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Chapter Text
It was supposed to be the day of the winter festival when the Empress got her scar. It didn’t take long for her to get it, no. It was a quick, clean strike, a diagonal line from the top of her left eye to the right of her mouth. She staggered back when she got it, stopped choking the Shinobi in the middle of the river where the great waterfalls around us amassed into pools of deep red. The color came from the blood of the fallen Dragonblood Clan. The same color dripped from her fresh scar. And the same color dripped onto the Shinobi’s pale face, his face almost as white as our hair, as he pushed her off him.
In my left hand was the small wooden box with a flower engraved on the cover. In my right hand was the shoulder of a girl about half my height, looking like one of my now-dead orphanage sisters. She was holding a wand and holding me and I was making sure she had her eyes closed from what was happening. I didn’t want to look, but I had to. It was the only way to ignore all the other dead bodies around us.
Where the Empress fell, she knocked over one of the incense flasks placed in front of the gravestones of my parents. The glass shattered and the blood on her hand with her engagement ring smeared on the gravestones that read, “The Warriors of the Clan.” Shaking and backing up, the Shinobi dropped his bloodstained kunai into the water.
A big splash. Mucky red soaked her dress, and dirt marred her face. She hadn’t been this dirty since she was an eight-year-old walking barefoot on the riverbanks, playing stick-fight and drawing pictures of ogres and goblins in the dirt with me and the other kids. She hadn’t been this dirty since before her late fiancé came to live in the village permanently.
When her head hit the broken slab of rock from the Astral Dragon monument behind her, a voice called out from deep within the Den, hidden between two of the mighty waterfalls and two towering red-and-black, moss-covered dragon statues. Everyone stopped moving while the waterfalls kept flowing. The low, hollow voice echoed, “Children of Our own blood, you desire power… vengeance.”
Me, I desired for my brothers and sisters to come back to life. I imagined the Witch being one of them, even though I’ve never seen her before.
As our deity, as the Astral Dragon Atruum spoke, I expected myself to pray and say thank you, thank you, over and over in my mind. Thank you for making sure the Empress didn’t kill an innocent person like what the Divine Knights did to everyone else. Thank you for making sure the Witch didn’t end up crushed under the rubble like my siblings in the orphanage. Thank you for not killing the Shinobi the same way I saw the Empress’s fiancé with his face smashed under a rock on the bridge leading into the village. This fiancé, Angelo, he still had the unwilting white rose in his hand when the Empress arrived, and she was carrying the small wooden box, a present for their marriage. He had trample marks and bruises over his arms and legs.
“We have abandoned power and war,” Atruum said, “and yet there are those who would pursue us.”
On the ground, the Empress, she started rocking back and forth and grasping her stomach. Like she had a stomachache. She laid down on her side and started spasming and biting down on her lip.
From the suspension bridges connecting us to the rest of Remlia, to the heart of our isolated village, footprints in the hard dirt trailed back and forth, layered on top of each other, armies of shallow holes eroding the land we used to call our home. There were so many that it was hard to tell which way they went—which ones came in, and which ones never came out. The footprints trailed into the foundations of broken, burning houses. The dark smoke rose high enough that one could see it from five villages, forests and forests, away.
The orphanage, the last place where I saw the orphanage director and all of my brothers and sisters, the old lady’s shattered glasses on the floor, toys scattered about, bloodstained, little hands and feet and arms all cut off, all of them now dead, dead, dead, somehow, the black smoke bloomed and rose the highest from there. The smoke rose even higher than the largest statue of the village, the smoke, black and ugly, clumped up together like a rotten heart I could reach out and crush with my bare hands, then store away forever.
The hardest thing to look at on a dead body is the face. It’s like their souls got sucked right out of them, leaving them no opportunity to say farewell. But it’s also like they’re still there. Like they should be alive. And all we saw was mangled body after mangled body, soulless face after soulless face. The clothes of the fallen had deep cuts and burns that only a Divine Knight’s sword could make. Even Angelo’s.
“There are those who use power to enforce tyranny,” Atruum said. “They now force Us to let Our power be known once more.”
The Astral Dragon sounded a lot like my dead father. At least, he sounded like the few moments I’ve heard his voice when I was a baby. I don’t think he ever talked like him, though, at least I hope.
Ever since the Empress and I stepped foot into the smoldering village, just like the footprints, dead bodies with their once-brilliant white hair now stained with red laid silent all over. Most of these people weren’t even Warriors. Most of them dressed humbly with light brown or black rags, some with the adornments of our now-dead Dragonblood style, golden lines now red, carrying baskets or fishing rods or books or nothing, and then they got killed. Most of them laid face-down. Most of them had been running.
The Warriors, those few men and women who offered to protect our peaceful village, blessed by body paint that never saved them in the end, they were all put into rows and rows in front of the smaller Astral Dragon monuments scattered about. And then they were all beheaded. The headless body of the Chief—the Empress’s father—laid at the end.
Seeing all of them out like that, knowing I had the same permanent Warrior paint on my body, I should’ve been dead with them. I shouldn’t be alive.
I was looking at the Empress on the ground and the Shinobi frozen and trembling, and below me, the Witch started sobbing, loud. Her opaque goggles clouded up with mist and teardrops.
Both of my hands were covered in wet blood from me checking if anyone was still alive. Whether the blood came from my dead siblings or Angelo, I couldn’t tell. My left hand somehow never stained the small wooden box red, while my right hand left streaks of finger-shaped blood on the Witch’s back.
In truth, we didn’t look that different from the dead bodies. Our own selves—the Empress’s dress, the Shinobi’s lightweight uniform, the Witch’s heavy robes, the blue paint on my bare chest and waist—none of us were exempt from the bloodstain.
No rose was gonna save us here.
With my bloodied fingers, I traced the heat blowing up from the bridge of my nose into a bloody, bloody X-shape burnt into my face. A new, final remnant of the blue war paint will replace it, a brand of ownership for the deity I forged my pact with. A seal over my spilled blood of that day.
Angelo, he no longer had his angel face from back when I first met him, from back when I returned from the Warrior rites at twelve years old to see him and the Empress together on her tenth birthday, eight years ago. It was the first time in public I saw her wear a traditional Dragonblood dress. Before that, she used to wear soiled robes and no shoes whenever I saw her by the riverbank with a stick in her hand, scratching pictures of monsters and swords and claws in the ground. She used to trick the Chief into letting her come along with me whenever I went fishing for the orphanage. That was what I was doing right before I crossed the bridge.
Right then, with the state that the Empress was in, she and the rest of us looked worse than however the two of us used to look down by the riverbank playing stick fight.
“So shall it be engraved upon the Divine Family themselves,” Atruum said, “who dare to rob the Clan of their lives!”
The hardest thing to look at on a dead body is the face.
The Empress didn’t get to see his.
I thought it was for the best.