140 - Resentment

TW: Non-graphic references to physical abuse, drug abuse, attempted s**cide.

After her herbology class, where they experimented with native elven plants that laid eggs, Lexie finally got some time to craft the card. The first thing, of course, was research. She searched Fae literature and some Undernet Eldritch texts that she struggled to decipher (apparently speaking Eldritch in her dreams did not translate well to reading it), but she found it difficult to find a story that matched the intent. 

Of course, she knew there was an easier way to do it. She could simply tell Xena that she wanted to feel her pathways, to know how her light powers worked, but she wasn’t trying to make her friend any more suspicious than she already was. That would probably be a last resort type of situation.

So for the rest of the day, she made a list of every relevant fable that had to do with light as the driving force of something. 

She also asked her dad about it when she finally reached him, and told him about her adventures with the V’Sala.

He didn’t know much about it, but he was happy for her progress and eager to get back to whatever it was he was doing. 

After a nice dinner with her friends, where Lexie and Jace got into a minor popcorn tossing competition, Lexie finally went to sleep. 

And had another meeting with Naem.

He was standing in the dream world, waiting for her, and asked, “Did you succeed in making the card you wanted?”

“Not yet,” she admitted. “What are we doing today? Meeting another Eldritch?" 

He nodded. “The next in your soul-tree is very different from the others.” Naem spoke as they once again traversed the field of black. “And it will likely strike a very familiar chord with you.”

“What do you mean?” Lexie asked.

“It’s an Eldritch-human poltergeist,” he said. “It was once the soul of a human with a lot of resentment that caused it to haunt an entire town on earth for a decade. Eventually, the resentment grew, accumulating power from other troubled souls until it was strong enough, and it wreaked so much havoc on that town that it required several powerful necromancers to be banished into the Eldritch world. It’s here now.”

“Amazing. So a human soul can eventually turn into an Eldritch with enough time and motivation?”

“It’s not typically seen, and when they do turn into Eldritch, they’re never particularly powerful. Humans don’t typically live long enough to build up that much chaos. But this soul managed to hold onto enough resentment to meet the chaos potential of an Eldritch. We call it a Trechtl.”

“Rhymes with Hechtl,” Lexie said, then paused. “I won’t have to face one of those, will I?”

“Perhaps,” he said, and Lexie's stomach sank.

“Great,” Lexie said.“Did Dad tell you about the baby Hechtl that attacked us a couple of years ago?”

“Yes, he told me. He hasn’t stopped searching for the source of that attack ever since.”

“I see.” Lexie remembered the conversation she'd overheard in the kitchen. Aiden had assumed Naem would know where the Hechtl came from, but Naem said he didn’t. Naem’s brother, Neqal said Naem did know what happened. Then again, Nepali was a known liar. 

That brought her to her next thought. “Not to go too deep into Eldritch business, but I’ve heard of demon-led attacks on Earth and all that stuff. Who plans that? You?”

“Not always.” Naem had no qualms about admitting. 

“But sometimes?”

“Of course.”

“Why?” When she’d been in Naem’s soul, she’d noted a distinct lack of desire for anything, not power, not money, nothing. Why would he commit crimes if he didn’t want to?

“Because we can. Due to our abilities, Eldritch are often used as tools, either by higher-ranking Eldritch or by powerful species like the Fae who can control them.”

“Fae can control Eldritch?”

“Of course. What do you think they use the Lightlarks for?”

Kill the Light. Lexie had already realized how the Lightlarks tied into that intent.

Lightlarks could imbue hope, belief, and all the good feelings that Eldritch did not have naturally. They could probably manipulate their drive, too, by adjusting or orienting their 'light' in a certain direction. The Fae probably used Lightlarks to control Eldritch this way, by feeding the Eldritch everything they sought so desperately, promising them satisfaction in return for compliance. 

When she thought about it, it was all… a little diabolical. 

“Is that why you work with the Fae?” she asked. “Why you let them use young Eldritch to create dungeons?”

Naem didn’t answer, which Lexie took to mean ‘yes’. She felt unduly affronted on his behalf. 

“Why?” she asked. “I mean…not that I’m advocating for this, of course, but aren’t you strong enough to defeat the Fae?” 

He looked at her. “Why would I do that?”

Lexie shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

“There is no reason for me to destroy the Fae,” he said. “ I have no desire to. Perhaps other Eldritch might have a reason, but not me, as I have a facilitative relationship with the Fae for now.”

“Could you do it if you wanted to?” Lexie knew that Naem was the most powerful antagonist in the game, the final boss. She assumed that meant that he and Aiden, who was the supervillain at the time, had fought the human-led coalition of heroes and Fae in a last showdown. They probably got beaten in the end, because that was how things usually went for the bad guys. But then there was talk with Tate of the bad ending. Did that mean that the Eldritch won in that end?

