Chapter 52: Enemies

They were her enemies. Vestra knew this. The priests, reading from old, religious texts, had pounded home that point in every reading and every sermon. The people of Vylun were the enemies of the Dagowyn. The lesser creatures of Vylun had banded together hundreds of millennia – perhaps even eons – ago and hunted her people to extinction. It was only through the grace of god they’d escaped, exiled to a similar world but a world lacking in life or mercy. D’arwyn, the “world of death”.

She didn’t want to like them. She wanted to hate them. She needed to hate them.

But she didn’t.

After killing the two who had attacked her, after burning and melting her two fellow Dagowyn, she had felt her heart grow cold and tendrils of ice had crept up her spine. She couldn’t stop herself from shivering, a tremble that started in her torso but quickly spread everywhere. Flight became impossible as she couldn’t control the wings that had sprouted from her back. Her forepaws had trembled uncontrollably and her legs – if the form she was in even had such things – felt incredibly weak and completely useless.

She had plummeted towards the lapping waves below her, waiting for the cold, cruel water to accept her and enclose her as it had her brethren. In a strange way, she yearned toward death and waited only for its all-encompassing embrace. She had killed and death was her only reward.

Some hitherto unknown survival instinct must have kicked in because just as she was closing her eyes, welcoming the sweet clasp of death the splashing waves would bring, her wings spread wide, and her plummet curved once more into a glide. She re-opened her eyes to find herself quickly zipping mere feet above the impossibly vast body of water. Even as she had marveled at her flight, her keen eyesight had picked out so many different kinds of fish, both large and small, from the murky blue-green depths.

She had turned her head to take in one of her wings. Moments before, she would have sworn they were too weak to support her increased weight, but there it was – there they were, she confirmed, as she had turned her head to her other wing – spread wide and steady, and rising ever so slightly from a sudden current of warmer air reflecting off the chilled water below.

Her heart had pounded within her chest, each beat driving yet another shiver throughout her body. She had killed yet the death promised in the holy books of her god was evidently to be denied her. At least for now.

She had considered driving herself up, up into the clouds. She had considered using her wings to swim as high into the air as she could and then to wrap them around her and plummet purposefully down into the sea. The wondrous sight of land – land beyond the Gate’s island to which she had been previously exiled since coming through the Gate from D’arwyn to Vylun – had pushed thoughts of suicide from her mind. It was far away but her eyesight had grown so keen in this form, she could almost pick out every grain of sand on the beach even in the near darkness of the night’s sky. She had been thankful for two large, bright orbs up in that sky. They were as large as the sun but apparently not as bright. They were certainly not as warm.

Her eyesight in her new form was spectacular and unbelievably complex. She could see as she had always seen, as she had seen since birth in her bipedal form, though unimaginably clearer, further and more focused. Yet there was another sight as well, overlaid on the first. A sight filled with the reds, oranges and yellows of warm air and the deepening blues and purples of cooler air and the vast colors of blues, purples and black of the cold water below. It made flight easy, her body gently and instinctually turning in micro-motions to push her into the warm air currents that provided lift. In the reds and oranges of warmer air she could glide whereas in the blues and purples of the colder breezes, she had to scull her wings for every inch of forward motion.

Her heat vision had also revealed moving game, running and hiding within the trees and brush set back from the approaching sandy shore. This was how the two she had killed – she had killed! – had tracked her. This was how her heat, even when she was unseen, had betrayed her.

She had driven herself to the shore, her wings swimming near effortlessly in the rapidly cooling air coming off the water below. She had sought to land on that yellow, sandy shore. Her newly enhanced eyesight had picked out a spot of clean, flat sand, free of the driftwood, brush and dying plant life swept in from the lapping, seemingly constantly moving water.

Her legs, though, had betrayed her. They had still felt alien and weak, and her body had still trembled from the cold tendrils of self-loathing clawing at her spine. She had bounced rather than landed, her scales protecting her at least partially from the vicious grit of the sand. A giant, majestic plume of sand had erupted around her but her forward motion had caused her to somersault and rebound in an arc. She had bounced and rolled again, the resulting plume somewhat smaller. Her next arc took her to the tree line. She had had the strangest sense of déjà vu as she hit, her magically repaired back slamming painfully into the trunks of trees. There had been no give in her back that time, though, and it had been the trunks which had given way against her newly acquired bulk.

When she had finally came to a stop, she couldn’t tell how many trees she had knocked over with her disastrous landing. Five? Ten? Twenty? She had found herself lying on trunks, branches, leaves and bushes perhaps 40 yards from the sandy beach. Debris had been strewn all around her. Somewhere in that failed landing, her wings had folded against her back, but off to the sides. She unconsciously opened them slightly, just enough to move them. There had been no pain, so she had considered it a win.

