Act Zero: Intercessor & Adversary (2/3)

Prevara and I each had our part to play in Melpomene’s script. Prevara nudged Kiana from afar and set itself up as the monster behind every mystery. I took the closer role, playing the part of her closest friend, the healer girl Clary.

Our starting scenario was simple: Kiana, blessed and chosen, believed that she deserved more than to be just another cog in the machinery of empire. The council that ruled her nation believed her to be a dangerous tool, a crude weapon unfit to lead and inspire. In search of even more power that could allow her to force the issue, Kiana ventured into a mysterious labyrinth with her only friends, myself and a warrior named Alak, following.

In the depths of that labyrinth, a creation of Prevara and Melpomene tormented Kiana. It was a mirror creature, taunting Kiana with her own insecurities and failings. And, before she killed it, the mirror demon reached out to Alak and weakened the spell that kept him bound.

The next day, Alak broke free of the spell entirely and tried to kill Kiana in the middle of their regular sparring practice. He lost, and she tore his mind to pieces to keep him controlled. Another step on the path we’d charted for her.

Kiana was brooding when she returned to the house we all shared. It was then that I made my move, my part in the dance.

“Hey, Kiana,” I said shyly, the bookish healer with button nose and doe-like eyes. “Do you think we could go for a walk? Just the two of us?”

Living shadows curled around her feet, Kiana’s immense power unbridled and seething, but with a visible effort of will she brought the shadows to a halt. “A walk?” she asked. Her tone was sharp and she immediately winced, squeezing her eyelids shut as if to banish something from her mind. “Yes, yes let’s do that. I could use the fresh air and a chance to clear my head.”

Together we left the house and aimed for the woods just beyond. As we walked, we made small talk, and Kiana seemed eager to get her mind off the events just prior.

“It’s all going so poorly,” she lamented. “I’ve shown my new powers to the council and it’s still not enough. The role I’m after, they’ve all but given it to that worm of a man, whatever his name is, that we met the other week. Short of killing them all I don’t know what I can do.”

That was exactly what we wanted her to do, but we needed to lead her there carefully. Kiana needed to think of herself as a monster in order to do monstrous things.

When we reached an open glade, a gentle stream running through, I asked for a stop. I made myself look as nervous and hopeful as I could, stealing glances at Kiana and worrying the hem of my shirt. She smiled at the sight, and I smiled back.

With a deep breath, I began. “Kiana, I have something I’ve been wanting to tell you for a long time now.” I bit my lip, took another deep breath, and said, “Kiana, I… I love you. I’ve loved you since the day we first met. Would you… would you like to g-go on a d-date with me?”

I looked up at her with desperate eyes, hands clasped tightly behind my back and an ocean of innocence on my face. Her face told a story of its own: the pleased curl of her lip, the sparkle in her eyes, and then a hesitance that passed over her whole body, and something like horror stealing her smile. She took a step back, hand twitching, looking unsure of herself for the first time in her life. “I…”

She needed another push. “Kiana?” I asked, putting fear in my voice and making myself shiver. “Are you—I mean, did I… did I do something wrong? I-I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked. I’m sorry. Maybe… maybe I should go.” I turned to leave, to flee.

It was like I’d stabbed her. Kiana let out her breath in a wounded gasp and sucked in another. “No, wait!” She reached out a hand, then pulled it back, more complex emotions darting across her face and passing just as quickly. “This isn’t—I’m not—you’re not… it’s not real.” She spoke those last words like delivering her own death sentence.

I turned back around, all clueless curiosity and nervous shyness. “Not real? What do you mean? Do you—do you think I don’t really love you?” My voice cracked on the L-word and I hugged myself tight. “Would I really lie to you like that?”

Kiana’s shadows were swarming around her, the living darkness seeping into the soil and ripping up roots. A stray tendril lashed out at a tree and cracked it in half, branches scattering. She clenched her fists and tried to speak, but nothing came out. A second try, a third, and finally she had her voice again. “You don’t understand. I made you love me.”

I blinked in confusion. “What do you mean?”

