Their Villain

Their Villain

By Justin J. Harris

From hundreds of winds above Josephine stared down toward the cromlech through the scope of her rifle counting the series of torches bracketed to each column. “Nine,” she said. A fire for each member of the council. The lit torches signaled that the ceremony would soon begin and The Nine were arriving. 

All but one of them, anyway.

The body was at the center of the cromlech draped in a ceremonial white cloth with a red fringe. Four vertical dots on the left and five on the right were stitched into the cloth. The sigil of the council.

I pulled the hood down over my head for the third time, a foolish gesture considering our height. “Are you sure you want to do this?” 

“Without a doubt,” Josephine unhunched, flipped down the lens cover to her scope and stared at me with undisturbed certainty. 

Only one of her eyes blinked and showed her tempering emotion. The other eye was some of my most ingenious work, a snug and tiny bulb cast in the metal reconstruction of her left orbital bone. She never disguised it with a patch or concealed it. She fashioned it boldly. She reached for the shard pendant dangling at her neck, stroked it the way one might a rabbit’s foot.

“Shall I go down and recon the ground floor?” 

“No, Deliah,” she waved me off, “too risky. No. We’re going to do something different than our usual merc missions,” she said before turning toward a tarp covering a series of crates, equipment she had transphased from the ship. Transphasing was how the Palladin's were able to teleport nearly anything instantly.

As for risk? I didn’t bother to mention that she was about to open fire at an elite group, but not just any elite group. Her comrades. The Nine, mentors to some of the most dangerous soldiers and bounty hunters to ever fly the galaxy.

With one yank, the tarp fell behind her, revealing a series of monitors and blinking buttons. The sound of the tarp rustling echoed in the still air, sending a shiver down my spine. The musty smell of old fabric blended horribly with the metallic scent of the equipment beneath.

Wires serpentine from one machine to the next, leading to a central console where a spherical glass dome stood. Beside it were two levers. Inside the dome, a piece of rock the size of a fist was encased.

I eyed the rock in brief wonder. The back of my mind itching with its possibilities. And then a single fear: What if this didn’t work? But what if it did? I didn’t know which was worse. 

“What is all this?” I said, my voice soft and careful as if speaking too loud might trigger something catastrophic.

“We’re going to siphon the energy from the Eonic shards. Each member of The Nine adorns one. The shards keep The Nine immortal. We’ll harness that power here,” she lightly tapped the dome, her eyes gleaming with a mix of determination and something darker. “And when the shard’s are depleted, I’ll take my shots.” 

I squinted at the stone. “Is this one Eonic?” I asked, trying to control the tremble in my voice. The shard appeared much less refined, all matted with jagged edges like a chunk of quartz. 

“No. It’s empty and pure.”

“They only become Eonic if charged.”

The iridescent haze of colors emanating from inside the dome warmed my face but did little to ease the ice cave of fear from forming in my stomach. “You think this will be enough to hold the nine energies?”

“Remember that mission where I dropped you into that dragon’s pit?”

I involuntarily flinched. Dragon dwellings always have the most acute smell of rot. You smell it once and it stays with you forever. My stomach churned.

“Sorry,” she held her gloved palm out apologetically.

“But the tech witch who owned the dragon told me how she was able to harness power in her crystals.”

“Just willingly gave you that information, did she?”

“There were other, worse options at the time,” she grinned.

“Anyway, she used the crystals to store energy and emit it to burn the dragon when training it. Of course,” she shrugged, “she used the dragon to destroy whole villages and was crazy as bats in a sack.” She smirked. “I transphased her tech after I manipulated the dragon into eating her.”

I remembered that witch. Ukelooli was her name or something. I hated her. I also recalled that her tech had more to do with the feat of paracausal efforts than anything scientific. And Josephine was no magic user.

Caws from the sky pulled at my attention like thread on bramble. Crows. They were wheeling above us no doubt curious by our presence. The sun was bright and stark against the tower. The glass dome kept catching sparks filling me with unease. 

The tower she had led me to was a small distance away from the cromlech with a perfect vantage point. The tower belonged to the ruins of an old enemy The Nine had bested in one of the many wars they championed. A hulking reminder of what happened to those who saw fit to oppose them and here we were about to do that exact thing.

“We shouldn’t both be up here. We should come back at night. The ceremony can last for hours anyway,” I said. Josephine turned sharply at me. 

“You realize what they’re doing? They’re going to bring back the man that killed my family. Leader of the Sparrows, and destroyer of our city. And that I cannot forgive nor allow. It’s treason. And they must be judged.” One eye glared at me and the other glowered with an intense fiery blue light. 

