I awoke what I assume was a few hours later at the side of a fire. I stared up into the starry sky, obscured every so often by the boughs of tall deciduous trees swaying flippantly in the night breeze. Flickering in the firelight were the leaves of alder, birch, and a few maples. Aside from the roaring of the flame next to me the forest was silent, peaceful. I lay naked upon a bed of moss - I forgot my clothing was signed off in the prior battle - and felt a few beetles or some other insects were crawling about my back through the moss.
I contemplated falling back asleep; I truly was exhausted, but then remembered the situation leading to this one. I jumped up swiftly and started turning around frantically. Not even a meter away from me Nassaux was bent over herself placing her hands over the injury she suffered earlier.
"Still yourself, I couldn't completely heal the burns." She spoke through The Way, not breaking concentration. At that moment my senses came back to me and I felt a strong flow of magic emanating from her hands. It was a familiar flow, but very complex; it was consisted of Water, Earth, Wind, Fire, and Light magics.
"You're a healer, too?" I was surprised. I suppose I blindly presumed, with her high affinity for Earth, that she, like me, was limited to that one element. I couldn't have been more wrong; she was an echt mage, not a haphazardly malconstructed enigma.
"I can do a little, human," She removed her hands, baring the wound. There was a visible scar on the snake flesh, but at least there was no more risk of infection or hemorrhaging, "Unlike you creatures we are taught from a young age to respect and preserve life."
I looked down at my hands: the charred black dermis on my forearms was once again a healthy pink, though my movement was still restricted to an extent and I felt a little pain. It would heal, in time, though, "You have my gratitude, Nassaux," I conferred my thoughts with trepid shame, "Both for your aid against my assailant, and this." I fell back to the moss bed, being wary not to crush any insects on my descent, and crossed my legs.
She raised her head and gazed into me with a serious countenance, "I will ask but once more; and if I find your answer unsatisfactory you will meet my wrath," It was an empty threat, now. I had recovered virtually all of my mana, and even without full use of my arms would be capable of overwhelming her in the event of conflict, "What are you?"
I rolled my eyes and sighed, "I lost count of how many times you've claimed it, but you don't seem to have any difficulty attributing my existence to that which I am. Man, human, homo sapien, descendant of the primate order, fleshy meat puppet, whatever you want to call me," I tapped my finger to my forehead, "Why does this simple fact elude you?"
"Humans," Her lips twitched in aggravation, though she spoke not, "don't possess ability like you. Humans don't bear such strong affinity for the Earth. Humans don't care about the welfare of the rest of the world."
I fell back on my arms, an action I regretted as the shocking pain jarred up them, and stared up into the sky again. I loathe repetition, and this is a conversation I have had hundreds of times over the course of my long life, "If it pleases you, feel free to refer to me as 'monster.' Everyone else does."
From the bottom of my vision, I witnessed her lean back a little, supporting her flexible vertebrae on itself, and fold her hands on what I am assuming would be the lamia equivalent to a lap, "Then you are ostracized?"
I laughed aloud, "Ostracized? No, I chose to disassociate myself with my supposed kin," I rose again, "I'm hungry, and I am done speaking. I need a new kilt, besides, it seems," I looked down on my bare self, "I'll be back in a while." I turned round, sending my mana through the Earth in subsonic waves. I surveyed the lay of the land and found the sundered landscape a little over two kilometers to the south. Before I did anything else I would apologize to the dead who fell because of my incompetence.
-----
The lamia did not follow me. Under moon and starlight I stared over the crater and the broken Earth. Everywhere I ever tread would be scarred in such a way, it seemed. Lives would be destroyed and tragedies born. Everything I did for the sake of the world always had an adverse effect on someone, something. No, I do what I do to satiate my own selfish desires to see the world in balance. To claim I act in the name of another is a delusion I will not permit myself to suffer.
The ground was scorched; the entire plain must have caught aflame in the explosion. My toes were painted black with soot. I could see several dozen bodies of larger animals in my general vicinity; mice, gophers, a wolf, two hawks, a Letter Shrike… and even a couple coyotes. It pained me to see such wonton desolation, though I felt a small reprieve in the fact that I saw one nocturnal vulture feasting on one of the coyote's carcasses. In time they would return unto the Earth, but for now they were testaments to my inadequacy.
