§
“What is the meaning of this?” Rod demanded as soon as he saw me.
Rather than answer him immediately, I moved to the child resembling me, whom I feared was about to act out. Mireia still held her in a hug from behind, but her eyes held a look that wasn’t panic, since Tiana would never panic, but something more like her emergency mode. What I used to call Tiana Full Battle Mode.
It would be bad to give her a chance to act on her reflexes, so I didn’t move the normal way. I dissolved my image and reconstituted myself already bent over her, holding her head between my hands. Before she could react, I used the emotional layer of my spiritual voice to project calm directly into her. I wasn’t sure if she had yet developed to the point where she could properly hear words without me using some fairy [Secret Voice] technique to carry them, but she would get the emotional content.
Once I calmed her, I gave her husband an answer.
“It’s different than what you are thinking, Your Highness,” I told him quietly. “I am not imitating her. I am wearing my true appearance. Tiana just happens to almost perfectly resemble me.”
“Take your hands off of her right now!”
“Rod, no!” Mireia scolded, then became self-conscious with everyone else around her about addressing Royalty so sharply and repeated, more calmly, “Don’t worry, Your Highness. She’s telling the truth, and she’s here to help.”
It’s unnatural how much this child Tiana looks like me, to be frank. She’s only my great-granddaughter. It’s normally a rather thin relationship, so you would think the genetics would have diluted my contribution somewhat more than this. Especially given how little her mother, my granddaughter, resembled me.
I can only assume that becoming my virtual doppelgänger had less to do with DNA and its magical and monstrous analogs than it did with interference by certain higher realm Immortals. After all, they originally intended to stick my soul in her body, not anticipating she would develop her own soul at conception, far earlier than normal.
Other than Tiana, you see, only the rarer-than-hen’s-teeth newborns of the Immortal Realms develop souls upon conception. It’s otherwise unheard of, within the Trichiliocosm. In lower level universes of the Mortal Realm, like those of Huade or Earth, it normally takes days after conception for Magical races and weeks for everyone else. For Mortals, it’s not until the nervous system develops, in fact. Even the gods could not have expected her to happen.
So, if I ever learn that Oranos or Immortal Mother, or whoever directed the guidance of my soul through Samsara and arranged Tiana’s birth, manipulated genetics to give her body my appearance, I will simply say, “As I suspected.”
I could feel this child’s trembling body in my hands and her trembling soul in my spiritual sense. The situation I feared, the whole reason Fan Li chose to drop all my incarnated personalities to make room in my spirit core to reproduce a semblance of my whole self, was now burning in front of me exactly as severely as she feared. Adrenaline was surging through Tiana’s veins while racing thoughts were flooding her consciousness.
Only one person in the room who was not now a component of me had been part of our conversations in Fan Li’s tea room. I looked up into Mireia’s wide eyes and addressed the goddess behind them.
“She’s clearly unstable, Senior. She’s wound up like a spring.”
Rhea-in-Mireia replied, “She’s starting to remember, Little Sen. It seems she was much closer to the edge than any of us realized.”
Rod’s voice cut into our conversation with a sharp tone. “Remember?”
I interpreted, “She is seeing flashes of memory from the time period she forgot. Either they are leaking across the Spirit Core interface or she is instinctively using Cosmic Deduction to gather them directly from the Sea of Knowledge.”
Then what was the point of all the work we’ve been doing? I wondered in despair to myself.
“We can still salvage the situation as long as Lydia controls the interface,” Rhea answered.
She closed her eyes, then opened them again with her gaze sharpening. “You’ve closed the tea room?”
“I need my entire spirit core to manifest myself right now, Senior,” I explained. “No room for such luxuries.”
“I hope you have not spoiled the Lydia incarnation,” she worried.
“Fan Li strictly isolated her, and I have not undone it,” I replied. “Lydia has only learned what she learned in her lessons.”
