Alicja
A server came forward and put a silver dish down, a sort of half-shell bowl. Inside was a chocolate mousse, with a beautiful strawberry, sliced and arranged on top into a flower. It was very yummy looking, but my stomach was soured.
I was going to mess this up and get Victor into trouble. I knew I was. I had no idea what might be good or bad to say.
The meal was wonderful.
I tried the wine, and it was tasty. I wasn't much of a wine drinker. This was cold, but red, and Uncle Max didn't seem to be the kind of man who would make a mistake like that — serving it with chicken as well. But it was delicious. So perhaps it was a cross-over thing.
He was spooning what looked like a dish of sherbet.
What did I think of Victor's reason for crossing over?
Well, "He came over to find the ones responsible for killing his father, didn't he? I thought he told that to people here."
"Yes, he did say he was going to find them, and bring them back for trial," Uncle Max agreed.
"And you don't believe that was a good enough reason?" I asked.
He paused and then tasted his sherbet again. "Not for a king," he replied.
"And was he?" I asked.
He glanced at me, from under those thick eyebrows through those slits of wrinkled eyelids. "No, I suppose he wasn't."
"You found being Regent a chore?" I asked.
He shook his head, "No, no I haven't. I've complained enough, certainly, but honestly it hasn't been much of a burden."
"So, your actions have been to 'standing orders' as well. You ordered him returned, because that was the way of things," I surmised.
He sat back, "For the most part, probably."
"Well," I said, after a long breath, "I don't know your traditions or laws, so I can't speak to that part. I can't say if it was a moral or ethical act. I can say, I believe it was his to do, if it was to be done. I believe his reasons for wishing it done are valid, still. And the way he wished it to be done: sensible, sane and thinking for the greater good, rather than his personal vendetta."
"How does it serve the common good?" he asked, his voice rougher than it had been to this point.
"I didn't say it did," I told him. "I said his thinking was for the greater good. He didn't want it to be about him. The man was his father, yes, but he was also king. King of these people. For a very long time, I've been led to believe."
He nodded, but didn't look up as he began tasting from his sherbet bowl again.
"He wanted these people to be a part of the justice that was due. Not to hear about it, but to be there when it was done."
He took several tastes before he said, "You believe that?"
I thought about it for a moment, and then nodded my head, "I have no reason to doubt him. I don't know him that well."
He shrugged in a way that conveyed the point was recognized. "His father was king for nearly four hundred years."
I adjusted myself in the chair, "How long do your people live?"
"The people? Maybe a hundred and twenty years, give or take for life practices and disease. But dragons can live much longer, especially if they get past the madness."
"The, madness?"
He sat back again, "You are aware of a thing called Alzheimer's?"
"Yes," I said.
"It is like that, but a little worse for the victim. It comes around five hundred years. We dragons can spot places which are 'thin' between worlds. Or dimensions, or whatever we should call them. Around five hundred years, we notice much more and what we notice is apparently pretty awful, because it drives us insane."
He paused and looked around, then motioned the servers to leave. "It doesn't happen to every dragon. Some go through this period without a care. It just never comes up. But others are driven into homicidal rages. They fly off, and might wipe out whole villages before they are finally brought down."
He looked up to me, "There is no cure and no talking them down. We have to kill them, or they will continue to rampage across the land, until someone does."
That sounded horrible. What a burden on the people who loved them.
I suddenly remembered something he said, "And, um, how have you been feeling?"
He gave me a wan smile, "And there's the rub, as Hamlet would say."
"You've been infected?" I asked, with a quiet voice.
"Not yet," he sighed. "But it is there. I can feel it. Waiting. It's enough to cause me great concern. I love these people. I don't want to murder them. Or to cause them grief. But I might not have a choice in the matter."
"So, you want him back..."
"So that I can retire and perhaps travel for a few years. Take a long walk, as they say."
To go off and die, alone, as they say, I thought to myself.
"Does this have anything to do with the Morrigan?" I asked, a speck of insight guiding me.
He nodded and chuckled, "You don't get distracted easily do you?"
"No," I said, as an apology. I didn't press this time. I took a sip of my lemonade and simply waited. This was obviously at the core of his desire to talk with me.