I fell to me knees and planted my hands into the soil. I brought my mana to bear and bolstered my mana perception. When at last I had both a mental map of the landscape and of the various mana signatures scattered about the area, I began to work. Through my hands and feet the flows of Earth mana swam through the granite, soil, and bedrock of an ancient river. I was careful to isolate the flows around each living thing in the vicinity; every single worm, mouse, plant, or anything else which resided in the ground was safe from the torrent of liquid earth.
I pulled the pillars and spikes back down into the ground, using them to fill the crater. I closed the chasms and leveled the mountains. To the best of my ability I restored the plains to something akin to their natural state, only now deprived of a good portion of its former splendor. Time would restore all, but in the meantime I gaze out over black land and charred stone.
The ground trembled violently for at least 20 minutes; it was no trifling task to terraform and do so in a way that prevented casualties; those living beings who happened to be in my vicinity deserved none of this. When at last I finished, I was spent. Tired beyond belief, I rose to my knees and clasped my hands. Praying is not something I commit to habit – it's not something I believe has tangible merit; but on rare occasions, as means of thanks and apology, I will commune with my kills. I could think of no better occasion than now.
"Humans don't regret the scars that they leave…"
I fell forward and landed on my face. As exhausted that I was, especially after draining most of my mana again, I neglected to keep my mana perception piqued. I turned over and lay on my back, eyes wide with fear. My senses were so dulled that I was unable to even determine the origin of the voice, The Way, until I looked up at the being.
I dropped my head down onto the ground and panted heavily, "Gaea, damnit, Nassaux. You could at least alert me of your presence."
"I have been here for at least ten minutes."
I sat up and rubbed my skull, wiping my hair out of my face, "That doesn't exactly make me feel better."
"What was it, that creature?"
I turned around and looked at the ground where the crater once stood, "I wish I knew. I've dubbed it 'Shadow.' It has hounded me all my life, drawing near every time I raise my mana expenditure to a certain point. It's a sort of inhibitor, as far as I can tell. Like you, it doesn't seem to think humans should possess my magnitude of mana capacity. Though, its origins are a mystery to me," I got to my feet, "So again, I thank you for your aid in slaying the aberration. With its death I am free to act at my leisure once more."
"You speak as though this has happened in the past."
"Aye, and in time it will be reborn with a new incarnation."
"I've never once in my life felt a disturbance in the world's mana as powerful as the one today, human. I have lived for over one hundred years, so your claim bears no fruit. What aren't you telling me?"
I chuckled. Of course she would never have felt such a disturbance in her lifetime, "It is irrelevant. I am returning to the woods. It's only a matter of time before the people of Thaeria mobilize an army to investigate our activities. To be honest I am surprised there aren't people here, already."
I turned around and glanced at her as I walk north towards the campsite. She was scrutinizing me in a new light, it seemed; less spite and more curiosity than before.
-----
Nassaux was incredibly powerful. Together we became a force which would change the face of the world. However, as I have come to realize over the years, all people with great power sacrifice something to obtain it. For Nassaux, this was her sense of belonging, community, and camaraderie. She fought for what she believed was the right and just course of nature, but to do so she had to defy even her own people. To make matters worse, long ago as she attempted to find companionship in humanity - she was rejected and branded a monstrosity. The end result was a pariah who bred enmity in the deepest recesses of her heart.
-----
"What the hell was that?!" I screamed in Gu'ana'hadi, the ubiquitous language of the lamia. We had been operating together for a little over a year, and in that time I had convinced her to teach me the tongue. It was a guttural, reverberating language which was very difficult to vocalize with the human larynx. However, I was somewhat able to enunciate the subtle intricacies due to the temperament of my own voice as a result of my… less than human expression of anger. All those years of growling like the coyote had steeled my vocal cords.
"They had to die! They were protecting him!" She hissed back at me.