For the moment, Amnesiac Tiana existed as one isolated set of memories, with entropic backlash having wiped all the other lives away. Except for the events starting from her wedding day a week ago, she only knew Tiana’s life prior to my arrival on Huade, memories that ironically belonged not to her but to my original great-granddaughter.
But throughout the last week, a manifestation of Lydia had been with her, dreaming inside the spiritual vessel that she wasn’t using. The dreamer within Tiana was our sole link to her here on Huade. In the moments after the backlash, Rhea had forcibly reconstituted her there specifically so that her mere presence would keep it active and therefore the connection between it and my spirit core alive.
Meanwhile, in the accelerated time conditions that Fan Li had been maintaining, the Spirit Core copy of Lydia had been learning the job of gatekeeper between Tiana’s spiritual vessel and my spirit core.
Mireia-as-Rhea nodded. “Then kindly release enough of your core to manifest Lydia’s awareness, Little Sen. It need only be for a moment. I will connect her with her copy inside Tiana now.”
§
I was gradually growing more and more resentful of the woman in front of me who held my head in her hands while holding her incomprehensible conversation with Mireia. I could tell, very clearly, that she was forcing a state of calm on me, as if feeding me a tranquilizing drug. Despite the sedative, my instincts were to rebel, to fight against it.
Bunching up her brows, she gave me a worried smile. “I promise you, we are doing our best to save your life right now. You have no need to fear us.”
“I can feel you controlling my thoughts!” I protested.
She gave me a kind smile. “Not your thoughts, dear child. I am only interfering with the chemical stress and fear processes within your body.”
Within my distress, I was also gradually becoming overwhelmed with the blood hunger that had been gnawing away at me, more and more. The cruelest twist of all was, this same strange medicine was helping me control my urge to break free and attack one of the mortals in the room.
That fact only added to my worries. The condition had never come upon me this fast before. But of course, that woman said her presence was causing the acceleration. When she stopped or when she disappeared, what would I end up doing?
“Who are you?” I demanded.
“My name is Senhion, dear child,” she answered frankly. “I’m your great-grandmother. And I am very much here for the sake of you and your daughters. You are my progeny, and your health and safety are my sole motive, I assure you.”
I shuddered again, and my lips began trembling. Despite her technique, my condition was still growing worse, at a frightening pace.
“My presence here is too much,” Senhion stated, looking up at Mireia. “I need to put Lhan in charge and leave.”
“I need you to stay as you are for only a bit longer,” Rhea replied, then looked over at the maid nearby. “Miss Syl, yesterday you confessed that you wish to feed Lady Tiana. Do you still feel that way?”
It didn’t shock me this time. After all, Syl had already offered the same to me, directly.
“Always, My Lady,” she declared with a bow.
“This is an emergency,” she stated. “Please come over here.”
Deep inside, I was horrified at the idea, but I was beyond caring as I watched the maid approach. A delicious meal was delivering herself to me.
“One moment,” interrupted my self-proclaimed great-grandmother. “Syl, I must warn you first that you risk the possibility that your blood bond with Lady Tiana’s father will transfer to her when she feeds on you.”
“What?” I burst out. “I never learned that?!”
“It’s lost knowledge in this age,” Senhion explained, “because it doesn’t happen for vampires. For us Elders, a blood-related descendant can inherit their parent’s Servants, if the parent allows it or is deceased, and provided the Servant is willing to trade the old bond for the new. Of course, you must feed upon her to complete the bond.”
“Elder?” I echoed the odd use of the word.
“An Elder is what you call a ‘fairy vampire’,” she answered with a smile. “You, like me, are an Elder. We are the same kind, members of the ancestral race of both fairies and vampires.”
She ordered Syl, “Child, loosen your clothing to expose your shoulder.”
If I had not been raging with thirst, I would have told Rod to leave the room, but by that point my fangs had grown, my wings were threatening to grow under my clothing, and I couldn’t care less what Rod saw.
I need to offer my apologies to Miss Syl later.
