Page 24

WRATH

I knew I shouldn’t have come here.

It was the middle of spring, the flowers on the bushes an opulent purple. The garden was lush with greenery. The sky was a pastel blue with only a single white cloud far in the distance. It was exactly as I remembered, the little house I’d built with my bare hands.

I stared at it for hours, seeing glimpses of someone move past the window between the curtains. There was still time to go back. My imagination was torture, but I could always tell myself it wasn’t real. But once I saw reality, I couldn’t unsee it.

I took a breath before I crossed the yard to the front door.

I heard voices inside. Darius. Tiberius. They were fighting about something. My hand moved to the door, but I didn’t turn it.

Then Anya’s voice came. “How many times have I told you not to play with that inside the house?” Her voice was angry, but she was alive and well, healthy.

It brought a mist to my eyes.

My existence was a dark servitude, but it was worth it.

Then I heard another voice. “Listen to your mother, or I’ll make you listen to me.”

I recognized it—because it was my brother.

I was content hearing their voices, but now his presence caused more curiosity. Bahamut said she would remarry and have more children. But had he referred to my brother all along? I turned the handle and entered the house.

It looked exactly the same…but everything had changed.

The boys played with makeshift bows and arrows they’d tried to make themselves. They were on the rug in front of the fire. Anya was in the kitchen cooking dinner, and she was pregnant.

I stared at her small belly. Someone else might not have noticed, but I had been with her every day through both of her pregnancies. I knew her body well, knew when it had changed. And now, I could see she was in the beginning of a new pregnancy, maybe three or four months along.

It’d been a year since I left.

And there was my brother. Helping her in the kitchen like he lived there. They didn’t touch or kiss, but the way they moved together told me they were more than friends. She smiled at him when he handed her the salt. Her eyes lit up, just the way they used to for me.

I’d been replaced.

I’d known it would happen. Bahamut had warned me. But I hadn’t expected it to happen so fast, for her to move on and have more children with my own brother, to start a new life almost the second I was gone.

“I told you not to come.” Bahamut appeared on the other side of the kitchen, watching them together with mock interest. His blue eyes moved to me, absent of empathy and full of malice.

“I had to.”

“Well, now you know she wasn’t worth your sacrifice.”

Despite the tremendous pain it caused me, I returned many times.

I watched my sons grow into men. Watched Anya become someone else’s wife. Time passed differently for me in the underworld, so years to them felt like decades to me. To say I healed was too strong of a word to use.

But I accepted it.

I was condemned to an existence of permanent servitude, ushering in new souls who’d made the same mistake I did. They all did it for the wrong reasons, so I felt out of place in the darkness. Every time I visited, Bahamut was there to watch me suffer.

Like it pleased him.

He waited for me to admit that it’d been a mistake, that she hadn’t been worth the price I’d paid.

But I never did.

I stood there and watched Tiberius and Darius call my brother Dad.

And I just…accepted it.

Anya had always wanted a girl, and now she had one with her daughter. The girl wasn’t my child, so I should have no fondness for her, but it was hard not to love someone who was half my wife…and half my brother.

And she still looked like me, in some ways.

Darius left the house first, started a carpentry business in the village.

Tiberius married a pretty girl and settled down on the same land.

He built their home with his bare hands, and I cried out of pride.

I watched him have two sons of his own, watched him become a tall and strong man who could lift a tree trunk.

He was within sight of his mother, taking care of her while caring for his own family.

I continued to visit…until Anya died.

My brother went first, and she followed just a year later.

Her life had come and gone—and my servitude was endless. But Bahamut had delivered what he promised. She had lived a long and healthy life. She loved again, had more children, and died surrounded by her grandchildren.

I stood at her headstone and stared at the etching in the stone, the date of her birth and the date of her end. She died peacefully in her sleep. Didn’t succumb to a painful disease that slowly and brutally drained her life-force away.

Tiberius appeared in the cemetery with a bouquet of white flowers in his hand.

The twinkle of boyhood in his eyes was far gone, either because life had broken him down…

or because he believed I’d run out on him.

He came closer, his dark hair turning gray, wrinkles and divots in his face.

He was almost thrice my age when I’d left the house.

His identity was unmistakable, but he wasn’t the little boy who had helped me hunt in the forest.

He stopped at the headstone and stared down at her name in silence.

