Into Eternity (The Eternals Book 3) Read online

  “Why would one wish to do either?” Aurora paced to her brother's side, her face imploring and bemused.

  “We hunted them, sister; they defended themselves. Would you not do the same?”

  “I do not know,” she said turning away.

  “And you, Jean, what would you say to such things?”

  “I would say it primeval.”

  “But you are one who has tasted of them, something even I have not done for millennia. If anyone knows why humanity was hunted, it is you.”

  I declined to answer on account of it being Sunyin that I'd tasted of. Instead, I changed the subject, whilst Grella appeared more talkative. “Just how long ago did all this take place.”

  “A long time ago,” he replied.

  “How long is long?”

  “How long does a star shine, a moon glow, a heart beat?”

  “That is cryptic and evasive.”

  “It is not meant to be,” Grella said meeting my gaze.

  Something told me he spoke the truth. But I sought answers, so pressed him again. “Are there many who would know the answers to such questions?”

  “Now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Even before you started working your way through them?”

  “Is that supposed to be amusing?”

  “I am sorry,” Grella replied. The blood-spattered Nordic sighed for a third time, placed a clenched fist to his chin and tried again. “You are both young. Neither of you can contemplate just how young. To an elder, such as myself, your lives thus far are as the blinking of an eye. Where you have questions and enthusiasm, I have memories lost to the sands of time.”

  “Do you remember the true reason mother removed herself from society?” Aurora tried a different tack.

  “Yes, my sister,” Grella answered.

  “If our time is as close at hand as you suggest, should us younglings not be told the truth. I for one would like to know why we die a dysfunctional and broken people. I would like to know why we did not thrive when the humans died.”

  “They did not die.”

  “Left,” she corrected. “Is it not the same thing?”

  “No.”

  “Please, Grella,” I said adding my own voice to his sister's. “I carry in my arms the last of humanity, or so I believe, it makes sense to tell me why I deem this burden so important.”

  Grella looked to his sister, then me. He gave the cross another offhand glance and sighed again, an action I now found annoying.

  “I have no idea why you think the monk important, and that is the honest truth. As regards his ancestors, they did not die out, they left.”

  “Yes, you have said that but where?”

  Aurora slipped her hand into her brother's own. “Please brother,” she whispered. “What lands did they sail to?”

  “We swore not to say.”

  “Who would know?” Aurora suggested. “What harm can it do now?”

  “There was a time when the Hierarchy would've known, and I was one of them.”

  “But only a handful remain,” I said.

  “That is true,” he acknowledged.

  “So, I ask again,” Aurora pleaded, “where did the humans go?”

  Grella did not reply, just cast his eyes to the sky.

  In that moment, that one fleeting glance, Aurora and I realised, we knew nothing at all.

  Chapter Eight

  -

  Truths

  “They left the Earth!” Aurora gasped. “But how, I do not understand?”

  “Few ever did.”

  “I bet the Marquis did.”

  “Yes, Jean, as you have surmised, he did.”

  “And he seeks to replicate them.”

  “I cannot be certain, though it is not beyond the realms of comprehension.”

  “It's all too much to accept,” I said, sitting cross-legged on the ground, Sunyin held off the mud.

  Grella leaned back against the first available object; the cross creaked. He moved away in haste.

  “If he could have left, then he would have already, would he not?” Aurora suggested.

  “I do not know,” Grella shrugged.

  “Is he so desperate to evade death?” I hissed.

  “He is much older than you, Jean. You cannot imagine the anguish of having all you've seen, known, planned, snatched away. There is a finality to finality that one never expects.”

  “If I'm bored of life, you lot must be sick to death of it. Pardon the pun,” I added.

  “Pardoned,” he replied. “But I doubt that is what you really think. A man would not go through all you have if he had no desire to remain alive.”

  “You mean, undead.”

  “You know very well what I mean. The instinct to survive is one we are all born with. One will do almost anything to persevere.”

