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Enki recognized its slim face. As it stared at him he could recall with precision the times the last owner of that face had given him the same look. There was also no way that time could have muddled his memory of Cahara, his mind would not have distorted his image, adding things that hadn’t been there or changing the grey hue of his eyes – much like how he’d augmented his body to live past the natural lifespan of a human, he’d magically bolstered his memory, letting him recall the past with infallible precision.
The youth who was confronting him in the dank passage, who had called out "dark priest" behind him with a voice that had stopped him in his tracks, was Cahara’s exact likeness.
– You are that dark priest, correct, the visage cried out. The one that lives in this dungeon?
The torchlight on the wall framed the young, weathered face with severe shadows, and turning his eyes the color of lead. Enki felt echoes of the dread belonging to a much younger and endangered man, exposed to all the things he had yet to understand.
The first time he’d seen Cahara he’d mistaken his hair color for pitch black and, with all the grime that the man been covered in, had wondered if he didn’t carry abyssinan blood in his veins. This one’s clothes is pristine, which would be a clumsy oversight where this an illusion meant to fool him into believing that a person had ventured this far into the dungeon of fear and hunger to see him.
Yet this was not him, and Enki didn’t draw this conclusion merely because that man had been dead for years. Necromancy was, after all, a familiar subject to him – it would have been less strange to find a resurrected Cahara staring him down. While his strictly human senses told him one thing the others that he had developed shouted that this thing was neither human nor the remains of one.
– I must speak with you.
The same time that the thing started forward, Enki stepped back, an incantation on his tongue even before the conscious thought. The next second the spell had transported him away from the passage and into the refitted study that for all intents and purposes had become his home, within several sets of protective wards that effectively hid his presence from all known and unknown entities that could think to intrude. Safe, but none the wiser of what he’d just encountered.
It didn’t take long for him to start to berate himself for fleeing so handily. What had that been: mirage or physical being? And what had it’s intentions been?
Likely nothing good, was what all of his previous experiences with the dungeon moved him to presume, but it still infuriated him that he escaped out of a knee-jerk reaction. That he hadn’t grown beyond being rattled by an unforeseen event after all that he’d seen.
The energy spawned from his frustration he turned towards the many crowded bookcases in the room, where he begun pulling out codices and scrolls without the need of an index. Anything with any mention of changelings – or perhaps it was magic similar to the mire of memories in the ancient city.
All the while his mind was occupied by, not only the encounter, but older recollections. A group of people huddled around a cooking fire that needed constant coaching from the barbarian as to not die; a battle against an ogre where he would have been felled by its bloated stinger where it not for the woman knight cutting it off with her sword at the last second; or the man who, at the most hopeless place on this earth, sat down in front of the mute and strange girl that accompanied them, and tried to teach her a children’s game with pebbles and sticks. The memories skipped and danced around uncontrollably like skeletons raised by a faulty ritual.
The experiences of delving into the dungeon of Fear and Hunger for the first time was something he reminisced over from time to time. Not because they were pleasant, the mere suggestion of that was ridiculous, but rather because of the significance of them; those were the formative days (weeks – months?) that raised him up into the enlightened person he was currently. In that light he regarded the trails he’d endured with something resembling fondness, which for better and or worse also extended to the people whom he wouldn’t have survived without. Hard as that has been to admit.
Distracted, he cut his finger on the codice that he was leafing through. The taste on his tongue when he sucked on the wound was more sulfur than iron.
For a long time he hated the idea of being chained down by anything remotely resembling affection. To him a person had rarely held the same objective value as a book, but perhaps because he didn’t have to feel harrowed by a limited lifespan anymore, his opinion had mellowed.
What was once unending frustration about his inability to purge a certain set of individuals from his mind after he had gotten all the use he could out of them, even as remembering their names and voices served no purpose anymore because he would never see them again, had grown into acceptance. It even extended towards his brain’s insistence of preserving whole sets of banal memories, the shock of tasting the stew that Ragnvaldr had made (There is nothing in this place. How could you have made this, Cahara had cried outright); D’arce humming a melancholic melody while honing her sword; or the sound of somebody shifting beside him when they had tried to sleep on whatever thin layer of straw and moldy mattresses that were available.
