Fallen warrior, can you hear me? Listen well, for I have only a moment to share before I must tend to my task.
We are not as old as time. I did not watch your world spin into being from the primal scattered dust of creation. Some of the others will tell you such stories, but they are lying. We were born in the early days of your kind, when you stopped smashing one another over the head with sticks or stones and began to create such ideals as honor and justice. We have been known by a thousand names by a thousand peoples; Athena to the Greeks, Tyr to the Germanic tribes, Baba Yaga in the cold north of Russia, Forseti to the Norse and Anbay before the worship of the One God in the sandy east. We call ourselves the Vicaria and we are watching over you.
The Vicaria are children of your greatest enlightenment, spirits of honorable purpose. When you, the purest warrior falls, your purpose unfulfilled, we are there to finish what you could not. I have lifted the shield of the fallen knight to defend his liege-lord, raised the sword of the samurai to defend my ancient homeland and pulled the soldier’s gun from the mud to fight back the invasion that would take the world.
But there are rules, strict rules, to the Vicarian ways. We must not reveal ourselves to the others of your kind, for we and all Ephemera are offspring of humanity’s dreams. If you knew us for fact, we would cease to be dreams and fade like mist at sunrise. We may speak only with your final breath. When we have spoken your final words, we are sent from your world and return to our own. Last, we serve but one purpose: we are your dying wish and must carry out your honorable work, never our own. For a Vicaria to pursue her own agenda would be in defiance of her very nature and unmake her.
Say nothing, honored one. Rest now, for I will take up your heavy burden and carry it just a little further. Sleep in peace, for the blush of dawn waits just over the horizon and by her coming, I swear that your final wish will come to pass. Give to me your final breath and with it, I will see your will done. I am of the Vicaria and I am your dream given flesh.
~ ~ ~
The light melted away and she was engulfed in sooty darkness. Where were her weapons? She stepped back to widen her stance, balancing lightly on the balls of her feet, ready to melt away from the inevitable hail of bullets and raising her bare arms to fend off the coming blows. How many were they? She grinned behind her fists in anticipation of the battle. Let them come! Numbers meant nothing to a Vicaria. The armies of the world entire had never stood for long before her fury. Why did they wait? Perhaps they were afraid. She could have laughed. How wise these villains were!
She waited, but all remained still. Scowling, the Vicaria glanced down at the fallen warrior whose final wish had summoned her. It was a thin woman, dressed not in the armor or uniform of a soldier, but dirty jeans and a stained flannel shirt. No, the woman was more than simply slender. She wore her dark skin like. Her dark skin was pulled tight over the sharp angles of bones that should have been concealed under layers of muscle and fat, never meant to be seen so nakedly. The woman was huddled between two charred trashcans, both filled with sifting, stinking ash but the fires had long since gone dark and cold. Surely this was not the great warrior whose dying call had rung in the ears of all Ephemera? She was only a dead homeless woman, finally succumbed to hunger and cold.
The confused Vicaria dropped her hands to her sides and took in her surroundings for the first time. She stood not in the midst of a battlefield, but a narrow alleyway that stank of refuse and urine. Abandoned buildings with boarded windows like closed eyes stood to either side, barely silhouetted against a sullen, starless night sky. Red Robin Press, proclaimed one in flaking paint. Red Herring Press had been scrawled mockingly underneath in hurried, garish angled letters. The alley was choked with overflowing dumpsters and boxes of moldering newspapers and tabloids.
She knelt beside the dead woman, who had pulled a handful of relatively intact pages into a sort of nest and was curled tightly around the pile. But not in them, the Vicaria noted. She rolled the body awkwardly onto its back. The vagrant was already immovably stiff. Surely she carried some mark of battle, some sign of the heroic valor that would have sung out for a Vicaria in her final moments…? But turning out her pockets only produced a pair of expired bus passes and a torn receipt from a drugstore. The spirit bit her lip in frustration. There was a wet sniffling noise from the darkness.
“She got no money, lady. Can’t you leave her alone?”
A small shape detached itself from the deep shadows, skirting the wall of the alley cautiously and keeping its distance from the Vicaria. It was a little boy, no more than twelve years old. He was better fed than that lifeless woman, but only barely so. Skeletal arms and legs, also only a shade lighter than the murky night, stuck out from a ratty Lakers jersey and over-sized shorts. They were spotted with painful-looking dark sores that shined wetly in the wan light that leaked in from the street outside. The tight black curls of his hair were surprisingly well-ordered, painstaking combed and showed only the most recent signs of being disheveled. She stared at the child. Who was he? But she had only a single breath with which to speak and had no wish to waste it on this whelp. There was battle ripe to be waged somewhere near, even if she did not yet see it. When she made no sound or movement, the boy crept closer.