A bleak, ragged laugh. “Hells, am I really this pathetic? Am I really faltering now, at something I’ve planned for so long?” She laughed again and ran a hand through her hair. “Clary, I’ve been controlling you for years. You and Alak both. The mirror demon, when it said I had my strings in you, it wasn’t being abstract; I cast a spell on your mind the day we met, when you turned away from me because you didn’t like how I acted. I wanted you to like me. I needed you to like me. So I put strings in your head that made you fall in love.”

I stared at her with my best shocked expression. “You… made me this way?”

“I don’t even know how much of the original you is left,” she muttered before barking another desolate laugh. “I know nothing’s left of Alak now, after today, but you… the hooks were always deeper. You were my personal project. Molded for me. Made for me. I created the person you are now. I created your love.”

We both went quiet. I let my face fall into contemplation, gaze pointed down at the forest floor. I chose my next words carefully. “Even if you did… can’t it still be real?” I looked up to find her staring at me with eyes wild like an animal’s. “I mean… it still feels real, to me.”

“I put that thought in your head,” she snapped. “I crafted those feelings.”

“But I still think them, and I still feel them,” I said softly. “I still love you. If it’s you, Kiana, I don’t mind being controlled like that. I don’t mind that you made me love you, because I like loving you.”

Kiana was in agony, the anguish writ on every part of her face. “But is it real? How can it be real, if I made it with a spell? Can I… can I really be loved? Do I deserve it?”

I stepped closer to Kiana, and she didn’t move away. I drew closer again until I could reach out and lay a hand on her cheek, holding her gaze with mine. “It doesn’t matter,” I told her simply. “I don’t care. It feels right to love you. It feels good to love you, Kiana. Maybe feeling good is all it needs to be.”

I kissed her, and she kissed me back. My hands wandered across her body, and hers across mine, and we made love on a bed of velvet night.

Hours later, as Kiana slept soundly, I slipped away to watch the stars. The words of our conversation still echoed in my mind. I had played my role perfectly, had pushed her toward the desired outcome, but something lingered. A stray thought, crawling beneath my skin.

If someone is created to love you, can their love ever be real? And if it isn’t, can you still be loved?

I wondered to myself, alone in the dark, whether that scene was for Kiana, for me, or for Melpomene. The role I’d played for Kiana was false, just a mask I’d put on as my maker’s loyal Intercessor. But in another sense, it was true; I had been created to love someone, and Kiana had been created from that someone.

Did Melpomene lay awake at night wondering if I really loved her? Did she think that she couldn’t be loved, or that she didn’t deserve to be loved? I couldn’t really know, I supposed, any more than she could. But maybe, if I played my role well, I could make her believe.

In the morning, Kiana returned to the capital and broke the power of the high council, dominating those she could control and killing those she couldn’t. Declaring herself empress of a new world-spanning empire, she began a great crusade to conquer the six moons and the ravaged planet beneath them. I was at her side, her confidante and consort.

The months that followed grew repetitive quickly. The Shadow Empress would lay the groundwork for invasion of a moon by abducting key players and brainwashing them. She enjoyed turning a country against itself, stirring rebellion and factionalism before swooping in behind her favorite pawns to reunite the nation as a vassal state. She only ever took the stage at the climax of each conflict, wary of letting her enemies learn too much about her capabilities.

In the time between battles, I tended to my empress. It was an opportunity to practice before returning to the woman I loved, so I took to it with enthusiasm. Kiana had been shaped from my Creator’s flesh, so it stood to reason that her preferences would align. I learned what made her smile, what made her hungry for me, what made her moan—

You can skip some of these details. Really. I insist.

Ahem. I played the role of a lovestruck consort well, encouraging her and supporting her in all the ways she desired. My time apart from Melpomene made me miss her more and more, and that midnight stargazing became a clockwork occurrence for me. I was already vastly more of a person than I had been when I cut Kiana from her flesh, and I yearned to show Melpomene my progress.