  “I have persevered, for the good of others, not myself.”

  “Your point being?” Grella replied.

  “I would welcome death if I was free of burden.”

  “One is never free of burden, something I appreciate better than most.” Grella sniffed at his own words.

  “If you say so,” I said.

  “You appear more encumbered than most, Jean. Does that not suggest you would fight for life more desperately than others?”

  “I don't know, I really don't.” I shook my head in dismay.

  “Er, I do not mean to interject, but I think you had both best see this.”

  Aurora had snuck some way off without Grella or I even noticing.

  I got back to my feet and followed her brother at a gentle jog through the slurping sediment around the rotting remains and corroded shells, until skirting a giant of a craft half-buried in the sea floor, we came to an abrupt halt.

  “You see,” said Aurora. “My brother spoke the truth.”

  Like the charred remains of a forest fire, they poked out of the mud in bleak decay. They reached for the sky, arms splayed, in numbers uncountable. A forest of crosses, they protruded from the revealed seabed in a brutal display of ancient horrors.

  We stepped forward, a triumvirate of Eternal lords and ladies, faces agog at that which had once been. We traipsed between the remains of our own kind without words for what we witnessed because there were no words to accommodate our thoughts. When we rounded the hull of one particular behemoth held on a ridge of accumulated mud, a craft of such length and girth as to have carried thousands, we saw everything.

  The figures hung like kelp fields swaying in the currents of a long dead ocean an ever-shifting vista of death. Deprived of their balancing waters, thousands upon thousands of crosses wavered in the gathering wind rocking back and forth in the mud in which they were lodged. It was an abomination, and I struggled to control the emotions that welled within; Aurora could not.

  The Nordic princess fell to her knees and wept for those lost souls, those skeletal remains. Her tears cast a shade on the already dark remnants of my soul, the mud on her white vestments a final humiliation. So many lost. So many I had never known. The former Baltic depths were not just a graveyard, but the proof of a near extinction.

  “Did you bear witness to this?” I asked through gritted teeth.

  “No. Ragnar, Ekatarina, Narina and I were born not long after the worst of it. We roamed the far north of the country once known as Sweden.”

  “Sweden?” Aurora queried welcoming the distraction.

  “A segment of Scandinavia that swept from the Baltic Sea high into the Arctic circle beyond the boreal forests that humanity found impenetrable.”

  “These names mean nothing to me.”

  “I would not expect them to, they are long forgotten.”

  I tried to take in the fundamentals of the Nordics' conversation but the sight of so much death had affected me. For a man with blood on his hands, nothing could have lessened the impact of those massacred millions. I meandered through the sea cemetery wide-eyed, lost and bemused. I had thought our kind limited in their dispersal through
out the habitable parts of the planet, select even, yet I was wrong. The Americas, Africania, all gone, all understood, yet nothing could have prepared one for what the lost sea had revealed. We were never few but many. I had underestimated our former numbers a thousandfold. How could so many have died? More pertinent still, how could almost all who'd survived be idiots? It annoyed and antagonised in equal measures.

  There were so many bones, their clacking in the wind a veritable symphony of glockenspiel monotony an orchestra of the lost. Any lingering flesh was long since nibbled away, which beggared another question: where were the fish? I would have thought some trace of life to have flopped around in the mud, at the least a smattering of silver-scaled death, but there was nothing. Not one creature, bug or bigger, remained on that drained seabed. If not for humanity's leftovers, and the beamed tombstones of our forefathers, the Baltic Sea would have stood an empty tomb.

  I walked in silence for many hours tracing the line of Merryweather's flight, the heartbeat of the world depleted, exhausted by its previous outburst and in a state of torpor. Sunyin's blood infused my body making the journey an easy if not sad one. In fact, so reinvigorated did I feel that despite the Britannian's flying start, if I'd wanted, I felt certain I could have caught him in a heartbeat. If? Because I wasn't sure I did, anymore. Whether it was Sunyin's essence calming my mind, I knew not, but Merryweather's revelations just seemed more and more absurd. Surely, he sought to rile me into some action I would not have wished. If that was the case, he had.