“You sure are weird. You escaped from a loony bin, lady?” he asked with a child’s unabashed curiosity. “Hey, why you naked?”
Naked? The Vicaria furrowed her brow and looked down at her body, all lean muscle and skin pale as moonlight; centuries of Valkyrie dreams made flesh for the night. She wore nothing into battle but her own long golden hair and the blood of those who fell before her in single-minded honor of the fallen warriors. Having apparently decided that the newcomer was not dangerous-how very wrong he was!-the boy turned his back to her and crawled into the nest of rumpled newsprint and cold corpse-flesh. He pulled his skinned knees up to his chest and touched his bony hand to the still woman’s face.
“My ma isn’t waking up no more,” he said sadly. The child sniffed again and wiped his nose and eyes on his sleeve. “I guess the cops find her in the morning, yeah? Don’t know why I’m asking you, crazy lady… Why don’t you talk, anyways? You dumb?”
She shook her head. The boy shrugged and turned back to his mother. He kissed her sunken cheek and stood, impotently wrapping his stick-thin arms around himself against the cold. Surely in the street outside, she would find some thunderous firefight worthy of her calling… But she could only make out the pounding thrum from the stereo of a passing car and a thin, distant wail, like the keening of a dying dove. The boy, too, heard the sound. His eyes darted to the mouth of the alley, wide and wary.
“I’m getting outta here. Last place I want to be is here when the cops find ma. If you don’t want to end up dead or beat to rags, you better move it, too,” he advised. The boy took a few steps towards the street beyond, looking back over his shoulder to the strange woman and gesturing urgently. “Come on! You’ll get picked up fast dressed like that. Ma doesn’t need her clothes no more, so you can have them.”
The Vicaria was taken aback. She had seen few children in her battlefield visitations to the mortal plane, and the myriad Ephemera did not mate in the same way humans did, nor birth offspring. But she knew at least a little of human young, enough to be startled by the boys unshed tears and placid acceptance of death. He must have lived in this kind of destitution his entire life, always a cold night or missed meal from oblivion. Shaken, the Vicaria undressed the rigid body and pulled on the pants and shirt herself. They were short in the limbs and the fallen mother’s shoes were far too small to fit her, but at least she was clothed. The acrid scents of sweat and fear in the cloth were not so different than the smells she was accustomed to, she decided. The woman whose clothes she wore certainly seemed to be the one whose dying wish had called her, but she was no warrior… What was she supposed to do? Where was her glorious war? Perhaps she was here to carry out some more subtle plan on behalf of the fallen woman.
“You have no idea what’s up and down. I’ll get you far as Mason Street, at least. Let’s get going,” the dark-skinned boy said, tilting his head towards the street. “I’m Mark, by the way. You got a name, crazy lady?”
A hundred images flashed through her mind, ideas and memories, but none of them were names. The Vicaria said nothing. Even if she had the breath to spare, what was there to say? She was an idea, an immortal dream.
“No name? I can’t just call you lady,” Mark mused. His small fists were thrust deep into his pockets as he took in the strange, Amazonian woman in his mother’s clothes. “How about Erin? That was my sister’s name.”
The Vicaria nodded without considering the name. What did it matter what one little mortal child called her? She would be gone by the rising of the sun, another noble task done. Any name he gave her would be cast off as easily her clothes.
The lonely cry of the siren was closer now. Mark hurriedly took Erin’s hand, long-fingered and calloused by uncounted millennia of warfare. She gave the child a questioning look. Twice before, she had been called forth by police officers. Once to chase and bring to bloody justice a murderer, the second time to take up an officer’s sniper rifle and kill a maddened teacher. A single shot and she had freed almost a dozen frightened children. Why was the boy afraid of them? Were the police not the knights of the new age? Erin longed for the simplicity of the battlefield! But pondering the question made her wonder… Had she been summoned to protect the child? It would not be the first time she had fought on behalf of a charge. No matter; whatever her task was in this world, it would be done.
