Unbroken Bonds: The Bonds that Tie #6, page 4
“The first time I awoke, I did not get to meet my Bonded. I knew something was missing and that there was more to my existence than the desolate life I led. Then the second time… you were there.”
He turns to look at me, and for the first time, I see some expression in his face.
Hunger.
The type that has butterflies rioting in my stomach, the type that says that this man would consume me in the most satisfying and delightful ways if only I would let him, audience be damned.
My cheeks flush, and I clear my throat under the heat of his gaze.
“Each time I woke, there were more and more Bonded, until we knew that time was repeating itself, that the six of us were supposed to walk together. But the timelines never quite lined up. The closest we got was four of us at the same time, the last two missing out by a decade. The Draconis takes longer than anyone else to re-cycle and awaken. It has always been this way.”
The Draconis, the Soothsayer, they have names for themselves, but they’re nothing like the ones we have for each other now.
I turn to look at Gabe for a moment, but he's grimacing as he finishes off the last of the antacid, still looking green around the edges.
“What do you want? From us, I mean?” I say, the words tumbling out of me before I really think them through.
I clear my throat again and try to be clearer. “What is it that you keep coming back for? Or do you have no control over this ‘rebirth cycle’ you're on?”
He leans forward in his chair, the hand on my thigh tightening a little more as it answers me slowly. “We return for the Eternal. We return because it calls out to us. The thought of a lonely existence for my Bonded is unthinkable. While the Eternal returns, so shall we.”
The Eternal.
I meet North's eyes for a moment, watching his flare with interest before I shut my own and check in with my bond.
Is that your name? The Eternal?
What use is a name to a god? But yes, it is what they have called me.
I always hate when it talks in riddles like this, but the fact that it's answering me at all gives me hope.
Why do you keep returning if you've lived hundreds of lives with each of them? Why continue to come back here?
I can feel the itch of irritation on my skin, the emotion not my own, and I'm expecting a full-blown bond tantrum from it. Instead, it floods my mind and takes over my body before I have the chance to fight back.
There's smoke everywhere.
The area around us is burning, a wall of flames devouring the well-established tree as though it’s nothing more than scrub. The ground underneath our feet is blackened by the ash. Even through the makeshift leather shoes on my feet, I can feel how hot the ground is, as though scorched from the sun itself.
Every fiber of my being is exhausted.
There are no more souls left to take, none but our own. And no matter how hard the Corvus pushes me to take his life force into myself to repair the damage done to my body, I will not do it.
I couldn't hurt him any more than I could hurt the rest of them.
The devastation of the battle between us and the other god-bonds is severe. Piles of bodies around us in various stages of damage and decay, hundreds more have been consumed by the shadows with little to show that those Gifted had ever existed in the first place.
Still, it's not enough.
My energy is waning, and once again, we're going to be separated from each other in death, as we always are. I look down at my vessel, and I find that I've already taken significant damage. The Corvus and the Crux are both unable to heal me the way I can heal them. The only one of my Bonded who has that ability isn't with us this time. Even if there were a Healer I found tolerable nearby, I doubt they would be strong enough to fix the mess my stomach is in.
I can see the strain around the Corvus’ eyes as he looks me over as well. I can see the rampant need in him to fix me and wipe away the damage, but I have already started to accept that this lifetime of ours is over. Just another chapter in a book that doesn't seem to have a happy ending… or even just an ending in sight.
I don't know what it is that we had done in a previous life to be cursed in this way, to wake up and find one another, over and over again, but never truly finding happiness. To be hunted by those who should be nothing more than ants beneath our feet. If only we could all wake up together. If only we could complete our Bonds and find peace together.
Instead, we are cursed with nothing but destruction, death, and decay, heartache and loneliness, over the span of a millennia.
This memory hurts my bond.
It tiptoes around it in my mind, fussing with it like a festering and weeping wound, one of a hundred other deaths they had endured at the hands of our enemies because we are separated and weakened without each other.
Without a complete Bonded Group.
The Crux returns to us, blood covering his hands and his face in the shadows as the darkness from the tree coverage bends towards him. The face he wears is different, but the soul inside is still true, still perfect and mine, no matter which vessel he wears. Even though it's nothing more than a memory, I cringe away from it inside, as loyal to my Bonded as my bond is to the other god-bonds. I suppose that's why we work together so well.
My bond agrees.
Even in the memory, I can feel that the strength of my spirit is the strongest my bond has ever felt. I had always believed that my power came from my bond, but being here in this vessel, I can see that's not true. This vessel is different. It’s weaker, the limits to what it can take are much lower than mine. I can see clearly that they’re not a good fit.
Even without the bond, my Gift is more than the other Gifted could ever hope to have.
“We’re not all going to get out of here alive. If you need to take our souls to live, do it. We will return to you again in another cycle,” the Corvus says, but I shake my head.
“There is no use being here unless we're together. There is no me without you.”
