Chapter 20 - Strings (Patreon)

Tanya sat quietly on her bed, and tried not to show her nervousness. Regardless of whatever happened, she hated being weak, and if she couldn’t stop herself from being afraid, the least she could do was try to not show it. That Lukas was currently sitting next to her, and just being in contact with his body was making her flush didn’t help things. That he was feeding her soup with a spoon while making baby sounds only made it worse.

Maude sat across them, on a makeshift stool, a thick rock pillar raised up from the floor and smoothened for ergonomic benefits; Lukas’s terramancy in action. A part of her felt slightly jealous that he was using his skills to Maude’s benefit, even if it was so rudimentary as a rock stool. She couldn’t honestly remember a time when her stomach was fluttering around like that. Her life was shattered as a teenager and the illusion of normality had forever stayed out of her grasp.

No matter how much she tried.

Tanya had admitted to witnessing everything that had transpired in the throne room. How Solana had resurrected the fallen Empress, and how Lukas had fought both of them, with Maude’s timely aid, ultimately freeing Tanya out of her nightmares. She had avoided looking at Lukas while admitting that, but never once, during the entire confession, had she left his hand.

Turns out she’d require periodic ‘examination’ from now on. To quote the Oni, being forced into submission by a foreign identity, followed by subsequent and extended exposure to her worst nightmares had damaged her psyche. Maude, whose naturopathy skills extended all the way to inspecting and healing psychic disorders, would need to run multiple checks just to see the extent of the damage and if there was any vestige of Empress Meynte that remained. With that in mind, she had been through several very intense, ten-minute sessions with the naturopath since morning.

“Well…” said Maude, leaning backwards and stretching her arms. Tanya scowled at the rather provocative gesture but kept her thoughts to herself. Knowing the Oni, she probably did it just to see if she’d get a rise out of it.

“Well?” asked Lukas.

“From what I can gather so far,” said the naturopath, “there’s only one mind inside her head, and it's indubitably hers.” She met Tanya’s gaze. “I see no signs that the Empress’s persona has left any active presence at all within your mind.”

Tanya was just about to sigh in elation when Lukas frowned. “Active?” he asked. “What about… inactive?”

Her lips twisted into a frown. She hadn’t considered that subtext.

Maude sighed. “On that, I have bad news. To be completely honest with you, I do see… remnants of the Empress within you. Faint signs of psychic architecture it created during the possession. Normally such signs would fade over time as you return to your normal habits but this is a special case.”

“How?” Tanya demanded, her stomach flipping at her words.

“How do I put it? Your case is not just unusual, but also unique. I’ve participated in several cases where the victim’s psychic architecture was destabilized by his or her kami, but mostly that developed from a growing imbalance of their emotional spectrum and growing soul corruption. Even after becoming an Oni, I studied the effects of yokai possession on bremetans, but again, the damage was mostly spiritual in origin. But as far as I’m aware, yours is the only case in which the intruder isn’t a spiritual creature, but a memory. A collection of psychic threads with enough structural lattice to give it an identity, one so developed and powerful that it was able to displace your own identity from your own body. There is little to zero spiritual damage, and whatever changes I can see are from the constant summoning of Everfrost, but you have had that corruption for years, so, not my current concern.”

Tanya’s face fell. “You mean she can come back.”

“I never said that,” Maude corrected her. “It is true that your psychic architecture was compromised. Heavily so, but the results are in no way detrimental to you.”

“What are you saying?” asked Lukas.

“You’ve to understand that there are several similarities between her and the Empress. Both of them are yuki-onna, and from what you tell me, the Empress held a physical form as well. Both of them used Everfrost and held similar genetic structure. This has had the effect of two different identities with similar spiritual presences overlapping and melding with each other, instead of one trying to destroy the other.”

“A spiritual resonance,” said Lukas.

“...correct,” said Maude, eyeing him speculatively. “You have some experience with this.”

It wasn’t a question, but a confirmation.

Lukas shrugged. “Just a bit.”

Maude narrowed her eyes and then looked back at Tanya. “I suspect that because of the overlapping of identities with similar spiritual presences, you might have gained some of the skills that the Empress has. If nothing else, the ones she employed against Aguilar. To be blunt, it’s also possible that you might have gained negative traits as well. But I see no evidence of this residual architecture being in any way detrimental for you.”

