CHAPTER 5
A Way Forward
“How? How is this possible?” Shepherd asked aloud of himself.
“You know very well,” the voice of Cecily lectured.
“The power is supposed to give me what I want. I wanted to heal her,” Shepherd argued to his feminine aspect.
“Maybe there are limits on what you can do after all,” the faint voice of Finian posited. “For instance, I’ve never seen a god raise someone from the dead.”
“The divine power is limited only by the one who wields it,” Cecily corrected. “By their desire, more specifically. If you have not seen a god raise someone from the dead, that’s because the gods you’ve did not want to raise someone from the dead.”
“But I wanted this,” Shepherd broke into his combating thoughts, “so badly that I felt it. I felt the power like never before. I commanded it, and it listened to me. I saw myself guiding it. Saw the future that such control of it could bring.”
“Obviously you didn’t want it badly enough,” Finnian blurted out. Both Shepherd and Cecily turned to look at him, incredulous. “Maybe,” Finnian backpeddled. “I meant to say maybe. Actually, I didn’t. Sorry. You are me, there’s no use in lying. Strange that I would feel the need to spare your feelings. Oh, it’s because they’re my feelings too. Ugh, I’m starting to hate this whole, three aspects as one pickle we’re in.”
“Well, seems the two of us are in agreement on something at least,” Shepherd offered, finding a slight solace in recognizing a piece of the real Finnian in the ghost that stood before him.
“All three of us are in agreement,” Cecily clarified emphatically, “all the time! You know that!”
“Fine! Yes, I know that,” Shepherd relented. “Are you happy now?”
“No!” Cecily yelled. “You know I’m not.”
Shepherd opened his mouth to retort but ended up laughing instead. “I’ve missed this,” he said. And after a while, after his laughter had died down and the silence set in, “I miss you.”
He did not look up to see the ghosts of his friends looking back at him. He did not need to. He knew they were smiling, because he was smiling. He knew that they felt hot, because he felt hot. But more importantly, while he couldn’t be fully sure, he believed that they felt the same way…no matter where they truly were at this moment.
“Didn’t want it enough,” Cecily said aloud quietly; as though she would have said it to herself, had she been a self.
“Huh,” Shepherd and Finnian uttered, the three of them coming to the same realization.
“The power grants its bearer what he or she truly wants,” Shepherd began, forming his thesis from the scattered thoughts of the three of them. “It stands to reason then, that if two gods come to conflict over the same thing…if they want the same thing, then the god that wants it more will win it.”
“Rama wants her eyes more than you do,” Finnian added.
“More than we do,” Shepherd corrected. “For the moment, at least.” He gave the ghost of Cecily a hopeful look. “This can still work.”
“You think you can encourage all the world to follow a single god…you, and then, with all that adoration and worship, you will free them?”
“You know the answer to that,” Shepherd said snidely. He enjoyed turning her own lecture-ous ways against her.
“Very well,” she conceded with a wry smile. “But you know the other gods will not allow it.”
“They won’t have a choice,” Shepherd concluded, “not if I want freedom for mankind more than they want the slavery of mankind.”
“This is a dangerous game you play,” Cecily said. “In the entire history of mankind, never has selflessness been victorious over selfishness.”
“It certainly has at times,” Shepherd argued.
“In moments. Instances. Matters of singular choice, maybe. But never in the long years of man,” Cecily clarified. “This is more than a soldier sacrificing himself for his country. Or a martyr giving herself over to heathens for her god. The type of sacrifice you are suggesting must last as long as the world itself lasts.”
“You forget,” Shepherd said with a smile, “I am a god. Not a mortal. To a god, it may be that the lifespan of mankind is as a moment to man. An instant. A matter of singular choice.”
Cecily’s brow furrowed and her head fell. She was thinking, Shepherd knew. He traveled, as his feminine aspect, down a road of conjecture looking to find where the dead-end lay. The Cecily-side of him was sure there she would find it, so sure in fact that Shepherd was taken aback at how much he apparently doubted himself.
Finally, the pale reflection of his friend looked up at him. Her face was inscrutable. She hadn’t found any dead ends, at least, he didn’t think she had. Just as he was beginning to doubt everything he had come to know about his connection with Cecily, she shrugged her shoulders.
“I’m right?” Shepherd asked, unsure if he was relieved or not.
“I don’t know. Because you don’t.”
“You could be right,” Finnian offered, materializing into view.
“I think I’m right.”
“I’m not so sure,” Cecily posited.
“Stop doing that.”
“You could be wrong,” Finnian added.
“You too?”
“That’s right,” Finnian added with a wry smile.
“What would you have of me lord?” the woman on the alter interrupted. Had Shepherd not known better, he would have sworn that there was a hint of annoyance this time.