He drops down onto his haunches, the shadows that wrap around his legs are obedient to their master as he shakes his head at me. “I can't watch you die again, Eternal. Don't make me watch it all over again.”
The cycling is slowly starting to chip away at us.
This reincarnation of the Corvus is more open with his pain than any others have been before because the vessel might be new, but the soul is tired. The soul has been on a long journey to get to this point, and it’s starting to take its toll.
“We can make it,” the Crux says, looking behind us to the mountain opposite the fire, where the sun is slowly starting to set an orange glow on a blackened sky as the rays of light fight to shine through.
“If we leave now, we can make it.”
The Soothsayer didn't wake up with this cycle, still decades away from his next turn on this earth, but I don't need him here to know that the Crux is lying. He's trying to give his brother something to distract him before our deaths together, something small to get him through the pain of the night, because it's always this way.
It's always standing together and watching the destruction around us as we go forth to our death.
We have a hard choice ahead of us now. Whether we choose to take matters into our own hands here and now, to leave behind these vessels and begin the cycle again on our own terms, or if we continue to fight until our bodies give out. We've made the decision many times before, never truly happy either way.
I do want to fight. I want to leave the small, sheltered area that we're in at the moment and run until I find that god-bond that haunts us. I want to tear it apart with my bare hands, to show it the same callous treatment that it has shown me and mine. But no matter how many times I've killed it, it continues to wake. It wakes and hunts us down.
I’m tired.
More tired than I ever wanted to admit to my Bonded. So tired that I hope I don't wake with the next cycle or maybe ever again. Maybe I need to give up, to know that the small pockets of joy that I have found with my Bonded are all we’ll ever get, to go to my final resting place at peace, to know that at least I got to meet each of them.
If only for a few moments in a thousand lifetimes, I got to know those who complete my soul.
“Don't think like that, Eternal,” the Crux says, holding out a hand and pressing it to my cheek.
He's having to take care of both of us now, something that doesn't sit quite right with me, but I lean into his hand anyway. It feels strange to do, like the hand isn't familiar to me, but at the same time, it feels like home, because the god beneath the skin remains the same.
“You two should go. Leave here quietly together. I will stay for a little longer, finish what we started and hope that our enemy sleeps through the next cycle.”
He always would give every last piece of himself until there was nothing left, but the Corvus and I would never let him leave alone, not if we had a choice in the matter. Instead, we brush ourselves off, standing together. I try not to wince at the state of my vessel as the blood continues to drip down to the scorched earth beneath our feet.
“We will finish this together,” I say. “We will go to sleep together.”
CHAPTER THREE
North
Watching Oli shut down as she speaks to her bond still sends the same ripples of unease and frustration through my gut as it always has, but I try to distract myself by speaking with my own bond instead.
My least favorite thing to do.
But my feelings don’t matter right now, because as much as I have always fought with the thing that lives inside of me, I will do whatever it takes for my Bonded to be safe. Knowing that there are gods living in each of us means that it’s time to get over my own feelings and start working with it to get through this, especially if there is a precedent of us losing this battle.
I’m never going to lose Oleander again.
Do you call her the Eternal as well?
It answers me quickly enough, clearly listening in on this conversation, though it hadn't made itself known to me. My bonded is Eternal, always.
And what do they call you? You must all have names if you’ve been around that many times.
The Crux. My brother's name is the Corvus. There's also the Soothsayer, the Cleaver, and the Draconis. They have all woken, finally.
The Soothsayer.
That’s what Oli had called Gryphon’s bond.
How are we going to keep them alive? What is your plan for the Eternal and my Bonded that it lives within?
I'm not sure what sort of a response I'm expecting from it, but I'm happy with what I get. Beyond happiness, the relief it fills me with is enough that maybe, just very maybe, I might start speaking to the god a little more often.
They are both mine, as they are yours. There is no distinction. When our enemy comes, as they always do, we will defeat them all. We are unmatched now.
I open my eyes and glance across at Nox to find him already staring at me. I give him a simple nod before he turns back to Gryphon’s bond.
The Soothsayer.
I have to bite the inside of my cheek to stop myself from smirking, already knowing that my Bonded is going to have a lot to say about the names of the gods, but I also find myself happy with the one chosen for her bond.
The Eternal.
Without question, she is eternally and completely mine. The center of our Bonded Group, eternally the one thing that we can all agree on and come together for, all of us working together to keep her safe.
That's the difference, my bond says. That's how we are going to make it through this time, all of us together.
“What's going on?” Gabe mumbles into the silence of the room, and I answer back without any attempts at secrecy.
They have no place here.
“My bond’s name is the Crux, yours is the Draconis. Atlas is the Cleaver, and Nox is the Corvus.”
I’m expecting some sort of reaction from them, especially my brother, but Nox merely shrugs back. “The Corvus makes sense. They both link back to the Draven name. What if all of the reincarnations of the gods with shadows are born to our family bloodline? Father had them too.”
