Black creatures crawled beneath his feet, and he didn’t care. He didn’t even rush to disperse them. The ashy traces of their touch remained on his golden sandals and immediately disappeared. Madael stared into the void.
“Well, do you like being betrayed?” Asmodeus’ flattering, luscious, and invariably insidious voice was like a serpent crawling in ashes.
Madael did not react at all to the mockery. His handsome face furrowed slightly, but he remained arrogant, even as he habitually crossed his arms across his chest and stepped forward, watching with pleasure as the servant staggered away from him.
“There is merit in this, the desire for revenge is an interesting feeling, and it will be even more interesting to get satisfaction from it,” one fling of his hand and his golden nails clenched forcefully on the black dried throat. His servant wailed. His burnt skin hurt as it was, and this touch stung even worse.
He gripped the writhing thing for a moment, then tossed it away from him.
“Me first, not you,” he reminded her, then looked away. Let the wretch crawl back into its hole. The creature crawled back down its hole. The black bodies began to coil themselves in a tangle of writhing black bodies, snaking across the floor, but not under his feet any longer, beyond the empty space that had cleared. The emperor needs honors. He is their king still. This thought gave him pep. He even tasted the bloody wine left in one of the goblets. It tasted disgusting and at the same time somehow appealing.
Asmodeus crawled to the side, scrambling over the tangle of strangers’ bodies, even uglier than he was.
“And what if she were to be the first,” he remarked venomously.
“Well, then there’d be nothing left of you,” Madael grinned. If the servant had meant to hurt him, he had done so wrong. “My copy could be fierce. Her cruelty need only awaken.”
Asmodeus hissed in annoyance as he crept away. Good riddance. Let him sit in his hole, climbing the world, whispering and doing evil, or raping golden-haired girls and boys again. Madael didn’t care about the mischief of his subjects, but he himself had no idea how symbolic the last words would be. His smooth forehead furrowed for the first time in thousands of years. What if, without giving much thought to the meaning of what he said, he happened to be right?
Rhianon looked at the sleeping children. Were there any marks on them? The dragon could have burned the symbols into their smooth skin, just as he’d burned them into the walls of houses, fields, even the ground. There was nothing to destroy them afterward. Grass could not sprout again where the ground had been touched by dragon fire. It was alarming and frightening. People tried to avoid places where such symbols remained. The poisonous vapors emanating from the burnt areas could affect many. Rhianon herself was more sober about it all, but she couldn’t deny the existence of magic. She remembered how the creature conjured at the hearth and how the flaming symbols hung in the air. What did they mean? After all this time, she should know by now. Having lived with Madael long enough, she’d learned to understand the hisses of the angelic language, but what about the signs they left behind. They should have made sense to her, too.
Two dark-haired baby heads and one redhead rested on the grass. Rhianon already knew the children’s names: Marla, Shon and Quentin. They only remembered their names. They could have spent hours in vain asking what the dragon had done to them, or to their playmates. Marla only remembered that someone had approached them while they were playing in the yard. His shadow blocked the sunlight… and that was it, not another word could be got out of her. Her freckled face wrinkled, tears welled up in her eyes at every question. Did she remember nothing, or did she not want to remember? The boys didn’t answer questions at all, just huddled together fearfully. The dragon was gone, but his shadow still hung over them as if he would not let them speak. Its presence was still felt close by. There may have been some magical power nearby, visible only to the bewitched children, but it still restrained them better than any chains.
There was still something left of the chains, by the way. No matter how hard Ferdinand’s knights tried, they couldn’t free them completely. They had yielded somewhat since the dragon’s disappearance, but Rhianon could still see the thin, thick ring of iron jammed into the girl’s wrist.
Marla was asleep and as if she felt no pain. Or maybe she was just used to the iron hoop. Rhianon decided that her powers were enough to undo the iron with her bare fingers. Her new powers, springing up as if from nowhere, allowed her to do things she’d never thought possible before. She guessed at the source of these powers, but she preferred not to speculate about procreation just yet. The supernatural fruit fed her from within. Perhaps by carrying the supernatural seed within her, she herself ceased to be human.
With just one light squeeze of her hand, Rhianon effortlessly unfolded the steel ring without even waking the girl. Marla only moved slightly in her sleep. A scratched part of her neck flashed under her reddish curls. Rhianon noticed that the arm where the hoop had been worn was very red. She didn’t need to light the lamp to see the scarlet rash on the baby’s delicate skin and anything else that looked like a burn.
Carefully, with her fingertips, she touched the scorched mark. It was a symbol. It was a familiar symbol. Already familiar images flashed through her mind, so distant and yet vaguely recognizable. Fighting among the clouds, swords striking like lightning, carnage, screams, broken wings, severed arteries and fire reflected in the azure-blue, ethereal pupils. Hell and heaven became one in that instant, equally engulfed in flames. Only there was no hell at that moment; only after the battle would it begin to unfold below. Perhaps further away, perhaps, where the earth would emerge later. Rhianon didn’t know the exact location, and she didn’t want to know.
“And you should, because that’s where you might have to look for your lover,” came a nasal voice from behind her, with a slight hint of hoarseness. Without even turning around, Rhianon already knew who she was going to see. Of course Fate had come out of the ground again. He seemed to be hiding in every bush, in every bush, in every hill, in every subterranean inch of the road she walked, and only came to the surface when he wanted to tease her.
She wasn’t interested in him right now, so she only gave a careless sniffle in response. She was much more interested in the sleeping children. Had the dragon scorched the marks on all of them with his fire? And why would it do that? Then his plans were frustrated, the sacrifice had not taken place, and the children were alive but marked. She knew that the dragon’s flame was capable of destroying living matter. Flesh is no exception. If these unfortunates are alive now, that doesn’t mean they won’t feel sudden fatigue and the call of death the next day. The dragon’s poison may work slowly, but it is still devastating. If these children are poisoned, it was better not to save them. Why drag bodies into Vinor that might start decomposing while they were still alive?
Besides, they were behaving strangely. It was as if their minds were trapped somewhere far away, away from the machine-moving bodies. What if a dragon still possessed them, held their minds and their wills captive. Just as in the afternoon, during a halt, Rhianon caught Marla drawing some signs on the ground. Only not the kind of signs the dragon had burned on her body, a little different. How could a child of five or six remember something so complicated? And a scholarly old sage could have been confused by it. All the scientists and connoisseurs of the sciences and even the stargazers in the royal court are, after all, only human; the possibilities of their minds are limited. Rhianon knew only one kind of creature who knew everything and nothing is a mystery to them. It was the angels, whose head to this day was Mastema, and therefore the dragons that lived in the caves full of books belonged to them. Some of them might have forgotten what they once looked like and still