We were far underground, in a burrow Nassaux had dug out beneath the city of Masser. I couldn't see her face in the absolute darkness, but could feel the relative position of her body using my sonar-like magic. I threw a punch at her, but her extremely flexible and reflexive body merely shifted to the side and avoided my blow, "I told you once before, Nassaux, we don't kill innocents!"
"Don't you dare strike me, Zien!" She whipped her tail around and slapped me across the chest. I was outfitted with over 100 kilos of stone skin, however, and the strike merely bounced off, "You yourself have told me, time and again, that there is no such thing as an innocent human!"
"Humans are animals, Nassaux," I was trembling with anger, "and just like if a cow hasn't done anything wrong, it doesn't deserve to die without necessity for some other creature's survival."
"If you'd like we can go back and gather up the corpses," She said with incensed sarcasm, "I know you aren't opposed to cannibalism."
I raised my hands to my head and dug my fingers into my skull with frustration, "That's not the point, Nassaux! There was no reason you couldn't have just impaired them, they weren't of any threat to us."
"They were guarding that man," She referred to King Justin IV, our target that day. His entire empire ran on Magitechnology, funded by the royal coffers. Seen as a saint amongst men he was, in truth, a perpetuator of global disintegration, "They were guilty of using the sinful arts."
"With Justin out of the way the whole division would fall apart, woman, we discussed this!"
"Stop yelling at me!"
"Why do you always have to do this? Those men had families, maybe even children! Do you have any idea what it's like to grow up without parents?"
"Shut up!" She screamed. I felt mana surge from her interior focus and into her arms. She threw a punch at me, empowered by physical attunement, which threw me to the wall of the burrow. I fell over and spat up blood, she clearly did not hold back on that one. Before I could regain composure, she surged with mana once more and tunneled away to the west.
-----
She sealed off her mana signature in an attempt to dissuade my pursuit. However, hundreds of years honing my own seals and mana perception as both hunter and prey made pinpointing her, a particularly strong signature, a trivial matter.
She secluded herself in Masser's old district. Many hundreds of years ago, prior to my incarnation in that world, Masser sat in the bowl of a valley. An unprovoked war between nations, however, pitted Masser against a mighty host. While they emerged victorious, the capitol was ruined. The city was rebuilt against the face of a mountain to the east of the valley, and the old settlement, that which hadn't been stripped away for resources, served as a reminder for the people of Masser of the cost of war.
I surfaced from the earth and erected my own seal, my strongest, and entered the dilapidated stone garden. I tracked Nassaux to a building with three walls still standing - one of the less derelict structures. Twilight was falling, but visibility was still ample. The lamia was coiled in the corner of the two stronger walls and embracing herself. She was weeping. Her eyes clenched tight, tears streaming in no insignificant quantity, as she whimpered softly.
Her eyes bolted when I stepped onto a stone at the threshold of the single room. Under my weight, and with the aged quality of the cobblestone, it fractured, "It's so easy for you, isn't it?" She tried to sound hard, but the deafened tone of her weepy voice defeated the bravado, "You don't have anyone, you don't have anything. You're used to this, used to people hating you. You revel in it!" She sputtered, shaking droplets of tears from her eyes.
"I don't know what it's like to grow up without parents?"She shook her head violently, her hair flitting like tassels on armor, "Fuck you! I was abandoned at the age of twenty. That's like… five in human years! I spoke up about the outside world; I dared to dream there was more than the jungle. The bastards tossed me aside, branded me a heretic, and left me for dead! I taught myself to hunt, to kill, magic… I survived!"
She sniffled and wiped away her tears on her arm. In the setting sun her brown skin adopted an almost orange hue, and the tears still spilling forth from her eyes shined like ocean water, "I was so happy the first time I found a human. They almost looked like me, but they weren't from the jungle. I thought I found a place I could stay; a place where I wouldn't have to be afraid to fall asleep; a place where I wasn't alone…"
"They hunted me!" She growled at me, thrusting forward and spitting. She barred her teeth, each of which looked like the incisor of a human's maw, "Day and night I had to look out for the damned flames of their torches. The farmers stabbed at me with pitchforks, the bounty hunters shot at me with bows, the mercenaries tried to fuck me in my sleep!"
