“Lord Dicion! Lord Dicion, please wake up!”
The Elder awoke with a start, and jumped up. “Ha! What! What day is it! Elysia, how is Elysia?” He turned to the voice. It was Elysia’s old maid, Hannah. His eyes widened at the familiar sight of her. Dicion rushed forward and took her in his arms. “Hannah! Hannah what about Elysia?”
“She’s fine, milord! She’s improved dramatically. She started to heal not long after Lord Akil left us.”
“Ah. Ah,” was all Dicion could say. What could he say? “What day is it? Has she had the baby? Where’s the baby?”
“Easy, easy Lord Dicion.” Hannah supported the thin, haggard creature in her strong matronly arms. “Yes, she had the baby. A girl, as it turns out. Your first girl. Spitting image of the lady, too. But I won’t have you seeing them like this. I’m going to bathe you and feed you and cut your hair.”
“Woman, you let me see my wife right now or I’ll have you...”
“Now you hush! You’ve been in a coma for a month now. I’ve tried every day to wake you. You haven’t eaten. You look like you’ve been torn apart by a wild animal. You are going to let me clean you up to see your beautiful wife and child or you’ll not see them at all.” Hannah stared dead into his eyes, and for good measure, bared her teeth at him and hissed.
Dicion complied, as he felt too weak to even walk completely on his own. Hannah gathered some male servants of the castle and led him to a public bath chamber. He ate twelve pots of venison stew, and even fed on a live boar for fresh blood.
After Hannah had her way with cleaning him up and returning him to semi-normality, she led him to his bedroom. The door opened to reveal Elysia, Peter, and Christof, sitting on his bed and playing with a happy, healthy, cooing baby girl.
“My Dicion!” Elysia fell from the bed into a running embrace that nearly toppled her emaciated husband. They sunk to the floor and sobbed quietly. Peter scooped the white-haired Layrion in his arms, and together with Christof, they went to their father and knelt beside them.
“Father, it’s so good to see you.” Christof wiped a tear from his eye. “We were so worried.”
He released Elysia and turned. “My boy, my boy,” Dicion wailed as he brought his younger son to him and kissed his head. He looked to Peter. “Peter, you’ve grown so much. And is this...is this...”
“Layrion,” Elysia chimed. “The Seer was wrong. I had a girl. But I’m so glad I did.” The child did indeed look like her mother in the face, but the shocking head of pure white hair was something the family had not seen in any Icchorian before. It was different than the white of age, seeming to glow even in the candle light. Her eyes were the next thing to shock Dicion. One was the golden color of their kind, the other was of a deep green color. It was not unlike that of a Human.
The baby smiled at him and laughed. She reached out for him, and he took her in his arms. “Layrion. Layrion, someday, you’ll be an Elder. I can see it.” He looked at his wife. “The Seer was not wrong, Elysia. I believe that Layrion was first conceived as male. I believe that the pain you started experiencing, and even my deep sleep, was the cause of some great evil. Something has changed the destiny of our family...of the whole world. Something very powerful and dark changed Layrion in your womb. For what purpose, we’ll never know. We’ll never know what she could have been. And we may never even know what she will become now. We can only be on alert. We must guard ourselves very carefully.”
Elysia didn’t argue. “What you say is the most plausible truth I can understand. There were times when I felt as though my insides were being torn apart...as if even my pure form was being ripped from this power. I didn’t see you for so long...I thought you were dead. There were times when no amount of gold could hold me. Ask the boys. At night I’d run around the outskirts of the village in mad rage, and wake up just before dawn, not knowing what I had done or what I had killed. Layrion miraculously survived through transformations.”
“This happened more than once?” Dicion’s eyes widened in horror. Elysia hadn’t had cause to change to pure form in hundreds of years. Other than a few random attacks on the road between countries, their overall encounter with humans had been limited. Their small kingdom was relatively secluded and heavily fortified. “What in the Originator’s name could have possessed you to change so? To have this much trouble in childbirth?”
“It must be as you say. Something changed inside of me, changed our child. I went mad, you fell into a sleep like death...” She suddenly fell silent and turned to the boys.
Dicion’s gaze shifted to his sons. They were wide-eyed in horror. “What? Don’t tell me you were affected as well?”