Mark led Erin from the alley and past the desiccated Red Robin Press. The mismatched pair was hurrying past the dirt-streaked windows of a shoe store when flashes of blue and red eclipsed the dingy yellow streetlamps. With a last off-key whine, the sirens fell silent behind them. Mark’s hand tightened around hers fearfully.
“Don’t look back,” he whispered urgently, but Erin’s curiosity was too strong. Mark’s mother had died of exposure… Why would the police respond so quickly, lights flashing and sirens blaring? How would they even know what had happened?
The shield on the door of the car was scribed with a blocky blue 28. A pair of men in dark uniforms, guns and badges glittering in the alternating flashes of bright-colored light, pulled themselves from the squad car. Both wore dark glasses despite the starless night and the bulging midsections of men overindulgent in rich food and drink. Instead of down the alley she and mark had vacated moments before, the policemen pulled clubs and flashlights from their belts, nudged open the doors of Red Robin and vanished inside. Erin could just make out the creak of their shoes on old floorboards. Mark was tugging insistently at her hand.
“Come on, Erin! Let’s go! We don’t want to be here when they come out, especially when they find ma.”
She did not want to leave, but Mark’s obvious fear made the Vicaria turn her head and follow him away. They crossed the empty street and made their way past a row of blank windowed apartment buildings and a post office with a cracked urbane facade covered in a decade of graffiti. They turned a corner, passing under a guttering lamp and out of sight of the alley. The boy walked close to Erin’s side, shivering in the cold night. Or was it fear? Mark had certainly taken his mother’s death in stride, but the appearance of the two officers had sparked an unexpected terror in the child.
A loud bang from the direction they had come startled Mark, making him jump and squeak sharply. Erin put a firm hand on the boy’s shoulder and held him near. If she was to protect him, she could not have the child running off into the night. But the noise was only the angry slamming of the police car’s door, followed by the thunderous roar of a gunning engine and squeal of tires. Mark was turning this way and that, looking frantically for a place to hide, but the cacophony faded quickly into the distance. He let out a shuddering breath and sat heavily on the chipped concrete curb. The Vicaria stood over him, looking down at the child and waiting with her arms crossed. The least the boy could do was clarify her quest!
“The cops musta found ma,” he said, resting his thin face on his knees and scratching absently at the angry red sores on his legs. “They won’t be happy cuz a body means reports and they don’t want that kind of attention. They don’t want anyone to look too close at that Red Robin place but them.”
Erin snapped her fingers impatiently and gestured to the street. A rust-streaked cab rolled by, unhurried but not bothering to slow as it passed by the obviously penniless woman and child. Mark coughed as he took a shallow breath of the sooty exhaust. His lungs must be weak, she thought. The air was foul, but not enough to make him wheeze so. Erin thumped Mark on the back and the single blow almost sent the boy sprawling in the street.
“Jeez, Erin! Watch it,” Mark admonished her, then coughed again and spat a gobbet of something thick and dark into the littered gutter. Erin pointed up and down the street again. “How should I know? Ma always told me where to stay… We can’t go to any of the shelters ’round here. The cops watch them all and they know me, see? And no one else will let us stay with them now they’ve heard them racing outta here like that. Everyone knows to lock up and shut up for the rest of the night. I don’t know where to go!”
It seemed that the corrupted knights of this squalid place would endeavor to avoid a thorough investigation of the death just outside the Red Robin Press and Mark feared that he would be swept away to avoid complications. The police monitored the local homeless shelters and had intimidated the neighborhood gangs and vagrants into refusing refuge to anyone out of the ordinary. Erin sat beside Mark, ignoring the stinking trash around her bare feet and stroked her sharp jaw thoughtfully.
The frantic exit of the officers seemed to indicate that they were worried. If they had complete control over the rest of the police, they surely would have had nothing to fear from an investigation. Their fear meant that they had a tenuous cover-up of their activities, at best. They relied instead on more easily pressured elements to keep their endeavors out of the light, like the local poor. The merest threats of violence or a couple of dollars were doubtlessly all they needed to smooth over any disturbance. The blare of sirens and the flash of lights probably scattered anyone potentially annoying to their nightly activities.
But that was more than the Vicaria had… She did not fear death. After all, she was a dream, immortal and unkillable. A hail of bullets or tempest of blades meant nothing to her. Mark, however, was not so blessed. He was just a mortal. He was fragile… and sick. The child was coughing again. If she was to complete her task, Erin would have to get him to safety, to a place of warmth and haven beyond the control of the fleeing police. Only then could she speak the dead mother’s final words, be loosed from this inglorious duty and return to her own world! The Vicaria caught Mark by the upper arm and hauled him to his feet. She had to get him moving away from danger, from whatever it was his mother had so wished him safe from.