There was another angle she didn't understand, too.

If the Fae effectively had the Eldritch so under control with the Lightlarks, then what were they scared of? Why did they still complain of Eldritch attacks, and why were they willing to give such ridiculous concessions to humans just to get another Lightlark? Why did they not have Lightlark variants on their planet? Was it magic that the Fae did not have on their own?

Then that would mean that light powers were a high-value human skill. So why not make more Lightlarks, rather than relying on reproduction to do the job? Why did the system not give out more light powers to people who weren’t Lightlarks, instead of prioritizing other, less-needed skills?

And why did they give the Lightlarks a choice to join them, rather than enslaving them outright?

Lexie had a feeling there was something very strange going on here, and she wasn't quite putting the pieces together the right way. She bit her lip as she thought more about it, and it took her a while to realize that Naem didn’t answer her question. Instead, he stopped and said, “We don’t have much time. We must meet the Trechtl now."

"Alright," Lexie said with a swallow. Despite her brave front, she was frightened of what she would face after the V’Sala. 

She still remembered the encompassing terror of being engulfed in its sadistic soul. She didn’t know what to expect from a creature made entirely out of resentment, especially given that this creature had more ‘depth’ and authority than the V’Sala.. 

Naem stared at her. “This won’t be easy.”

She shrugged. “It never is.”

A pool of black began swirling in the air, and they appeared on a vast graveyard in an abandoned town square, with coal falling from the grey and brown sky. Smoke filled the atmosphere, and wrecked buildings lay in the distance, and it looked like the aftermath of a nuclear bomb. It was all very eerie and sad.  

But nothing was eerier than the screeching creature that appeared in her midst when the dust cleared. 

“REEEEEEEEEEEE!”

Lexie flinched as the scream filled her ears. She backed up into Naem,  as she stared at the giant worm creature with the masked face of a weeping woman. It had folds all over its body with slits where the screams seemed to be coming from. Its actual mouth was sewn shut, and as it released its blood-curdling wail again, Lexie's heart jumped, and she reached out for Naem, gripping his hand. 

He looked down at where their hands met, his face thoughtful. He seemed to experimentally tighten his hands around hers in a show of comfort. 

“It will be alright,” he said and reached out to awkwardly pat her head. “I’m here. It will not hurt you.”

Lexie nodded, but she didn’t let go of his hand as she closed her eyes and reached out psychically to the worm creature. 

“REEEEEEE!”

The scream sounded one last time, echoed, and engulfed her. She wasn't sure what she was expecting. With the V'Sala, she had been instantly inundated with its pure raw emotion, and that was probably what Lexie anticipated again. 

But it wasn’t what she got. 

Instead, she landed on the scene of a field.

Lexie thought the place looked familiar, perhaps it was the field she was just in, just without the devastation and the gravestones. Everyone wore what looked like late twentieth-century clothing. A little blonde girl in a dirty frock was by the river, using a stick to trace shapes in the water. 

Behind her was a playground where the other kids played. Every once in a while, a kid would stop and stare at her, as though wondering whether to invite her to play with them, and someone else would instantly drag them away. 

They whispered behind her back, whispers that eventually reached her ears.

“....don’t talk to her…”

“...did you not hear? Her mother’s a witch…”

"...she's been cursed by the guardians..."

The girl heard them but pretended not to. Lexie stood by and could sense the pure loneliness and longing she radiated, so much so that she wasn’t on alert when the two strange men walked up to her. 

"What are you doing?” one of them asked.  

“Waiting for my daddy," she said. 

They shared a look. “Your dad asked me to pick you up.” 

She glanced at them. Somewhere deep inside, she knew they were lying, but she didn’t want to go home to that silent house filled with ghosts and memories.

“Okay,” she said and took their hand.

The scene changed, and it was now her as a teenager in a filthy room. Vomit on the floor. White dusts in lines near the window. Shattered glass wrecked on the side of an overturned table.

The girl sat in the center of all the wreckage.

Pain wracked her body. Dark bruises tracked up her arm and down her legs, smaller pin-like ones and bigger blotchy ones. Barely healed surgery scars were on her abdomen, and she was missing a few toes. Pain wracked her body as she glared up at the door, waiting for his arrival.

There was blood in her mouth and smeared over her lips. Rage made her heart beat so fast she thought it would explode. She couldn’t remember what happened. She thought she might have bitten someone’s ear off. She would get in trouble for that, she knew, and she wasn’t sure she would survive that punishment. 

Yet, given the chance, she would do it all over again.

They often told her things would be easier for her if she didn’t fight so hard. After all, they weren't taking anything from her she couldn't get back. But she couldn’t help it. She was a fighter by nature and couldn’t just give up.