“For three weeks while you were gone, Father, I remained in my pure form. I tried to change back, I tried. I couldn’t help myself. I traveled far. I ravaged human villages, killed without being attacked first, I slaughtered so many...”Christof hung his head. “It took a search party of thirty from our cavalry to hunt me down and bring me back.”
“Peter, were you affected as well, son?” Dicion put his hand on Christof’s shoulder to steady his youngest boy who was silently shedding tears of remorse and confusion.
“Yes Father. Whatever this force was, it affected me in a...in way...um...” Peter’s voice trembled and his face turned beet red.
Elysia suppressed a giggle. “Peter’s is probably the most humorous rampage, if you can call it humorous. Let’s just say that for fifteen days straight, Peter had intercourse with every willing female that he could find.”
“It was like I couldn’t even control it, Father!” Peter’s voice, having just turned not two years prior, still managed to hit high notes every so often, and it did so now. “I was just so hungry for women! I couldn’t stop, no matter how exhausted I got.” He was panicking now, and still red, and almost crying, while Christof was trying hard not let a toothy grin creep across his face.
“The brothels are in the green this month solely because of him,” Christof whispered, and Peter put his head in his hands and sobbed.
Elysia smiled and looked back to Dicion, who still sat slack-jawed in shock as Layrion took his gold pendant in her mouth and chewed on it. “Four thousand shillings in whores. And no telling how many more gave themselves to him for free.”
Dicion was so choked up with laughter that he couldn’t breathe, and before long, all five of them were laughing and hugging each other, just thankful to the universe and the Originator that they were alright and that the mysterious power that had possessed them was gone.
Later that night, once all of their children were asleep, Dicion and Elysia sat in Dicion’s private study. “When did you return to normal, my love?”
Elysia sat on his desk, a mug of ale in her hands. She drank slowly and closed her eyes. “I vaguely remember Hannah coming to me and telling me that Lord Akil had left. You had fallen asleep—what we thought was sleep—in that chair. It was the eighth day of the fifth month, Hannah says. Two days later, I stopped screaming. The pain was much more subdued. I stayed in this form. I swallowed the medicines that the healers gave me instead of vomiting them out.” She took another long sip of ale. “Within a week I was more stable, but I still felt my womb rumbling with thunder. That’s when the boys began to act so mysteriously. I had no idea what was happening for the longest time. I thought you were dead. When Hannah told me that you hadn’t woke up in seven days, I snapped. That’s when I started to turn and venture out. There are even rumors that Christof wasn’t the only one running for miles and miles, hunting rogue human settlements. I only hope the Humans do not retaliate against us.”
Dicion listened with a heavy heart. The mysterious evil that had wreaked such havoc on his family was not a coincidence, and he definitely knew it was not a coincidence that it came and went with Lord Akil. Whether his friend knew it or not, he was cursed beyond the limits of finite Icchorian understanding, and possessed powers that even he didn’t know he had. Dicion was planning to write all of these things on parchment and send them to Akil when Elysia said, “Lord Akil must know none of this.”
“What?”
“Lord Akil. Do not tell him. When he asks about me, or when he comes to visit again, which he no doubt will, tell him that it was just a rare complication. Our healers are very skilled, you’ll say, and they saved me and the baby from certain death.”
“The gender. Icchorian babies don’t just suddenly assign themselves a new gender in the womb.”
“We’ll tell him the Seer was simply wrong. His judgment was clouded, and his visions were not blessed by the Originator.”
“Why are you insistent upon hiding these events from Lord Akil? He is our friend. He could even shed light onto this mystery. It wasn’t just you who was affected, but me, and our children as well. He is very old and very powerful. He knows more than we could ever know.”
“Which is why I don’t want him knowing about these things. I know you trust him, Dicion, and so did I at one time, but you can’t deny that his presence—and lack of it—had something to do with the birth of Layrion.”
Dicion said nothing, but his body language was all that Elysia needed. “I’m right and you know it. Akil means well, true, but he doesn’t need to know everything. It is because he is so powerful that we should have a healthy fear of him.”
“I won’t have you talk badly about our friend!” Dicion rose and paced the floor. “I don’t know why it all happened. He is somehow connected to it. But surely you can’t think that he caused it, or even that he made it happen on purpose? No, no. I won’t hear it. If that’s what you think, then you can just keep your thoughts to yourself.”
Elysia sighed and finished her ale. She said no more, but simply took her husband’s hand and led him to their bedroom.
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