“Ow!” he yelped and tried to brush Erin’s hand away. He may as well have been trying to topple a mountain. “What’re you doing?”
The Vicaria tapped impatiently at an imaginary watch on her wrist and gestured down the street. Mark brushed his shorts clean of perhaps half the dirt clinging to them and nodded.
“Yeah, right. I said I’d take you out as far as Mason Street. You’re in a hurry, aren’t you?”
Erin, of course, said nothing.
Three hours later, Erin guessed that it was nearing dawn. There was no sign of the police. She was glad to be moving again and this time towards a definite goal. Her feet were dirty from walking so long unshod, but her otherworldly flesh was not sore, unbruised and uncut by the broken bottles and cast off stones. Mark had fallen long since silent, his dark little head bowed and eyes focused on the cracked sidewalk as he struggled to keep up with his companion’s long strides without tripping on the jagged concrete. More watchful than the boy, Erin had seen several shadowed, fearful faces in the dark windows, but no one had emerged to further investigate the passing pair. A few cars raced past, most either dilapidated wrecks no more than a deep pothole away from inaction or cheap, gaudy racers that screamed off into the distance faster than their drivers could possibly have taken in either pedestrian. Erin passed the time imagining clever ways to evade the other Ephemera when they asked her about her most recent calling.
“Mason Street… a few blocks down. Should be… home free after that,” Mark wheezed. Erin nodded absently.
Almost too late, the Vicaria heard the muted thuds of shoes behind them. She whirled, roughly pushing Mark behind her. A cluster of young men, most as dark complexioned as her ward but far healthier, were closing quickly. Erin counted seven of them, including a muscular girl with spiky violet hair and a gold-skinned boy with almond eyes who could not have been much older than Mark. Every one of them wore thick hooded sweatshirts and an orange bandanna folded into a band around their foreheads. They carried no visible weapons, but most had their hands in their pockets and the tallest man held an empty beer bottle with deceptive negligence. Should he need it, the bottle would make a deadly and easily disposable weapon. The gang stopped out of arms’ reach and spread out in a loose half circle around Erin.
“Hey, Mark,” one of them called, a broad-shouldered fellow built like a bull ox. “What you doing out this late? You better come with us.”
Peeking out from behind Erin, Mark hesitated before responding. “Thanks, Kato, but I’m good. Just going for a walk, you know? I’ll head back home soon.”
“You got nowhere to go back to now that your mama’s dead,” the one called Kato replied.
“How you know ’bout that?” Mark asked suspiciously. Kato was silent.
“The Blues want you lost,” he said finally. “You and your ma lived next to Red Robin too long and heard too much. Can’t trust you to keep your trap shut anymore with your ma gone. You know the Blues get what they want. Give it up and we’ll make this easy on you and your friend.”
“We’re real sorry, Mark,” added one of Kato’s companions quietly.
Erin could make out the bulk of a handgun in the front pocket of Kato’s sweatshirt and the squirming shadow of a finger being laced through the trigger guard. The others were reaching for more guns secreted in their lose clothes. The Vicaria grinned as she leapt at Kato, shoving Mark to the ground and leaving him behind. At last, a battle! Kato was far too slow in pulling his gun, still untangling it from the hem of his sweatshirt when her bare foot cracked against his jaw and sent him sprawling. The Vicaria’s heel arced and came down on Kato’s throat a second and final time. He never even managed to fire his gun.
The others let out a collective growl of shocked outrage and ripped guns from their hiding places. Erin was still grinning as she waded into their midst. For millennia, she lived for such moments of blazing glory! The hulking gangster brought his beer bottle down on the Vicaria as he bellowed in rage. She caught it easily on her forearm and the glass shattered, slicing deeply into her flesh. Blood sheeted down Erin’s arm, but what did such wounds mean to her? Earthly wounds were nothing to one of the Vicaria!
The bottle-wielding mortal was trying to gouge at her face with his jagged weapon as his friends thumbed off safeties. Erin ducked and slammed her shoulder into his midsection. Just like the street brawlers of the old world, when she had come to claim the life of another fighter for his drunken killings. The Spaniard, knotted with muscles like a great gnarled tree, could not stand before Vicarian fury. This modern street tough was no better. Erin swept his feet from under him, catching his wrist as he fell, twisting it and driving the broken bottle deep into his own vitals. He gurgled and was still.