  Soothed of badness, I made my way in a trancelike state. The dandy's footprints, though intermittent, paved the way, for there were no others. So, I followed them, on and on in relentless mud-caked pursuit.

  The Nordics kept their distance, space I appreciated. Grella and Aurora talked incessantly, as though they'd lived their centuries together in silent separation, which in a way they had, and the two rushed to make amends. I tried not to earwig, but when Grella asked why I addressed his sister as Aura and not by her given name, I almost laughed. She attempted to explain it in ways he would understand, but he could not. Aurora had not the words to explain it and Grella not the capability to comprehend it, so they settled on her just liking it. They rambled on as our world stalled, the ruby light unchanging, the tinted shadows stagnant. Our time approached its end. The planet sensed it, wanted it, and strove to dismiss us in strengthening, stale gusts interposed by lessening lulls. The hours passed slower and slower and I feared Sunyin's children had abandoned us. What was one to believe when all one believed was wrong?

  “Is there no night in this accursed place?” Aurora's frustrated tone cut through purgatory like a knife.

  “I don't believe there will ever be a night again, not here,” Grella replied

  “What a strange thing to say,” I commented.

  “Ah, you are still with us, Jean.”

  “I never left.”

  “I would beg to disagree.”

  “Well, maybe just a little.”

  “Has your bloodlust ebbed?”

  And just like that, I realised it had. “Yes.”

  “I thought it might. The monk's blood was indeed pure to have driven you over so great a distance. Only human blood could do such a thing.”

  “You say that as though you knew it would.”

  “I hoped.”

  “Then, why not say?”

  “Would you have believed me?”

  “No.”

  “There you have it. Until an Eternal is replete, sated by that which it should always have fed on, what it was born to feed on, there is little any other might say to suppress those manifested emotions.” Grella cast his sister a concerned look, then returned his attention to me.

  “Would I be right to assume you have tasted true humanity?” I asked.

  “You would.”

  “Are you so ancient?”

  “I am.”

  “And.”

  “And, what?”

  “What was it like?”

  Grella closed his eyes and drifted far away before replying, “The same as you tasted, but over and over again. I was a different man back then, Jean, a beast.”

  “In what way?” Aurora questioned, more herself again.

  “When surrounded by food, one becomes gluttonous.”

  “Was humanity truly so proliferate?”

  “They were an infestation, at least, for a time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Humanity spread across the world in a way our kind never could. Their lifespans were short, but they made up for it with rapid breeding. A human might be born, grown and dead, during a single Eternal feed.”

  “Really?” Aurora stood rigid.

  “Not really, but it seemed so at the time. To be fair, there were less of them in the cold places we resided in. By that, I mean the Nordics. Humans never liked the cold. Fortunately for us there were still enough to provide sustenance, until they left, that was.”

  “That must have been quite a shock,” I said.

  “Not to us. Humanity had ravaged the planet to such an extent, pillaged every last resource that they had no other option but to leave. If they hadn't, they'd have died, anyway.”

  “That quick, then,” Aurora said.

  “As I have stated, when you age like me, time is counted differently. What I remember as an exodus was more likely a steady drip, a gradual departure. But I remember seeing the doorway in the sky and the last of them passing through it. I wondered then, as I have ever since, if I would ever see them again.”

  “You reminisce as though you miss them.”

  “They were more than our food, Jean. They were also our brothers in a manner of speaking.”

  “Brothers,” I laughed.

  “Brothers,” he repeated in his usual calm way.

  “How can a person be both brother and foodstuff?” Aurora cocked her head to one side as if it might improve the answer.

  “They became us if we so chose it.”

