The Twice King Read online

  For a second, the two of them watched one another, as if wary. Then a peculiar stroke of boldness hit Aardgar right then, and he made his move, crashing his mouth into hers. He knew nothing but her lips. He felt a light between their bodies, a light as tangible as her long, golden hair, a light that filled him with possibility, with hope, with security.

  Her light …

  And for the first time ever, he felt history through the touch of another person.

  The history, however, terrified him. He saw a great fire consuming the world. He saw stars moving past his eyes like dust in the candlelight. He saw the faces of his mother and father like mist in a mirror. He saw the earth beneath his feet evaporate like breath against his flushing cheeks.

  Was this the past he saw, or the future? Was that the birth of the world, or the end of it?

  He saw two boys, one who shared his hair, the other his eyes. Who were they?

  Brothers …? My brothers …?

  The taller, bald one looked his way, afraid, and then a great, watery axe shattered him into fifty seven pieces. Each piece became a boy Aardgar did not know, and each boy knelt before the water to worship the Three Sisters of light.

  The other brother, his eyes full of flames, stood on the edge of a building and tipped back, but when he fell, his body didn’t move through the air, but rather through time—hours and days and years. The farther his brother fell, the more flames enwrapped his body until all Aardgar could see was fire, fire, fire.

  Then there Aardgar himself stood. He watched himself through the visions that struck him after touching his lips to Evanesce’s. The grand Aardgar he saw wore a crown made of lightning. Electricity ran up his skin and connected to the sky in a great show of light—light twenty times more golden than Evanesce’s. The Aardgar he saw was older, wiser, and had two beautiful women at his side, women with long white hair.

  But neither one was Evanesce.

  Aardgar pulled away quickly from the kiss, frightened.

  Evanesce looked worried. “What is it?”

  Aardgar shook from what he’d seen. Had his Legacy shown him her history? Were those two boys his brothers, or just imaginings of what could have been? Or was that the future he somehow saw? It didn’t make sense.

  “It is okay to be afraid,” she assured him. “Just speak.”

  “I’m not afraid,” he lied.

  She tried to touch him. He retracted. He didn’t want the visions again. They disturbed him even worse than the memory of his murdered father.

  “Aardgar …”

  “I saw histories,” he blurted then, not meeting her eyes. “By touching you.”

  She tilted her head. All her golden hair went sweeping in one direction as she studied him, waiting for more of an explanation. When it didn’t come, she prodded him. “You saw histories? What histories, Aardgar? What did you see?”

  “The world. It was all … fire.”

  “Yes?”

  “And there were two men … My brothers.”

  “Brothers …” Her eyes drifted off.

  “Yes. Two of them. I … I think they were my brothers.”

  “What did these brothers do?”

  “One was made of water … and he shattered into pieces, which each became a boy. The other had fire in his eyes, and he could fall through time. And then there was—”

  Me, Aardgar finished in his mind. And I had a crown of lightning. I was King.

  “You,” she finished for him, as if drawing the thoughts from the fear in his eyes. “You saw yourself as the King of the twelve villages.”

  “I don’t know what I saw. The future?”

  She wrinkled her face at that. “But you don’t see futures with your touch. Only histories, yes?”

  A crown of lightning. A brother of water. Another brother of fire and time …

  After only a second more of thought, the truth of it hit Evanesce at once. “You touched my skin and must have seen my sister’s dreams! I have seen them, too, long ago. She dreamed many things to come, Aardgar. So her dreams are now a part of my history, since they are something I’ve seen. A memory.” She tried to touch him again, and again he recoiled from her. She frowned. “Please, don’t be afraid.”

  “I’m not afraid,” he asserted more boldly this time. “You still haven’t told me everything. You’re withholding.”

  She sighed. “If I tell you …”

  “If you tell me …?” Aardgar hissed.

  “They will not even know you exist,” she then finished. “They are lost forever to you. You will never know them, and they will never know you. It is for naught, Aardgar.”

