scourge where it was founded by the descendants of the original sixty-four.”
“How many of them are still direct descendants?” I asked the falcon-man.
“Sixty,” Horus replied. “Sha-Kane is the newest member of the Council, and the first in over thirty seasons to take a seat without being a blood relation of the predecessor.”
“He was adopted, I think,” Shay added. “Shaw Aras was a Natavian legacy, but he held no wives and bore no children. Sha-Kane became his protégé.”
“So, you could say Aras took Sha-Kane under his wing?” I asked with a grin, but it was clear none of the three Aventollians around me understood the pun. I coughed sheepishly into my fist. “So, Sha-Kane’s the first person in over a generation to not be born into the Council?”
“Sinopa Crevan is the other,” Shay told me. “He’s Vulpian, and he killed another Asher from Leen in the first real Duel against a Councilman in centuries. He’s… something of a pariah within the Council.”
“That could be helpful,” I said. “If there are people on the Council who aren’t steeped in generations of power and control.”
“The other two won’t be of any use, though,” Horus warned me darkly. “Their families took over centuries before Crevan took his seat. They’ll have been fully brought into the fold. And there’s no guarantee Crevan and Sha-Kane weren’t assimilated, too. They still joined the Council.”
I thought of the conversation Horus and I had had about Sha-Kane. That had only been last night, but it felt like days ago. Part of me wondered if Horus was so reluctant to trust the osprey-man because he knew, on some level, that the Councilman was hiding something from us.
When we got back to the Manta ship, I needed to speak with Sha-Kane. Whatever blood debt he owed-- and now that I thought about it, I was willing to bet it had something to do with his Council seat and killing Shaw Aras-- Sha-Kane still needed to tell his children they were his children. Horus and Shay had a right to know who their real father was, and if the osprey-man was still so worried about his blood debt, then he didn’t have to go public about Horus and Shay being his kids. It could remain a secret between the three of them.
Well, the three of them along with Zoie and me.
“Then we should deal with the Council first,” Zoie said to the falcon-man. “They care enough about us to have Alex on their radar. They tried to have him killed, and Shay and Amaya basically enslaved to them.”
“They’ll come after us quickly, anyway,” Shay said. “They’ll feel the shift in Aventoll. They’ll notice there aren’t any demons.”
“We should strike first.” Zoie nodded firmly, and I agreed.
I’d taken on one of their members. Shay had healed the Heart of Aventoll. The Council was going to learn soon that no one messed with our Crew, and no one was going to stop us from our mission to save Aventoll.
I reached up and slowly closed my fist over my Duelist stone as I looked at Teivel Tas’ body lying on the ground. Horus had said sixty. But he’d been wrong. Fifty-nine.
“Then,” I said to the others, and they all turned away from Teivel to look at me. “It’s a good thing I have a seat on the Council now.”
End of Book 10
End Notes
Thank you for reading The Duelist 10! I’ll start working on the next book as soon as this one hits 100 reviews, so please leave a review right here. Thank you!
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2022 by Eric Vall
….
Patreon
Don’t forget about my Patreon! You’ll get advanced audio chapters (for your ears) or written chapters (for your eyes), and nude/sexy versions of my covers (for your… uhhh… well…) I also have an audiobook subscription so you can get 3-4 of my books every month at a discount along with all the other stuff. Check it out here! Or search for my name on Patreon.com.
Amazon doesn’t update readers when an author comes out with a new book unless you follow that author on the store. Make sure you click this link and then click on the follow button. Then Amazon will update you a few weeks after my next book comes out.
If you want to get notified of my books the day that they come out, make sure you follow my Facebook author page and join my Facebook fan group. If you don’t follow me on Amazon or join my Facebook page, you’ll never get alerted that the next book is out.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2022 by Eric Vall
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