I stepped closer, about two meters away from Nassaux now, and she shot a cobblestone spear out of the ground at my feet, "Then I found out about those machines. I found a purpose! No one would accept me, so I would live as a proxy for the will of the world! The spirits would never hate me, and even if they wouldn't love me I could die knowing I was doing the right thing by helping them."
I moved closer again, pulsing with mana, and she continued. This time without attacking me, "But then you come along, telling me that what I am doing is wrong?! You are doing the same damn thing! You are such a fucking hypocrite. You think that king didn't have a family? You think his children and wives won't be 'crushed with tragedy' at his death? Humans… They are all filthy, disgusting creatures! They all deserve to die!" I took note of the fact that she did not seem to include me in that context; saying "They" instead of "you."
"What does it matter?" She sniffled, "On the grand scale we're making the planet a safer, cleaner place for the vast majority of its inhabitants. What does it matter if the few have to suffer for the good of the many?"
I was close enough, now. I reached out and gripped her shoulder firmly; enough so that the sensation of her smooth skin would not pain my tactile faculty, but not enough to harm or alarm her. Her lips twitched in an attempt to make herself look ferocious, but again this was defeated by the fact that her lineament was contorted with hysterical sorrow, "The difference between you and I is that I consider these facts before taking life, Nassaux." I spoke softly. I forced myself to look into her golden eyes as I continued, "Be it human, or bear, or wolf, or vegetable; I always try to weigh the implications of their death."
She closed her eyes and her mouth trembled as she stuttered, "W-what am I… Zien?"
"You are a monster," I said bluntly. She opened her eyes and glared into mine. She tried to back away from my grip, but I would not let her as I finished, "not because you are a lamia, but because you cannot empathize with your kills."
"Hypocrite…" She whispered weakly, trying without effort to break my grip.
"But so am I," I added. The line around her eyes softened and her brow piqued in confusion, "You don't have to be alone anymore."
She bit her lip and contorted her face in an attempt to stifle the onslaught of sobbing; a futile effort. She broke my grip and buried herself in my chest, squeezing me with the force only a constrictor could produce. To be honest, it wasn't an entirely unpleasant sensation.
-----
At the time I had no idea the weight my words would carry for Nassaux. It was a small gesture of sedation made on my part, but to the lamia it imparted great significance. I could not possibly fathom the extent to which being ostracized had damaged her emotionally. In that regard she was more human than I; she yearned for a sense of belonging and purpose. She was not content merely to be; she was proud and believed there was more to life than merely living.
Evidently she found that rekindled spirit in my petty beau geste. In me, like a few poor souls before and after her, she found companionship and belonging. People are drawn to those who share their misfortunes, and while I did not consider isolation an object of my ire, Nassaux found that in me.
We grew close over the following months. An unholy union, if the legends were to be believed. The man and the serpent. While at first I attempted to steer her away from romance, eventually I, too, reciprocated the feelings she held for me.
She became complacent with me, docile in comparison to her former self, and marginally more suggestive in her actions. She would heed my counsel to a lesser extent, relenting from flagrantly murdering every human in her sights, but the animosity she held for both lamia and human-kind never cooled in its fiery belligerence.
For some peculiar reason, however, I seemed exempt from this broad truculence. Even as I pointed this out to her, Nassaux would dismiss it time and again. It was a flawed logic which I never understood, but of which I also reaped the benefits. When we weren't slaughtering "sinners" she was a genuinely pleasant person to be around. Before long I felt comfortable enough around her to sleep in her presence; even reveal to her the secrets of my long life.
We traveled the world, gathering information and targeting production facilities of Magitechnology with discrimination. After a little over a decade we started seeing the fruits of our tireless labor. While I felt a pang of regret seeing humanity living in fear of the "demons," a reputation we earned, Nassaux convinced me it was worth it when we started seeing a shift in the natural world. The atmospheric mana had not only stabilized, but even started to germinate. Forests expanded, rivers flowed strong and clear, mountains saw the seasons, and even humans began turning to the old arts of magic once more, shifting gingerly from the destructive machinery to a more archaic and environmentally friendly alternative.