  He froze at her words. “My brothers? So … it is true? I have two brothers?” he pressed her. A part of him dreaded the answer. A part of him felt swollen with curiosity.

  She sighed and answered simply: “Yes.”

  He couldn’t believe it. “Did my parents—?”

  “Yes, they knew.”

  “Where are they now? My brothers?”

  “Far, far away.”

  “Why didn’t I know of them until touching you?”

  “They vanished when you were a baby,” she explained, somehow knowing the answer to his every question. With every word she said, Aardgar’s cheeks burned with anger. How could she not tell me? How could my parents not tell me? “An accident. One of your brothers, his Legacy … it took the two of them far, far away. It was an accident.”

  “Time,” concluded Aardgar, breathless. “The one … who can fall through time. They travelled into the future, or into the past …”

  “Your parents thought they were abducted,” she went on. “Your brothers were only seven when they disappeared. You were born after they had gone. They don’t know of you any more than you knew of them. Please, forget them.”

  Aardgar couldn’t believe her words. “I’m not alone. I’ve had more family this whole time. My mother, my father …”

  “Your brothers are gone to you. Forget them. I beg you.”

  He saw one shattered by water. He saw one consumed by fire. The two visions haunted him now.

  Then he turned on her, angry. “Evanesce. Even you. You deceived me.”

  She did not like his voice. Her eyes narrowed. It was like a constriction of the golden light that seemed to radiate from her, like the sun as it’s curtained away by storm clouds. He didn’t like upsetting her, but he needed answers, and he’d needed them since the day he was born with a power that his parents did not have, a power he might’ve shared with two brothers—two brothers who didn’t know he existed.

  “The truth is,” she said, “you don’t need me to tell you a thing. You’ve seen it all.” She took one step closer. This time, he let her. “When there’s a crown on your head, it won’t matter whether you have two brothers or none at all.” Her lips hovered near his. “Humankind needs you, Aardgar.”

  Her words sobered him somehow. Even his anger faded to nothing, for then he thought of that third man in the vision—a man who wore a crown of lightning.

  That man was him. Aardgar. King Aardgar.

  But what of the two women at his side? The women with the long white hair? The women who were definitely not Evanesce? Did she know of them, too?

  He took one long drink of Evanesce’s face with his eyes. He wanted to bring the chalice of her lips to his own and quench a King’s thirst.

  But first, I will need a crown.

  The King

  For many years more, they survived within the shield of her golden light. Decades. And in those decades, more and more children were born with gifts from the Goddess Three. In a matter of one hundred and fifty years, every child was born with a Legacy, and the number of people who were without power dwindled so much that they became the minority.

  The Outliers had a name for them. “Sleepers …” Aardgar recalls in his eternal tomb.

  The children born with Legacies did not sleep, but those without them still did, and it became an ironic turning of fate that soon, the S
leepers and their ability to sleep and dream was coveted as deeply as the powers of the Outliers once were. It was now the Sleepers who were hunted.

  It was at this time that Aardgar went from village to village with the golden light by his side, Evanesce, and he spoke of Three Sister, the name he gave Evanesce and her two sisters, from which all their unique powers had come. Aardgar never bothered with whether Evanesce and her sisters truly were the three powerful beings known as the Goddesses, or if it was just another partial truth twisted into legend and embellished with the imaginations of humans. He knew Evanesce too personally now to truly see her as a Goddess the people used to worship.

  She was too real to him to be a legend.

  Not every journey was safe, and not every visit was met with a kind smile. But village by village, the people were swayed by the beautiful, potent showing of Evanesce, and each mayor swore their allegiance to Aardgar, to Evanesce, and to the powerful, enduring will of Three Sister.

  The twelve villages were spread out quite far, only connected by narrow paths through woods and plains and rock lands. Some were nested between the ignored ruins of fallen cities from the past, and some made use of them, building upon or restoring the rubble as best they could.

