The Everborn Read online

  And they were right.

  And they were afraid.

  They dared not speak of her nightly liaisons with the man, nor of what they supposed the two were doing behind closed doors. This was enough to be afraid of, for the Queen would quite possibly have their heads if she became aware of such gossip.

  Truth or not.

  The truth was, while all along the Queen was under the assumption that she was having her way with him...he was having his way with her.

  How could that not be? As far as the soldiers reasoned, any man with the powers of a god knew what he was doing.

  And he was using the Queen even more than the Queen was thinking she was using him.

  This was what the soldiers feared most: their queen was being set up.

  Then came the rumors that the Queen was with child.

  ***

  It happened very late one night, when the Queen went to visit the stranger for the final time. More than five months had passed since the night she’d made her last visit, but to the watchful sentries she appeared as a woman would appear on the verge of labor.

  And, indeed, she was.

  When she arrived, she commanded the latches and locks of his vaulted cedar door to be opened, and afterwards entered the bed chambers of the stranger. Disappearing into the room, she left the command that the door be shut behind her, and it was.

  It shut behind her with a foreboding thu-ud, and when it did, the Queen found herself at once isolated within the corner cold candlelight of her captive’s room. She held herself close, her bedclothes hemming her evening gown like peasant mantle decor as she clutched her elbows bitterly and gazed out into the bed chamber’s opposite corner.

  In this opposite corner was the bed, and upon the bed sat a figure in a likewise flowing evening gown of crimson red which reflected and sparkled amidst the rampant flickering of the several surrounding candles.

  The figure rose; when he did fully, his stance was elfin, as though his height had remained the same as when he sat upon the bed.

  The Queen hadn’t laid her eyes upon him since during her last visit when he had frightened her enough to close her eyes to him completely for so long a time. It was then when she first came to realize his purpose with her and her utter helplessness to do anything about it… she couldn’t, because it was already too late to avoid it.

  And now...

  ...now, it was too late to do anything but to remain afraid.

  “You don’t seem yourself, Your Highness.” The rich baritone of the stranger, smooth and serene, broke the silence and startled the Queen, as though purposely meant to. The voice flooded the room in such a manner that it seemed to come from everywhere and not just the stranger’s lips...but from behind her and before her, above and below her, and the Queen trembled at the unnerving expectation of the she-demon appearing if only to torment her.

  Instead, the stranger continued. “Tell me, how does it feel knowing that your way of life is in jeopardy, knowing this but not knowing if it will stay the same from one day to the next, that in your vast power you’ve been rendered powerless to assure control of your own future?”

  The Queen would’ve responded in slight defense if not for her hesitation and if not for the sudden painful restlessness from within her womb.

  “Tell me of your kingdom,” the stranger probed further. “How are your efforts progressing? What of the surrounding empires in relation to your own?”

  “Those empires are at war with each other,” the Queen exerted. “As for my domain, it is in a state of...”

  “...of stagnation,” cut short the stranger. “You’ve entrusted others in your court to run your country for you and no wonder…you’ve become way too involved in matters that are more inward than they are outward. You’ve become less capable of dealing with the concerns of the big picture and have been forced to focus in on your own private you. Frightening, isn’t it, to live out your aspirations in pursuit of conquest when all along the real conquest would be in whether you could gain control of yourself? I taught you these things from the moment you desired the secrets to my power and how much more can a woman be forced to face her intimate self than to be with child? It is in this that you will not only know my power, as I had promised, but in order to know it you must become it!"

  “What do you know of true power without your she-demon to protect you?” said the Queen in icy resent. “Withdraw from her power and you face me powerless. It is only because of her that you speak to your Queen as bold and still live. Do I not speak truth?”

  “You speak truth, but if I were capable of standing on my own, I would just as soon give my life to teach you such a lesson in the conquest of power. My Watchmaid, however, always stood in the way of that. You see, it is her duty to protect me. But all that will be in the past, and soon...soon, you will be taking her place.”

  The Queen took an apprehensive step forward. “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve been relieved from the security of my Watchmaid for a little while now,” the stranger said, “and as we speak she is far away. I have released her from her bounden duties to fulfill her longing to become human again, as I have chosen you to succeed her. How does it feel, these final moments as a mortal, to know that you are about to experience the power that I assured would be yours?”

  The Queen took another step forward dreadfully. “You lie!”

  The stranger inched quietly forward this time in turn, nearer to the Queen but also nearer into the candlelight so as to reveal the clarity of his features. The Queen was swept aghast into a delusional horror upon his sight the moment she beheld him fully, and this horror paralyzed her as soon as it seized her, rendering her unable to take her eyes off him. She had been unmistakably wrong about him...absolutely, terribly wrong...for he not only held the entrusted benefits of a she-demon to work his bidding, but clearly he was a demon himself.

