Chapter 501 - A Parade of Memories (Patreon)

Talia fell upon the bed and, with a dramatic wail, buried her face in her pillows.  It actually took her a moment before her mind caught up to the scenario, but when it did, her tears dried and the sobs fell away.  Lifting her head, she looked around, seeing the once-familiar confines of her quarters back in her mother’s palace.  The expected décor was present, from the tacky golden trim to the elaborately carved – and gaudy – furniture.  But at least the bed was soft. 

She pushed herself upright and looked down at her hands.  Her human hands.  There was no evidence of her sharp claws, and her skin had taken on the rosy hue she’d once taken for granted.  More, she felt emotion welling up in her chest, and breath filling her lungs.  She was alive.  A human once more.  And it felt as if her entire journey as one of the unliving was just a bad dream.

Was that possible?  To dream years of a life she hadn’t lived? 

No.  Talia knew that wasn’t the case, and the memories that came flooding into her mind verified that she hadn’t imagined everything.  For uncountable hours, she’d been subjected to one scenario after another.  Each of them detailed some aspect of her past, from her earliest years as a child to the months she’d spent traveling across the Radiant Isles on her last mission before becoming one of the undead. 

As she got her bearings, Talia remembered the very scenario in which she’d found herself.  Though she wished she hadn’t.  Even more, she wished that her emotions would return to their muted state so that she wouldn’t feel the humiliation radiating through her mind and body. 

Or that she could simply forget the source of her embarrassment. 

But that wasn’t how memory – nor emotions – worked.  There was no forgetting what had happened, even if she wished for it with all her mind.  The worst part was knowing that it didn’t really matter.  In the grand scheme of things, her childish missteps were unimportant in the extreme.  And yet, they did matter, at least in the moment. 

The more she thought about it, the more she wanted to once again bury her face in her pillows and weep until her tears were no more.  As she considered that, there was a knock at her door, but the entrant didn’t wait for an answer before she swept through. 

Talia immediately recognized that Constance – her mother – was different.  She held herself with more poise.  Her face was calmer.  And for a brief moment, she looked like any other mother come to comfort her daughter. 

Was it a mask?

Or had Talia’s memory of the woman been stained by her eventual plummet into insanity? 

Constance sat next to her on the bed, then reached her arm around Talia’s shoulders.  She flinched at the woman’s touch, but it passed quickly under her warm embrace.  Constance pulled her close, then leaned her cheek against Talia’s head. 

“It’s going to be okay,” she said in her most motherly voice. 

Talia wanted to scream.  She needed to weep.  But most of all, every instinct she possessed wanted to be comforted by the woman who should have loved her above all else.  It was madness.

“Everyone makes a fool of themselves at your age,” Constance continued.  “It is inevitable, especially when it comes to boys.”

Talia’s memories flooded her mind.  That very day, she’d confessed her undying love to one of the Radiant Guardsman who had been tasked with protecting her.  Named Elend, he was everything she thought a Radiant Guardsman should be.  Tall and handsome, he’d worn his armor so easily.  He was like a knight in one of the stories she liked to read when she thought nobody would notice.

And he had laughed at her.

He hadn’t meant it to be derisive.  Just a chuckle at a child’s crush.  Then, he’d patted her head and said that she would make another man very happy one day.  It was condescending and insulting and utterly understandable.  The man was in his early twenties, while at that time, Talia was barely fourteen.  It would have been more disturbing if he’d taken it seriously.  Or worse, reciprocated that crush.

Yet, the Talia that had first experienced that memory had been devastated, and those feelings enveloped the current version that had been forced upon her by the dungeon.  She knew it wasn’t real.  She knew the feelings coursing through her mind were only echoes of the past. 

That didn’t matter, though.  She felt them just as keenly as if she’d truly traveled back in time to that day.  As a result, it was so easy to get lost in the memory, and if she hadn’t already experienced many more just like it, she might have let that current pull her away from the shores of reality.

Perhaps that would be better.

Certainly, her current life was not going so well.  Her closest friend lay on the verge of dying, and her adopted home had fallen prey to a civil war.  Sure, Zeke was there.  So was Pudge.  But in the years since she’d ascended, a distance had come between them, both in a literal and a figurative sense.  She still loved them both, but they weren’t nearly as close as they had been.

Maybe that was part of adulthood.

With age, people drifted apart.  As people developed different interests, the friendships of the past were inevitably replaced by changing priorities.  What did that mean for her current situation?  Talia wasn’t sure. 

In any case, she knew she couldn’t let herself be distracted by the current memory.  So, without further hesitation, she divorced herself from the apparent situation.  It was a trick she’d had to learn during the first scenario, but she’d been forced to further internalize it with each subsequent set of circumstances.  Now, it was second nature to discard the image that had been forced upon her. 

Her skin paled, and green blood coursed through veins as her claws grew.  She lashed out, ripping the memory of her mother’s throat out.  She died with a confused look on her face.

“I want to be sorry,” Talia rasped.  “But I’m not.  You were planning to sacrifice me from the moment I was born.  You are more of a monster than I could ever be.”