  Along Aardgar’s journey, many left their villages for his cause to unify the twelve of them, even including some Sleepers who were estranged from their families and did not believe in the war. In a location central to all of the villages, Aardgar and his followers built a town of their own. It was to be a place of safety from all the war and the fear and the death that so plagued the people.

  They called the central town Sanctum.

  Aardgar held Evanesce close every day that passed, as if he was afraid he’d lose her. Too often, he feared he took for granted her presence. He’d grown so used to her over the many, many years. The memory of his dead father and his lost mother felt like strange, fuzzy dreams.

  Though he was born over two hundred years ago, he only appeared to be in his mid-twenties. This was supposed to be due directly to Evanesce’s ability, since she rarely left his side, but Aardgar felt it was more than that. She made him happy, and she kept more than just death at bay; she kept evils from touching him, and she kept pain from hurting him, and she kept the darkness of his past from swallowing him intact.

  He owed her everything.

  “You are beautiful,” he caught himself saying one day to her as they rested under a canopy of branches in the garden.

  The smile she returned was radiant. Her hair danced in the wind. “And you are a brave and brilliant man who holds the world upon his back.” She put a kiss on his lips.

  I remember that kiss. Aardgar remembers his golden light, his woman, his Goddess, and he sighs without lungs in the eternal darkness.

  “The world …” said Aardgar when the kiss ended. “Aye, I believe that particular honor is more yours than it is mine, Three Sister.”

  Her eyes turned wistful, and she glanced off into the breeze as it played with her long lashes. “Just One Sister, more like. I miss them.”

  “Where have they been hiding all of this time?” he then asked. “Not once have they tried to find you. Do you know where they are?”

  “It … It is far less of a … physical presence than it is an emotional one,” she explained. “I feel them. We have a way of … speaking to one another. They are quite happy for me. But scared, too.”

  “Scared?”

  “They are feeling more hope now than they have in so long, Aardgar. It’s very warming. It’s the most encouraging thing, really.” She smiled quite suddenly, as if tickled, then faced Aardgar, dreams in her eyes. “Perhaps we were just too impatient in our mission to save humankind.”

  “Why save us at all?” he asked.

  To that, she simply kissed him. Then, hands were put here, fingers were put there, and soon, he took the pleasure that surged through him as a sort of answer that could not be put into words.

  The truth was, the power that Three Sister gave humanity was intended to mend the war that had ripped the world apart in the first place. Despite the power first making things worse, now their future looked brighter for them all.

  And it was only an hour after that tryst in the garden that Aardgar’s hand would graze along a blunt slab of stone, and it told a story of a fountain that stood long, long ago in this very garden. Through a veil of water that sprayed up from the nose of the fountain, he saw a great statue of a man with the world cradled upon his back. The image struck him so potently that he stopped, mentally grasping at the vision before it slipped from his memory. Beneath the statue was a placard with a name etched into its face.

  It was that name that Aardgar took to call the great city they were forging from the souls of twelve.

  Atlas.

  Thus, the Last City of Atlas was born, with each village becoming a ward within the great city. Aardgar went from ward to ward and, through his unique touch, he learned the histories of the ruins that rested among them, and he used that knowledge to revive their functions. Steel mills. Mines. Forges and smiths and metalwork. The trenches and the roots and the seeds. Greens. Irrigation. Harvest, spade, and mud. Looms. Textiles. Spinners, wheels, and woolen cloaks. Power and wire and pipe. Generators. Networks of water. Networks of electricity, of travel, of trade, of manufacturing, of farmlands. Stonework. Masonry. Architecture. Carpentry.

  And Aardgar watched it all. For years. For decades.

  Atlas, a city, his child.

  Soon, just as Evanesce once said, the term “Outlier” was long forgotten. Sleepers were a thing of the past, too, as no one was alive anymore who could sleep, and everyone was born with the power of a unique, Goddess-given Legacy.

  It was all just as Evanesce had promised, long ago.