But she did not protest. She immediately untied her belt and allowed her outer robe to drop, then loosened the sash of her inner robe and pulled it off her left shoulder, exposing it.
Senhion moved out of her way and she sat on my lap. Without hesitation, I leaned forward and plunged my fangs into the bend between her neck and shoulder. I even went as far as to let my hand explore her.
She gave a gasp, but wrapped her arms around me and stroked my hair, like a mother comforting her child. My mouth gloried in her sweet flavor as I drank greedily and felt her body reacting to me. I was so far gone, I didn’t even remove my hand when I realized it had sought out and exposed her breast. And she was so far gone, she made no move to correct the problem when her sash came undone and her inner robe fell open.
Under my hand, her chest rose and fell in a steady rhythm, deeper with every breath, and I found myself glorying in that as well, when I normally would be embarrassed at the questionable effect my feeding has on women. Instead of fearing what I was doing, I anticipated bringing her to the point of release. Such immoral thoughts, and yet I was craving to carry them out!
“She’s stable enough now,” Mireia declared, despite my ravenous behavior, then held my head in her hands like Senhion had done.
I knew what she meant. All my anxiety had vanished, washed away by the sweet taste of blood. Senhion’s control over my fight-or-flight reflex had vanished as well, although I couldn’t say when she stopped doing it.
Syl’s calming hand began instead clutching my hair as her body started trembling. The others surely should have made me stop feeding by this time, but with her already being Father’s blood slave, perhaps that didn’t matter. And when her gentle, almost inaudible cries with each breath finally congealed into a single soft moan, I felt it would be wrong to interrupt so I continued anyway. I waited until she finished before withdrawing my fangs from her.
She smiled up at me with adoring eyes as I straightened in my seat. Then her head dropped onto my shoulder and she closed her eyes.
Mireia declared, “Lydia is awake now, and has completely synchronized her memories from the spirit core.”
Senhion nodded, then turned and directed, “Lady Benedetta, please lead Syl to the bedroom and let her rest.”
“I need to watch her!” I protested.
“She left behind the risk of a negative reaction decades ago, when your father made her his Servant,” Senhion replied. “She can sleep without danger.”
Benedetta did as Senhion requested. Mireia quietly gathered the discarded parts of Syl’s clothing and followed.
Meanwhile, I became terribly self-conscious about what I had just done in front of everyone. I stared down at my folded hands and grew progressively more embarrassed.
Senhion’s hand rested on my shoulder. “Be at ease, child. Benedetta and Mireia have seen it before, I’m the same kind as you and your husband would surely watch you feeding at some point, anyway.”
“That leaves the two maids,” I grumbled, and she laughed.
“Both of whom are wearing the same bracelet and appear to be quite jealous of Miss Syl,” she gently teased.
I glared up at her and she responded with an apologetic smile.
She stroked my hair, looking down at me with a smile, and added, in a total non-sequitur, “To think I have a great granddaughter. When I departed from this world, all I had was one little boy.”
When she departed? “Huh?”
“I died, ten thousand years ago.” she stated, quite seriously. “Since then I have lived many other lives. Each has their own personality. Sirth, that woman whom you met, was me in one of those lives. Lhan, the girl who will replace me in a moment, is another. The current me standing in front of you is both the original as your great-grandmother and the culmination of all those lives.”
“Eh?” was my very intelligent reply. It was difficult to follow exactly what she meant.
“You will also meet another of those lives soon, once you two learn how to speak to each other. Mireia will help you with that. Lydia will be able to share her memories of her own life with you, and teach you how to manage your blood core and spiritual vessel so you don’t have to feed constantly. But she will exist as a sort of ghost whom you will only hear. She will dwell in the gateway between you and the danger we just saved you from.”
I repeated, “Eh?”
She gave me another kind smile. “We were trying to bring this to you more gradually, but we no longer have that luxury. It’s okay, though, because the only part you need to understand for now is that you are out of danger for the time being. I must leave now, as I am too big a drain on your body. But we will meet again.”