She laughed maniacally, but she stopped because every slight movement caused even more pain to spiral. 

The door opened, and someone walked in holding a baseball bat. He looked mad. 

He cursed at her and swung the bat. Lexie’s heart jumped out, and she wanted to shield herself, but it was too late.

The scene changed. She was now a woman, dressed in an expensive-looking coat, but with cheap, dirty sneakers. She was standing on a bridge looking out over it. She was still hurt, but her bruises were better hidden now. 

She took a step onto the pavement, closer to the bridge. Below them was the vast, endless sea. She was afraid. She was tired. She was hateful. 

A patter of running feet met her, and someone, a man, yelled, “Stop!”

She looked at him. The man had short hair, shorn close to his scalp, desperate eyes, and bruises over his body, too. 

“Alina, don’t!” he said. “Please.”

“Why not, Henrik?” Her voice was empty. “This way is better.”

“It’s not. I swear it’s not.” 

“They can’t hurt me anymore if I’m dead.”

“They won’t hurt you again,” he said. “I’ll go with you. We’ll run away like you wanted. I promise.” 

She looked back down. She didn’t want to believe him. He was making an impossible promise, and the easiest thing to do would be to take the relief staring up at her. But she was a fighter by nature. She couldn’t just give up. 

The scene changed. She was in a hole of depression. A baby was crying somewhere in a small apartment. She was lying on a tattered mattress. A picture of Enrique was pressed against her chest, but the man himself was gone, sacrificed to a war she did not care to understand.

She did not cry. A lifetime of sorrow had already been spent. She had no tears left to cry.

She’d fought hard, she and Henrik, to escape that hellhole of their life and find slivers of happiness. She’d done the physical and mental work to escape addiction, to overcome her nightmares, and tried to exorcise it. And she had almost succeeded. Almost. 

But now Enrik was dead.

Now the pain was worse than before, perhaps because it had come right after she had had her first taste of happiness. She was happy with Henrik. They were starting a family. Now the last person she cared about was gone. 

The crash was unbearable. The baby was still crying. She wished everything would stop. 

The scene changed. She was lying on the street, staring at people walking. She was tattered and in pain. Her stomach had sunken in, and the sensation she felt was too sharp to even be called hunger. She didn’t know what had happened to her. All she knew was that the crying had stopped. Her child was gone. And she would be gone too. 

But she would not go peacefully. She had never lived a peaceful life. All her life was pain and suffering and being used and left behind like nothing. All her other emotions were dead. The love was dust in her tongue. All she felt was hatred. For everyone who’d used her. For everyone who’d watched while she suffered. For the ones who took Henrik from her. 

They would all suffer. 

She was tired. She was hateful. She was nearly gone.

But she was a fighter. She could not just give up.

With her last breath, she felt a power burning inside her, and she let it out. 

“Lexie.” It was Naem's voice that pulled Lexie out because she was unable to pull herself out of the soul. 

When she came out, she heard hacking sobs, and it took her a second to realize they were hers.

She was sobbing so hard she couldn’t speak, could barely breathe. Sorrow ripped her in two. The sadness was unbearable, the hatred a burning passion. 

That woman....that creature...it's life was nothing but pain after pain, disappointment after disappointment. She'd had her organs harvested and regrown somehow again and again. Lexie didn't understand it, didn't understand most of the story, but if she knew where they were, she would hunt down those responsible, one by one, and kill them.

She didn’t know she was lying curled up on the ground until she felt Naem picking her up. 

“It’s alright. It will pass,” he said, comfortingly patting her hair in that stiff way of his, but it wasn’t enough. She turned and hugged him around the neck, burying her head in his shoulder. 

He didn’t seem to know what to do with that, but he held extremely still, as though not wanting to disturb her. 

She cried into his neck like she’d done to Aiden when she was younger and cried so much and so hard she thought she’d never stop. 

Eventually, she was able to speak through her sobs, “Where did it go? The Trechtl.” She realized that she no longer heard the screams of the creature. 

“It didn’t go anywhere. We are the ones who left it behind as we're now in the dream realm. I thought it would be better for you to calm down here.”

Lexie hadn't even noticed they left. That was how gone she was.

"Why…” she hiccuped. "Why do you keep it alive? It’s just suffering all the time.”

“I don’t keep it alive. It keeps itself alive. It’s a flavor of resentment called <hissing sound> Shplact. There is no human translation for that word, but it’s one of the most powerful types of resentment there is. Plus, this creature is used a lot by the Fae and others who contract it. It played a great role in the minor Orcan war, and it devastated their population.”

“So they use her pain as a tool?” Lexie spat, washed with bitterness. Even in death, Alina was still being used.

“Yes. That is what it means to be Eldritch.”