Magitechnology was still, in spite of global condemnation, a common facet of human society. Nassaux and I would not be satisfied until we saw it eliminated completely.
-----
"Daddy!!!" The little girl shrieked, "No, no, no… no…no…NO NO NONONONO!" She repeated over and over. I dropped my greatsword of diamond, stained red with the blood of her father. My mouth hung open as I observed the scene. She bent over her father's cadaver, with his decapitated head in arms. She tried to attach the bleeding cranium to the rent skin at the man's neck. She popped the head off, "Nononononononono…" She whimpered. She then placed it back on, then removed it, then returned it… as if by some miracle that it would properly affix itself and he would revive if she did it right.
She drug his body with all her strength and leaned it up, in a sitting position, against a nearby desk, and started repeating the process. She was in a state of traumatic shock; completely oblivious to me or her surroundings, "Come on daddy, come on! Get up, or I'll tell mommy!" No tears fell from her eyes, which darted back and forth so rapidly it was as if she were under the effects of REM.
As she continuously dropped the head on the body and pulled it more and more blood drained from the cranium. Her arms were crimson. The sound of the man's spinal plates knocking against each other as she dropped the head each time was rhythmic. I wanted to vomit.
"Zien, kill her." Nassaux rested a hand on my shoulder and spoke softly.
I did not respond; like the girl, who was hyper focused on her own frivolous activity, I was transfixed by the carnage I had wrought. At last she set the head on the chair next to the desk, bent over and grabbed the corpse's hand. She held it in one hand and slapped it with the other, like a parent might scold their child, "Now you listen here, mister," she wagged a finger in front of the esophagus opening, "you listen to me or there will be problems, so help me!"
"I didn't want this…" I muttered to myself.
Though evidently aloud and in Gu'ana'hadi, because Nassaux replied, "It had to be done, you did nothing wrong. Let's go home."
"I…" I started and paused when the girl slipped and fell in a puddle of her father's own blood. She wiped her face when she rose, only spreading the gore around even further, and then wiped her hand on her dress.
She got up and slapped the severed head off of the chair, "Now do you see what happens what you don't clean your room?"
"I can't leave her… like this." My head was starting to ache.
"Then kill her." Nassaux said, consolingly.
"I can't…"
"Can you believe this?" The little girl faced me, her eyes moving even faster than before. It didn't look natural, her wide blue eyes trying to escape her head, "MY daddy is so SILLY!" She took a step closer to me; the pink bow in her hair fell off and botched up some of the blood on the hardwood floor. I started breathing heavily and she added, "Some people just don't understand," She took another step and I began trembling, "You see, when you-"
The girl was cut short; literally. Nassaux's broad bladed spear cut clean through her tiny torso horizontally. Her large intestines spilled out of the upper half as she fell to the ground, and one of her kidney's sloshed out of the bottom half when it fell forward.
"Gaea, damnit Nassaux!" I threw her hand from my shoulder and rounded on her, "WHY?!"
I looked up into her unmoving eyes; she felt no remorse, "Why?" She slithered near to me once more, bending down to bring her face close to mine. I averted eye contact, "Because you wouldn't. Because you couldn't."
"It didn't have to be this way…"
"I wasn't the one who killed the man in front of his daughter; that was entirely your fault."
"I neither saw nor sensed her!"
She raised her hands defensively, "I know that, but it does not change the fact that you broke her. It was a mercy, you know this."
"I…" I paused and sighed, "I know…"
"This is a philosophy you yourself have adopted, isn't it?" She reached forward, gripping my face with both hands firmly - she knew I could not tolerate gentle contact – and forced me to look at her face. She was concerned, if her gentle eyes were any indication, "What would have happened had we permitted her to live? She would have lived a long, arduous life, forever scarred by the atrocities she had born witness to. That hatred and fear would have festered within her fragile little mind until at last she transformed. Do you want that? Do you want her innocence stolen? Do you want to give birth to another monster?"