Lukas just smiled at her knowingly.

Tanya swallowed. She knew perfectly that the Empress’s identity wasn’t gone forever. It had just deserted her and returned to the throne it had arisen from. And that was a serious risk.

“Tell me something honestly, Maude. Is it possible, hypothetically, that if She came back again, she’d be able to… affect me? Control me?”

Maude’s eyes widened in surprise. “Tanya, the Empress’s memory has returned to the throne, and she’s been dead for a millennia. Unless you’re saying that she’s still alive, or there’s some way of bringing her back to life…”

Tanya hesitated. Solana had mentioned that gods and goddesses of the Asukan Pantheon had been raised back from the dead, and reality itself had been altered. Lukas himself was on a mission to find a way to bring his goddess back, and he had done it, after a fashion, in that borderland. And given that Meynte’s memory was still around, it made such a possibility very much possible. All she needed was some hapless yuki-onna without a Lukas Aguilar to help her get out.

“As I said,” she murmured. “Hypothetically.”

“Hmm,” said Maude with what Tanya thought might be a hint of suspicion. “Well then hypothetically, I do not know. There’s no precedent for a living person possessing someone else through a memory. Neither is there precedent for what happens when the compromised victim comes in contact with the person, assuming the person even knows that her memory had possessed the victim in the first place.”

She paused, as if considering her words. “That said, there might be some kind of inchoate connection, a spiritual resonance like Aguilar mentioned. It is possible that drawing on whatever skills the Empress demonstrated while possessing you, could resonate between yourself and the Empress. Then again, both of you are vessels of Everfrost, a far greater and deeper connection than her skills can possibly be.”

“So what you’re saying is,” Lukas inferred, “that if Meynte hadn’t influenced Tanya using the Everfrost connection over the years…”

“The chances of her doing it through psychic architecture is even less.” Maude concluded.

“In that case there is nothing to worry,” said Lukas confidently.

“What?” Tanya whirled at him. Then in a meek voice, she asked. “How can you be so sure?”

He grinned knowingly. “Trust me. I know.”

Her heart thumped in her chest, and she tried to process all the weird reactions she was having to him. He was making her act like the person she never thought she could be again.

It was stupid.

She should’ve really stoppered those emotions.

But she couldn’t.

When you went so long feeling cold and detached, and then a complete stranger ignited those dormant feelings you thought were forever gone, you couldn’t help but be addicted to it. You couldn’t help but revel in the smiles you forgot how to use, or the laughter that sounded unnatural coming from lips that hadn’t had a genuine laugh in years.

“How long do you think she needs to rest?” asked Lukas.

“Ideally I’d have her under complete rest for the next two weeks with regular scans, but I know when I’m expecting the unreasonable so…” Maude gave Tanya a wink, “she’s fit to get going.”

Tanya blinked, and turned to Lukas. “Where are we going?”

“Well, the first thing we’re going to is the throne room. Solana’s still stuck there, paralyzed. I have Blob on guard duty just in case anyone gets any ideas.”

Tanya seized up, grabbing his hands. “You’re going to kill the bitch, aren’t you? I want to be there. I want — I want to do it.”

Lukas looked at her, then at her hands grasping his own, and then at Maude, who just looked at her in amusement. Then he said, “We’re going to meet the bitch, yes, but not to kill her.”

“...then?”

He grinned. “To wake her up. What else?”

Tanya gripped his shirt. “You— you’re joking with me, aren’t you? That bitch— you know what she did to me. She— I was back in my nightmares, Lukas. Looking into that mirror. I was back to my imprisonment, to how those — those —”

Tanya threw up.

Lukas held her, and after she was done, pulled her over his lap, and cleaned her face with a cloth. Tanya couldn’t help herself, and fell upon him, sobbing. She grasped her hands around him, her shelter from the storm, and held on to him for dear life.

“It’s okay…” she heard him say.

It wasn’t, she wanted to scream. Solana tried something horrifying on her. She was responsible for her having to relive her nightmares over and over. It had taken Tanya several years to become the strong woman she was, and Solana had reduced her to the frightened, sixteen-year-old torture victim that was so pathetic that she had to watch her father die to save her life. After what seemed like an eternity, she stopped crying, and when she looked up, what she saw would forever remain etched in her memory.

