#32 - Do You Want It Back?

In one corner of the room with the hot pool there was a glass door to outside.  It was strange enough that Ahrimaz didn’t even see it, to begin with, taking it as a sealed window, made up of the tiny, hand sized pieces of glass that this Inné thought was the height of technology.  One couldn’t see out of it really and this House of Gold was actually part of Innéthel itself instead of being isolated from the mob.

Heylia had padded into the cell this morning, bunted the door open and then waited for Ahrimaz to  follow her as if she somehow knew that he couldn’t make himself go outside.

“Yes, yes, I’m coming, cat,” he grumbled. She led him to that door and bunted at it with her head, meowing.  “You want out?  Why me?  Why here?  You could just have had someone else let you out.”

He had to hunt for a moment to find the latch and it opened with a click, popping open to let a billow of steam rush out into the snow beyond as Heylia shoved her nose and head and the rest of her enormous self outside.  He couldn’t see anything but steam for the longest moment as he stepped after her, the threshold mercifully blurred, not even noticing that he was barefoot.

The slate under his feet just felt cool and barely damp to him and he left a slow trail of black footprints as he went.  Heylia bounded off into the trees and Ahrimaz paused, looking around.

The door had sighed shut behind him but there was still steam, or fog, or snow in the air, he wasn’t sure.  Everything was either white or stark black, the trees swimming out of the fog like iron bars, but so spread apart that it seemed as though they were holding the white sky away from the white ground.

He sat down in the snow for a moment and just reveled in the silence.  It was calm.  The overheated rage poured on him his whole life just seemingly went away, evaporated into still and white and cool. His hands opened softly and water ran from all around him into his cupped palms.  His skin was almost shockingly hot when he drank.

He found himself looking into the eyes of a little girl sitting across from him as his hands came down and startled backwards into the snow, his equanimity shattered and he realized how wet and cold he was, lying in the snow.  “Who the scorch are YOU!” he snapped, scrambling up into stance, finding that his feet slipped on the ice under the snow.

She had long, long black hair and white skin that glowed almost as white as the snow around them.  Her eyes were black and her lips were the only bright red splotch all around them, like blood on snow and he found himself terrified, gasping, his hands up, shaking.

“You don’t need to be so scared,” she said.  “I’m just the horrid darkness that’s lived inside you since your father killed your mother.”

“W…w…w..” he couldn’t speak.

She held up a double handful of snow and it disintegrated into a pool of blood in her hands.  “It was the only way you could survive.”

“You’re evil!” He snapped and scrambled further away from her.

“How did you survive after you tortured Kinourae?”

“B… bbb….by enjoying it!”  She nodded.  In her hands, the pool of blood began to coalesce and move, a regular motion like a heart beating.  “Father required… father required…”

“He made you do it.  He tried to prove to you that you had no heart.”

“Exactly!”  He straightened, brushed his hands down over his clothes as if to wipe the memory off himself along with clots of snow and twigs and dirt.

“And what did Kinourae say to you, even as you harmed him?”  She held a beating heart in her hands.

Ahrimaz flung his hands up over his face.  “No.  You cannot make me remember.”

“You’re right, I cannot.  But you might.  Should you choose to.”  He sank to his knees, the wind whipping around him where he knelt, hiding everything but the girl, snow and cold, an unfeeling ache in his chest where the ice had formed that let him live, even as he broke his own heart.

Ahrimaz gulped and felt how hot his tears were.  “He… said… I love you still.”

She held out the beating heart to him.  “Do you want it back?  He’s kept it for you, all these years.”

He stared at her, horrified.  “That…”

“… is your heart, yes.  I’ve helped him keep it for you.”

As she spoke she grew from a tiny girl into a grown woman and then became a white tiger, with the beating heart held suspended between its fangs.

“I… can’t.” His hands crossed over his aching chest and his head bowed until he was wound into a crouched knot in the snow.

“Brother?” A hand touched his shoulder and he snapped up to stare into Arnziel’s concerned eyes.

He flung his head back and screamed in agony. “Why will you people not understand that I am not him?  Why do you insist on loving me as though I’m HIM!”

He found himself helplessly gathered up into his youngest brother’s arms and onto his lap, surrounded by Aeono’s heavenly fire in answer to the urgently sung prayer. “Father Aeono, help us, give us surcease from the Lady’s winter.”