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The entire time we had sat in this little circle around a blanket spread with Dorian-style hors d’oeuvres, Durandal had quietly nibbled on one or two and otherwise remained silent. But when Mother– Fairy Mother– appeared at the entrance to the Pavilion, he sprang to his feet.
“Deharè,” he blurted out in surprise, crossing behind me and Kanon toward her. “How…”
The old man– well, he had the appearance of a twenty-year-old, but I still thought of him as a grizzled veteran– was stuck, at a loss for words, as Fairy Mother gracefully strolled to meet him.
“Older Brother,” she greeted him, taking his hands. “Is that your human transformation?”
“If I had one, I suppose. I never achieved one in real life,” he replied, still looking baffled. “How can you be here?”
Gaia declared, “It’s courtesy my assistance and your niece’s simulation system, the same as the body you wear currently. You already know that Deharè’s not quite dead yet.”
While Durandal towed his sister with him, returning to his spot, he told the goddess, “But her body is! Your pendant is only keeping her soul from returning to Samsara, isn’t it? You need a brain to grant a soul the power of thought!”
The final gap in the circle, the space between Durandal’s and Immortal Mother’s places, had acquired another sitting cushion while I wasn’t looking. Durandal had been leading Fairy Mother there during his speech to Gaia.
The goddess sipped her tea as he sat his little sister at the last spot.
“Where is your brain, oh Holy Sword?” she wondered after she swallowed.
“But… that’s different!” he rebutted as he sat. “Lâra and Eurybia constructed me through the merger of three living spirits. Their combined spirit body remains embedded in my blade.”
“So you do understand that something other than a brain of living tissue can grant the power of thought?”
Durandal frowned and didn’t respond.
Immortal Mother chuckled. “In truth, neither brain nor spirit body are granting any of you here the power of thought currently. With the exception of my cute junior here.”
She’d said the last with a nod toward Gaia. She continued, “We are inserting our presences into this system, but for the rest of you, your bodies are currently suspended in the interface between the Mortal Realm and the Spirit Realm, in a state that can neither be called life nor death. Your minds are hosted by the simulation network, regardless of whether they normally reside in physical or spirit bodies. Gaia brought the awarenesses of Deharè and her child into this network in order to relieve the strain on her amulet. If she hadn’t done so, it would be expending energy to keep them from forming inanimate spirit bodies and accumulating death aura.”
A thought suddenly occurred to me. “But, right now, the amulet is in the interface, right? It’s in the same state as our bodies.”
Gaia grew an approving smile, like a teacher whose student has asked an excellent question.
I continued the thought. “If you keep the amulet here when I leave, Mother can stay here as long as she needs to, until I’m ready for this, right?”
“She can,” Gaia agreed. “She can live for years or centuries, enjoying life within the many worlds in the simulation network. I’m sure she would form friendships with those who frequent the place and learn quite a lot. But meanwhile, what would her child be doing? Dreaming in her womb as a fetus, never to be born? That would be unhealthy for the soul involved. Or we might simulate birth, childhood and adulthood for her, to become another disembodied soul who can only live within the confines of your network, just like Kanon. You’re her destined mother, so what do you choose for your child?”
Immortal Mother added, “Keeping in mind that letting her be born into the real world as planned is the best option, and only on hold due to your hesitation.”
– Aye, what are you whinin’ about, anyhow? You’ve no younger a body than I had, when I had my first!
– This humble one disagrees with that as a valid reason, but would note that you, when considered as the continuation of your last incarnation, are no teenager. And at your age counting from Robert’s birth, Jennifer Stewart had two children already.
– What do you mean, disagree? Yer sayin’ I was too young?
The sudden interruption from my prior incarnations baffled me for a moment, until I realized that I had never contracted my spiritual vessel. And that it had grown since I was here last. While supported by the environment of the Garden Pavilion, it was now capable of hosting my expanded mind while allowing everyone else except Senhion to be conscious, too.
While Daq and Kwelabi mediated between the two, a young slave girl appeared as well, injecting her worry that I could die from having a child too young, in the same manner that she had died. Fan Li quickly assured her that I was not only more fit but physically more mature than that girl had been. The girl faded again, leaving behind only my newly-acquired memory of her name, Lhan, and a variety of tidbits of her short life that had occurred between the two men currently arguing with Sirth in the back of my mind. It included the fact that she had been only six when she died… but her world had much longer years than Earth, more like Mars. She had probably not reached the Earthly age of fourteen when she died in childbirth, and that fact made me feel sick.
Immortal Mother watched me throughout the committee meeting that had broken out, and I knew she, and probably Gaia, were listening in. That realization caused the various attendees to settle down.
“You have all the wisdom and all the strength you need, Child,” Immortal Mother told me. Then she turned to Fairy Mother and noted, “She has a concern other than her own fitness, but she has not yet properly voiced it to you.”
Fairy Mother– I’m just going to give up and go back to calling her Mother– smiled at me and told me, “I already know about it, though. You believe that I would hate becoming a vampire.”
I frowned. “Wouldn’t it be bad, Mother? I’ve always been told that fairies and monsters hate each other! When Mireia’s magic was magnifying the hatred, half the fairy world was treating me with disgust! The rest seemed to be barely tolerating me! That means that, even without the magnification, they hated me, right?”
“Hm,” she mulled for a moment, “There were some who didn’t, right? I’m certain you encountered a few who treated you like any other, even while that spell was active. Older ones, especially.”
The declaration confused me a little. “Older ones?”
“They might have treated you no differently than a young fairy. You can’t think of any? Certainly my mother and Serera were both quite fond of you. But surely you encountered passing fairies who treated you without hatred, too, even while that spell was active.”
