Mortality: The Story of Mortanius

Chapter Twenty

As the sky glowed pink with the light of dawn and the sun peeked out over the hills to the east, Lora walked out into the vast field beyond the Home of the Guardians. She wore a simple sleeveless dress, her long hair tied with a wreathe of flowers. She strode out purposefully into the field, sliding her bare feet through the grass. As the first rays of light spread across the land, she stopped and stuck her arms out at her sides, as if embracing the morning.

Mortanius and Moebius did not intrude upon her sacrifice. They stood a considerable distance away, with a hundred or more people gathered farther back to watch the scene unfold. Mortanius would have preferred to keep the crowd away and let Lora have some privacy in death, but Moebius insisted that their followers be allowed to witness it.

“I admire her bravery,” Moebius said solemnly. “I never treated her with respect she deserved. I admit that. It wasn’t fair of me to group her together with the others. She didn’t choose to be made into a half-breed.”

“I think the only reason they told us ahead of time that we would be turned is because the ritual with Lora went so badly. They didn’t give her any warning at all. Maybe they thought if they told us about it beforehand, we could come to terms with it and not fight them when the time came.”

“Well, we can see how well that worked,” Moebius scoffed. “If that’s true, then Lora indirectly helped usher in our rebellion.”

Lora had helped them in another way, by not telling anyone what she knew. For now, Mortanius chose to keep that little bit of information to himself. Moebius didn’t need to know, and it didn’t matter now anyway. But Mortanius couldn’t help but wonder what might have transpired if Romanen had been the Guardian of Mind instead of Lora.

Romanen fought them to the bloody end. He killed fourteen people and wounded almost twenty more before they managed to injure him badly enough that he could he killed. They cut his head from his shoulders and dumped his mutilated corpse with the other dead Guardians. He could have surrendered like Lora. He could have been granted a more noble death. But Mortanius knew that Romanen would fight. His loyalty was to the vampires, not the humans.

His bloody final stand against the rebels gave Janos time to get away. Right as Janos took flight and soared into the air, one of the archers managed to hit him in the leg, but it wasn’t enough to slow him down. If Janos had only been standing another few feet closer when Moebius used the staff, he would have been paralyzed like the others. The tenth Guardian was out of their reach now, but Moebius was surprisingly calm about it.

“We have plenty of time to track him down,” he said dismissively when Mortanius had brought up the subject earlier. “We know the staff’s effective range now. Besides, Janos didn’t have a Pillar. Sometimes I wonder if he was really a Guardian at all.”

Smoke billowed from Lora’s body. Mortanius forced himself to watch as the smoke drifted away, blown in the morning breeze. Lora did not scream or cry out, even though the pain must have been excruciating. Behind him, Mortanius could hear the other assembled people mutter and gasp in shock. Lora’s skin turned almost black, and then there was a ripple of flame. Her long hair, waving in the heat, caught fire and burned like a torch dipped in oil. In seconds, her entire body was engulfed in flame, and then she collapsed to the ground, nothing more than a blackened, burning husk, setting fire to the grass around her. From the moment the sun’s rays had first touched her skin, it had only taken a minute.

This time, he and Moebius knew what was coming. Just like before, they felt a wave of anguish wash over them, and then it was gone.

Almost unconsciously, Mortanius let his vision slip into the spirit world, turning his vision to shades of pearly gray, supernatural blue, and ugly green. Switching from one world to the other was a trick he had learned a long time ago, although he rarely did so unless he was engaged in his studies. It still bothered him at a personal level to be able to see the spirits of the dead, but his revulsion at the sight was far less than it was when he was still a child. But somehow, he felt the urge to watch Lora’s soul escape her body, as if urged on by an unseen force.

The fire was invisible now. All he could see was Lora’s charred, motionless body surrounding by shimmering grass that withered as it died. A glowing, spectral form emerged from her corpse and rose into the air, joined by another, dimmer light that joined with the floating soul and soared away along with it.

Mortanius realized with a start that the soul of a Guardian had two aspects: the soul itself, and the special link with the Pillars that marked someone as a Guardian.

Were the two parts inseparable from each other? Would it be possible for the link to the Pillars to be sent off to another person? Mortanius’s thoughts swam with the implications of this discovery. What if he could separate the link from a living person, essentially transferring the role of Guardian to another person? It would require study and experimentation, but Mortanius knew that he could learn the truth. Many of his powers as Guardian of Death were still a mystery. Given enough time and practice, who knew what powers he could attain?

Moebius was talking to him. “... better this way. Her death symbolizes the needless cruelty of the vampires. That’s why I wanted to let the others see it for themselves.”

