#71 - The Imaryans Never Learned to Hate

I am soaked with blood.  I can smell it and taste it in the rancid air of their burning city. Shit too. Even the ones so scared they shit themselves before they died, did that.  Even them. I HATE THEM. All the buildings around me are burning. My soldiers are hurling bodies into the flames not taking any care to see if they’re already dead.  I have a babe, or rather half a babe in one hand and the Flamen in the other.  The sword is blazing, dripping red as the core of me.  I am on fire, screaming as I hurl the dead child into the kneeling mother’s face.

She catches the body and crouches lower, her hand raises in that strange ‘patting motion’ Imaryans use as a blessing and I swing the sword roaring in fear and rage. I hate them. I fear them. I HATE THEM. They must die. I’m screaming inside.  Every death I feel like the whip on my skin.  How dare they not fear me? How dare they bless me?

I woke up screaming again. My feather bag is soaked with sweat and Didara and Jagunjagun are both shaking me. “Sorry,” I husk and roll over, out of the bag, stagger to the human sized door, rip it open to let the snow billow in and stagger out far enough to close it behind me before I vomit blood into the snow.

“I want to die. I killed them and tortured them and mocked them, trying to get them to hate and fear me and all they did was bless me and die!  I’m never going to be able to pay for this!”  I thrust my face into the clean snow. It’s falling heavily enough that the scarlet splash of my spew is already dulled and disappearing in the gas lamp by the barn.  No fire in the barn, but light outside, safely behind glass.

I don’t feel the cold as I kneel here.  It’s nice.  It’s calm and quiet.  “I’m a monster.  Can I just fall asleep out here and remove me from this?  And you needn’t tell me that I’m not a monster in this world.  In this world the city of Imaru is not burned, the people are not all slaughtered.  I destroyed Yhom as well.  I decimated the Cylak herds to break them and make them bow to the Empire.”

“I certainly will not tell you that you are not a monster,” Limyé says as he wraps a horse blanket over my snowy self, urges me to my feet and back into the barn, into the tiny leather and hay smelling equipment and tack room.  He pushes me down to sit on the hay before settling across from me.  “You horribly slaughtered thousands of people.  If you succeed in killing yourself you can really only atone for one life.  You want to atone for what you did?  Stay alive and work for the great good of humanity.”

I stare at him, my mouth full of the taste of blood and bile, the snow now melted and I’m sodden and shaking so hard I can hardly  hold the blanket around me.  Then I start laughing.  It is a screaming kind of laugh.  It is instead of screaming I understand and he lets me go on until I cannot draw breath any more.  Then he shakes me silent and holds a cup to my lips.  “It is just water,” he says.  “Let me dry you off.”

The water on my face is snow I tell myself.  And it is, mostly.  He rubs my head dry with a towel that looks like it came out of one of the Horse Guard’s saddlebags, or barracks, harsh and rough and efficient.  The roughness helps, even though his touch is too gentle.  The water has the weird metallic taste that it always has when one has vomited.

He hands me a shirt and a pair of breeches and I realize with a start that I was naked, had run out naked into the snow. I pull on the warm clothing and as I yank the shirt over my head I close my eyes and see flames again but I recognize them as funeral pyre flames, not the random burning of cities.  I feel grief and rage that is not mine but is perfectly mine.  I sit, stunned.  I stare past Limyé, as though I've taken a sword through the guts.

“The other Ahrimaz… he’s killed the mother in that world.  Rutaçyen forced to pretend to be her twin.  He’s killed her.”

“How do you know?”

“I feel it. I just saw her funeral pyre.”  I shake my head and finish the water, holding it out to him.  “He’s becoming more like me,” I said.  “He’s killed her for betraying him, I imagine.”  I am glad that neither my hand nor my voice shake.

Limyé takes the cup and sets it down, looking away.  Then he holds out his arms to invite an embrace.  I shake my head.  “No, Limyé, no.  The demoness applies the whip and hook to the soul of those deserving.”  I shake my head again.  “That was something you Imaryans just couldn’t seem to learn.  I deserve every pain, until I atone for theirs.”

“One man cannot atone for the agony of thousands.  We will talk about that more, later.  Right now, as far as you know, you can only grieve that in your world both women who were your mother are dead.”

He is too gentle to the pieces of me, all of me, the shattered bits of mirror that are being shuffled back together again, for some reason, by some Being or Beings… or just by the madness of Imaryu that thinks all humans can be healed.

How did I move to be enfolded in his arms?  Where did the blasted cat come from?  I know that I must have moved because he will only offer, I am required to take responsibility.  He will not force comfort on me.  I must take it up myself.

Heylia doesn’t care for such niceties of consent for healing and has plastered herself along my back.  This place. This place. This world. Mother is dead. Mama was dead years ago. But… Mother is dead.  I cannot let myself weep, but neither can I pull myself from the comforting embrace of a blasted, scorching, be-damned Imaryan healer.  Damn his eyes.  Damn him.  Scorch him. I am weeping.  Silently. Mother is dead and burned.  I am truly orphaned three times over.  Mother is dead.