The Yaak House, Part Seven

 (Originally published on my main blog, Andi and I Write, on October 12, 2020)

(Special thanks to the talent of  McCallum J. Morgan for his incredible illustration! You can view his blog in the link on his name there.) 

Gerald stared hard at the scene before him, Jasper pulling him close from behind. Gerald could feel the heartbeat of the other against his shoulder, the stutter in his breathing as the gun was lowered at the silent command from Thaz’ra, a hand motion from their wretched past. Gerald’s hands shook as he holstered the gun.

“It has been years,” the color drained from Gerald as the voice crept into his ears, and he felt Jasper’s breath hitch again behind him.

“And as I promised, I gave you a voice,” Thaz’ra answered the voice as Jasper felt the blood drain from his face, light flooding the chamber as several candles lit with blue flame. Leathery carcasses lay along one wall as Gerald swept his light along it; a bear, a two-headed fawn, and beneath the skull, before the candles, lay something cervid and deformed.

Thaz’ra’s words wavered, “I gave you means to move freely through this realm,” Gerald caught their reflections in a tarnished mirror hung on the wall adjacent to the skull on the wall.

Gerald saw first Jasper in the mirror, then himself. Jasper was surrounded by a pulsing aura of pastel violet around his form that followed the beat of his heart. It was bright and looked dented, but somehow velveteen. Gerald was surrounded by a similar aura; though his was autumnal, full of orange and red wavers of light amongst the golden majority that lit the mirror like a sunrise; Gerald found himself breathless for a second before the beauty of it before he saw the leathered corpses along the other wall reflected by the candlelight; one was just a hip down remnant. That one was Clipper; he knew without being told.

“What do you require of me?” Thaz’ra asked the skull, looking up after a long pause, though she remained kneeling.

“You bound me to this realm,” the voice was a mournful echo of the man it had belonged to, it was almost unrecognizable. The green phosphenes of the skull echoed tenfold in the reflection before Jasper in the mirror.

Gerald stared long and hard at the mirror, and he shook his head and put his hand up when Thaz’ra turned to him, looking over as the Clipper beast from the woods strode in calmly behind them to collapse before the lit candles. The doors slammed shut before Gerald could bolt free of the place, though he tried and failed, clutching at the door handles.

He screamed, he pulled on the doors, he screamed again, fear crashing through his veins on the heels of anger. He struggled to grasp at the thought, the implications of what Thaz’ra had done, though he knew not what it had been.

“I didn’t know that would happen,” Thaz’ra’s voice continued, wavering over a pained note as Jasper and Gerald saw her reflection in the mirror, her aura shrouded, as Jasper had always sensed, “I’m sorry,” she added.

Gerald’s heart clenched; he saw the waver in his own aura reflected when he saw the condensed, pastel green glow over Thaz’ra’s heart mirrored in a second glow that sat low in her hips.  Gerald turned to her, there was no glow; to the mirror, the glow was there. Gerald’s own aura spun into a tumultuous whirlwind of orange. Jasper saw in the mirror pulsing threads that traced between the auras reflected. Vivid blue between Thaz’ra and the phosphene glow, red among the trio. The antlered head on the wall tilted and Thaz’ra hissed, the shroud about her aura vanishing as tears ran down her face and she again bowed her head, bringing it to rest against her knee. In the mirror, two elegant and spindly antlers of mist swirled and swooped back from her head.

“What did you do Thazenelra…” Jasper was more startled by Gerald’s utterance of Thaz’ra’s full name than his cold tone, though Gerald’s expression was impassive. A grey thread snapped into existence between the two men and the phosphene glow in the mirror. Jasper stepped out from behind Gerald to approach Thaz’ra, her aura looking in the mirror beginning to look like a glitch on a phone screen, jagged and too angular for the likes of nature, fractured despite the way the green glow pulsed steadily for the time being.

