At last, it was over. He had won. Tu'teggacha had won!
The Taskmaster could not prevent a wet, burbling laugh from bubbling out of his squidlike throat as he beheld the two children. A boy and a girl, perfectly healthy,
completely within his power. Here was the perfect material for molding into his ultimate weapon, the greatest slave-soldiers the Maw had ever seen. Before he had always worked with flawed tools, creatures riven with the impurities of lives they had already lived. He had spent so much time erasing the people they had once been, hollowing out their minds and scraping raw their souls to make room for absolute faith and loyalty.
But the children were a blank canvas for his masterwork...
... or so he thought.
The Ebruchi looked over at the mother for a moment. He found his thoughts toward oddly cluttered, as if he was trying to root around for them in a messy office. She had survived only thanks to his last-minute change of heart, ordering the medical droids to save her life alongside the lives of her children. Why had he done that? Something about keeping her alive so she could not escape his vengeance, so that he could torment her soul... but the idea felt somehow
foreign. Shouldn't he just kill her now, to ensure she had no opportunity to escape and take revenge? She was a slippery one.
But the thought that pressed down on his mind remained firm and unyielding. He would not kill her. He needed her alive, even if he could not quite grasp the
why of it, the answer dancing out of his reach whenever he tried to close his gnarled fingers around it. Perhaps he was simply tired. It had been a long, long day, and despite accomplishing his goals he could not deny that he felt
spent. He would retire to his quarters to rest, leaving the children in the care of his droids. There was no escape from his secret facility, after all. He need not worry about any interference in his plans anymore.
The shadow war was over at last, and he was the victor.
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Mercy was fading. Her consciousness was sinking down into the darkness of exhaustion, sped along by the painkillers the medical droids had given her. Kallan had felt only echoes of what she had experienced, like words spoken underwater, but even that had been overwhelming. To say that it had been a difficult birth was something of an understatement. But the pain was coming to an end, and Mercy was at last able to simply
rest, without the shadow of death hanging over her. They had made it through. Maybe Kallan had given her enough strength to hold on, holding onto her in the guise of Asher.
Or maybe she had always been strong enough on her own.
Those last words before she fell unconscious, though... they would haunt Kallan for a long, long time.
~ You were never unworthy, ~ he tried to tell her, scrambling for the right words to make her understand - if such words even existed. But she had already sunk down into the peace of temporary oblivion, lost in the darkness of dreamless sleep. When she woke, she would know he was not Asher. He wished he had known what to say, something that would have stayed with her, helped her heal. But that wasn't his gift. Tu'teggacha broke minds, and Kallan couldn't heal them. He didn't know how.
The bitterest irony of all was this: both Asher and Mercy had felt the same way. Each of them had felt
unworthy of the other, had felt that they always let the other one down. Their love for each other had been undercut by the feeling that they did not deserved to
be loved. That was what had led them to the tragic ending on Tython, the day that had left one of them dead and the other broken inside. Perhaps, if they had learned to believe that they were worthy of love, they could have escaped that fate. Or perhaps they were always doomed, caught in the jaws of the Maw like so many others.
Kallan would never know for certain...
... but the question would haunt him to the end of his days.
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~ They were born, Mercy. And they were perfect. ~
Kallan was waiting when Mercy awoke in her cell, scant hours after the traumatic birth. He'd had a little time to think on what to say, now that she knew who he was - only her husband's shadow, and not her husband himself. He still didn't feel prepared for this conversation, but he had to try. He had to do whatever he could to salvage their impossible situation.
~ They saved us all, you know. They influenced the mind of the Taskmaster, convinced him to keep you alive. ~ He offered her a solemn smile, supportive but insistent.
~ Now it's our turn. Now we have to find a way to save them. ~
Ara Sheridan
Zhea Nox
