Page 95 of The Merciless Ones
I look inwards, and that’s when I notice: my essence – our essence – is mixing with another’s, a human’s. Anok and I, we are giving birth. Have already given birth to multitudes. And yet, I am not present. Was never asked.
ReD RaGE, OrANGe. The sky shakes with the power of my emotions. Volcanoes explode, clouding the air with ash and fury.
“Anok!” I roar. “What are you doing?”
I hurtle towards the veil, but it does not give way. Does not open to my command.
Only when Etzli appears on the other side of the celestial divide, her eyes disdainful, do I start to understand why. She’s flowing there now, shimmering in the form of sunlight and matter she and the rest chose when they decided to make themselves visible to humanity.
“The veil will no longer open to you,” she says with a calm finality.
“What do you mean, Etzli?” Etal, her counterpart, rumbles, causing an earthquake to split a nearby jungle in two.
He slams against the veil, but it easily bounces him back, the nebulas there holding fast against his strength. When he tries again, it’s the same result. A black-green horror rises inside me. Etal is trapped here. All of us are.
“Justice,” Etzli replies, a word repeated by our sisters, who appear beside her. “We were sent to bring the humans peace, but you have destroyed it. You have pitted armies against each other, turned families into enemies.”
Images flash through the tether: armies of humans clashing. Thousands of bodies littering the ground.
“All in an effort to drive them to a higher understanding!” Etal hisses.
“Is that what you call it, Etal?” Beda queries, her wings flurrying gently. “Let me ask you this: did you enjoy it, what you did to the humans? The wars you caused?”
Etal pauses, and then I see the flashes. Red green white: anger, deception, malice, one after another. Emotions he can’t hide now that I’m paying attention to the tether.
“What about you, Hyobe?” Anok asks.
The same flashes. The same anger, malice, unease – all previously hidden from me. It seems the human habit of prevarication has infected our collective.
I whirl to my brothers, betrayal pricking an icy whiteness through me. “Is it true? Have you been forcing the humans into wars? Pitting them against each other? That is what they call it, is it not, the human tendency to play with moving pieces on wooden boards?”
Silence blossoms, crystal sharp around the edges. An iceberg taking shape.
I do not have to look into my brothers’ emotions; the quiet is more than enough. They have been doing as our counterparts accused, have been toying with human lives for their own amusement.
Blues, deep and unrelenting, to mark my sorrow. I turn to our sisters. “Release me,” I request. “I have caused no wars, have only ever sought to advance humanity.”
“But you are male.” The disdain drips from Hui Li’s voice. “The very designation you have chosen dooms you to aggression, domination, deception. We cannot risk your falling prey to your baser urges.”
Fury blisters over me, an overwhelming, bright red. That is the same thing we say of the humans. But I am not human, and even if I were, my physiology alone would not doom me to the things Hui Li accuses me of.
I slam the veil. “You cannot keep me here!” I shout.
The moment I do so, I know I have acted in error. Determination fills Etzli’s eyes. Her resolve seeps through our tether. “We must,” she decides.
“For your own good and the good of humanity,” Hui Li and Beda agree.
“Anok?” I turn to her, my counterpart. The other half of me. The one who understands all my intentions.
She flows forwards but then stops, desolate purples and blues colouring her emotions. Sadness. Regret. My sorrow grows hard edges. Lightning strikes, searing a lake to ash.
She’s abandoning me. My own counterpart is abandoning me.
“Anok!” I roar, reaching to her through our bond. “I demand that you release me, Anok!”
When she remains unmoving, I summon a maelstrom of colours from deep inside me. An explosion of light, warmth, unending darkness. All of them facets encompassing the brilliance of her name, the true one that she has hidden underneath the letters the humans now pronounce. The one thing that gives me the power to force her into action, just as she can force me.
Beside me, the others designated as male are doing the same, calling on their counterparts’ deepest names, the true identities they wove when they bound themselves to their new vessels of matter and sunlight. The vessels that allow them to be gazed upon by mortals.