The one answer Enki had as to why he would recall something like that now was that when you laid surrounded by the darkness, the rattling ambiance and distant screams, the sounds from your companion became the thing you anchored yourself on, focusing on the breathing turning more slow and even, and the faint whiff of alcohol in it.
What was the mimicker doing now? Still running around and shouting for the dark priest to reappear. That was something that didn’t add up about it’s behavior, Enki reflected, as he sat now, sucking his thumb, amidst the hastily assembled research, where it truly something created from his memories. The Cahara he knew would not have acted like that, shouting and running towards the person he wanted. He’d always had to put on casual airs, as if even being tortured and thrown in a cell was a game, and it certainly never stopped him from flirting with the very next unmalformed face that passed by.
Where he to – hypothetically – imagine a reunion with the suave mercenary, it would not have been like this meeting. Had the mimicker even recognized him?
He put aside the last scroll in his possession with accounts of face stealing demons and doppelgänger ill-omens. Most of anything with shapeshifting abilities have sounded applicable, but doesn’t strike him as right, not with the way that thing had turned his sixth sense reeling. His instincts told him that he was following the wrong lead. He could keep searching methodically through the sources until he stumbled upon something more promising, but he suspected that there was a quicker way. There existed after all another knowledge seeker who still exceeded him.
Nosramus had begun to be non-present during large stretches of time. Often now the other undying knowledge seeker would opt to put his own research on hold to instead sit in an lightless room, neither sleeping nor studying, truly existing as something between alive nor dead, perhaps meditating or perhaps not even that. He hadn't divulged much on wether he did anything worthwhile while in that state. Things had not regressed so far though that he wouldn’t react when Enki appeared with queries for him.
The other man was blinking slowly from his dusty seat, the lantern that Enki had brought probably hurting his eyes. The mattered tresses of hair seemed too much of a weight for his thin neck and his head hang listlessly, but Enki saw a glimmer in his eye and knew he had his full attention. Since the eye account was the only source he had to elaborate on, he took the time to describe it exhaustedly. The thing’s actions, his own reactions, the temperature in the passage, the behavior of the light, each rock in the wall: every detail significant and insignificant in order to print the full picture, and as suspected, before he was done Nosramus had begun creaking with intrigued laughter.
– Rare, most rare, he said.
– Do you know what it was then?
– I have my suspicions. That mercenary you knew, he had a wife, yes?
– He mentioned something of the sort, Enki mumbled while following the now invigorated other into the study proper. Nosramus library was still more extensive than his own, there still being shelves that he had yet to explore. The older scholar knew them like the streets of a dearly beloved hometown. In little time he had retrieved a crumbling codice adorned by white pearls and winged snakes stamped on the cover.
Peering over his shoulder as Nosramus sat down by his reading table and opened it, Enki felt his brow furrow at the very first sentences he made out.
– I wouldn’t say that I’ve ever been one to take the belief in angels seriously, he commented.
Beings of Sylvian. Little recipients of worship from commoners who believed that any fortune could be contributed to a magical creature that didn’t have anything better to do than act the personal guard of any one individual.
– That is likely because you have only ever known the later, distorted myths about them, Nosramus countered. Ah, here. "As man from earth was made and to earth made to become, so was the angelfolk in turn made from love. The one unquenched by age.
– This still sounds …
Enki sighed, having been demonstrated plenty of times the potent power of the old god of love and lust, Sylvian, but still having difficulty stomaching the saccharin verses that always accompanied her worship.
– I remember the whole chapter now, Nosramus continued. It happens among the worshippers of Sylvian. If any one of them share a love with another, strong enough to bridge any distance and life itself, then the egg of an angel may be planted within their soul.
– That is the love that births them them?
– That is the conception. What follows is the painful labour. Consider that this man felt a love so strong for this woman that he willingly headed into a most accursed place in order to win her freedom, and that the woman’s feeling in return were just as strong. Their future was not to be; the man perished and as the years passed without notice, eventually she would have to realize the truth. It begins then, with the cracking of her heart, the first hole also appears in the shell that traps the angel, and with each contraction of aching loss thereafter a little more of it gets free, but ever so slowly.
