Val (make_it_new) wrote in bearandbarnacle, @ 2009-02-25 21:04:00 |
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Entry tags: | secrets, topic, valpost, valthread, zelgadisthread |
Val: Topic: Secrets
Seventy years ago, or seven thousand in the future, there’s no way to tell, this happened; now, it's a memory in a boy’s mind, too large a memory for him to cope with …
“What happens to us when we die?” Val asked his master once, idly because just then he was most focused on avoiding it, not speculating about it. “Are mazoku reborn from the Mother like humans?”
They were outside the great ancient fortress in the desert of Testabourne, where none but the hardiest could settle even over the trickle of precious water that was rare enough to be misnamed an oasis. Over the turreted stone city too far away to see except as a glow of nighttime fires on the dust hanging in the air, where nothing outside was ever painted lest it be scoured clean by sand storms and even the wealthiest could not buy enough water and shelter to keep horses alive, the sun was sinking, casting its fires across the horizon in a dull burning blaze. Val’s name was still Valgaav then, after his master (he doesn’t know his own name anymore, but he knew it well back then), and he still had someone to live for.
Gaav was old when they had that conversation, a score of years or less from yet another death and rebirth. He never lost his strength to age, as a human would, not enough for Val to tell in any case, but at the end of a cycle, when his human soul was pulling against his mazoku nature, he would begin to feel weary. His face changed little. Some called Gaav ugly; Val thought him glorious. His flaming red hair had threads of grey, Val remembers. The bloody sunset light threw the lighter strands into relief as it turned the rest to the burning richness of hot coals on a blood-reddened carpet. Val had a strand of it under his fingers – it was long enough, unbound, for him to touch while his head lay in his master’s lap, warmed as much by the contact with Gaav as by the sun-baked heat of the fine sand under his body. Gaav’s hand was laced into Val’s hair as well, resting on the back of his neck – rough affection toward a beloved slave.
Gaav leaned back against the sandstone wall of the ruined fortress they called home, looking a bit pensive. Val wasn’t facing him, so someone unaware of how long he’d been Gaav’s priest might have assumed Val didn’t know his expression, but someone like that might also have thought from his prone position that Val wasn’t ready and waiting for any slightest threat to his master. That second assumption might have cost someone his life.
“We come back as rats,” Gaav said calmly.
Val twisted to look up at him. “Really?”
“Are you calling me a liar?” Gaav rumbled, with a slight amused smile, his hand tightening painfully in Val’s hair.
“I thought you were joking,” said Val, not wincing – this slight pain was no more than petting. “Weren’t you?”
Gaav made a noncommittal noise.
“Really? Rats.”
“You know She has an odd sense of humor.”
“Sort of sick, actually,” Val opined. He didn’t consider this blasphemous, because it wasn’t an insult. He still couldn’t tell whether his master was joking. Gaav was amused, that astral taste was clear, but separating irony from amusing fact was beyond Val.
“Why do you ask?” Gaav said, relaxing the hand in Val’s hair to give him a slight ruffle.
“Curiosity, Master.”
“What’s the dragon legend, since She only knows what species She thinks you are?”
“Or you,” Val noted a little impertinently. “Golden Dragons think they go live in glory in the palace of Ceiphied, or possibly there’s just a pile of sleeping Golds next to their comatose god. Like so much kindling,” said Val, and then shook off the brief vivid daydream about oil and matches. “I don’t remember my people’s legend. Maybe it was never told to me, or maybe I’ve forgotten it.”
“Or maybe it’s the same as the Golds’ idea,” Gaav suggested.
“Could be,” Val acknowledged, after a short conflict between instinctive agreement (he was allowed to disagree with Gaav, but didn’t like to) and instinctive revulsion (his hatred of the Golden Dragons who’d murdered his people so many years ago had not only survived his pledging to Gaav, but if anything intensified). “But I don’t think so. We considered humility a higher virtue than pride.”
“How the hell did you happen, then?” Gaav asked with a low chuckle.
“I had an abnormal education,” Val protested, snuggling closer to his master’s hip.
Gaav laughed at him and gently scratched one of Val’s wings; Val purred a little.
“It’s hardly going to matter to Her that I was a dragon before, though?” Val went on, less than certain but closing his mind to the horror of any other possibility. “If you die –” he hurried past the concept – “I’ll have died defending you, and I’ll be waiting to serve you in the next world even if we’re rats.”
“If She thinks you’re pure enough mazoku to share my fate, or that I’m pure enough to share yours. My having a soul could fuck up that system.” Gaav sounded unconcerned by this prospect.
Val shook his head, his face pressed to Gaav’s thigh. “She wouldn’t be that cruel.”
But She had.
Val has a pet rat now. It’s bizarre and ironic, but he’s pretty sure the rat thing was a joke anyway. He calls it The Plague just in case, so it won’t feel that it’s lost its dignity.
It’s strange to be small, to be only the last Ancient Dragon again. It’s strange, not to be powerful. It’s strange to be a child, and the child he is can barely endure the knowledge he has.
He was meant to die. He knows that with the fullness that he knows what and who and whose he is. His blood shed before Gaav-sama’s blood, his life taken before Gaav’s – is it not as clear as red sunlight? Having failed his duties, his final one was to revenge himself, and die, and however close he got, She would not allow him to finish it.
No, She spat him back out, in a world that did not know him, with Xellos and Zelgadis of all people both here, and a child again, weak and helpless and knowing how weak and helpless he is, and caught in the full knowledge of his failure. Even if he tried again, would She allow him to succeed, or only send him to another place, even younger?
Where Gaav-sama goes, go I.
He is alive, and he has a secret from those it would hurt to know it. His secret is this: If he could find a way to follow his master even now, if he could be sure of a way to die, he would do it in a heartbeat.