Erin surged to her feet, gloved in slick blood and turned on the other gangsters. They were stumbling back, five guns trained on the Vicaria, and pulled the triggers. At least half a dozen bullets bit into her, but Erin felt nothing. She was on the battlefield of the first great war, charging across plains of ash and thorns of metal into the nest of belt-fed vipers. A hundred bullets tearing at her body had been unable to stop her, only weighted her with lead. Five frightened little humans with tiny guns meant nothing. Mark’s frightened cries were lost in the screams of the dying.
In moments, four lay unmoving on the dirty pavement and the last leaned against an overturned trashcan. He cradled a broken arm against his stomach and stared in wordless terror at the Vicaria. His gun was on the ground at her feet. She kicked the weapon towards him. It clattered to a halt against the toe of his shoes. The terrified gangster whimpered and cringed away from his own gun as though it might bite him. Erin took a step towards him, her fingers curled into claws and dripping blood onto the sidewalk.
“Pick it up,” she demanded.
There was no glory in defeating an unarmed, cowering enemy. The red-drenched Vicaria kicked the man in the ribs and sent him sprawling. She shoved the ball of her foot down against his sensitive flesh of his inner arm and pointed to the gun. Moaning in pain, he finally made a desperate grab for the weapon with his free hand. Erin grinned and stepped back as he hauled himself haltingly to his feet. He brought up the gun, his injured hand trembling so hard that he nearly dropped it. She waited, basking in the musical roar of blood in her ears, the thunder of her heartbeat and the rising gale of her own breath. Somehow, it seemed that she had never heard anything so beautiful before. Finally, the gun rang out. A child’s scream answered, hideous and sharp.
“No!”
He had fired right past Erin and hit Mark, perhaps a mistake of his faltering aim or perhaps a final desperate move. The Vicaria did not care. A bounding step brought her within arms’ reach and a blow with the blade of her hand sent him twitching down into the gutter. Erin ran to Mark’s side as quickly as her long legs would carry her, but her body seemed strangely slow, heavy. There would be time enough for questions later.
Mark was not crying, just holding his blood-slicked hand in front of his face. His dark eyes were wide and round with disbelief. Erin pulled him into her arms. There was blood everywhere… so much of it. The sticky red ichor had never bothered her before, but now, it made the Vicaria’s heart clench painfully in her chest. Would he die? Erin felt sick just contemplating the idea. Was it the prospect of failing her task? She was surprised to realize that it was not her duty that made her heart ache so, but the thought of losing this kind, brave little boy. She ripped Mark’s dark-stained jersey and probed gently at the wound. Please, let it not be fatal!
The bullet had caught her young charge in the shoulder, less than a hand’s span from the sharp line of his collarbone. Mark screamed in pain at her light touch and more blood poured from the wound. She could feel a hard, hot lump not just under the skin. It was dangerously close to his heart and only the bullet still lodged in his flesh had kept him from bleeding to death already. But it would not keep him alive for long. She did not have long to take him to a hospital. Where was everyone? Every window was dark, veiled by drawn curtains.
“I don’t feel good,” Mark moaned. His eyes were glassy, rolling up behind fluttering eyelids for a terrible moment before finally focusing on the Vicaria. “Erin, you’re hurt!”
He put a quivering but gentle little hand against her chest and Erin almost screamed in pain. How? But she was a Vicaria! Nothing in the world or the next could harm her. Yet the bullets that had seemed so insignificant only moments before suddenly burned with agony. She looked down at the bleeding little boy in her arms. Her blood and pain were terribly mortal. Erin bowed her head in defeat. How could she save Mark now? She was human, fragile and fallible.
How had this happened? Erin realized with slowly dawning horror what she had done. Spoken to the fallen gangster, goading him and wailing when she saw Mark fall. That breath did not belong to her and she had wasted it on baiting a defeated man! Erin had put her own glorification before Mark, before his mother’s prayers for his safety.
“It’ll be okay, Erin. There… there’s a hospital just a block past Mason Street,” Mark whispered. His eyes were flickering white crescents as he struggled to stay conscious. He pointed weakly down the filthy street. Between the cracked and leaning buildings, Erin could just make out the blushing glow of the coming dawn. “Just a little further… that way. You… you can make it. Get going!”