Lexie was furious, and it made her cry even harder until she didn’t want to anymore.

“You said being Eldritch was excellent.”

“It is. You are not seeing it yet.”

Lexie shook her head. She didn’t think she would ever see it, and ever accept being used like that.  

“Do you think it would be easier if she were not to exist?” Naem asked. “Non-existence might be difficult, but perhaps the merciful thing would be for the creature to be denatured, and have less awareness of their own pain.”

Lexie wanted to say yes, but she couldn’t. Using her human senses, sure death would offer some kind of peace, but death wasn't something that woman/creature wanted. Lexie didn’t know how she knew, but she knew that the woman had used her last power, whatever witchcraft she did have, to wish the creature into existence. She wanted to keep living through it, to keep fighting. Death was an end to a story she didn't deserve, and it would be a betrayal of everything she had lost to be put away like that.

It was cruel to think that this resentment was all she had as her light. She would never find true happiness, but living for her purpose gave her some kind of satisfaction. And that was all one could hope for as an Eldirtch.

It sank in as Lexie sniffled once more, her voice low as she wiped her tears. “No. I don’t think death would be the easier.” It wouldn’t erase what she had suffered, and it wouldn’t stop her from suffering more. Death would be just more injustice.

Naem nodded, which meant that was the right answer. 

“How do we…” She shook her head. “Is there no way to help her soul find some peace?”

"The very nature of being Eldritch is antithetical to peace. There is no peace for us. Only existence and nonexistence."

"Even for you?" Naem often looked very peaceful. 

"Even for me," he said.

“So, how do you keep yourself from going crazy?”

“I don’t. That madness is my superpower.”

Lexie sighed. “What is your Eldritch core? What makes being Eldritch so excellent?”

“We’ll get there eventually. We’re still working our way up. You, my soul spawn, have only just broken the surface of what it truly means to be Eldritch.”

***

Lexie was a depressed wreck for most of the day. She told her friends she wasn’t feeling well, and they brought her breakfast and hung out with her for some time. Lexie accommodated the visit, though she would have much rather been alone. She was supposed to continue her research and help Dewie with his pathways today, but she had to postpone it. Maybe in the evening she would feel better.

She currently felt raw and weightless. She oddly missed Logan. She wished she could talk to him, but Isaac had pretty much assured her during their last conversation that he hadn't found a way to make interdimensional calls without the ISTS. That only depressed her more.

The rest of the group eventually dispersed, leaving Lexie alone, but then Xena came back sometime in the afternoon, with some soup and other remedies. 

“Hey, hey,” she said softly. “Feeling better.”

Lexie was still in bed with the covers up to her nose, but she nodded anyway. “A little.”

Xena put the soup down and put her hand over Lexie’s forehead. “You don’t have a fever, so that’s good.”

“Yeah. I don’t think I’m physically ill, I’ve just been feeling down.”

“Did you have a bad dream again?”

Lexie shook her head and then nodded. Might as well lie. “I don’t know, but I think it was about my mom.”

Xena went to sit in bed beside her and held her hand. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“Do you want me to get someone to see you? The Lightlarks have a pretty good mind healer on Planet Fae, and they're known to help with dreams. I can bring her back for you.”

Lexie shook her head, then realized the implication of what Xena was saying. “Wait, you’re going to Planet Fae again?”

She grimaced. “Yeah, in a couple of weeks. Another demon attack, and they might need my help since they're getting swamped and they almost lost an entire small town of sprites.” Xena sighed. “I know this is gonna be my life forever, but I'm so sick of these Eldritch. I swear, it’s like every month a new one and no matter how hard we work to drive them away, they always come back. I don’t know why the Fae won’t just get rid of the Eldritch once and for all already.”

Lexie knew that Xena didn’t mean it, but she flinched. “Not every Eldritch is out to attack people.”

“Yeah, but the majority of them do. And Lionel says the very nature of Eldritch is evil. Like they literally can’t be good if they tried.”

“Maybe there’s a reason for that. Maybe they’re only inflicting the pain they’ve learned to live with.”

Xena cocked her head. “What are you talking about?”

“Eldritch can’t help being eldritch. It’s all they know. What if their powers hurt them the same way they hurt others? What if they're living in constant agony with no hope of ever having any relief?"  

Xena thought about it for a second, and Lexie thought she saw a thread of pity in her eyes, before her friend shrugged weakly.

“In that case, aren’t they better off...dead?” she asked hesitantly.

Lexie felt a pang in her chest and opened her mouth to answer, but then closed it again. For the first time in a long time, Lexie felt so terrifyingly alone. 

AN: I’m very conflicted about the darkness of this chapter. I’m not trying to make the themes of this book super mature, and I feel like this one might have pushed the envelope. I’m debating dialling it down. Let me know your thoughts.