“No,” I said. “It is you who will be in agony. Andyou,” I looked at Owu’s father, “who will be in emotional agony. You did not pay the cost of your mating at the time, and so you will pay it now.”
The red stared. “What do you mean? The rituals are over. They cannot be reopened.”
“No,” I agreed. “This will be pain for the sake of pain. But without that pain, we will not find balance in Owu. The levels of him disagree on the correct path. In the power of the pain you inflict on your mate, and with my help, he will find alignment. The departed children of two colors will watch on and find peace in witnessing what they wished had been possible for themselves.”
The red glanced at the dead children, who were clearly not going anywhere. They fixed all their ire on the mother and father who represented their own parents. They had led a hard and short life, filled with so much pain.
“Demon,” I growled at the father. “You made a mistake many years ago, and now you realize the price of that. The price wasyour son’s suffering, and the price will be your son’s life if you err. Remember that if you think to hold back from hurting her.”
The mother snarled at her mate, “Hold back and I will kill you myself. If you’re determined to leave us, then at least heal him first.”
Hurt flashed across the red’s face, but I was not so eager to judge him on the choice to enter Tiers. That choice had led him to find me, after all. He had entered Tiers to heal his son, and that had worked out in a convoluted way that only deities and ancient powers might understand. “This healing depends on your savagery. Find the bloodthirstiness that makes you a demon and unleash it.”
He dipped his head. “I will not fail.”
Owu’s breaths were coming faster. The mood in the room was tense, to say the least.
I took one of his hands, not removing my other hand from his forehead. “You understand pain, Owu, so I will not try to reassure you on that front. The power you have developed to exist through that pain is what you will need now. I will guide you to what you must figure out. Your parents will give you the power to do this. Do not be afraid, Owu. You are meant to live on for many, many centuries. And while this pain has seemed so endless and pointless, it has been for a reason—to give you the tools that you will need.”
His mother sobbed, clinging to her son’s other hand.
“Close your eyes,” I told the young demon, and then did the same. I retreated into my magic, casting it forth over Owu.
“Begin,” I ordered.
The mother’s whimpers filled my ears until I strode deeper into my power, and then, even if she had screamed I would not have heard.
I walked through my power radiating over Owu, and then I sank into his essence, feeling him twitch and moan at my intrusion.
A mess of yellow and red filled him. Clots of it. Sluggish rivers struggling to flow past blockages. Hardened masses clinging to the sides and steadily encroaching inward. “Owu,” I echoed through my power. “Follow me.”
I shouldered my way through his smoke, digging my shoulder into the hardened masses that were like boulders. They cracked against my magic, stinging and cutting me in the doing. I grunted and waded through the sluggish rivers toward his iron-cased heart.
I obliterated the clots and blockages I found on the way, feeling the presence of the weakened Owu clinging to my back.
We moved to his center, and the sight of his center robbed me of speech. Warped, calcified. On all his organs and bones. His ribs had been abused into becoming one piece of bone. How did he breathe? How did he move?
“We are here,” I whispered to him. “Feel the disagreement in you, Owu. Here is your heart. Do you feel what it says?”
A nod of his power.
“Here is your soul. The message is different. Your mother is your heart, and your father is your soul. But both heart and soul should be yours alone. Take them back to find your smoke. Your smoke forms your destiny. Can you feel that too?”
The boy trembled at the feeling of his destiny, as he should. But he would meet his destiny one step at a time as we all did. Whether he wished to or not.
I gently pushed him toward the heart and then noted the increasing warmth at his center from the efforts of his parents.
Owu touched the iron casing around his heart. A tiny crack appeared, and he slipped inside. I winced at the mounting heat as time passed. How much time, I could not say.
Eventually, the boy’s power seeped out through the crack, and he collapsed against the side of the iron casing. The power at his center rose to meet him, wrapping the boy as if in a blanket.
And there he was for a time again, radiating pulses of yellow and red, yellow and red.
Sweat beaded on my forehead, and I panted and blinked away sweat as colors radiated from Owu’s soul and heart, then started to change.
Wisps of orange, which then disappeared.
Green. Then they were gone.