I protested no further. It would have been pointless. There was bloodlust seeping from her voice and a maddening tightness holding on her face. It was a look I’d seen before every mission, before every wayward, half-cocked idea she had that we’d somehow survived. It was a look I’d admired, of ferocity and determination. She was dangerous when she had that look and I’d just then started to feel myself resign more and more from what I’d found so alluring about it. 

“When you trigger this mechanism with the shards? You know that would also include your own?” I gestured to her pendant.

“And that is where you come in, Deliah, my Deliah. You will discharge the energies back into mine.”

“How?”

“The controls. I’ll place my stone inside the casing so it’s faster to connect to the others. One lever is the receiver and the other the emitter.” She unfastened her pendant. Carefully lifted the dome. The glass made a soft thrumming sound. She placed the pendant there. Her shard glowing nearest the rock. “You’ll discharge after all is said and done. The energy will be redirected to the shards. We’ll transphase to the ship and be gone from here in no time. I didn’t even change the code word for the transphase effect so we both know it. Easy.”

I glance in-between her and the equipment. The sun and the birds. I peer over the ledge of the tower. 

Robed figures moved in the distance in a single file. They appear as ants might. 

“They’re here,” I said. 

“Good.” She began toward the rifle and gestured for me to the controls. I followed the command as she bade. 

I felt a darkness uncoil in the pit of my stomach, like something acidic had been uncorked inside me. I reached and noticed my hand visibly shaking. 

“You didn’t need me for this,” I said. “You could pull these levers without me—”

The sudden grip of her hand both startled and silenced me. She then spoke in the softest of voices that I ever thought her capable of. “You’re wrong. I absolutely need you,” she said. “I always have, remember?” 

I closed my eyes. Both our hands are locked now. Her thumbs stroke the inside of my palms. I could feel the warmth of her as she neared me. Whatever magic this was I didn’t want to dispel it. I felt for the first time she’d actually heard me, seen me, and felt me. I chased away the thought of this being more than a casual closeness, that she’d been obliviously close without intention. Guilt soon surfaced and I felt ashamed of my uncharitable thoughts when she squeezed my arms. Shook me some.

“Stay with me, Deliah. We’re almost done.”

When I opened my eyes her very own had softened and descended to my lips. 

“Maybe we should rethink our steps,” I stuttered a whisper. I felt all reservations in me disarming.

The moment that might have forever changed what happened next in our lives ended with the sounds of The Nine’s loudening chants.

The voices in syncopation parted our hands. 

The war was won when I found her.

Though wars might be won they certainly are never over. The battlefields were still alive with soldiers wrestling to the death, their angst replacing their agenda. Fields stunk with corpses and burning flesh, of smoke barreling languorously toward the sky off the center of a ruined city. Our city. Our home.

I strode through a cacophony of laments edging my path, over charred rubble and bones. I’d fallen into and crawled out of craters from the Palladin’s elemental explosions. Some of them could conjure massive balls of energy with a just mere wave of their hand.

I heard crying down below from inside another crater and managed to eventually locate a trap door that led to a bunker wherein I spotted them. She was lying under him with the dagger that killed her family jutting out from her skull. 

His dead hand was still firmly wrapped around the handle. 

Another blade impaled through his back. I half thought to turn away as the smoke was stinging my eyes and squeezing my lungs but then I glimpsed the insignia patched to her outfit. Nine steel pins arranged vertically side by side, four left, five right. The sigil belonged to the Palladin’s of The Nine. It was a curious find.

Her hand twitched, her lips parted in a feeble attempt to call again for me. She was too weak to push him off and I thought she would have most likely suffocated from his weight or bled out from her injury. Her hand had been spidering against the cracked floor at a necklace some feet away. I was nearly hypnotized by its glow.

“Stay with me. We’re almost there,” I’d said time and again as she kept going lank against my body. We managed to stumble back to safety and left the body and war behind.

The facility I’d been working in remained unscathed mostly because it was underground. I had no specializations in medicine, but at the lab I was able to nurse her wounds and keep hidden from the potential dangers of any surviving enemies. I made modifications to her missing eye and replaced it with one capable of multi-spectral functioning. After a dangerous fever her body took to the technology remarkably with minimal rejection. I was proud of the work.

Her eye flashes blue into the scope of the rifle. I leveled my strength over the controls and awaited my instructions. The members of the nine began to span out each to their own column. Their chants resonated as a faint hum in unison. The winds picked up. Gusts moved through the top of the tower like gentle hands shoving me this way and that. 