  On the tenth sweet birthday of Atlas, Aardgar was unanimously named its first King, and Evanesce ruled at his side with the spiritual, unseen wisdom of her two sisters guiding her, as well as Aardgar’s history-reading touch.

  When the Last City of Atlas was very young, it had no Wall. The Oblivion that existed beyond the outskirts of the city looked different depending on which ward one viewed it from. From the sixth ward in the north, it seemed like a scorched forest, its trees nothing more than broken thorns jutting out from the dead, grey earth. From the ninth ward in the west, it looked like a rocky wasteland of dust and smoke. Beyond the edge of the twelfth in the southeast, the world was nothing but a rolling lowland of marsh, insects, and ten-foot-tall weeds.

  In his tomb, Aardgar remembers what the Last City of Atlas looked like then, and how its lack of a Wall made it look infinite. The world felt so much bigger then, he muses, dreaming of it. It pangs him to think of Atlas now and what it has become with its enormous Wall enclosing them from the Oblivion, which is only home to wasteland and death from one end of the planet to the other. There is nothing out there for us any longer. You should not miss it.

  Yet he does. Yet he did.

  The people loved King Aardgar. They worshipped him as though he was brother to Three Goddess. They prayed to him to cast a great, powerful light into the Oblivion to keep out the horrors and the smoke daemons and the Sleepers who were rumored to live out there. The people claimed that the Oblivion Sleepers would sneak into the edges of the wards and steal away children in the night. King Aardgar had seen no evidence of any of those things—Sleepers, daemons, or unnamed horrors—and despite the people’s wish for a great wall to shield them from the Oblivion, King Aardgar refused.

  Maybe he thought his mother—who would be long dead by now—was somehow out there in the Oblivion, no matter how nonsensical the notion was. Maybe he still held hope that the rest of the world would mend itself after the great wars of their past and join them. Maybe he couldn’t stand the notion of depriving his people of the true horizon.

  Evanesce trusted his judgment. Aardgar never truly saw Evanesce as some mystical being like the rest of the populace of Atlas did. He simply saw the woman he had fallen in love with.
He saw his companion for eternity. He saw the woman who was once just a girl on a riverbank who asked him to take her hand. The girl with the golden light in her eyes …

  The people were at peace. The city was thriving. The King and Queen ruled a citizenry who trusted them with their power. Aardgar had now seen the beginning of Atlas that Evanesce promised to show him that day on the riverbank when she asked him to take her hand.

  Now what of its end?

  The Lightless

  Her golden light protected them for over seventy years. Seventy years, Aardgar watched the city turn over. Children to men and women. Men and women to older men and women. Older men and women to gravestones.

  And then more children.

  But Evanesce and Aardgar remained, and neither of them aged a day. Aardgar had soon begun to understand the great and terrible weariness of living forever. The world began to appear to him in patterns of predictable curiosities. Very little surprised him. He wondered if he was growing crueler with every ruling he gave in his court. A woman’s house burned down, leaving her widowed. Aardgar granted her a new house and sent a convoy to investigate and bring to justice the culprit behind the fire—and the justice was swift and cold. There was also a man who squabbled over the boundaries of his precious farmland, threatening to kill his greedy neighbors he suspected were stealing from his crops. Aardgar didn’t use his own touch to seek the truth of it; he merely ordered the suspected thieves to be imprisoned until their lesson was learned.

  Then, worst of all, there came to court a bald man in a colorful robe who was stabbed in the belly for his purse of gold, and the attacker was even right there with him, as if the pair had chased one another straight into Sanctum. “He even holds the knife!” cried the bald man as the healers tended to his wounds. “Dangerous, this one! Dangerous!” It was then conveniently learned that the attacker had a most curious Legacy that allowed him to be pulled apart limb by limb and yet still somehow survive. Whether it was from the cold demeanor that Aardgar had adopted over the years or simply from his own boredom in the tedium of being a King, Aardgar ruled that the attacker have his Legacy used against him: he would be pulled apart and each of his limbs buried separately until he learned from his wrongs.