I groan and rub a hand over my face. “Don’t you think we would’ve heard more about all of this if that were true? That maybe we wouldn't have had to look so hard to find the gods?”
“Did you, though? I mean, I know a lot of the books are rare and out of print, but it sounds like these things were hiding in plain sight… If they were ever hiding at all,” Gabe says, still looking incredibly green around the edges, and Atlas gives him a pat on the back with a sympathetic grimace.
The budding friendship they’d shakily started has turned into one of deep respect, and seeing the lengths that the dragon had gone to to keep the masses of Resistance soldiers away from Oleander was inspiring, to say the least. Atlas himself had mastered the Cleaver’s powers in such a short amount of time, thanks to the urgency of the fighting.
All in all, we’d walked away from everything relatively unscathed, only the now-healed bruises and scratches on my Bonded to show for it. Fighting in the Wasteland had taken too long and we’d come too close to losing her. The moment the shield had snapped into place around Oleander, separating her from the entire Bonded Group, I thought we’d lost her. It had only gotten worse when Nox’s shadows had filled the space, obscuring her from our view as she’d fought her torturer off.
I don’t know what I would’ve done if my brother hadn’t made it in there to get to her.
“Do we need to be worried about that?” Atlas murmurs, running a gentle hand down Oli's cheek, but Nox only shrugs.
“She's always had a close relationship with her bond, even when she was scared of what it could do. Whatever it's showing her right now, it’s important for her to see.”
Any distraction to keep her from thinking about what had happened on the battlefield at the Wasteland is a win in my opinion. When we’d returned to the Sanctuary, it was only the distraction of Gryphon’s bond that had kept her from falling apart.
The moment we had returned here, I could see the cracks beginning to show on her carefully pasted-together facade. No matter how righteous she may feel in her work now that she is doing so to defend her Bonded Group and the community itself, it still takes a toll on her that no one understands as well as I do.
Her kill count in the Wasteland was only rivaled by my own and Nox’s, the sweeping clouds of our Gifts flooding over the soldiers and tearing them apart in the most vicious and violent ways. There isn’t an inch of remorse in me, but still, the cost of that power is heavy on my shoulders. It’s part of being a human with a soul, I think. Knowing that the weight of that choice is yours alone to carry.
I might believe in my abilities to tell right from wrong, but there's no denying that to the Resistance and families of the East Coast, I'm the villain for what I can do, a role I'll gladly play again and again for our safety and freedom.
“Are we going to remember the past lives as well? Am I ever going to remember what it was like to be a dragon back then?” Gabe asks, and when I look up, he's staring at the Soothsayer.
It stares back at him with its blank and soulless eyes as though it has no intention of answering him, but Gabe stares back at it with that open and easy way of his. Whether or not it's that that breaks the god-bond down, he does eventually answer. “If the Draconis chooses to share it with you, then yes, but it has always only ever communicated with the Eternal. It's only ever wanted her.”
Gabe nods for a second and then shrugs. “It communicated well enough with us both when she jumped into my dreams, so I'm not worried. I don't have to remember the past lives to know that everything is okay.”
I hope it’s really that easy.
I shut my eyes again, rubbing a hand over them more out of irritation than anything else, and my bond speaks once again.
I will show you. I will show you what happens if we fail.
I’m surrounded by a sea of cobblestones and bodies. Underneath my feet, there are rustic wooden slats with nails sticking out everywhere, as though the platform had been thrown together in a rush with whatever materials were on hand. The buildings around me look like quaint village houses rather than any of the modern architecture that I am accustomed to, straw rooftops and roughly hewn stone walls everywhere. It’s as though I’ve been thrown hundreds of years into the past in the blink of an eye.
I guess I have been, in a way.
I don't know where I am or what time it is, but I glance over and find my brother standing with me.
That one thing has stayed true, no matter what.
He doesn't look like Nox, of course. His face is so different, but I get the same feeling from him as I do from Nox. It’s the protective urge to kill anyone who might want to harm him and a sense of familial connection, the need to make it out of this situation alive for him as much as for myself and my Bonded.
For him to find happiness and contentment.
I feel all of that for myself as well, for all of us to make it through this hellish experience that I’ve found out we’re stuck in, both back at the Sanctuary and here in this memory.
The cheering and shouting around us is my first clue that that isn't going to happen.
I look down at my hands, but they are bound together in front of me with iron chains. The skin all the way up to my elbows is black, the same blackness that it changes to when I call on my shadows, but they’re nowhere to be seen. I haven't run out of power for my Gift. I can still feel it there, but there's a block inside of me, something stopping me from accessing it, even though I can feel the shadows pounding beneath my skin to come out, to devour, to kill and to protect, to stop this from happening.
I glance around, but my Bonded isn't here with us. It's just me and the Corvus standing on a platform in the middle of a rudimentary village, facing a crowd of Gifted and non-Gifted staring up at us as though we are monsters.
