The Tears of Kas̆dael

“Don’t go! Pleaaase!” Aphora smiled indulgently as Qas̆pa rammed into her, and wrapped her arms around her legs. “It’s not safe to go,” the little girl whined.

Kneeling down, she returned the girl’s embrace and ran a playful hand through her hair. “We talked about this, Qas̆pa. Everything will be fine. Imḫullu will be going with me, and I won’t be gone for very long. And you know why I have to go now, don’t you?”

The girl released her, rubbing angrily at a few tears that had escaped their prison. “Because of the baby?”

“Yes, honey. Travel will soon not be easy for me, and I’d like to make contact with these elves before then. You don’t want them to continue suffering, do you?” She felt a twinge of guilt at the manipulative question, but it had the desired results.

The girl hung her head with a sigh. “Noooo,” she dragged the word out reluctantly.

Aphora gave a Qas̆pa a final kiss before standing up and, as she did, her hand reflexively brushed against the faint bulge in her bosom. The dress she wore hid it well, but she knew it wouldn’t be long before that was no longer an option, and she hadn’t decided yet how to break the news to her people. While generally speaking, no one would care if she had another child, having one with a Sidhe - an enemy - would likely cause a stir. If she told them. We’ll decide that later.

She gave the girl one last hug before sending her off to take her lessons with Mullu-Lim, having finally given up on trying to get the girl to attend school with the other children. Then she headed to her chamber and, after double-checking she had all her supplies packed, activated the letter Imḫullu had given her.

With a crack, the air rent in two, a gnarling, gaping wound in reality that led straight to his domain. To her surprise, Imḫullu was waiting on the other side.

He practically bounded into the room and planted a long kiss on her lips, his hands brushing against the gentle swell in her belly. Embarrassment and confusion swept her through as, frankly, Aphora wasn’t sure what she wanted out of the relationship. It had been nothing more than a fling, an intoxicating, forbidden romance with an enemy of her people, but she had never expected it to grow into anything more. Imḫullu, however, ever since he had learned of her pregnancy, seemed to think they were in a relationship and, despite her own doubts, her body betrayed as she leaned in closer.

When he finally came up for air, there was a mischievous glint in his eyes as he surveyed her room. “So I finally get to see your room. A bit more restrained than I expected, but I suppose there are not too many luxury furnishers in your little realm. The bed’s nice though. Should we break it in?”

“It’s already broken in,” she replied drily, but the Sidhe remained unflappable.

“Not with me,” he shot back dismissively and winked at her. “I’m sure we could carve out a little time for ourselves before we depart.”

An amused smile flitted across her lips, but Aphora shook her head. “No dessert before supper,” she said lightly.

Unperturbed by her refusal, the Sidhe released her arms and sauntered over to the large double-paned windows that overlooked their little settlement. It was a picturesque scene; toward the east, the glowing, lilac sea broke against the rocky shores, while the grand cliffs that bound the settlement’s northern side were dappled with large pockets of luminous plants. The city itself stretched to the south, ever lit with the soft light provided by great glass orbs of seawater, and above them all glowed the avatar of Selene herself, the gentle moon they’d summoned. While she still missed the bright sun and the big blue skies of the world above, Aphora had yet to tire of Arallû’s beauty, and she doubted she ever would.

Yet, Imḫullu barely glanced at it. Instead, his gaze was transfixed on the small wooden cradle she’d set up before the windows. He ran a gentle hand down the pale wood, cracked and beaten with age. “Was this yours?”

“Mine and my mother’s before me,” she replied, joining his side. “It was one of the few pieces I managed to recover from Als̆arratu.”

A rare moment of seriousness fell over the Sidhe. “Yes, you lost your people too.” His hand reached for hers and he bent down to place a chaste kiss on her cheek. “To new beginnings,” he said softly.

An hour later, after ‘breaking in’ the bed, Aphora followed him through the portal. His palace, as always, was as silent as a tomb, when it wasn’t echoing with his boisterous voice.

“Where do you want to start? Il-Abāt or Dūr-Adû?” He asked as he led her to the strange metal table that housed his map.

“Any suggestions?”

Imḫullu drummed his fingers against the table for a moment, a thoughtful look on his face, before pointing to Dūr-Adû. “Despite the name, I think Dūr-Adû is probably the weaker settlement. Its lord, Uzzîl, rarely ventures outside its walls these days, having never recovered from his wounds in the war.”

Uzzîl? Aphora froze as she recognized the name. “Uzzîl is the lord of Dūr-Adû? But wasn’t he-”

“Yes,” Imḫullu replied softly. “Trey was my right-hand man, and a good friend of mine at one point.”

“Then why fight against him?”

“Because the war is long over and our world lost. Trey was a good man, but Uzzîl is a creature filled with naught but bitterness and hate. His death will be a mercy.”

“I suppose I can understand that,” Aphora replied, her thoughts turning to her mother. She had been so sure she could save her, so sure that she could turn back the curse that had consumed their people, yet, in the end, all she had done was harm the ones still living. “You’ve never really spoken of the war, you know. What caused it?”

He took a long time to respond, so long that she began to fear she’d made a mistake in asking it.

“I’m sure you’ve noticed,” he finally said, “that we have more than one name. Uzzîl was Trey, Duluḫḫû Jonathan, Ilatmūt Elspeth, and I…I was Ivan. The Sidhe were not of this world.”

“Scholars have long suggested that you came from another realm, like Adammû or Arallû.”