Something lurked in the back of Mortanius’s mind. He narrowed his eyes and turned to look back toward the Home of the Guardians. Lora’s body sputtered and burned out, sending up clouds of thick black smoke, bits of flame still flickering in the surrounding grass. Mortanius rubbed his eyes and then set off at a brisk walk.

“Where are you going?” Moebius asked.

“Come with me.”

“Why? What’s going on?”

“I have to check something. It’s important.”

They returned to the Home of the Guardians and went inside. Moebius took a moment to order one of his men to extinguish what remained of Lora’s body and prepare it as much as possible for burial, and then hurried after Mortanius. By the time he caught up, Mortanius had reached the courtyard where the bodies of the slain vampires were laid out.

He shifted his vision once more to the spirit world and stared intently at the bodies of Aleph and the other vampires. After a moment of examination, he confirmed what he had suspected, even if he didn’t know why he had suspected it.

“We have to burn the bodies,” he said.

“What? Why?”

“Their souls are still there.”

“What?” Moebius sputtered. “Are you saying they aren’t dead yet?”

Mortanius returned his vision to the real world and looked at Moebius. “I’m saying that their souls still inhabit their bodies. I don’t know what that means. Maybe they aren’t truly dead after all. Maybe they’ll heal if we wait long enough.”

“But we felt them die!”

“I don’t know what we felt. But their souls are still there. I can see them.”

“What about Romanen?”

“No, his soul is gone. It’s only the vampires.”

Moebius stepped forward and rubbed his chin. “How fascinating. You know, it just occurred to me that I’ve never seen a grave or any kind of memorial for the other vampire Guardians. The ones that died a long time ago, I mean. The ones we replaced.”

“You’re right. I’ve never seen a grave either.”

“Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”

“We never learned the vampires’ funeral practices. They must have burned the bodies.”

“If it wasn’t for your powers as the Death Guardian, we wouldn’t have found out about this.”

Mortanius shrugged. “Maybe it was destiny.”

Moebius laughed at that. He went off to get some men to move the bodies, while Mortanius remained in the courtyard. He knelt down and looked closely at Aleph’s body. Upon regular inspection, Mortanius would have sworn that Aleph was completely dead. His heart was pierced, drained of blood, his body cold and already growing stiff with rigor mortis. And yet, his soul remained.

The vampires’ biology was a complete unknown. There were both male and female vampires, although fewer of the latter. But they were sterile and could not have children, although they must have been born at some point, unless they simply came into existence out of nothing. Janos had told him once, long ago, that the vampires had not always been that way. What had happened to them?

Was this curious detail about their souls related in some way to their immortality? Did the vampires even know that their souls remained inside their dead bodies? He supposed they must have known, if they burned the bodies of their dead.

Was their link to the Pillars tied to their body in death as well? When he looked into the spirit world, he only saw the soul there, trapped inside the corpse. When Lora died, he distinctly saw two glowing forms emerge from her body, but he could not tell if they had both been visible inside her when she was still alive. Had the link to the Pillars only become visible after her death?

There were so many questions. If the bodies of Aleph and the others were not burned, would their souls remain there forever? Would the bodies decay? And more importantly, would another Guardian be chosen to replace them? Mortanius reeled at the thought of keeping the vampires’ bodies locked away somewhere to find out what would happen. Maybe they would heal and return to life after all. No, he thought, they must be burned. Even as much as he desired to know the truth, he would not risk their rebellion on such an experiment.

Moebius returned with some men with litters, and they dragged out the bodies one by one. A very crude wooden pyre was hastily constructed, and the bodies lain atop it. Mortanius was too distracted to pay much attention to the makeshift ceremony, but Moebius gave a quick speech to the assembled members of the Sarafan Cult, telling them that new human Guardians would be born to replace the vampires and that now the Pillars were completely under human control.

When they lit the pyre, Mortanius once again switched his vision to the spirit world and carefully watched as the souls of the dead Guardians rose up from the flames and sped off on their journey to a new body.

“Well?” Moebius asked under his breath.

“The souls have moved on,” Mortanius replied.

“Good, good. Right now, somewhere in Nosgoth, there are new Guardians being born.”

“So we’ve been told.”

Moebius frowned. “Let’s hope they didn’t lie about that little detail.”

“I don’t think they did. But given what we already know, I’m disinclined to trust anything that they told us.”

“Now you sound like me,” Moebius said with a chuckle.

“Yes, I guess I do.”

Moebius set his hand on Mortanius’s shoulder. “Come on, old friend. We’re going to have a feast this evening to celebrate our victory, but right now I could use some breakfast. Today is going to be a busy day.”

“And here I thought the hard part was already over,” Mortanius muttered.

“Of course not,” Moebius said. “You and I are in charge now. The hard part is just beginning.”

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