Erin’s eyes stung. When she licked her lips, she tasted copper. Blood and tears sparkled in his black hair under the sporadic light of the street lamps. Mortality had not stopped Mark’s mother from defending the boy to her last breath, from loving him so intently that her final fear for his life had called a out to a Vicaria. Erin brushed her trembling fingers across his cheek. Every inch as selfishly as she had hungered for battle, she yearned to see Mark safe and well. What moment had made her mortal, blood lust or affection?
She held him close and struggled to her feet. There was no time for self-reflection or flagellation. Mark was in pain, he was dying! He pushed her away with quickly flagging strength, but Erin clung to him and ran. Her legs were numb, heavy. She could not feel each sharp, shuddering impact of her unshod feet on the concrete until it jolted in her aching spine. Her footprints were shockingly red in the dim predawn light, slippery and treacherous, but she ran.
Where was Mason Street? Erin’s heart was hammering, this time in panic instead of excitement. Where was the light? It was so hard to see… Her vision was turning gray and crumbling at the edges like burnt paper. A light was blinking yellow over an intersection as Erin ran into it. Or was it red? She could not tell, but by the flashing light, she could just make out the sign hanging askance from the post by a twist of baling wire. Mason Street.
Erin stumbled over the curb. Carrying Mark’s limp weight, she had no way to steady herself and crashed to her knees. Her pants tore and her knees left broad smears of blood. Erin tried to rise, but fell once again. Mark was so still. His dark skin was a frightening ashy color and every shallow breath brought a froth of red bubbles to his slack lips. The boy had only minutes left. She pulled herself to her feet and ran.
Where was the hospital? Erin bolted across the intersection of Mason Street and Weaver Way. There! She could just make out the graceful stark rise of a tall white building. The side was marked with a great golden caduceus, the winged staff and snakes of the healers, glowing in the rising morning light. Erin wept with joy. She was so close!
Something came screaming down the road towards her, a beast of steel and blinking eyes or red and blue. Erin barely caught sight of the black shield and blue 28 on the door as she ran past. The police car screeched as it wheeled in a tight circle through the intersection and she was bathed in white light. Still, Erin ran. Behind her, she heard doors clicking open and the even more ominous clack of guns being pulled from their holsters.
“Police! Freeze!”
Erin ran. The hospital was only a half block away… less… It shone like a great blazing beacon that reduced the fire of the Gates of Glory to scattered embers. She had never known a sight so beautiful.
“Freeze! Stop where you are or we’ll open fire!”
The hospital was a scant hundred yards away. Erin could not hear her own heart beat, only the pounding of her feet as she ran. A woman, an angel all in white came through the doors. The nurse was pulling keys from her purse and muttering to herself. She looked up, screaming for a doctor as she caught sight of Erin and her precious burden.
“Open fire!”
It was only three small bullets that finally drove Erin to the ground, but she would not have traded their burning kiss for the storm of lead and laser fire of all the wars of all the ages past and yet to come. She cradled Mark against her chest as she fell.
The car doors slammed again, but there was no squeal of tires heralding their escape, only a choir of angry voices demanding answers. Two doctors flew towards Erin on wings of white cotton, pulling Mark from her arms with gentle care and lifting him to a gurney. An old man with deep smile lines shined a flashlight in her eyes and shook his head.
“We’ll take care of the boy, miss. Just rest now. If there anything you’d like us to tell him after… to tell him later?” he asked gently.
“Tell him… tell him that I love him.”
They were his mother’s final words, and Erin’s, spoken with her last mortal breath. She smiled and closed her eyes.
~ ~ ~
Vicaria, can you hear me? Listen well, for I have only a fraction of a moment…
There are no rules to the lives of humanity. Nations and cities may place laws on those in their dominion, but in the end, a human is ruled only by her heart. Often, the price of a mortal heart is high, when they become twisted and corrupted. But for a moment of love, they accept this heavy toll.
There is more to existence than blood and glory, Vicaria. I have known love for a brave, selfless boy. I had less than a night with him, but I burned brighter in those hours than the thousands of years that came before. I have wept my own tears for him and spoken with my own breath of my love. Do not pity me, for I lived well, even if only for a handful of moments.
Listen to them… to us, Vicaria. Visions of righteousness and vengeance are only a part of the dreams of humanity and not their greatest part.
Rest now. I died well and have no need to call for you.
