RE: Monarch

"Get to the Cellar. There’s too much smoke. I’ll be right behind you," I commanded. The infernal pulled herself up, leaning heavily on her stave. I watched Barion closely, preparing to intervene if he pursued her. He didn’t seem interested. He simply waited, content to let the forest burn down around us.

"I thought you were iron, boy. I planned to mold you into steel," Barion said, a strange sadness in his voice. "But I was wrong. You were already steel. And I was a fool to not see it."

"I owe much to your teachings, Sir Barion." I held my sword upward in a mock salute, covering one eye. "But I am no longer yours to mold." I summoned the spark and set the rose oil on my sword aflame.

"Even to the end, you intrigue me."

He circled me. I was expecting another surprise attack from his rapier, my nerves balanced on the edge of a knife. What emerged from over his shoulder looked more like a scorpion’s stinger, angry and red, the tip dripping with dark ichor. It moved almost too quickly for me to track. A single blink and I would have missed it.

The stinger plunged forward.

Somehow, I managed to sidestep, batting it away with my flaming sword. It caught fire for a moment, but Barion quickly smothered it in darkness, leaving it unmolested.

He hissed in pain. The fire did hurt him, then. But Barion was much smarter than the demon. He pushed me backwards, strike after strike, each intended to kill. I dodged, throwing myself to the side, only to come up to another, swinging over my head. I back-pedaled, the heat of the burning forest growing hotter and hotter.

Barion leapt forward, his stinger plunging directly at my forehead. I ducked under it only to find myself face to face with him, his arm pulled back. There was no time. His rapier plunged through my gut. He cackled in triumph.

But this was hardly the first time I’d been stabbed. My wounded arm screamed as I grabbed his sword hand, trapping his arm. With a burst of strength, I swung my sword into the dark mass where his face should have been. The shadows retreated and Barion’s head was exposed. He screeched, throwing me backwards. His jaw hung off on the left side by a gruesome thread, fire scorching his face before the shadows rushed in to quash it.

He growled inhumanly, and his attacks grew much faster. But he didn’t try the rapier again, content to pick away at me from a distance.

Finally, I was pushed back to the forest’s edge. The flames licked at my back, setting my robes on fire.

Barion didn’t gloat. His stinger pulled back, preparing the killing blow.

"I yield!" I yelled, dropping my sword to the side.

Barion paused mid-strike, confused.

That was all the time I needed. The bright purple light around us suddenly died as I pulled in the flame. All of the flame. The fire I hated so much. I breathed it in and pulled and pulled until the fire was more of me than anything else. It leaked out the pores of my hands, my eyes, my very soul. If only for that moment, I did not hate the flame. It was capable of great cruelty, yes.

But it was more than that.

The fire was a part of me, and without it, I would have been lost long ago. So I accepted the flame, and the flame accepted me. Something rumbled, like a giant stone shifting deep within my soul.

I held my hand out, first, second, and third finger extended, then spoke the word that was now etched in the darkest depths of my being.

"Burn."

The fire rushed out of me in a great wave. The shadows fled. Once the robe was eaten away, Barion’s body was a strange eldritch mass of limbs and flesh. His many hands grabbed at me, spasming. He howled as the fire consumed him, skin sloughing off white bones into pink-black piles of limbs and charred, desiccated flesh.

Within the mess, a single golden amulet shined up at me.

I stared at the ruin of flesh beneath me and fell to my knees. Relief surged within me, a lifetime’s worth of tension and fear expunged.

We actually did it.

It was over.

It took less effort than I expected to stop the forest from burning. While the trees burned wildly, at some point, the fire seemed to stop. Given the otherworldly aspect of the forest, to some degree, this made sense. It’d be a little strange if a single spell were capable of destroying such an old and magical entity as malevolent as the Everwood. Surely, I wasn’t the first demon-fire user to let loose within its confines over thousands of years.

Still, the damage was significant, and a massive ring of trees around the clearing spanning a half-mile radius had burned, lending the cottage a suitably creepy air. The corpse of the demon remained. I eyed it warily before entering the cellar. Now that the moment was over, all adrenaline left me, taking my strength with it. I could barely lift the iron doors. Something tugged painfully in my gut, beyond the simple pain of where Barion stabbed me. Perhaps this isn't the best example, but all I could think of to compare it to were those lonely nights after Lillian, where I drank far into the morning light and woke up in the late evening, quivering and in pain, knowing I had taken on too much but unable to do anything about it after the fact. Only instead of a physical ailment, I felt it within my very essence—as if I had been on the verge of being torn apart.

From within the cellar, a spear pointed up at me. Maya stood firm. Her white, pupil-less eyes brimmed with rage. She hadn’t expected me to come back. That was okay. I hadn’t expected to come back. Not this time at least, not really.

"Going to finish me off?" I asked.