It took a year for us to reach the final battle of Kiana’s war. An alliance of elementals from all six moons, united in their defiance of the Shadow Empress, made their stand around an old temple buried deep within the earth, protecting their leader as he performed some ritual that they believed would save them all. Kiana followed, and I with her, knowing the trap that was about to be sprung.

In the heart of an old god’s prison, elements clashed and chaos erupted. Prevara emerged, all its pawns having served their purpose, and all its gifts were ungiven, returned to their sinister source. The temple crumbled, Kiana barely escaping, and on the surface above she found all her minions freed from her control, armies disintegrating as sometimes half their number wailed in rage.

None of them drew her eye. None of them mattered. The moment she realized what had happened, Kiana turned to me, her stalwart companion for a long year of tribulation, and she wondered about a conversation we’d had in a glade, and the nature of love. She hoped that I would stay. She hoped I would forgive her.

I let horror and anguish cross my face, and I ran. I said one word: “Monster.”

In the days that followed, the endgame began. Prevara began seizing control of one moon after another, stealing the apparatus of empire that Kiana had left for it. Kiana, broken and hurting, learned of her past life and the role she had played twice over in damning her people. And then she found me, having fled back to Nyx, and told me everything.

“What should I do?” she asked quietly, hugging her knees on the floor of Clary’s bedroom. “What can I do? Everything is awful and it’s all my fault.”

I sat on the bed and watched her, for once not bothering to perform any emotional responses. I was still and silent and cold, and that made it sharper for her. I asked her, “What do you want to do, Kiana?”

“I don’t know!” she wailed. “I thought I wanted to be powerful and important, to change the world, but I was wrong about all of it. Everything I did only made things worse. And I just… I just wish I could go back to how it was before that day.” She stared at me with haunted, desperate eyes. “I wish I could fix everything I broke.”

“There’s no going back,” I told her calmly. “Maybe, if you went to Prevara and begged it, you could be its champion again. Maybe it would give you back the spell that let you control me. But even if I was back under your thrall, you’d know it wasn’t real. You’d know you can’t be loved. And I don’t think you can live with that, anymore.”

“So what am I supposed to do?” she begged me. “Please, Clary, help me.”

“I think you already know,” I murmured, “but you’re afraid. Because your past self invited Prevara in, gave it a foothold in all our souls. You sealed it, you unsealed it. And when it got out, it took away your power but it didn’t take everything. It didn’t kill you. It needs you, Kiana. If you go to it, if you fight it with all you have left, you’ll win. You’ll save the world… but not for you.”

The light left her eyes. “A sacrifice. Is that what it takes, to atone? Is that redemption?”

I smiled. “I don’t know if I believe in redemption, really. I don’t know if I care about it. But you’d be saving me, Kiana, if you did that. And I think that’s what I’d remember. It’s what I’d choose to remember. So please, Kiana, do it for me.”

I pushed myself off the bed, walked over, leaned down, and kissed her. She wasn’t expecting it, and at first she stiffened, but then she leaned into it like a drowning woman. I held her close and let us stay like that for a long, quiet moment, and then I broke away. She looked at me with her broken heart bare on her sleeve, but didn’t try and stop me.

“For luck,” I told her. “For the good times. For what you’re about to do.”

I walked away, leaving the house behind, and when I stepped around a corner I vanished from the world entirely and returned to Melpomene’s palace. My task was done.

A year of toil, a year of lies, and finally it was over. I’d learned a lot in my time as Clary, but as I stood before the Creator’s throne I shed that mask and once again wore the face that my beloved Melpomene had given me.

A quick glance around the summit of the palace confirmed the absence of my Creator, her adorable form neither resting on the throne nor wandering the checkered tiles. She was probably below, inspecting her work as it reached its final moments. I’d find her soon enough, but her absence gave me an opportunity: I squealed.

“I’m home! I’m finally home!” I twirled around the throne room, hopping and dancing and hugging myself in glee. “Melpomene, Melpomene, Melpomene! My Creator, my beloved, I’m finally back! Oh, the things I have to show you! The stories I can tell! Oh, how I missed you, how I yearned!”