"No…" I replied, casting my eyes down.
"That's why we do this, right? So others don't have to suffer fates like our own. Could you let another Zien watch another Gleam Fang slaughtered before his very eyes by the people he was supposed to trust? Could you bear to see another Alicia rise from the ashes of a depraved society? That would defeat the purpose of our mission, dear." I looked up at her. There was a softness in her eyes, now, one I could not see before. She hated humanity, but for some reason cared deeply for me, "We execute to-"
"Avert tragedy to the best of our abilities." I finished the mantra.
She smiled and embraced me, "That's right, dear," She coiled around me several times, lifting me off my feet, shifting her torso around to my back. She rested my head on her breasts, her long white hair draping over my face. She sensuously wrapped her arms around my throat, using her considerable flexibility to bring her face over mine. Her touch was too light; painful where she was not constricting me, "I'm sure I could…" She started seductively, "help alleviate some of your stress, hmm?" The lamia piqued her eyebrows.
I shook my head, I was still nauseous, "Not now, Nassaux…" I sighed, "Not now."
-----
Our crusade lost momentum in the succeeding years. Magitechnology was becoming a lost and "dated" applied science. The equilibrium the world deserved was slowly but surely surfacing from the depths of mankind's very own machinations.
The two of us, or more specifically I, decided to retire for the time being. Nassaux's bloodlust was sated so long as she was within my presence; for that I was grateful. We resided, at my proposition, in a forest known by man as "God's Beard," a boreal forest near the northern pole of the planet.
-----
I sat on the bough of a massive, sparse Pinus Sibirica, my left leg hanging down over the edge and my arms clasped behind my head. The tree grew at an angle and hung over a deep river at the bottom of a shallow ravine, a few dozen meters away from the forest wall on a precipice. The wind was blowing today, and the pine rocked gently to and fro almost hypnotically.
I was almost ready to doze off when I heard, "Get down from there, you're going to fall!" from the base of the tree. I opened one eye and yawned, "Zien, come down!" I ignored Nassaux's pleas. I was too tired. In a flash, however, she swirled around the tree and ascended the trunk until she was parallel to me; about 20 meters up in the air, "I know you can hear me…" She whispered coyly in my ear.
"I've been climbing trees since before your great grandparents were even a glimmer in your great-great-grandparent's eyes." I mumbled.
"I suppose that makes you a pedophile, then?" She japed.
"Huh?" I sat forward, steadying myself with my hands on the bough. I wiped some sap off of my left hand onto my moose-skin kilt.
"Nothing, old man," She chuckled, "Now come down; the wind is going to pick up and I'm not fishing your bloated corpse out of the river if this thing comes down."
I sighed and stood up, balancing myself on the cross-beam sized bough and dropping down a flight, catching one branch and swinging myself forward. I physically attuned my legs with mana and leapt away from the trunk, falling towards the grassy crop at the base of the tree. I didn't use quite enough mana, however, for when I landed from the 9 meter drop my legs jolted violently.
A moment later Nassaux was there at my side. I kicked my legs out one at a time, stimulating blood flow, and looked up at her. It was nice, loving someone who wouldn't age in horrible disproportion to me. The average lamia's lifespan was about 500 years. Chances are I would disappear from the world before I had to see her die…
"Hey, Nassaux…" I started. The wind picked up, whipping my hair around my face, and I ducked down.
"Let's get out of the open." She suggested.
I followed her back to our ramshackle home; which was really nothing more than a mud and stick-thatched hut barely large enough to fit the both of us standing. She already had a fire blazing and a few rabbits on the spit.
"What did you want?" She enquired when we passed the threshold.
"Let's eat, first."
I tore into the first hare and we split the second; in spite of the fact that Nassaux probably had 1.5 times my body mass I still managed to eat just as much if not more than her. I discarded the bones into my mortar for use in medicine later, and tossed the giblets and inedibles outside for the animals.
We finished the meal – which I might add was horrendous, Nassaux was about as proficient in "cooking" as I am – and she reiterated, "What was it?"
