Descending Star

RELEASE

Aro withdrew his finger with a shudder and a deep frown of consternation, and Alice shuddered, too, felt dirty, defiled. She looked up at him, hugged herself with secondary and tertiary shivers, and glared at him with resentment, as though his hooked, boney fingers had coursed over and into her body. Aro absorbed her opprobrium and recoiled.

It was Caius who interjected on Aro's behalf, with resentment of his own, over being unfairly maligned. "Your invasive inspection was needed. Judge us not, damn you. It was necessary, child."

Alice glared at them both and would not dignify their rationalizations. They were decadent sops, who indolently presided over the world, infants who occupied the chairs of the giants who had preceded them and had sat on their thrones for twenty thousand years, before abdicating of their own accord, in grief over their one error.

And now Aro knew it.

Now Aro knew more than he could bear.

He came out of his reverie and implored, palms upward, "Peace, Brother Caius. Her grievance is just, and no doubt this soulmate of hers, Jasper Hale, will call me to account in due course, but mayhap I am an expedient sacrifice, the necessary price, for all that we have learned today."

No one in the vast rotunda of the horrific Tasting Room hungered more for all that Aro had learned than Brother Marcus, recently arisen from his chair. He stood over Aro and Alice both, his remarkably tall and gaunt spine bent inquisitively. He had torn himself forcibly from the seat and arms of his throne for this reason alone, and now he would not be denied.

This two thousand year old specter asked, with a child's meek curiosity, "Has this infant truly heard the ancient one's account of the secret path to our return to a mortal life and death?" He could not wait for Aro's reply. His neck and spine curled downward to cringing Alice, and he stared into her optic nerves through his rheumy gray cauls, as though to divine the answer for himself.

Aro replied, "The talented infant Alice has heard Cythæra's account truly, Brother, albeit through a recording, though I must concede that her testimony rings true."

The dripping gray eyes of Marcus filled with avarice, and he asked, "And can you not share... the particulars of her testimony, and how this blessed mortality is achieved?'

Aro replied, "The particulars stand before us for inspection, though the way is not easy and indeed is unachievable to all but a few."

"I can achieve it," Brother Marcus averred, with naked greed which struck Brother Caius and many others in the room as unseemly, "for I am on my feet and prepared to act."

Aro enclasped his fingers in genuflection and said, with abject contrition, "Dear Brother Marcus, would that action were enough. Behold, for the next great chance at the feat's achievement stands here before us: this infant vampire, Miss Edythe Cullen and this human boy, the cherished pet, Swan. Apparently the two are necessary, such as they are. It seems that reciprocal love and mutual consent between vampire and human are required, pure and unsullied desire as we see before us."

All eyes turned upon the actors in question, who this whole time, absorbed by the enormity of their reunion and the compelling evidence that they were real after all, had been testing the conjecture with their all-absorbed and entirely consuming kiss. They had been whispering all along, oblivious to the proceedings of the room, from incredulity to apologies, from relief to astonishment, full circle ten times over, yet their mouths had not once separated, and now with a shared premonition that the room's focus centered upon them, they broke the kiss and looked up, together, to face several severe, cauled faces, mere inches from their own.