The spear clattered onto the floor, then rolled down the stairs with a resounding series of wooden bumps. "I... cannot believe it," she said, her mouth working as if the words wouldn’t quite come out. "You really killed him?"

My legs gave out on me on the second step. Just decided to stop working. My arms pinwheeled. Maya caught me—gods she was strong for her size—her hands grabbing beneath my shoulders. My chewed on arm ached. She grunted, leaning me against the wall and kneeling before me.

"He’s dead. If that fire didn’t get him, nothing will." I handed her the golden amulet. She took it, staring at it in disbelief, then held it to her chest, starting to cry. "It’s an anchor. For the demon. Iheia above. You saved us." She touched her forehead to mine tenderly. "This is my vow. I will never forget this, my friend."

"We saved us. It’s nothing," I said guiltily. My actions might seem like altruism in her eyes, but it had not come nearly so freely. I saved her. But I also let her die. If anything, my actions this final time had balanced the scales. Maya caught my discomfort, and seemed to misplace it, realizing for the first time the extent of my wounds.

"Ni’lend you are a mess!"

I snorted. "Prone to injuries, I’m afraid." Maya’s hands glowed green. She focused on the gut wound, a strange crackling sensation radiating from the wound into my spine, then focused on my arm. I flexed it experimentally, painlessly, then smiled. "You’re a miracle worker."

"Maya?" We both jumped at the voice. It was the boy I saw so long ago down in the cellar, missing the eye. Only, now he wasn’t. Twin blue eyes studied me, alert. He held her spear to the side and it towered comically above him. Five other children hid behind him. A weight lifted off me, seeing that they were more or less intact. Barion really had laid off them after I took his assistant out of play.

"Come meet my children," Maya smiled joyfully, tugging me up and pulling me after her. She introduced me to them, one after the other, and they crowded around us. There was Eliza and Fiona, two little girls who looked so similar they could have been twins. Victor was a large boy, taller than me by an inch though he was two years younger. Oscar was the smallest of the bunch, only coming up to my waist. Finally, there was Lucius, the brown-haired boy who held the spear. There was something about his bearing that I recognized.

It was a hunch, but I took a shot anyway. "What’s your house name, Lucius?"

"Timbermour," He replied automatically, then grimaced, realizing he’d been baited. "What’s your house name?" He eyed me defiantly.

Valen. But of course, I couldn’t say that.

"Lucius," Maya scolded. "Don’t be rude. Cairn isn’t a noble, he’s an apothecary’s apprentice. He doesn’t have a house name."

"With posture like that and shoes like those?" Lucius looked me up and down skeptically. "Royal apothecary, more like."

Little bastard was going to out me. Before Maya could think too long on that, I clapped my hands together. "Who’s hungry?"

There was a chorus of cheers in response. As we emerged from the cellar, there was a gust of smoke that sent some of the children to coughing. Maya instructed them to put their shirts over their mouths, and we escorted them to the house. Maya paused at the door, looking at the corpse of the demon still lying in the center of the clearing. I remembered what she said about regeneration.

"Should we take care of it now?" I asked, hoping she would say no. As I’d been too nervous to eat this morning, my stomach rumbled with every thought of food. But the discomfort of going hungry for a little while longer paled in comparison to the idea of having to fight that nightmare again.

"We should." Maya walked towards it slowly, lost in thought. "Cairn?"

"Yes?"

"If you think what you did in the cellar went unnoticed, it did not."

"Would it hurt you to miss a thing or two every once in a while, Maya?" I asked, grimacing.

"It would, actually." Maya said. "During my time with master-" she stopped, correcting herself. "With Barion. You knew him for little more than a week and probably already noticed he was prone to mood swings."

"That’s putting it mildly."

"Indeed. I had to be attuned to his every whim and emotion, or things would go poorly for me." Maya indicated the house. "And worse for them. So I became adept at reading human emotions."

"Whatever he was, Barion wasn’t human." I said testily. We had just won a great victory. Why couldn’t she let it go?

"Perhaps. My point is, I wonder what it is you hide. Especially now, after everything. If it is that you are not truly an apothecary, I do not care—though that would make me wonder how you learned the trade so thoroughly. If it is that you are a noble, that might even make me respect you more." Maya smiled. "A human noble, treating an infernal like a person—even an equal. It is the stuff of fae tales."

I ached at that because I knew that she wasn’t lying. But the one thing she couldn’t imagine was the truth: that my father was the king, and the sole engineer of so much pain and suffering for her people—her entire race. Still, I needed to tell her. I had faced down a demon and a monster, but somehow the prospect of speaking those words seemed so much more daunting in comparison.

I readied myself. "Maya, I-"

She grabbed my arm suddenly.

"Cairn."

"What?" I asked, off-balance.

Her eyes narrowed, staring at the body of the demon "It is still alive."

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