“Babe,” Jasper prompted her gently, only to gasp and grab Gerald’s hand as a fog filled the room, taking on shapes as a choked sob escaped Thaz’ra.

“I did… what I have always done,” she forced out, “what seemed best at the time.”

Around Gerald and Jasper, they saw the fog figures become clear. Rin looked strung out and complacent, as if drugged; Opiates, Jasper suspected, it was Rin’s old demon from the wretched days. Rin was wearing a thin robe, being lead through pews in a familiar looking cabin with two others, to a yawning cellar that the two recognized… but this was not the Rin that Gerald had known well, this was Rin that Jasper and Thaz’ra had known, with a slender, meek build. The mirror reflected not Rin, but the head of a stag atop a slender, bare woman, and Gerald balked for a moment at the sight of this… as well as the sight of one more figure reflecting as a man with a deer’s skull. Jasper squeezed Gerald’s hand, and the two shared an uneasy glance. Gerald felt as though he should have known the man, but his eyes hurt when he tried to look closer. The way Jasper squeezed his hand told him he wasn’t alone.

Clipper appeared from the space between he and Jasper, as though he had walked through an unseen door, leading a hobbled and gagged Thaz’ra by her bound hands. Her foggy visage broke free to swing at him with these bound hands as he tried to lead her down a familiar set of cellar doors, hopping back a few steps to swing at one of the men leading Rin and the other. She had managed to strike the hooded figures before Clipper’s fist collided with her misty jaw.

The fog stirred, Gerald becoming aware of the shaking sound of Thaz’ra’s sobbing before them in the present before a new scene came to form before them.

Clipper was straddling the thrashing body of a frightened yearling fawn on a mossy floor before slitting its throat as a horrified Rin watched, the foggy figure of Thaz’ra laid across his lap, the other behind him. The mirror showed no reflections this time around, but when the knife Clipper held was brought around to Rin’s neck, Thaz’ra’s form sat up, and the two men heard a pig’s squeal as she clubbed his face again, managing to grab the knife from him and lunge up from where she rose from the tilted altar.

In the fog, Clipper staggered back and raised a gun as Thaz’ra charged him.

She could have dodged, could have knocked it from his hands, even swung at the robed figures that swarmed her.

She charged on instead, fury and determination in her stone-cold eyes.

A flash filled the chamber with the boom of a gunshot that echoed from the past to the present.

Steel met flesh as she threw herself onward in her charge toward the barrel, the muzzle flash burnt her skin, but she staggered on with a war cry as copper met muscle and bone.

Thaz’ra of the fog staggered another step, clutching at her collarbone as she fell to her knees, a heathen name on her lips as they turned up in a defiant snarl.

“Dvasia!”

She snarled even as Clipper ordered her silence.

Clipper pressed the pistol to her hairline.

Crimson sprayed over the men behind her, the skull, the altar.

From the present, Gerald himself staggered to his knees, a thousand miles away as she collapsed, a thick red fog blooming where she fell as the rest faded. Whatever hells he had seen had lunged from one past to bring forth another.

“Gerald, listen to me,” Jasper’s voice was firm, his hand squeezing Gerald’s breath hitched as well now, “You’re safe,” he didn’t believe the words, but he couldn’t bear the idea of being the only one to witness the scenes in the mist around him as Thaz’ra’s white fog visage turned to red, “Gerald,” Gerald put his other hand over Jasper’s. His silent way to say he was calming down already

On the ground before them Thaz’ra of the present shook and shuddered with sobs as she stood shakily, in time with the red fog visage of her.

Red fog Thaz’ra reached her hands to the fossil on the wall, chanting that profane name, “Dvasia ab compensare, Dvasia ab cambiare! Venire, Dvasia!”

Thaz’ra of the flesh put her face in her hands, shaking her head as a spectral stag rose from the earth. It was a skeletal thing, but alive in a writhing mass of vines and greenery, but it was not a stag for long; becoming something human as it stepped forward.