The illustrations on the page were not humanoid, but more of the same snake imagery. Large, writhing creatures with taloned feet and maws of red teeth. Well, Enki thought, if the depictions were accurate then angels would not be the first creatures that had the ability to hide behind a facade.
How long exactly would the birth last, he asked.
Nosramus leaned back, pondering.
– How many years have passed now since we met? Say that, despite her lot in life, the woman got to live to her old age, and during all that time the love she felt for the mercenary never ceased, nor did the ache dissipate. The hatchling would have broken free from her at last when her soul was extinguished, at the moment of her death. Add a few years for it to gather it’s bearings inside the aether where things of its kind exist, and learn how to impose its presence on our physical plane – yes, if it got the idea to search for its roots then it would be about this time that it showed up here …
Enki glanced at Nosramus, regarding the way the other’s conclusions formed rapidly in the flow of the moment, and stilling a distant ache in his chest. The first few decades of them engaging in the study of the universe together Nosramus had not shown any sign of degradation. They had engaged each other like this nearly every evening and he had soon ended up speaking to him more than to any other person he’d known, but the sickness or whatever to call it had then begun to make it's presence known. The man didn’t appear to fight against it, as if it was a need and a call that had forced him into compliance. It could be a testament to how much more ancient Nosramus was, and that even someone who had conquered death would eventually be lulled into a state much like it. The most bitter hypothesis he’d conceived was that he’d been the catalyst of it, as if the other scholar had subconsciously been waiting all this time for an inheritor of his role as the eternal gatherer, and, once that had happened, had begun to relinquish himself to the exhaustion of the soul. It was a fact after all that the old died more abundantly during spring, when the harsh winter being replaced with warmth and light had them relaxed and lowering their guard.
– Does it seem likely that the angel would look like the mercenary, he asked.
– What other shape could it take other than the object of the affection that conceived it?
Enki considered Nosramus earlier words. "Searching for its roots". Typical of some parentless thing born alone. The creature wouldn’t even have had the luxury of feeling abandoned as his orphaning simply was the natural state of things. It usually wasn’t wise to infantilize a holy being, but thinking back to the encounter now he had a hard time shaking that impression.
– Can I borrow that book, he asked, tucking the codice under his arm as Nosramus readily handed it over.
– You know what you are going to do now?
Enki simply turned and wandered out of the room.
He’d accepted the lingering sentimental ties towards the people he met in the dungeon, because he’d realized that they too has been significant. As the dungeon was emptied of most of its enduring horrors and the rumors would later reach him of a slayer of monsters who would appear and purge the monstrosities that had haunted villages for generations; as he saw the signs of Legard, at large once more in the wider world, and learned of the fell magic that D’arc must have used to revive him; and as a new god, a different god, seeped into the fabric of existence, bringing with her a special kind of torment and a single whisper of gratefulness towards the man who had helped in ascending her. He could see now how the treads of grand fate had spun around them all along, even at the moments that they had felt as most insignificant in comparison to the place that they labored to survive.
The angel hadn’t moved far, lingering listlessly in the old prison, and squintingly trying to read the circle of an old blood ritual scribbled on the wall. This time it was Enki who surprised it. Cahara’s face turned around with Cahara’s scorpion quick reflexes, and although he knew better Enki again experienced the deja vu.
– I suspect you came here to ask me something, he expressed tartly, though it wouldn’t have hurt to introduce yourself first.
The angel got a sheepish look, glancing down at his toes.
– That’s just it, it said. One of those things I need to ask you. My name, you would know it?
Enki imagined for a moment Celeste, not as anyone he had seen himself, but as the person that Cahara must have loved. She had to have been very beautiful to ensnare him, but at the end of her life, strife and aged had surely taken their toll, and as such he imagined a frail, broken woman stumbling down the poor streets that she were never allowed to leave, soon to be stumbling towards her death bed as well, the snake like coils half emerged and strangling around her soul. Perhaps she had found some minor contentment to help her bear the years, but after carrying that weight for so long she must have been more than weary. He sent her his respect mentally for bringing something extraordinary to his doorstep with her demise. Maybe that too would turn out to have been significant.
– If you mean the name of the mercenary that entered this dungeon long ago and whose face you wear, then I can tell you that his name was Cahara, he said. And yes, there are a lot of interesting tales to be told about him.