Blood of Azura

Part XX

He longed to turn his head, to see what look her golden eyes held now.  She already thought him a beast of Leoth.  This new truth, this sororicidal admission, would not surprise or shock her he knew.

'You killed your own sister?' she whispered.  'For her foresight?'

'No,' he shook his head.  'That was not the why of it. It was merely... the consequence of it.' He turned to her for the first time and found, to his surprise, that her mouth was parted with a mixture of shock and horror.

'Consequence...?'

'Or, as I have come to see it, the punishment for it.' He smiled bitterly.  When she said nothing he felt the urge to fill the thick silence. 'You think me no better than Leoth the Dark himself, I presume.'

'In saying that you would presume I pay your God any mind at all.'

'Meaning you do not?'

'Of course, I do not.  It would be an affront to Azura.  He defiled a Goddess - his own sister. He tore apart the great realm and laid waste to millions of innocents to satisfy his own contemptible and base desires,' She spat.  'He is unworthy of anything other than his own curse.'

He had to stifle a sigh. So predictable. So certain she was of her truth, a truth written and perpetuated by the victors.

'So there appears to exist a soul whom you despise more than I,' he mused.

She did not confirm it. Instead, an odd look came over her eyes before she looked down at the bedclothes, averting her gaze.

'You said your mother was a Visier,' she asked after a moment.  'Does that mean she is passed?'

'Yes.' He forced away the images that threatened to overcome him. 'She threw herself from this very window when I was no more than three namedays. Driven mad by the sight of things she no longer wanted to see.'  

He heard a small, inaudible gasp. Her voice was soft and gentle a short moment later. 'No child should lose their mother so young.' She was picking absently at the lint of the bedclothes.  'My mother too died when I was a child.'

'And your father?' He asked, curious now. Was she was conversing with him, voluntarily?

'Not so long ago,' she replied, before the same odd look he noticed several moments earlier flitted again across her features. When she lowered her eyes from his he understood what it was. It was not deception, it was the pulling of a curtain, the hiding of a sight behind it.

'My father is dead also.' He wandered away from the verandah in search of his wine, wine he was certain he'd brought up from the stores himself last moonrise but which seemed to have vanished.  Mor must have cleared the chamber - too efficient for her own good.  Though perhaps it wasn't thirst that plagued him but exhaustion.