Her heart had still pounded insanely hard within her chest. Icy claws had still scratched and gouged down her spine, sending a lonely feeling of utter cold throughout her body. A feeling of malaise and weakness had consumed her, and it was more than she could do just to rise up from the bed of debris beneath her, even though it had poked and prodded her under her scales.

Then, she had cried, loudly and pitiably. She had killed. She, a woman, had killed two men. The holy texts of her god decried such action. A man killing another would be punished but could eventually be forgiven, depending on why he had killed. The holy texts described a series of motive-based penance for men who had taken the life of another man. Once the penance was complete, the man was brought back into the gentle grace of god. A woman killing another woman was likewise afforded penance.

A man killing a woman did not even have to suffer penance, so long as the death was justified. Such a killing was just a general right for all men.

A woman killing a man, though, was completely proscribed. There was no penance. There was only one punishment for a woman who had taken the life of a man – slow, painful, torturous death. The qal’dasare – the ‘long wicked death’.

As such a woman, she could look forward to death by rape. Men and beasts would have her over and over again. Sticks and rods would defile her. The priests would tend her wounds but only to the point of keeping her alive, so that she could be raped more. Years later, broken and bleeding, when she was nothing more than a mindless thing, she would finally be put to death by a burning hot poker thrust inside her. Even then, death could take weeks or months to claim her, and the ensuing time was not pleasant.

Even worse, her eternal spirit would be scorned for all time. Her future held nothing but an eternity of pain and suffering, first by men and later by her god. She would never be free of what she had done.

Her tears had been relentless and her trembling uncontrollable. She had sobbed, her breath coming in gasps and there were moments when she couldn’t even find her breath, her sobs interfering with her ability to breathe. For hours she had cried, late into that night, until finally she had fallen into a troubled sleep.

The gentle light of the sun rising into the open sky above the gouge she had made in the forest woke her. For a moment, she had been at piece. In that instant between sleep and wakefulness, she had no memory of her terrible deed. She had awoken alone and wondering at the lumpy, painful bed in which she had slept. The gentle heat of the sun had warmed her and the earthen smell of moss and foliage, intermixed with the sweet scent of unknown flowers and plants, had swept over her. A light breeze had played about her, covering her skin in gentle bumps. For that brief moment, everything had been right with her.

Then, the tears had come again as she remembered the unholy evil she had wrought.

She had found herself back in her bipedal form, her body completely nude. She had covered her wickedness as best as she could for a time, but it had proven impossible to climb over and down the mound of broken trees upon which she had slept and still maintain her virtue. Finally, in angst, she had willed herself unseen. She would still be nude but at least no one could see her shame.

She had still felt weak but the clutching, icy touch along her spine had relented. For a moment, she longed for the heat of D’arwyn’s red sun instead of Vylun’s cooler brightness. For a moment more, she wished she had stayed on D’arwyn itself.

Then, her thoughts broke at what she would have had to have put up with if she had stayed. How was it different, putting up with the base, disgusting desires of Marcin tuk’Cura or the lusts of men and beasts which was to be her punishment for her heinous crimes? Either would break her. Either would lessen her. Either would crush her spirit.

Submitting to Marcin would not jeopardize her spirit, however. What she had done had destroyed her both in this life and the next. It destroyed her for all eternity.

She had tried to change into her other form, wanting to fly far away. She had thought maybe she could fly far enough to forget her crime, at least for a little while. No matter how she tried, however, she couldn’t call forth the huge creature she had been. She had felt for the heat within her and grasped it but still the form would not come. She had tried to force herself to feel what she’d felt before – the panic, the fear – but still she did not transform.

Then, she knew. She had killed. The other form was a gift from god, but she had committed an unforgiveable act against the teachings of god. God had taken away the other form as partial punishment.

She had wandered for a few days, ever upward since the terrain seemed to climb in every landward direction from the huge expanse of water, lost in her misery. Occasional streams provided her water, but she did not eat. She wasn’t even sure why she had bothered with drinking water. It would be better to die, slowly and painfully, and start her eternity of pain. At least she would not have to suffer the defilement of her body.

It was perhaps the third or fourth day after crashing on the shore when she’d come across the people. After the first day of her wandering, she hadn’t even bothered becoming unseen. If animals attacked and killed her, it was what she deserved, after all. She had still hidden at night, sleeping in caves, under fallen tree trunks or partially covered alcoves. She was weak. She didn’t want to experience the torture of qal’dasare, so she hid from her kind.

So, the people had seen her, and she was too weak and too uncaring to run. She simply closed her eyes and let them come. This would be a good death for one such as her. Surely, these people would make her death painful but quick and she could begin on the tortured journey of an eternity of agony.

They had not killed her. They had certainly not acted like she had expected them to act. They had spoken to her soothingly, but she could not understand them.

The ones who had approached her were women and they brought clothing. They clothed her and offered her cold, clean water to drink. They’d succeeded in feeding her despite her efforts to push them away and the food was warm and filling and good. She cried a lot, but they comforted her even though she didn’t want comfort.