Lukas sat beside her, firm and steady as a mountain, his right hand softly caressing her golden curls. His left hand though… was clenched into a tight fist, and bleeding. It took her a second to realize that he wasn’t firm, he was stiff. And his mana, it was trembling, a violent maelstrom of rage and hate held in place by an ironclad control. Power was rolling off him in waves. His eyes were distant, but the presence of a smoldering rage was unmistakable in them.

He did not say a word, but his anger was palpable. Tanya found his power enveloping her like a protective cocoon, as if ready to destroy anything and everything remotely hostile to her with extreme prejudice.

“I know what she did,” she heard him say. The frigidity in his tone could freeze her frost. “And I know what she deserves as a result. But right now, we need her alive.”

“Why?” she mumbled.

“Because,” he whispered, his arm entwining around her, pulling her into him. “Like Maude told me, Solana is one of the wickedest beings I’ve ever seen. A terrifying, stone-cold bitch.”

She watched as his eyes found Maude’s.

“But she has a purpose. She holds the yokai together. And right now, that is essential.” He looked back at her. “If not for Maude vouching for us, the yokai would’ve attacked us by now. Your friend is the one holding them together.”

Maude laughed. “You’re being too generous, Aguilar. Nobody wants to give a go against someone that… How did you put it? Kicked Leader’s ass.”

“Exactly,” said Lukas, grinning. “Which is you.”

Maude blinked, as a veil of confusion settled in her eyes. “Which… I am. I suppose. But you went against the Empress and came out victorious, and we both know your metal made Leader’s life a living hell.”

Lukas snorted. “I’ll pass your appreciation to Blob.”

Tanya looked at the constant banter with a growing amount of irritation. “If the yokai are against us, then why are we here? I’m— I’m fit to move now. Why not just leave Solana like she is, and return to Havis—”

The rest of her words died in her throat as he softly cupped her face. Damn it. What was it that he did to her?

“Solana’s fully capable of healing herself, Tanya,” he said. “If we just leave right now, we’ll be leaving the yokai as our enemies. Things are already fucked up enough without needing more. Besides, I have unfinished business with her. At least this way, I— we can run the show.”

“I agree,” said Maude.

“I don’t,” snapped Tanya. “She’s a lying, backstabbing, vindictive bitch. She’s going to botch things up for you and strike the killing blow when you aren’t looking.”

“You know,” Maude drawled. “For someone that’s so distrustful of Leader, you were too quick to just rush to the throne on her words. In fact you accused Aguilar here of having twisted motives and blindly went with what Leader said.”

“And look where that got me!” Tanya said hotly. She turned to Lukas, a pleading look in her eyes. “Let’s just leave this god-forsaken place. I just want to return to Haviskali.”

“What about your heritage?” Maude taunted.

“Fuck my heritage!” Tanya snapped, glaring at Maude. “My heritage has given me nothing except failures, loss and endless nightmares. All my life I’ve relentlessly tried to understand it, achieve it, become worthy of it, and it has only made my life worse. I’ve lost everything, my father, my family, my past life, and now nearly my existence.” She grabbed Lukas’s hands tightly. “I don’t want to lose you.”

Lukas gasped, but Tanya was far from paying any attention. “You told me we can get away from all of this, right? Away from the Empire, away from all of— all of this? Then let’s get away. I’ll go with you. Just please…”

She was shaking at the end of it.

“Tanya! Tan — Tanya!” Lukas called out, grasping her arms tightly. “Look at me!”

She met his eyes, and felt her breath vanish.

“Do you trust me?”

More than myself.

“... yes?” She murmured.

“Then trust in my trust.”

“But… why?” she tried. “If you woke her up, wouldn’t she try to kill you?”

“She has a point, you know,” said Maude. “You did stop her from achieving her goals. If not for you, Empress Meynte would’ve walked this ground again. If she were me, she’d be trying to kill you the instant she wakes up.”

“Oh she’ll want to kill me,” Lukas sneered. It was a cruel thing. “But she won’t. She cannot. Because for once, she’s not the one holding the strings.”

He met Tanya’s eyes. “I am.”