When enough of my wild glee was expelled that I could move normally again, I hastily went about reshaping my appearance. My extensive experimentation with Kiana had given me what I hoped was a reasonably accurate profile of Melpomene’s tastes, and it was those tastes I hoped to appeal to with a new outfit of my own unique design.

Once I was satisfied with my look, I descended into the palace proper and searched for Melpomene. My first guess that she was in the orrery chamber proved correct, as I found her staring at the turning orbs of the model system.

I curtsied on entering the room, still brimming with energy. “I’ve returned, Lady Melpomene. Everything is as you requested, and I have a full report written and prepared for you to peruse at your leisure.”

“Thank you, Thalia.” Something was wrong. Melpomene sounded tired, almost weary, and she didn’t turn away from the orrery.

“Creator?” I inched closer, my excitement bleeding away into nervous concern. “Is something wrong? Did I make a mistake?”

“No, Thalia,” she said quietly. “The mistake was mine. I caught it too late. Like always.”

And then, with careless grace, Melpomene snapped her fingers and the orrery burst into flames. Paint peeled off and smoke rose from melting metal. The connecting bars fell apart and the orbs representing the moons and planet fell to the floor and made a puddle of paint and metal and burning.

I stared at the pyre in shock and horror. She had worked on that world for so long, had poured her love and excitement into getting it just right, and now she was destroying it. “Why?” I asked aloud. “Why did you burn it?”

The divine architect watched the fire and didn’t answer. When the pile was more ash than orrery, Melpomene finally turned to face me. Her eyes were bloodshot, black liquid staining her cheeks like she’d been crying ink or oil, and the lines on her face had deepened.

My heart ached for her, and I longed to comfort her, but I didn’t know how. I hadn’t expected any of this. I wasn’t prepared.

“Let me tell you a story,” my Creator said. Her voice was still tired, still painfully soft, but as she wove her tale a bit more life crept back in.

“Once upon a time, when I was young and foolish and fresh to my role, I made a world and filled it with people. They weren’t like you, they weren’t pieces of me in the same way, but they still held many of my dreams and desires. I pulled their strings and set them dancing, and then I broke their world and flung them to another. I broke that world, too, and turned the whole universe against them. I drove them to a point where the only answer, the only path that would free their fates from the forces arrayed against them, was to burn their universe down to ash that a better world might rise from it.

“I was merciful. When they sacrificed their lives for their phoenix gambit, I let them reincarnate into the new world. I gave them new identities, new adventures, and new lands to explore, new companions to meet. And then I took it all away, drowning that world in darkness and ruin as I had the first and the second and the universe. It ended in fire, and again I shaped something new from the ashes.

“I thought I could get it right, that time. I moved my pieces and refined them, sharpened them, remade them. I stretched out their stories, gave them more power than ever, I tried with all my being to delay the inevitable. But still, just as quickly, it all turned to rot. I needed to hurt them. I needed to break them. And they just couldn’t satisfy me. So I burned them all, one final time, and scattered the ashes to the void outside this palace.

“And then I made you.”

My eyes widened at the revelation of just how much had come before me. Entire worlds that she had made without my help. I hesitated, curious to hear more of my predecessors, but there was another question that took priority. “What went wrong?” I asked.

Melpomene sighed. “I don’t know. I’m not omniscient, just omnipotent. I can make anything, but only if I understand how to make it and what I’m making. I can tell when I’ve failed, but figuring out why I failed is a far greater challenge. I’m a blind god.”

My chest clenched, my face falling. She was in pain, and her pain was mine. Her sorrow like knives, her grief a well to drown in. I needed to make the hurting go away. “How can I help? That’s what you made me for, wasn’t it? Please, Melpomene, let me help you.”

Gratitude flickered in her eyes and pulled at the corners of her mouth. “Thank you, Thalia. It means a great deal.” With a wave of her hand, Melpomene gathered the ashes of her latest creation and vanished them, scattering them in the void as she had three times before. “I just have to keep trying. We’ll make another world, then another clipping, and this time I’ll get it right. It’s just a matter of time.”

It wasn’t.