  If this was no demon, this was indeed an illusion, a diabolical impression of what the Queen knew to have been a perfectly human outsider, human if not but in appearance alone. He raised the silky thin drapery of the arm of his gown to reveal an attenuated limb and the five pale-grey stringy digits which were fingers protruding outwards from a child-sized hand. They reached into the empty air preceding his face and head, both of which were fleshy and ill-formed and completely absent of hair as they were with wrinkles or any signs of age. The stranger/entity bore no noticeable nose save for two slits of nostrils above a lipless horizontal mouth which parted to speak...but before it spoke, its lifted fingers formed and pointed to draw the Queen’s mesmerized gaze into two enormously widened slants of eyes as black as a nighttime starless sky.

  “I speak truth,” the stranger said to her. “And now, the time is ripe for you to know it!”

  These words were his last; as soon as he had spoken them to her, impossibly, his flesh began to expand and then collapse into a bony thinness which shrunk into his robe in hastened retreat and disappeared from view. Even his head followed suit, like a turtle retracting into its shell.

  And then he was no more.

  His robe and gown fell depleted and bodiless to the floor.

  Just as suddenly, the bed chamber flooded with the blood-choked outpouring of a woman’s screams.

  And an infant’s cries.

  ***

  Four of the Queen’s sentries in alert watch directly outside the door heard the screams. Without hesitation, they scrambled to their Queen’s aid, releasing the bolts to the chamber door and opening it; as they did so their diligence slackened in fearful retrospect of what had become of the last soldiers to defy the powers of the mystical stranger. Still, their allegiance to their Queen was to the point of death, so a change of mind and motive at any point was cast to the Shit Heap of No Return in this kingdom.

  By the time they stormed into the bed chamber, their weapons drawn and poised as was their goose flesh and very mortalities, the wails of an infant child were all that remained....

  ...and all that r
emained within the room was an infant child. It was unthinkably impossible for a newborn infant to have been in the room at all...to have been there, upon its back and upon the stone cold floor, legs and arms up and flailing and slapping against a foot-long umbilical cord still attached to its belly but oozing and slashing through the air like a slit-away high pressure hose line.

  Of anyone else in the room there was no sign. There was, however, a discarded and familiar pile of garments, the Queen’s evening attire, immediately beside the newborn; before the bed, a second set of abandoned robes.

  Blinded by a primal panic, the sentries raised their weapons to the child...

  ...and extinguished its life as suddenly as it lived.

  ***

  After a persistent search within the bed chambers and a vast canvas without, neither the Queen nor the stranger could be found, not a solitary trace, nor would they ever be.

  But for a succession of years to come, those who dwelt within the area of that land would tell tales of wispy shrieks of the Queen’s ghost, which became eerily audible the first few moments before each new daybreak, cries of ill attempt to deliver her infant son from death.

  One day, after the shrieks grew more faint and more distant, they silenced altogether.

  Eventually, the tales silenced as well...

  ...to be spoken only among those who know what happened afterwards....

  33.

  The Black Widow Messiah

  -1968-

  This was the unspoken Promised Land of once-in-a-lifetime events, and no matter that it wasn’t exactly promised, it was more or less prophesied, and as far as Salvatia was concerned, prophesied was the ferment in the wine of promises. And no human being with an average lifespan of ninety years or so would ever know the magnitude of a once-in-a-lifetime event for a being whose lifespan was more than six times as long to date.

  As far as Salvatia was concerned, she was quite certain of this.

  For there was recently born a set of Everborn twins.

  And, like the prophecy was told to her, they were going to bring salvation to the one who would bring salvation to all other Magdalene that would come to her.

  Not entirely because of both of them, but because of one of them. The soulless one.

  The one referred to over the centuries as a Dreg.

  In this case, the one who would be known as Simon.

  It was known to all involved, Magdalene and Watchmaid and Watcher alike, that when a set of Everborn twins is born, only one can harbor the soul that has been reborn, although the lives were --as fate would have it-- split into two.

  And Dregs were a very special and rare breed, indeed.

  They could do things for a Magdalene, yes, and by far for any Magdalene that knew well enough to search for one, and find him...

  ...to be, as they say, at the right place and at the right time.

  ***

  A white Plymouth Belvedere rested solitary and vacant within the parking lot of the Dr. Jonas E. Salk elementary school. It was blanketed by a coat of weather-worn dirt, which was emphasized by the remains of a finger-scrolled WASH ME upon the rear window, all letters but the WA ME portion wiped away by a single dirty-filmed swipe.

  It was eight forty-five in the p.m., and the sun had retired from the pre-evening sky an hour or so ago and for the first time since the time was sprung an hour forward the night before.

  A misty torrent of air floated down from the school’s hallway rooftop and settled upon the Plymouth’s hood, lightly denting its metal. This was a first, the first time in a long time the Magdalene had any effect upon the physical world, even if it was that one simple dent. It felt good. It felt great. It felt brand new all over again, as if she’d never crossed the threshold into the physical realm before; it had been a long, long time since she had. The feeling was euphoric, to be able to do that again.