I looked over the rock sitting there beside the shard. Something so tenuous and small infused with immortality.    

The noise of something grew louder nearest the cromlech, scattered from it and whipping past us and into the sky. The world groaned and clapped like rocks the size of planets smashed together from the heavens. The floor trembled beneath me.

“Almost there,” said Josephine. She grappled onto the ledge and knelt at the very end of it. Her rifle in her hands. I could see her breathing becoming timid. 

The Nine were working their incantations. Raising their hands up to the sky. A glowering circle formed around the body. Thunderheads roiled from nothingness. Winds picked up and leaves danced on contrary gyres.

The shard inside the case sparked with a dark and glowering shadow around it. It appeared to mimic the patterns of the circle of the cromlech that whenever it pulsed so too did the shard.    

A chill rushed through my body. My fingers felt itchy and numb like when they thaw from being in the cold too long.  

My heart was suddenly whooshing through my ear. My hands shook. My knees felt gelid and weak. 

“Josephine,” I called out. 

I needed to feel like I was still in control of something. My voice would do.

Silence.

In an abrupt moment the world was quiet. The birds were gone. The clouds were thick and the air was static; windless.

“Now. Do it now,” said Josephine. 

I pulled at the controls. The receiver first. The console buzzed and groaned like I’d been disturbing it from a long sleep. But the shard in the casing hadn’t lost its luster. It sparked and winked. The quartz-like rock hadn’t taken its energy.

“Josephine. It’s not—the shard is still empowered. It’s botched.”

“We’re too close. I won’t hear of it! I can still take this shot. I can at least destroy his body so there is nothing left to bring back,” she seethed through gritted teeth.

The members of The Nine seemed disoriented by their shards sparking. The hums and chants ended abruptly. One had fallen over clutching at hers.

—“What? What is this? Who dares!” I could hear one of The Nine call out. Their voice is menacing, resounding with rage.

“They will kill us, Josephine. We must go,” I said.

“They’ll never kill me,” she said and I heard the rifle click. 

“Josephine! Wait. I am not immortal!”

A familiar smell engulfed us then. 

I remembered the size of the craters.

Chaos magic was hot, incendiary. They would destroy us. Eight immortals versus one and a human. It didn’t add up to survival for me. My heart sank as if it weighed as much as the stone on the console.

The shard glowered from within its glass dome at the corner of my eyes. 

And then it happened.

I cried out when she looked back. I feared she might.

She was aghast. Startled. We both were.

She never expected it. Neither did I. My hands led me to her. My body acted without my mind, or at least it felt that way at first. 

My legs moved quickly. Josephine let out the strangest high-pitched shriek and it cut through me, flesh and bone. I fell to my knees, shattered. I kept hearing the scrapes of her boots and scuffs of gloves against the stone bricks. I did not hear when she hit the ground. There was nothing after. Just the windless quiet.

Sulfur stenched the air, my skin was prickly. The blast was coming.

I tucked the shard to my chest and cried more as I remembered the code word for the transphase effect: “Devotion.” 

My body dispersed into spirals of glimmering light and I was whisked away and respawned into the hull of Josephine’s ship where my wails could resume at abandon. I watched from the cockpit as the tower exploded into graveled bits and I flew off. 

The more I rethink my actions the more I realize there was nothing else I could have done. Was I a coward or a survivalist? There was too much that reminded me of Josephine close to where she died. I never returned to the city. I’d given up my work as a scientist and become the tagalong in Josephine’s path of quests. I’d long forgotten what it was like to be a self without her.

For months I’d flown without stopping much. 

I was a shadow in the darkness, morose and impoverished. I’d hardly eaten. I was so gaunt and slender I was near unrecognizable. But whenever I did touch ground, there our story was.

In some versions the woman with Josephine was a sellsword of the Sparrows. Eager to claim a name for herself by taking out one of The Nine. But I told another one. Eventually people started to pay for my version of the story as I retold it. First with trinkets, drinks and food, and then a room at a keep. 

In my version, I am Josephine, former member of The Nine. The woman that fell from that tower was the woman I loved. She had gone mad with vengeance in her heart. And I loved her through and through.

I know The Nine are aware of the truth, and I know they will come searching for me sooner or later. Being immortal now, as the years go on I worry less and less about it. I suppose it’s poetic irony. I’d eventually face The Nine. I am Josephine.

And like her I’ll be their villain.