We made another world, another orrery of brass and paint, and I sliced another gobbet of flesh from my Creator’s divine form. We burned that one, and the next, and the next.

Dozens of times we made a princess, in name or in fact, and gave her power but denied her love. We pushed her to make the wrong decisions until they led her to a dead end, her destiny ever the altar. Prevara or something like it was my assistant in most of those worlds, another template repeated but retaining no continuity. Only I was allowed knowledge of the cycle.

In some of those worlds I took the stage as a close friend or object of desire, but in others I played the mentor or the nemesis. The roles were just a means to her end. Every time, I hoped that something will change, that Kiana will be more than what we made her to be. Every time, I was disappointed.

I started to hate that girl. I watched her fail again and again and again, and every time it ended with another burning world and more charred meat in the lab. Her failure meant I had to cut my beloved open again and rip out another piece of her flesh, had to see the pain wrack her body and the sorrow pool in her beautiful eyes. Kiana’s failures were killing Melpomene, and I started to revel in hurting the girl who was hurting my love.

It wasn’t always Kiana, of course. Between attempts at her template we experimented with others, two of them rising to become regulars in the cycle.

We made Mordred to be a response to Kiana, not quite an opposite but at least a foil. Where Kiana craved love, Mordred craved justice. Where Kiana was a sacrifice, Mordred was a murderer. She was a warrior, a killer, and a zealot. We gave her conviction, that most dangerous affliction of the mind, and it drove her to awful, terrible ends.

The story of Mordred was the story of a girl who tried to make things better and only ever made things worse. With sword in hand, time and again, Mordred cut away everything she should have cherished for a world that would never be. Time and again, she became unrecognizable, became the kind of monster that her starting self would have murdered without hesitation. We called that monster Malice.

Malice, too, was a failure, and so we burned her worlds like Kiana’s. In ruining herself, she brought ruin to my Creator, and I hated her too. I had to watch Melpomene bleed again and again, with less and less of her left each time she went under the knife. The bags deepened under her eyes, her motions listless and apathetic when not in the frenzied throes of making a new world. She wouldn’t look at me, too busy obsessing over the girls that kept failing her.

Our third template was Veseryn, and she cut Melpomene the deepest. Veseryn was a thief, a schemer, and a fool. She began each loop of the cycle, each instance of her being, thinking herself clever. My job was to thoroughly disabuse her of that notion.

Where Kiana was blessed with many gifts and Mordred was given great skill and aptitude, Veseryn was given nothing. Less than nothing, for we populated her worlds with people like Kiana and Mordred, the blessed and the talented, and her lack of either scraped Veseryn raw. Born with nothing and hungry for everything, Veseryn bared her teeth and fought for every advantage she could claim.

Dark bargains and reckless gambles were Veseryn’s game, and they always doomed her. Every victory was bought with sacrifice, every gain accompanied by loss. Inevitably, the costs added up, risks didn’t pay off, and desperate deals led her to calamity. She pledged herself to devils and horrors for just a little more power, and in the end they took her name and soul and made her their hollow puppet.

A corpse, a monster, a slave; these were the ends of the girls I helped torture.

Again and again I cut the flesh of my Creator. Again and again we gave life to splinters and put them through hell. Again and again we scattered the ashes and started over.

After one failed cycle, the lab filled with metal tables and charred meat, Melpomene broke. She screamed and raged and tore through the palace, destroying rooms and burning books, smashing glassware and bending pans. The moment her outburst faded, the energy leaving her in shuddering breaths wracked by coughing, she ordered me to fetch the knife and start cutting. We didn’t even have a world to put the splinter in, but she insisted.

I begged her to stop, to wait, to rethink, but she wouldn’t listen. She hadn’t listened to me for a long time, too busy playing with her other toys. Too busy destroying herself for the sake of girls that always failed her, always hurt her, always stole her attention away from the only one who had been by her side since the beginning. The only one who deserved her.

In the moment my scalpel met her skin, I had already made my choice. To save my darling Melpomene from the cycle of torment she was forcing herself through, I would do anything. I would make her listen, even if it made her hate me.

I loved her too much to let anything stand in my way.