  It only meant one thing: it meant she was in close proximity to a Dreg.

  The closer she came to one, the easier it would be to manipulate the world of the living, to touch something physical once more.

  She was a Magdalene.

  She wasn’t a Watchmaid, let alone a human being anymore. And she wasn’t the ghost of her former human self, she had never exactly died, but as a Magdalene she could never have contact with the physical world but for maybe --given chance-- a whisper or a rhapsody in the wind to be heard faintly in the early morning breeze.

  To the physical world, she was a ghost.

  She had never been granted the pleasure of achieving her full potential, not as an empire’s queen of ages past, nor as even a Watchmaid, for the Everborn who’d originally deceived her and tricked her had died as instantly as she’d given birth to him...and before she realized what she was becoming, she became what she was.

  She’d remained that way for so, so very long.

  Stagnant. Incapable of communicating with or manipulating the world around her.

  It was ruled among Everborn that should its Watchmaid see its own Everborn’s death, that Watchmaid would become banished to roam the earth as nothing more but a ghost. That stranger had released its current Watchmaid to be replaced by her...

  ...by her....

  And then he was killed...by her own soldiers....

  And she was banished, like a ghost, to be physical in one dimension only, a dimension beyond anything truly of the normal realm of things, but a dimension in which she could observe the normal realm of things around her as well as things normally unseen.

  And it just wasn’t fair.

  Not in the least.

  Not at all.

  She would use the Dreg to change all that.

  A certain commotion issued at once from the side yard of the house across the silent boulevard from her. She had been in constant surveillance over the house for over the past day and night, awaiting any opportunity to make a run for the home and seize the twin Dreg child who dwelt inside. It wasn’t an easy accomplishment; Salvatia was subject to waiting impatiently for the moment when the true Everborn twin was separated from its Dreg twin. The greater the distance between them there was, the least likely it was for Salvatia to run into a confrontation with that Everborn’s Watchmaid.

  And what was her name, by the way, this Watchmaid...? Oh, yes...it was...

  ...it was Bari.

  Bari was that newcomer Salvatia had heard about.

  Magdalene were just as efficient in catching vibes as Watchmaids were, for Magdalene had been Watchmaids, so they both shared the same telepathic internet. But if Salvatia could tap into Bari’s presence, Bari could tap into hers as well. More than likely, Bari was aware of the Magdalene’s presence as somewhere not far away and she would know her name, too.

  Which was odd, for when Bari would’ve sensed her presence, Bari would’ve sensed her with her true name...which wasn’t originally Salvatia at all, but the human name she’d been born with...

  ...but she sensed Bari had known her as Salvatia, and that only meant that Bari held certain knowledge of her reputation, of her celebrity status so to speak, of her infamy.

  Perhaps Bari bore insight enough to know how Salvatia got that name, that she was one day meandering around sixteenth century England when, not long after she’d heard the words of her own prophecy, she came upon the ramshackle outpost of a church bearing the words SALVATION TO ALL upon a broken wooden banner, the SALVATION portion split in two. She took that as a sign, far beyond more than literally, and, combined with delusions of grandeur, the name hence evolved.

  Perhaps Bari had learned of the prophecy itself.

  Bari seemed to be more in touch with things than others, for such a juvenile Watchmaid, so contrastingly new to the job.

  She could prove a great deal more of a hassle than Salvatia anticipated, so...Salvatia was forced to wait.

  For this moment.

  Commotion...in the side yard.

  She had to be quick.

  Whatever the reason, a teenage babysitter was at that moment eng
aged in verbal dispute at the side of the house behind the outside wooden gate over a matter of who’s chucking dirt clods at whose window with a teenage neighbor cradling over the partitioning fence...

  ...and the Everborn twin was with them.

  As for Bari, even her attentions were drawn into the feud.

  And the twins were separated.

  Salvatia waited no more.

  As she glided her way from atop the Plymouth and across the school parking lot, crossed the boulevard and approached the house, she gazed down upon herself in awe at how remarkably material her silvery skin tone was, and in the next instant how clearly and rapidly she was developing a transparent signature of own her form breaking into the visible world.

  This was indeed a true soulless Dreg twin she was after and this unmistakable physical materialization was the truest indication; the prophecy clockwork was already ticking its maiden voyage of tocks. Everything from this point on was guaranteed free flying, entirely in the Magdalene’s favor.

  It had to be, no question about it.

  Inside the house, within the twin infants’ bedroom of blueblack wallpapered stars and shooting stars, a woman’s pair of silver-toned hands, extending outward by likewise matched arms of intertwined muscle, protruded from the solid wall not far below the double window facing the outer front yard. The surreal hands searched and pawed until, lowering and lowering still, they settled past the painted white wooden bars of a crib as if the bars were merely holographic images from some unseen projector’s eye. The lustrous black of vulture-like claws discovered the infant twin Dreg with a harmless prick against the soft flesh of its inner thigh.