Page 53 of Tears of Tungsten
Jared’s revelations were a heavy blow. After he left, I lay there, on the round bed, musing over his words and trying to come up with any kind of explanation that wouldn’t involve believing him.
I failed, because this wasn’t about Jared at all. I’d seen Scylla eat people myself. I knew how cruel my friends and lovers could be. That didn’t mean Jared had been truthful with me in everything, but it did lend credence to his words.
The arrival of the strange glowing creature was a nice distraction. It looked like an amalgamation of solar winds, transparent, but well-defined enough that I could distinguish it was there. It was also carrying a golden platter with a strikingly Terran-looking meal on it. “We’ve prepared sustenance for you, Lady Selene. I hope you will find this to your taste.”
I wasn’t hungry and had no desire to try alien food, even if it did look familiar. Instead, I decided to engage the creature in conversation. It—or rather he—eventually introduced himself as a solar spirit. He didn’t have a name per se, but when needed, he went by Tessera.
Tessera was nice enough and confirmed some of the things Jared had already told me. He also said that my little bedroom was called a ‘mating den’ and that everyone was really excited about Jared’s imminent mating. Apparently, my choice was irrelevant in this matter. The Heliads all believed I’d agree to become a broodmare, just because they wanted me to.
When Jared returned, I fully intended to confront him about it. But something about his presence made me hold my tongue. There was a shadow of sadness in his eyes that hadn’t been there before. And so, when we started to speak, our conversation went into a different direction.
Considering what he told me, I almost wished I’d stuck to the topic of conversation I’d originally wanted to choose.
“As you know, I’m natively human,” he began. “My parents were good people in their own way, loyal to King Philip, a little prejudiced against Terrans, but not more so than any other member of Chimera nobility.
“To be honest, Selene, growing up, I wasn’t very different from the man you knew at school. As a child, I always wanted to serve our rulers. But at the same time, I felt so secure in my own superiority that I couldn’t conceive anything could possibly go wrong.”
“But something did go wrong,” I guessed. That much was obvious, since otherwise, he wouldn’t be here, in the Apsid Quasar.
“Yes, of course. It was a few years ago, before I entered the academy. I was still a boy. My father was an official in the Theia Corps, and we traveled to one of the smaller garrisons near Hyperion Base 35. They never explained what we were actually doing there, and I always was a curious child. I got bored easily.”
His voice grew distant, as if he wasn’t talking to me anymore. “The garrison base was older than what we have now. The vents were pretty big, the type that’s often used in less sophisticated places to ensure drones can efficiently move around without hindering human staff. It was pretty easy for me to sneak inside and start investigating. It was like a game for me.”
“There weren’t any sensors in the vents?” I asked.
“No. It didn’t occur to me until much later that it was strange, but by then, I had other things to worry about.
“You see, Selene, the garrison actually held an experimentation center for human-Heliad couplings. The Grand Judiciary has been trying to breed humans and Heliads for decades, and they’ve had some limited success. Of course, I didn’t know that at the time. All I got to see from my vent was several burly men raping a trapped little girl.”
I gaped at him in shock. “A child?”
Jared nodded glumly. “As far as I could tell, she wasn’t even ten years old.”
After what I’d witnessed in Tartarus City and in Gaia’s Haven, I had no doubt that he was telling the truth, at least in part. The Grand Judiciary had no scruples and couldn’t care less about the well-being of any citizen. And if the captive had been a Heliad, they’d have cared even less. Age factors might have been deemed just as irrelevant, no matter how repulsive the idea was.
But that didn’t answer my previous question. How had the rape of the Heliad child caused Jared’s change in species?
I decided to not interrupt Jared again and waited for him to clarify. He didn’t disappoint. “The girl’s power was contained by a collar. And it worked at first. But after a point… I don’t know, something happened. The collar cracked and the whole room exploded.
“Suffice to say, there was no way to survive that kind of blast—not for those bastards, and not for me. But unlike them, I was only a child, and collateral damage in something that wasn’t my fault. My soul cried out at the injustice of what I’d seen. And someone helped.
“Selene, Gaia might be a being that heals the earth, and Tartarus might try to protect it, but Helios… Helios is the god that can give anyone a new life, helping them be reborn from their ashes. I know it sounds like a paradox, because he embodies sunlight, not life. But that’s how it was, for me. I was created anew, given another body and returned to my previous location, after having made a promise and been entrusted with an important task.”
“Your mission,” I couldn’t help but blurt out. “The mission you mentioned in the labyrinth, which you said you had to entrust to me. What was so important that you had to go through all that?”
“I can’t tell you that, I’m afraid. It’s a secret that was entrusted to me by the Great Mother. But I had to fake my death in that way because I feared people were starting to suspect. Zephyrus in particular. It’s not that easy to fool a chimera, and even a harpy can connect to someone’s soul.”
“So long story short, Selene… I died after I saw the wrong thing. It was only an accident, but even so, I knew it was a sign and, in a way, a gift.”
It should have been an unbelievable story, but I’d seen Jared Glass burning alive with my own eyes at the tournament. That wasn’t something anyone could walk away from without some kind of special gift. Besides, I already knew the gods could do great things. I’d never heard of Helios intervening before, but it was possible.
“A lot of people here are just like me, Selene, people who died because of injustice. Naturally, not all of them are connected to Terra and to The Grand Judiciary. The Heliads are related to countless species. It’s just that mankind chose to be our worst enemy.”
“Because they wanted to feed you to the chimeras.”
“It seems so, yes. Truthfully, Selene, I don’t know everything. I’m still only a soldier and I don’t understand what could have determined Gaia and Tartarus to awaken the chimeras. They may have originally been meant for an entirely different purpose, before the Heliads made contact with Terra. It’s possible that the gods were trying to help Terrans, maybe shield them from someone else. But it was so long ago that it barely matters anymore.”
“I think it matters,” I replied. “Wars are started by powerful people, but it’s usually the weak that pay the price. Billions died in The Apsid Wars, and most of them had no involvement in what was done to you and to your people. We should at least know why and how it started.”