"Yeah…" I started, taking a seat on one of the granite-erected stools on the floor near the door, "It's been a cause of disconcert to me for a time, now. What will happen when I am gone?"
She piqued an eyebrow, "Where are you planning on going?"
"I mean when I happen to be reborn... Or transported… Or whatever it is. I've never spent more than a few hundred years in any one world, sometimes as few as a couple decades…" I leaned forward and wrung my hands, "I've been here for nearly a century and a half. What will happen to you if I'm gone when you wake one day?"
"I hadn't really considered it," She smiled, "You're so cute when you're worried. Makes my little heart all aflutter." She laughed melodically.
"Damnit, Nassaux," I cursed, "This is serious. I need you to promise me; promise me you won't fall back into your old habits."
Her lineament donned a serious visage, as well, "What is that supposed to mean?"
"You know what it means, Nassaux. I don't know what happens to the worlds I leave when I fade away. I won't ask you to stop what we do, but please, please don't go overboard. If not for the equilibrium then for me."
"You think I'm just going to go berserk if you aren't here to hold my leash?"
"That's not what I meant…" I grumbled.
"Fine," She interrupted me, closing her eyes and casting a finger at me, "but you have to promise me something as well."
"Anything."
"You can't forget yourself; ever. You feel as if you're the only string holding me back from genocide; well I feel the same way about your determination. Ever since that incident with the little girl a few years ago you've been getting lax in your duty. If it weren't for me this world would be in chaos by now; Gaea knows you don't have the stones to do it alone."
I bent over double and laughed boisterously, "It's a deal!" Her words rang true, though I laughed them away. Since meeting Nassaux, an individual who shared my ideals, I had shifted away from my self-proclaimed "duty." I became contented with the fact that I was no longer the only one capable of doing what needed to be done; Nassaux both held me to that reality and pushed me away from it.
My laughter ceded as a pall fell over me… There was an unspoken disease twixt us. The thought of life without her, more than our "professions," was most disconcerting to me. Alas, we both knew it would come…
"You won't…forget me, will you?" She finally spoke, as if reading my mind. She was quite adept at figuring out what perturbed me, "I mean, I know you won't forget, exactly, but…You know what I mean, right? Promise you'll think about me from time to time?"
"Of course." I smiled gingerly, "Same to you."
She slithered over to the bed, a pile of various furs and hides, and coiled up on herself. She leaned forward over her snake half, crossing her arms beneath her breasts, and winked at me, "Great, now let's go to bed, hmm?"
One of her most charming attributes was the way she had of disarming me completely.
-----
While the threats mankind posed to the world were diminished, they were far from eliminated. Several years of peace passed by in relative tranquility. I could see the glimmer in Nassaux's eyes when we felt the disturbance that day; the sinful arts had resurfaced and she was thirsty for expiation.
-----
The scene was almost mirrored; a different take in a different universe with a different cast and stage. The young man, no older than fourteen, curled his hands around the decapitated head of his mother. He did not speak, but his breath was heavy and irregular; hyperventilating. He turned to face me and those damned eyes moved just like hers. To the left, right, left, down, top right, left, up, bottom right, bottom left, right…
"No…no…" He began. Nassaux placed her hand on my shoulder and gripped hard; so hard she drew blood with her fingernails. I threw her arm off of me, taking the greatsword in my left hand in stance, and slashed at the young man. His body fell limp as his head rolled to the ground and joined his mother's.
Nassaux stooped over me; she brought her face to my shoulder and lapped up my blood with her broad, forked tongue. I remained motionless, I wanted to vomit. She licked my shoulder one last time and then gripped my face, osculating me. I could taste my own blood in her mouth.
We parted lips and she smiled at me, my crimson liqueur splotching her slender chin, "I'm proud of you, dear. This smell has me so excited; I couldn't stop myself."
"You're a monster…" I whispered.
She grinned and growled seductively, "Oh, yeah… Takes one to know one, hmm?" She pressed into me; coiling her tail around my feet, then tripped me to the ground and landed atop me. I dropped my blade.
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I couldn't get the taste of blood out of my mouth. I thoroughly enjoyed it.