"Men must bleed. They caused the pain of my sisters and I. United we are Goddesses, apart we are queens."
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Made from the souls of a thousand, the daughter of the earth is made to be one of the many rulers in a l...
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The daughter of Earth is alive.
She could bury this very palace under the millions of specks of sand that cover Jano but yet, she holds the job out to Olori and me.
Her finger points to a giant seal of both equal parts of gold and silver showcasing an image of an elephant tolling across an endless landscape of sand beneath a cloudless sky. The oldest emblem that still holds active in Ve'hra today.
It stands to taunt those who hold hope in the original goddesses like wordless hymns that tell of disappointment in their high and low notes that capture the hurt of man's soul. She is far from what the stories made her look like, here, even with the veil on she's rather frail and seemingly weak beyond her magic.
Black. The color of everything and the absolute of nothing. The most powerful magic that one can summon, that one being the daughter of a god.
She keeps her fingers intertwined as Olori searches for the right words, her mouth unhinged as I find myself relying on her for a response. With every half word that nearly flows from her, my hope in her courage dwindles.
"Knife or another thousand years?" Daughter Earth questions.
Olori finally breaks the silence with a coherent sentence. "How? Why didn't you stop this? How are you still alive?"
"Mother Earth abandoned me during the purge of all the kingdoms, after the so-called cleaning of the goddesses from Ve'hra." She tenses a bit but relaxes after taking a look back at Abus. "Now, they have returned to the walls but I won't forgive easily."
"Goddesses Earth abandoned you?" My voice shakes as the stories about the caring nature of the goddesses leave me, the uncontainable love that they had for their daughters made of blood.
"Did my words fail me or have the stories drilled into your mind steeled themselves?"
"Couldn't you have done something? You have goddesses magic. You could've saved us, we wouldn't be in this predicament if you had made use of your magic!" Olori comes back to her old self, as ferocious as a wild antlered lion.
Daughter Earth keeps calm, straightening out the deep wrinkles in the sky-blue gown. "I lost my magic when you lost yours, I became weak and a by-product of the skull, Daughter Moon, my cousin of a weaker strain."
"But Mother Moon didn't give me the power of her elements. I still inherited a greater power that is simply just the magic of the new gods."
Daughter Earth sighs and pulls her veil closer to her face. "I was made from the life force of a thousand souls, you were blessed by a goddess who lost her power and a lined with the new gods."
"That makes no sense. That would mean that the honored are no greater than that of those who were attached to the skull." I soften my voice, hoping that it will be enough to bring greater clarity. "But that isn't true, they spoke with the goddesses."
"Who were nothing more than stories until now." Daughter Earth's voice becomes more serious. "The wall is back meaning so is their magic. My cousins nor I ever shared our secret that the walls were what connected the humans to the goddess, what gave them their strength but Abus knew that they had some weight."
"Then why didn't he destroy them?" I ask.
"Why would he? Years passed and he didn't even know where the wall pieces were. Thanks to the goddesses, they only allowed him and his soldiers to see ruins rather than the pieces that your rebellion was building."
"I thought you said they lost their magic?" Olori keeps pushing for more answers, constantly wiping her eyes from tears that threaten to fall.
"They lost the part of themselves that shadowed the new gods but still they are gods, keeping their secrets and having their alliances." Daughter Earth stands from her seat, gown flowing as she touches the table with two taps.
The twins move in an instant, their heads torn from the slump that they'd once been forced into. The son moves slower than his sister who instantly moves to her father's side, shaking him in an attempt to pull him from his trap yet he only falls onto his plate.
"Father, what has come to you from this sorcerer?" She curses Daughter Earth with no regards for the fact that she once held the power of the earth's formation in her hands.
"Your father has befallen his years of evil, my daughter." Daughter Earth says, griping her daughter by the arm and snagging her as if she was a lap puppy despite the wild snatching that ensues.
"Mother, what is this?" Her son pushes past his father to confront her. "Have you poisoned them? Why is the General of the seers and her messages among us?"
Both twins stand tall and well-muscled, beautiful and well-groomed in their fine tunics made of the expensive red dyes that sell for the highest coins. Their seal pendants boldly show the seal of the capital Jano, holding up scarlet, gold, and white fringed mantles.
"You are looking at old magic. An illusion of the eye." She points us. "They will bring in a new age of old magic, these strangers will punish Abus and you will live with it."
"What?" The daughter turns her eyes to us. "You hired these two to kill your king, your partner?"
Red flares at her hands but like a doused fire, they disappear and fade away into grey. She screams as black coils up her arms, connecting her to her mother's wrist in a long vortex of dull light that wrinkles down the line.
Olori looks as if she wants a reason to use her knife, a need to rip the heart from the chest of the last living children of Abus. She narrows them in silence, a shared distrust in the children of Abus and Daughter Earth.
I don't trust them either but what can you expect from the children of man who they may can save. A man who probably raised them for centuries, hidden away in secrecy under the guise that they would live even after Ve'hrs falls into the ocean.
"No, they are a force of fate." Daughter Earth says, looking to her son who fixes her with a clueless stare.
"They aren't who they appear to be and nor are you." Despite his lethal appearance, his voice is gentle but swayed under the circumstances. A morning glory nests in his hair, a soft accent to his outfit and a sign that he is in fact the younger twin.
"We won't hurt you." I swear, taking a step closer to the timid prince.
He freezes. "Stay away from me."
"Raza, we don't have much time to save mankind from your father's plans to shorten the human lifespan before day comes."
Raza takes a breath, looking to his sister who keeps tugging at the spiral of magic that restricts her from moving. "He wouldn't."
"He did and he'll do it again. If I leave this palace without you, he'll have you both killed for being of my kin." She looks off. "Your sister is dead, her death the cause of Abus."
Olori looks to Daughter Earth but the woman holds tight to her lie.
"Abus wouldn't kill Indlovu."
Daughter Earth turns to her daughter who trembles, her fingers clawing at the magic to hide sorrow that forms in the blinking of her eyes as she turns them downcast. "He would kill you if it meant staying in power. The only child he cared about died over one thousand years ago, Valor."
"But why?" Raza asks, his hands lacking the magic that his sister was so easy to call upon.
"Because Indlovu could see the future. She could see his evil to come if he doesn't die."