I stared at him, wishing I could speak and he would hear. I watched the breeze move a tendril of hair away from his face. I remembered teaching him to care for the horses at dawn. I remembered reading to him at bedtime. Now, he was a man in his sixties, ripe with age, fatigued with wisdom.

I’d only known him personally for six years. The rest of the time, I’d been a stranger.

He bent down and placed the flowers at her headstone.

I noticed there wasn’t one for me. They never knew whether I was dead or alive, and then they stopped wondering.

He stood up again and placed his hand on the curve of the stone. “Miss you, Mom.”

My heart cracked like weak stone.

“See you soon.” He stepped back and began his return journey home.

“I’m proud of you, Tiberius,” I said, knowing he couldn’t hear me. “I wish you knew that.”

Bahamut, King of the Dead, emerged from the castle and moved down the steps, his cape draping behind him, his servants cowering in fear and revering him in silence. His boots hit the dark soil, and he approached the stone dais in the center, an ethereal blue mist floating over the void.

He stopped at my side and looked to the dark sky.

It was devoid of texture or details. There were no clouds. No stars. No moonlight. It had been a hard adjustment for me in the beginning, this eternal night, but I’d come to find the quiet beauty in the pockets of despair.

A moment later, the outline was distinct, a man who floated in midair and slowly crept toward the dais. His arms were relaxed at his sides, but his spine was slightly curved, his chest toward the sky.

He eventually came to a stop, surrounded by the blue mist.

Bahamut nodded to one of his servants. “Take him.”

Monsters that were neither man nor animal placed their long fingers on the man’s body and pulled him from the mist.

The second he was pulled free, he awoke. Fought the hold on his body and dropped to the earth. He panicked once he realized where he was, surrounded by a darkness he didn’t understand, creatures he’d never seen. He was there because of the agreement he’d forged—and it clearly wasn’t worth it. “No.”

The corner of Bahamut’s mouth rose in a smile. “Welcome home, Nathaniel.”

“No!” He tried to fight the claws and the strength of the hunched beings.

“Take him to his cell,” Bahamut ordered, watching his creatures do his bidding.

They took him up the stairs and to the castle—and he screamed the whole way.

Bahamut looked up at the sky once again, like he expected more. “Guess that’s it for the day.” He turned to look at me beside him, like he somehow knew I had something to say.

“I have a request.” A request that would surely be denied.

He continued to stare.

“I’ve served you faithfully for nearly sixty years. When I arrived here, I was quiet and compliant. I remain so.”

“Yes, you’ve adapted to the darkness quicker than others.”

Because I did it for the right reason.

“What is your request, Wrath?”

“Anya has passed on to the afterlife.” I loved her still, even after all this time, but the love was no longer the same.

I’d watched her love my brother the way she loved me, the way her happiness shone brighter than the sun.

My heart let her go once I knew she belonged to someone else.

Her death stung, but not the way it would have decades ago.

“My sons remain behind. They’re both healthy, but they’re in their sixties, and tragedy can strike at any moment.

” Men tended to have shorter life-spans than women.

I could lose either one of them at any moment.

My brother had lived an unusually long life, dying in his eighties.

I was certain that the happiness that Anya gave him was what kept him going for so long.

Bahamut’s eyes narrowed slightly as he waited for me to reach my destination.

“All I want is for them to know that I didn’t abandon them…

before they’re gone.” I wanted them to know I’d watched them grow into men.

I’d watched them become fathers themselves.

I’d watched them care for their mother like I asked.

That I loved them as much from a distance as I did when I could hold them in my arms. “Please.” It had taken all my patience to wait as long as I had.

But I knew I needed to serve Bahamut for decades, to do my time to earn this slim chance.

“No.”

I fought my despair and kept a straight face, knowing he fed off sorrow.

“That’s not what we agreed to.”

“My wife is gone. The debt has been paid. I can never get this time back with my sons, but I want them to know that I was always there…even if they couldn’t see me?—”

“No.”

“How did you come to be what you are? Did you leave no one behind? Did you ever care for any living person?”

His stare slowly hardened. Rain clouds masked his blue eyes. “One day, you will come to forget everyone you ever cared for, Wrath. Give it a hundred years. Maybe two. But it will happen.”

“I will never forget my boys.” Never forget my love for them. Never forget the absolute joy they gave me. The way each one fit into a single hand when they were born. The way they would climb all over me like I was a tree.

He looked at the dais again, the subtle smile returning. “We’ll see.”