Chapter 34 Chapter Sixteen Part One - Azadou
“Azadou, it doesn’t have to be like this.”
I clutch the tumbler in my hand, reducing the glass to powder in my palm as I attempt to dispel those words from my mind. Everything about that creature has been a plague on my senses, yet it's those words above all that cling to my thoughts like gum stuck under one’s shoe. Is it the words themselves, or the pleading tone her voice took when she uttered them? As each syllable echoes through my ears, I recall the look in her prismatic eyes as she spoke them. In their colourful depths, I saw hatred. It’s a look I’ve grown accustomed to seeing in the faces of those who gaze upon me and one I have come to expect. Until this morning, she had never looked at me that way.
I sought to break her, to make her beg me for rejection, but never once did the thought cross her mind, not even as hate swam in her eyes did it occur to her. There was something else in her eyes; an unfamiliar emotion I could not place and though I cannot name it, the thought of it has my vessel itching intolerably, as if the flesh that contains me has grown too tight.
I dust the pulverised glass from my hand and rise from the couch. I walk over and place my hand on the mantel, staring at the flames crackling and burning in the hearth.
“Azadou, it doesn’t have to be like this.”
With an infuriated growl, I slam my fist down on the mantel, shattering the black marble on impact, the pieces collapsing on the floor around me. Why will those words not leave me be?! I sought to break her and have her begging me for rejection and while I can feel somewhere inside me I have broken something in her, still she does not reject me. I should be rejoicing that I am one step closer to my goal, but all I have gained is a broken record in my mind.
My every muscle tenses, locking into place when I feel the sudden shift of energy in the room, blanketing it with static electricity. I grit my teeth, fisting my hands at my sides when the vile scent of fresh lightning amidst a violent hurricane invades my senses.
“Unless you’re prepared to die, get out,” I hiss in warning.
“I haven’t come to die, and I didn’t come to fight.”
I turn and glare at the face of my maker as contempt and hatred burn through my veins, scorching me from deep within, so much that I expect my flesh to blacken like charcoal. He stands in the middle of my living room, his snow-white hair hanging over his shoulder in a long braid, streaks of forest green weaving through the strands and adding layers of disgust to my raging contempt and hatred. He created me, condemned me, had me buried in the Earth like a skeleton from his path, and all the while he goes on to find love and happiness. He deserves death for what he has done!
“Azadou, I know you loathe me, and I deserve that loathing,” Jartre’s deep voice softly utters, his silver eyes staring back at me with a weak attempt at compassion. “I didn’t come here to fight; I came to make things right; to try and find some way to make up for the pain I bore you with.”
I chuckle darkly. “You wish to make up for my pain?” My smile vanishes, replaced by a cold mask. “Then I think it’s time you endured it.”
With all my strength I summon forth a large ball of black energy, sparking with bolts of purple electricity, and thrust it in his direction. I watch with satisfaction as his large frame crashes through several walls of my house before landing in the indoor pool. I calmly step through the perfect tunnel his body has formed, following the trail of destruction as debris falls around me. I step into the room as Jartre stands upright in the centre of the pool, the water sloshing around him as bits of debris float on the surface, all the while his expression oddly calm, even with the scorched hole in his shirt.
“I know you’re not afraid to die, Azadou,” he says in a placating voice. “I know that in your mind, if it meant my demise then you would do away with us both in a heartbeat, but there is a reason why you haven’t done so yet.”
“Even a human on death row is granted a final meal. I’ve just been getting in my feast,” I say with a cold smile.
Jartre steps out of the pool, water dripping from his soaked clothes. “That’s not the reason, and maybe you don’t understand it but if you’d just let me ex–”
I slam my fist into his face before he can finish his sentence, watching as his body flies through a marble column and tumbles to the ground.
“The Jartre I remember had more fight in him,” I taunt as I slowly walk over to him. “Just who is this pitiful God you have become? Is this what love has done to you? All this power and you can’t even defend yourself,” I ridicule in disgust.
I dig my fingers into his hair, fisting his braid as I yank his head back. I stare into his pity-filled eyes as a bead of silver blood gathers at the side of his mouth. I feel my lip quiver and twitch in rage as I summon a ball of purple energy around my fist and then proceed to pummel that energy into his face over and over and over again. My fist rains down harder as he refuses to fight back. Instead, the self-proclaimed God of Gods just continues to take it.
“FIGHT BACK YOU COWARD!” I roar as I slam his head into the floor, the marble shattering on impact and sinking beneath the weight of his skull.
I rise to my feet and begin stomping on his skull, silver blood spurting from his mouth, and yet no matter how much damage I seem to inflict, none of it seems to satisfy me.
“That’s enough!” he roars, throwing his hand out sending a burst of white-hot energy at me that hurls me across the room.
I hit the wall, the sound of the stone cracking under the force echoing around the room as I drop to my knees, cracking the marble beneath me. I look across the room, feeling my eyes glowing and burning in my sockets as I stare at him with scorching fury, sparks of purple electricity beginning to lick at my flesh as Jartre gets to his feet. He spits a wad of blood on the floor, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, a stream of silver trickling from his nose as mildly satisfying gashes cover his head, but it’s not enough. I want him to suffer.