  “Pardon!” Aurora and I both gasped.

  “An Eternal's bite kills. However, an Eternal's blood freely given made a human like us.”

  “But that is preposterous! We are unlike them, unique. We resemble them in form and nothing more.”

  “According to whom?”

  “It is well known,” Aurora said leaping to my defence.

  “Well known to whom?”

  “To everyone.”

  “You are younglings, there is so much you do not know. But I can assure you a bitten human if then fed Eternal blood will, or rather would, become one. Have you never wondered why there is a caste system in our society, why we are not all born equal?”

  “That is because of those with royal blood,” Aurora said.

  She looked aghast that her brother even suggested such a thing. I echoed her, but for once bit my tongue and tried not to make a fool of myself.

  “There are no royal bloodlines, no dynasties, no secret clans, only purebloods and the made. You, dear sister, and you, Jean,” he said inclining his regal head, “are both purebloods. That is not the case for all.”

  “Like who?” I said unable to contain myself.

  “Everyone else.”

  “But… our people!” gasped Aurora, visibly shaken by her brother's words.

  “All except the Nordic royalty, which as I have said is in name only, were turned, as the expression went. Those who have waited upon you, those who have died at the hands of the Marquis and our mother, were created by others. Otherwise, so few should never have massacred so many and we would now mourn our queen. Those of the lesser orders could never have resisted an original, a pureblood.”

  “But this is incredible,” Aurora said clutching her head. “It defies all we have been taught.”

  “Taught by whom?”

  “Mother.”

  Grella met my glazed eyes; he didn't need to repeat his question.

  “My mother and father,” I whispered.

  “Need I say more.” Grell
a peered from behind his circular goggles, folded his arms across a blood-spattered chest and fell silent.

  “But…” Aurora seemed lost for words.

  I knew just how she felt as the world I knew span before me, a kaleidoscope of inexactitudes. Grella had proven all I'd supposed incorrect and tabled the question why had my parents not explained the same. If they'd done it to protect me, then I knew not what from. If they'd done so to mislead, then I felt twice as lost.

  Enlightenment should have made one smile and gasp and sigh and weep. I just muttered, more mystified than ever.

  My mind turned to Merryweather then. I'd have thought such as he could not have waited to expound such details at an appropriately inopportune moment, to cast doubt and uncertainty in the minds of myself and others. I would have thought it a game in which he should've excelled, to have participated in with enthusiastic glee. Yet, he had not. It was strange, very strange indeed?

  When Grella suggested we stop and rest, I was not about to argue. I slumped to the ground in a slurp of sludge. I cared not. But I did care about Sunyin's dead form. So, I propped myself up against a rusting and rather dishevelled barrel, Sunyin's corpse balanced across my legs. The monk's small form looked even smaller than normal draped over me as he was, and I wondered if the human dead shrivelled away in a way we did not? It was as I thought such peculiar things that tiredness struck. Exhaustion overwhelmed me. Somewhere, somehow, a dam had burst and all it held back engulfed me. My lids grew heavy, the world faded and I fell into a restless sleep.

  Chapter Nine

  -

  Ghosts

  My dreams were… unpleasant. I'd imagined I'd dreamt just once before whilst delusional and recovering from a terrible fall from the highest echelons of Linka's formative monastery. I had no such excuse this time, therefore had to accept them for what they were, unwanted. They were the first true dreams I'd had and the last I'd wish for, if those mysteries of the subconscious were not some trick of the Baltic basin's shadows, masterminded illusions. How was I to know? Why would I want to?

  The Eternal body is like a candle, either lighted, or not, and without ever smouldering in-between. An Eternal, therefore, could not by definition dream, at least, not in the true sense of the word. Soulless creatures, possessing no astral self to send to those places one would prefer to frequent, they mired in the oblivion of a few hours' death each day. If it had been different, I'd have migrated to Linka's side on a dreamt up moonbeam and never have awoken.