As the life left Constance’s body, the scene shifted once more.  Only this time, there was quite a time skip.  She found herself in Darukar, in the immediate wake of the her solving of the spate of deaths she’d spent months investigating. 

Adriel was there, sitting on a bench near the river that cut through the city.  Talia sat next to her.  Both wore their Sentry uniforms, shiny new medals decorating their chests.  As Talia gazed out across the river, she barely noticed the handful of boats drifting lazily in the current as fishermen cast nets into the water. 

“You know there’s more to it,” Adriel said.  “Right?”

“I suspected as much.  Dirst wasn’t acting alone.”

“Do you think it was Adontis?” Adriel asked.

Talia shook her head.  “It wasn’t,” she answered.  “They were being used.”

Indeed, at first glance, the official explanation – that Dirst was an Adontis plant gone rogue – was sensible enough.  Yet, Talia knew the situation was far more complex than that.  He’d been prodded along by an unseen hand, manipulated until he was too far gone to think straight. 

The version of Talia in the memory had no idea how it would all play out.  There was a huge movement, the likes of which she couldn’t have imagined, already in motion.  And it had resulted in a schism in the Kingdom of El’kireth.  Thousand had already been slain.  Tens of thousands.  And more would follow, especially if the aggressive faction led by the Death Warden.  They were expansionists with lofty aspirations of taking over the entire world and converting it into an undead paradise.

Talia knew how that would end.

The Kingdom of El’kireth was strong, and the undead had a host of advantages over the living.  But there was no chance they could overcome the full might of the entire world that would be arrayed against them.  It was ludicrous to think otherwise.  If they expanded, it would be a worldwide war.  Enemies would become allies as the living fought against a threat to their very existence. 

It would be a massacre, and El’kireth would not survive.

That was only one of the reasons she opposed expansion.  The others were more complex.  She was no stranger to death.  She’d killed countless people, and she knew she would kill more.  Yet, Talia didn’t relish the slaughter.  And if it came to war, tens of thousands – perhaps even more – would die. 

She couldn’t stomach that.

And then there was the sudden nature of the movement for expansion itself.  For centuries, the undead had been content to remain within their established borders.  But now, they had abruptly decided to cross those lines?  It smacked of manipulation, though Talia had no idea who could have enough power to do such a thing.

The Death Warden herself, maybe? 

It was possible, but that didn’t feel right.

It was one of the mysteries that had haunted her ever since the split had escalated into a war.  However, Talia hadn’t had time to investigate before her opposition to the Death Warden’s policy of expansionism had forced her to retreat into the Cradle of Life.  Since then, it was everything she could do to simply survive, much less embark on an investigation. 

“Do you ever wish you were still among the living?” asked Talia suddenly.  It wasn’t how the conversation had originally gone, but she was far past following the script of her memories. 

“Sometimes,” the vampiric woman admitted.  “I had a life.  Children, perhaps.  I don’t remember much of it, but I do know that before I was turned, I was an entirely different person.  Most of the people here were never anything but undead.  They don’t know about that hole the transformation leaves behind.  I do.”

She let out a sigh.  “So, yes.  I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like if I had remained that woman,” Adriel continued.  “But she was someone else.  Someone I don’t even know.  Was she happy?  Maybe.  Probably not, though, if she ended up here.  The living do not visit the Kingdom of El’kireth on a whim.  I can’t help but feel curious, though.”

“I remember everything,” Talia admitted.  “I didn’t lose my memories like most people.  I don’t know why.  But there’s a clear line between who I used to be and who I am now.  I feel like a different person, even though I know that’s not true.”

“Perhaps that is just you growing up.”

That made some sense.  She’d been a teenager when she’d embarked upon that first quest to investigate Micayne and his territory.  Years had passed since then, and she’d been through a host of formative experiences.  So, it stood to reason that she would have been changed by those events. 

Especially when many of them were traumatic.

But Talia knew that it went deeper than that.  She hadn’t only grown older and more mature.  She had also been transformed into a completely different race from the one into which she had been born.  Her emotions had been muted, and she’d been forced to consume the flesh of her enemies.  That she would become a different person – if only as a defense mechanism – was inevitable. 

In truth, it was likely some combination of a multitude of factors that had changed her. 

Regardless, that debate, while interesting to her, was immaterial.  She was who she was, and she couldn’t allow herself to be distracted by the memory.  That was the danger.  Getting lost in scenes from her past was tempting.  Moreso than anything she’d ever encountered.  They were better times, each and every one, and it would be so easy to simply give in and let herself be enveloped by the nostalgia.

Yet, she could not allow that.  People depended on her success.  Lives would be lost if she failed. 

So, with some degree of sadness, she attacked Adriel.  The vampiric woman was so surprised that she only barely put up a fight.  It was useless, and Talia quickly overpowered the memory.  The real Adriel might have won, but the cheap copy was incapable of defeating Talia. 

As soon as Adriel lay dead next to the bench, the scene shifted once more.  This time, it was a moment from her childhood.  Talia looked down to see that she was wearing a glittering gown with flared skirts.  Her presentation to the people of Beacon, she reasoned. 

Like so many of the others, it was a good memory.  Yet, Talia was determined to bypass it as soon as possible.