“Please, please no, look away, look away,” Thaz’ra of the flesh begged. Jasper looked haunted, burying his face in Gerald’s shoulder; but Gerald found he could not look obey.

The stag stepped forward to merge with Thaz’ra of the fog before the red mist and greenery vanished to the misty white again, Thaz’ra of the pale fog rising with the green pulsing through the pale veins of the past.

The scene blurred again, and Gerald recognized the stepstone path Clipper was rushing toward, his hooded companions on his heels, though they crumbled to the ground and the stepstones vanished, Thaz’ra grabbing Clipper and dragging him back to the chamber, slamming the large doors with a crunch that echoed from the past to the present. Only the torso progressed as she dragged it along, throwing it against the slaughtered deer.

Rin’s foggy figure stumbled out of the chamber, running out, sliding for a moment in the creeping red fog that spread across the threshold, only to freeze in midair. The figure Gerald felt he should remember hesitated as they saw this, coming back for Thaz’ra of the fog.

“I’m sorry,” Thaz’ra of the flesh choked out, her fog visage saying the same, though without the emotion.

“Forgive me Jake,” fog Thaz’ra murmured, “I promised our boys I’d protect them…”  Jasper’s head snapped up, and Gerald’s knees felt weak; it was like a dam had broken in his memory.

Jake…? Jake!

The name! The face! His Jake!

Gerald’s first serious, though ultimately unrequited, love upon his honorable discharge from the military; the man he had thrown himself into the godforsaken trafficking ring to save, the man who had shown him how to survive civilian life, his first AA Sponsor…

“I know,” Jake voice was as gentle as the newly freed memories recalled from their repression, even shaking as it was through agony, “You were dead for a moment.”

“For but a moment…” Thaz’ra of the fog breathed as her flesh fell again to her knees as the figures in the fog shared a shaking kiss.

“What was Dvasia’s price?” Jake murmured.

“Voice and vassal, blood and bond,” Thaz’ra laid Jake down beneath the skull, the spectral stag having risen again and unhinging ivy ribs to swallow the torso before settling over the body of the deer Clipper had sacrificed.

“Of which am I?”

“Half the Vassal… half the blood,”

“Oh…” Jake looked thoughtful, “I’m to be dying here then?” the acquiescence the man had to his fate didn’t surprise Gerald, though it stung.

“I’m sorry,” Thaz’ra hiccupped from the ground as her foggy clone gave a slow nod, “I’m so- s- so sorry…”

Gerald could only watch in a mix of jealousy and hurt as the two foggy figures embraced and laid atop the stone altar in a blurred kiss, the scene fading once more before reforming again.

Rin was still frozen midair, and Thaz’ra pressed one last foggy kiss to Jake’s lips before stabbing the man in the side; Gerald winced. He knew it was a slow way to go; Thaz’ra had known this too. Her misty fingers ran over with red as she held the dying man against her chest before the fog faded once more.

The air was clear again, but in the mirror, he saw Jake standing guard over Thaz’ra as she stood shakily, though he appeared for only a second before his form seemed to swirl away into the mark on her collarbone, which now shone a pastel green in the tarnished surface and crept down her form to gather in her hips as well.

“She agreed,” the disembodied voice of Clipper continued, “to the blood of bonds in exchange for protection of family chosen,” Gerald couldn’t tear his eyes from the mirror, from the glow over Thaz’ra’s heart as it dimmed abruptly, though her own aura remained stable. He looked to Thaz’ra, no words in his mind coherent enough to convey any single emotion as the voice continued, “to foresight, so as not to end in her previous situation again,” the pastel glow dimmed again, he could see what reminded at first him of Yggdrasil- the Norse tree of Life- in the dimming glow before the cold reality of what it was slammed against him as this fading gleam revealed what her hands couldn’t hide in the mirror. They only highlighted what she had surrendered, the human cost.

“I’m so sorry Gerald,” she choked.