With an enraged scream, I convert the electricity into lightning and hurl it from my body with all my might, directing it at him, but before it can hit him, he reaches his hand out and clutches the air making it ripple under his fingers. He yanks his fist tearing a small hole in the fabric of existence, streams of prismed light emanating around the edges like shattered glass as a black vacuum sucks my lightning inside. With a wave of his hand, he seals it back up and looks back at me with an exhausted expression.
I rise to my feet, my nostrils flaring as I hold my arms out, reading myself to try again. With lightning speed, Jartre is in front of me, his hands fisting my shirt as his eyes glow silver and bright, his jaw etched in tension.
“Dammit, Azadou, stop this! It doesn’t matter what you do or what you throw at me, I am not going to fight you!” he bellows in frustration.
“Afraid you’ll go too far and kill us both?” I taunt with a cold smirk.
Jartre’s mouth curls in disgust as he throws me to the side, dropping me on my ass like an annoying bug.
“When are you going to get it? If the only thing that came from our deaths was you finally finding peace, I would grant it to you in a heartbeat, but this isn’t about you or me. I’m not choosing not to hurt you because I’m scared for you or myself, I’m choosing not to hurt you because I refuse to cause Orenda any harm, especially the kind that could cost her her life!” he shouts, his words coated in turmoil.
I sit up, resting my arms on my knees as I look up at him in annoyed confusion, “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” I snap.
He groans, fisting his hair at the roots. “If you had stopped for five fucking seconds to ask Zarseti – or anyone for that matter – to explain the animai bond to you, you might just understand. But that would also require you to listen and unfortunately, you’re so much like the hate-filled being I used to be, that I know someone could shove the words into your ears and they still wouldn’t get through.”
I stand up and conjure a bolt of purple lightning in my hand, “Make your point, or I’m driving this through your throat and using your blood to carve out your heart.”
Jartre sighs, his shoulders slumping in defeat. “The moment you became intimate with Orenda, you got one step closer to completing your bond and tying your essrams forever. Because of the bond bringing you two closer together, you can now feel whisps of her emotions and she yours, but that also means she can feel your pain. If I were to hurt you and draw blood the way you did to me, she would feel it and because she spends most of her time in her human body, it would probably kill her. I know this for a fact because I almost caused another the same fate,” he explains, closing his eyes in remorse.
I step back, the bolt vanishing from my hand as his words feel like the crashing weight of gravity on my body. That clicking sensation I felt the first time I entered her…those nagging feelings in the back of my mind that I couldn’t explain…they were never mine…they were Orenda’s?
“I know I deserve your hate, and your ire but Orenda doesn’t. Gabriella doesn’t and neither does Ayawamat. If you kill me, Orenda and Ayawamat will die because I made them. Gabriella, the most pure and loving thing to ever enter my life, who I can never truly deserve, would be destroyed, maybe even die from the pain of losing me because our essrams are bonded and if she dies, so does every makkari on this Earth. I deserve your punishments, but the innocent people of this world who have done nothing to you, don’t,” he pleads, his voice filled with a sadness I’ve never heard from him.
“If all of that were true, why let me hurt you at all? Wouldn’t your precious animai feel it?” I mock, pocking a hole in his story.
“I put up a block so she wouldn’t have to endure what I knew you would undoubtedly do to me and I’m sure she knew about it before I did it. Once upon a time, this was just between you and me but now this is so much more than us. Azadou, I am truly sorry and I’m willing to work to make this right; to help you however I can, if you’ll only give me the chance,” he offers, his eyes beseeching mine as he extends his hand out to me. “You don’t have to be like this.”
Those seven words.
Those seven fucking words.
He almost had me. The son of a bitch almost had me believing him, until he opened his mouth and said that.
“Don’t have to be like this?” I quote back acerbically. “You’re right, I don’t need to be like this because in case you forgot, I wasn’t forged in some ethereal paradise like you and your precious little friends. I was a mistake. Your mistake. Everything that I am is what you made me to be. So if your Goddess or pet birds end up getting hurt…then you only have yourself to blame.”
Jartre pales, his eyes widening with distress and trepidation as I clasp his hand and yank him close, my lip curling up into a malicious smirk.
“I’m the consequence of your actions, and I think it’s time you finally learned to live with them,” I whisper, my words a malevolent promise.
“Azadou, do–”
I snap my fingers and transport him to some distant part of the cosmos I couldn’t give two shits about.
“It doesn’t have to be like this”.
“You don’t have to be like this”.
They both said it. How alike they are, taunting me with a choice I was never given. Reminding me of the fear and loathing that welcomed me into this world as if I chose it. I have suffered because of Jartre and now he wishes to brush it all under the rug so he can continue to live his new life in peace. Why does he deserve peace? Now that I think about it, why kill him when I can watch him suffer the consequences of his actions for all eternity?