“And they were right, in a sense, but also wrong. We came from Adammû, but it was not the same Adammû that exists here.”

“The Sidhe were once but men. In our world, if there ever were gods like yours, they hid themselves from us, but that did not stop us from reaching for the heavens. We discovered many marvelous technologies, technologies that turned us from mere men to nigh unkillable beings of endless age. We cured disease, ended poverty, colonized our solar system - yet the heavens remained just as unreachable as before.”

“No matter what we tried, we could not crack the secret to FTL.”

“FTL?” She asked, furrowing her brow.

“It doesn’t matter,” he shrugged. “It would mean anything to you anyway.”

“So what happened,” she asked cautiously, trying not to take offense at his dismissive attitude. I'm not stupid! “Why did you come here?”

“For a time, our world was a paradise,” Ivan continued. “But we were trapped in our solar system, and as our resources began to run out, man’s true nature, reemerged with a vengeance. War broke out anew, and our technology rapidly advanced as we devised new ways to destroy ourselves. Yet, despite all our efforts, that final barrier to the heavens beyond our solar system remained uncracked.”

“In desperation, our scientists turned to a technology that had been set aside because it was too dangerous, the creation of portals that could take us distances our ships could never reach.”

He lapsed into a silence that dragged on for several minutes before Aphora finally prodded him. “And that’s how you came here?”

“Yes, our scientists eventually succeeded in creating a massive portal above the earth, one big enough to allow even the largest of our ships to pass through it, while several smaller ones were established on other colonies. With hope renewed, it seemed like the war would finally end, and we began to send ships to settle our nearest systems. But then,” a bitter smile flickered across his face.

“Not everyone was happy that the war was over. Some couldn’t stand the loss of power; others couldn’t stomach working together with those we’d been fighting for decades. What happened next has always been unclear, as the fallout wiped out all evidence. But someone, no one knows whom, tried to either conquer or sabotage the portal. There was a reason the technology had been forbidden before. Even once we got it working, the portal was inherently unstable but its collapse was even more catastrophic than we had predicted.”

“Just five minutes passed from the first message of distress to the time that all life on the earth and moon was blotted out. A black hole formed at the center of the collapsed portal, one far larger than any model had predicted, leaving those of us who survived the initial collapse, scattered throughout the rest of our solar system, living on borrowed time.”

“We fled through the remaining portals, not caring where the destination was, only seeking an escape from certain doom.” Imḫullu lifted his head, and nodded toward the massive windows that overlooked the silent city. “Our people were one of the last to escape, a former mining colony set up on the outer fringes of the solar system, that had been gradually turned into the production center for the war effort. Unbeknownst to all but the highest in command, a portal had been constructed around our little rock, one large enough to swallow us whole, but it was not quite finished. With no better options, we activated it prematurely and ended up…here.”

“We found ourselves trapped in orbit above your planet, a pristine jewel untouched by modern industry. It is obvious that it was already inhabited, but that was no obstacle to us, and we quickly abandoned our rock for your world. that is when we met the Mwyranni.”

He looked up at Aphora beseechingly. “You have to understand, Aphora, we were a people forged in decades of brutal war, a people whose whole world had just been obliterated. We came from a world where magic was a fantasy, gods were a myth, and technology was better than both. And then we met the Mwyranni, haughty, arrogant bastards who bid us serve them, who claimed to be gods, and who - as we wrongly assumed - oppressed the humans living under their rule.”

“Perhaps, if we had met under different circumstances, the tragedy could have been averted. Maybe, if we’d set aside our prejudices, we could have even seen that the Mwyranni, despite their arrogance, were benevolent rulers to the people we sought to ‘liberate’ but we were angry. We were desperate to avenge an act that could never be righted and refused to see the truth before our eyes.

“We quickly settled in the empty western lands and uplifted the trolls, who were little more than mindless brutes at the time, to bolster our ranks while we plotted the Mwyranni’s demise. But we had underestimated them,” he admitted ruefully. “We destroyed their empire in a single day, slaughtered so many of them that they have never recovered, and yet all we had done was lit the fuse on the powder keg. We didn’t realize that the many other races that occupied the lands then - the durgu, the skinchangers, the Fey, the elves,” he said with a slight hiss, "would all rise up in defense of the shatter Mwyranni, nor did we count on the humans we had ‘liberated’ to hate us so.”

“And none of us,” he added with a bitter laugh, “in our wildest dreams could have imagined that the gods themselves were not only real, but petty enough to directly involve themselves in mortal affairs.”

“Our moment of victory became a centuries-long war that left no victors. Most of our people died in the conflict, but those who survived, empowered by our technologies and the magic that awakened in us when we came to this place, became so mighty that even the gods grew to respect us. Thus our current detente was born; the west was ours, the east yours.”

“That…is a very different story than the one I’d heard,” Aphora said slowly, still struggling to wrap her mind around the many unfamiliar things he’d spoken of. “Are the people of Adammû-“

“No,” he replied, anticipating her question. “They are nowhere near as advanced as our people and, unlike our world, magic exists there, even if it is largely hidden. I do not know we arrived here, but I suspect that the damaged portal brought us from another universe.”

“But-“

“Hush.” The weight of his years suddenly seemed to press upon him as Imḫullu placed a gentle finger on her lips. “Someday, I will answer all your questions, but the past is…painful to recall. For now, let us focus on our mission. We have elves to save, don't we," he added with a tight smile.