Perplexed, I thought back, while wondering why she would bring it up. “I… guess? The owner of the House of Gold Leaves… and there was a dryad named Möemnen that wanted to keep me as a toy. I suppose she didn’t hate me?”
“You encountered a Green Man who was cordial to you as well,” Gaia noted. “As cordial as a hermit like that can be, anyhow.”
That Green Man hadn’t seemed particularly cordial to me, but I knew they were notoriously antisocial creatures. I had never met another, so I had nothing to compare.
“Haven’t you encountered an ancient monster as well?” Gaia asked. “He rejected neither you nor your young companion, the full-blooded fairy who also came into his territory.”
… by which she meant Lord Moram of Greenwater.
“How closely have you been watching me?” I demanded.
Mother took the conversation back over without letting Gaia respond.
“When younger monsters and fairies come into contact, their conflicting cultures and strong personalities grate, and they usually end up in conflict. That turns into general enmity. But that only counts for the younger members of our species. The wisdom of millennia will always defeat the stupidity of centuries, Tiana. I do not hate monsters, and monsters as old as me don’t hate fairies. Usually, we discover we have far more in common than in conflict as fellow long-lived creatures and become good friends.”
That reminded me of something that I voiced immediately. “Like… you and my father?”
She smiled and nodded, her eyes suddenly glistening with tears. “Becoming a vampire, becoming his granddaughter, I could never hate that. Please don’t raise the baby me to hate it either. I will be very mad at you when I get my memory back, if you do. Egon and I… most certainly did not hate each other. We looked after our beloved kingdom together for so long, after all.”
“Your kingdom?”
“When the Dorian Empire came apart, we founded the kingdom of Pen Doria together. We were disguised as mortals when we did it, of course. We passed it down to Egon’s son by his concubine, but we had to take it back over a few times over the centuries to keep it going. It worked until those blasted Universalists managed to weasel their way into all the noble families and ruin the very fabric of the kingdom. It all dissolved into chaos and we needed external help to defeat them, so we made a deal with the Orestanians. It was the only way to bring order back.”
I was hearing a parallel to the history I knew that inserted the active participation of my mother and father going back about seventeen hundred years. Well, he had been duke for a thousand of it, but Mother…?
“You’re talking like you two were a couple that whole time!”
“Oh, my,” she responded, with a slightly amused mock surprise. “You were told years ago that Egon and I were married, Tiana.”
“But I thought…”
… that was a fiction, made up to justify ‘Lady Sasara’s’ accession to the dukedom, in her role as a proxy for the ‘wife’ Deharè as guardian of the ‘legitimate’ First Daughter of Pendor.
She looked at me with a smile, and noted, “A lot of white lies were told to the common people, and you were allowed to believe them as a less cruel option than the truth.”
“The truth?” I asked, feeling a tinge of dread. I had realized a long time ago that a lot of falsehoods had been in the story I knew.
“That your mother, the Duke’s loving wife of over two thousand years, murdered your father to end his descent into madness.”
I gaped at her for several heartbeats. Then considered all the contrary facts. Then blurted out, “Exactly how much did you cheat on him?”
I mean, I knew for a fact she had been messing around with Owen before my father died, but also Amana and Inda existed, and I wondered how many others in the last two thousand years? None of them had been fairy vampires, which obviously meant someone other than my father was the sire!
Mother burst out in long, merry fairy laughter. Finally she sobered enough to say, “You should also ask how much your father cheated on me. Although it’s not really cheating when you keep your spouse informed. We never kept secrets like that.”
“Well, I know Elianora is his granddaughter, so there was at least one vampire woman in his life.”
“That doesn’t count. Elianora’s grandmother died centuries before we married. Actually, he avoided vampire women and we avoided having me become pregnant too, because he wanted to leave the Duchy to a mortal heir, someday.”
She paused, then noted. “He was lucid while he lay dying, and stopped me from healing him because the demon was too strong, and would take him back over unless he died first. He said he would rather die than allow that to happen, and instead made me use my magic to help him give me the child I had been wanting for two thousand years.”
In response to my thought about the gods having apparently planned their union, Gaia inserted, “We only knew in advance that they would have a child. We did not know the circumstances under which it would happen, and we certainly didn’t arrange them. Our only direct involvement was divine protection during intercourse, so that bastard couldn’t interfere.”
“What bastard?” Mother asked.
“No mere demon was capable of overwhelming your husband, Child. The one possessing him was obviously Astaroth himself. Egon was a strong enough being to become his host.”
Mother looked shocked for a moment, then, after a few breaths, she nodded thoughtfully. It did make sense.
Turning back, she gave me a sympathetic smile. “Tiana, you were going to learn that your mother killed your father early in life. The story that the public was hearing said that much, but was far easier for you to deal with than the real story.”
“And what was the real story?”
“That he went mad while fighting against a demon that had possessed him. That in his madness, he developed a frantic desire to create an heir, causing him to begin kidnapping women one after another that he would impregnate, whom the demon controlling him would then kill, and that well over a thousand women had suffered that fate before his wife of more than two thousand years fought her way through his defenses to put an end to it.”
I frowned. That wasn’t really any different than what I knew, just slightly more explicit. And included the part about Mother really being Father’s wife. But she wasn’t finished.
She pressed her lips together tightly, her tears beginning to flow down her cheeks. “That it wasn’t until he became obsessed about my beloved Sylphana and stole her as well that I finally overcame my unwillingness to kill him.”
She rubbed away her tears, and stated, “More than anything else, Tiana, I couldn’t tell you that your father murdered Ged, Rod and Amelia’s mother.”