"The Morrigan, she is a powerful spirit," he began, and then glanced up at me, from under his brow. He shook his head and murmured something I thought was 'so young'. "When you've been around as long as I have, you've lived through times you never wish to see again. No matter the cost. I've lived through many of those times. Times of famine. Times of defilement. Times of war. Civil war is harrowing. It is, or was to me, the worst of times. Brother killing brother, in the name of someone who believed their claim to the throne was stronger.
After pushing his bowl away, he folded his hands as if in deep contemplation, "If I were to succumb to this madness, and Victor were not here to take the throne, there would be civil war. There are strong claims, but none definite. No claim that couldn't be challenged and surpassed."
He stopped. I waited.
I waited some more.
This time I didn't think he was going to fall out of nostalgia, "What can the Morrigan do about that? If memory serves she is a goddess of war and strife."
He nodded, "We see her as the same. What she can do, is end me, so I don't add to that bloody mess."
"You..." I gasped, my voice meek. "You want me to kill you?"
"The Morrigan is powerful. Very powerful. She could turn me to dust in an instant. Which is a death I hardly deserve, but would be eternally grateful for."
"But," I said, panic rising in me, "you're not even sick. You said it hasn't happened to you yet."
"True," he nodded. "But I feel it. I know it is coming. Just like my friend Simon, it is coming."
"Simon?"
"Victor's father," he sighed.
"Victor's father was — he had the madness? Does Victor know this?" My voice was a scythed whisper.
"No," he said, in confession. "Simon kept it from him. He kept it from him with his mother as well. His mother ... oh she became a terror. The Sidhe were targeted the hardest and she slaughtered so many of them. Simon and I and a couple of others, tried in vain to protect them. She was just so strong."
"She was killed?" I whispered.
He nodded and sat back, "We never found out how. Or who." He suddenly barked a laugh, "Or if we owed the villain a medal of honor."
I was mortified. My hands trembled in my lap. I could feel my face, drained of blood and prickling. How could he ask me such a thing? And what was to happen to Victor? How could I not tell him this? It was his father. His mother. They weren't just killed — they were sacrificed because they were monsters.
I couldn't become a Morrigan. I couldn't. No. Not if this would be the thing people would come to me for. I would not be such a thing. Ever.
"I think I would like to go to my room now," I said.
He didn't move. I wasn't sure he heard me. Then he rang a small crystal bell. When a porter arrived, he asked him to take me to my room and then he bid me goodnight.
I gave him a slight bow after I stood.
"Consider the lives you would save," he said, as I walked away.
...
The room was spacious and well furnished with chairs, a small desk, and a beautiful bed. It had been a very long day. I should have been exhausted but I couldn't sleep right now. And I didn't want to just lay in that bed and think.
I opened my pack and took out Oma's journal. Then I found the page I had opened in the backyard — was that today? It felt so long ago — and then took out a good pen and a wire bound tablet of paper. Sitting down and getting situated, I began working on the page, and deciphering the glyphs she used.
The lights in the manor, I noticed, glowed steady enough to be electric — unless it was some use of Mana that I wasn't aware of. It seemed a very mundane use for magick, if that's what it was. But of course, that would be mundane in my world. Not here, perhaps.
As I worked, there was a pesterance, an annoyance that grew wings and was fluttering around in the back mind theater areas of my brain. It pestered. And fluttered. And annoyed.
What was most annoying about this pesterance was that — inexplicably — I had no idea what it was fluttering on about. The horrible little thing wouldn't come forward far enough for me to realize what it was.
Maybe this is how the madness starts?
What happened to the other Morrigans? What happened to this one, the one I was deciphering about? Did she get asked to kill people?
He said the Change acted like a retrovirus. HIV was a retrovirus. A retrovirus changed your cellular DNA. In the case of HIV, a retrovirus is the type, which inserts a copy of its RNA genome into the DNA of a host cell that it invades, in this case mine, thus changing the genome of that cell. It changes your cells. All of them. Organs, blood, lungs, liver, skin, brain. Every cell in the body was a target.
In the case of HIV — AIDS — you die from the process.
But what is happening to me? Were All of my cells being changed, at the DNA level? Would I even be me after the change was done?
It was like death then. I would not be who I am.
I will not be who I am.
...
...
I screamed.