But he was too excited with his epiphany to dwell on a strange woman possibly judging him for a conversation that, to her, would appear to be a single person talking to himself. He stepped toward her, releasing the ghosts of the past back into the ether of his own divinity. He would did not need to confer with Cecily and Finnian anymore. He knew what to do nest.
“I want you to stand.”
She sat up and quickly swung her legs over the side of the stone alter, vaulting herself onto her feet before him. The blood from her wounds trickled down her face, falling now onto the simple white frock she wore, and leaving its mark.
Shepherd focused all the strength he had into suppressing his power. The strain pulled him even tighter than it did when he faced the crowd at Malmot, but he was determined to talk to this woman before he acted; and to talk to her, he needed her to be freed from his subjugating influence.
He felt his power recede from the world around him and enter back into himself. It forced him down to the ground, like he was carrying a heavy boulder on his back up a steep hill. But as he fell, the woman rose. The power was leaving her, and with it so too the burden of it.
“Ah. AHHH!” her cries of pain turned to shrieks as the severity of her injuries took back the forefront of her mind.
“Lady…,” Shepherd struggled to say. His body was quivering as it tried to contain his own infinite raw energy.
“Who is that?” she called out, terror tinging every word.
“My na…” he couldn’t even finish the word. He breathed in and out; short, sharp breaths as he readied to speak again. “Shepherd!” he finally managed.
“What do you want?”
“To…help!”
“Help how?” she asked meekly as she brought her hands up to where her eyes used to be to try and stem the flow of blood.
“Eyes!” Shepherd barked quickly, breathing fast again. He felt like he was pushing a door closed against a great wave on the sea, crashing against it on the other side. “Get them back!”
“Get my eyes back? Who are you to promise such a thing?” the woman shrieked. Then, amidst fresh sobs, “you’re no god.”
“I can,” Shepherd’s voice was down to a whisper now. The rope of his control was down to a single strand. “If…you want.”
“Of course I want my eyes back. And with them, I would leave here, and so help me if I ever laid eyes on another god.”
SNAP
“What would you have of me lord?”
The strand had broken, and the power flowed out from Shepherd. As it did, it filled him with a euphoric giddiness, the likes of which he had not felt since Malmot. For a moment, he remembered the might of Malthus in all its glory, and the image of all the gods in existence bowing low before him came to life in his waking sight.
The euphoria passed in a moment, and the sightless woman came back into view. She stood hunched before him, but proud. She did not wail with the pain of her injuries now, but the blood determinedly continued to gush; a scarlet reminder of what Shepherd failed to save in the first place, and the promise he intended to uphold now.
“You will not stop,” Shepherd commanded, “until her eyes are restored.”
“You are too kind lord,” she said in the cold calm of the possessed. “Now what would you have of me?”
Shepherd was struck with a sudden realization. “I don’t know your name,” he said aloud.
“Do you wish to?”
“Yes.”
“You honor me lord,” she said dispassionately. “My name is Carys.”
“Carys. Will you walk with me?”
“Anywhere lord,” she asserted coolly. “Everywhere. Forever and ever.”
“Not forever,” Shepherd proclaimed. “Only until we take back what was taken from you. And to that end,” he pulled Brand from the scabbard at his side. The blade came alive with a white glow that pulsed from within. “We go to the one responsible for this.”
“But Janus cannot restore my eyes lord,” she stated stoically. “Nor the priestess.”
“They were not the ones responsible,” Shepherd said and instantly wished he hadn’t. Because right on the heels of him saying it…
“Actually, they were,” the ghost of Finnian suddenly appeared before him. “Janus more so than the priestess, but still…they were responsible.”
“I was trying to make a point,” Shepherd argued.
“Oh I know. Just like you knew I couldn’t resist correcting you.”
“You’re not correcting me. Janus and the priestess are puppets. I want the puppet master.”
“Oooh, that’s nice. I do like that. Being puppets still doesn’t rob them of responsibility for this, but that is a good line.”
Shepherd was angry, though he couldn’t help but give the ghost of his friend a small smile. “You don’t take anything seriously, do you?”
“I do. Just not too seriously,” Finnian clarified. “And I’ll never let you take anything too seriously either.”
“Hm, fair enough,” Shepherd grinned.
Flashing a smile of his own, the pale Finnian vanished.
As Shepherd calmed, Brand’s glow faded, finally diminishing altogether until the sword was just a piece of bright steel in his hand. He was grateful in this moment to have his friends still with him, even if they were only reflections of himself. They held enough of what made up the real Cecily and Finnian to bring out in him what they brought out in him: wisdom through forethought, and temperance through humor. They gave him confidence to pursue this path, in no small part because he came to it with their help. Which is why now there was nothing else to do but go forth.
“To Rama.”
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