Chapter 102: A Life’s Debt

A/N: Welcome to the last chapter of Act 3! Without further ado, please enjoy this finale. It's... a lot, so read it slowly.

***

*****

***********

The first time Ying had wondered if Jemi was immortal, was eight years ago. 

She had been on standby on Mount Casca. It had been a strange time. Technically it had supposed to be a battle night, but there had been a series of battle nights where the Cockatrice would lead them to the foot of Mount Casca and tell them to wait on standby. She would disappear on her own, and return later as if having just emerged from a scuffle. When probed she refused to elaborate on the details. This was one of the early days of the Cockatrice's release from prison, and people hypothesised that two years of jailtime had driven her stir-crazy for a while. 

On this night, from her hiding place Ying had seen Jemi’s signal flare, near-invisible Lunaki shoot up into the sky. Next, she heard a rooster cry, and she went flying. 

She soared over grey promontories of rock, lower Casca’s crawling plateaus of dry sedges and cushion grass whistling in the frigid night air. As she passed over them, she soon noticed the bodies littering the terrain. Passing over lower, she realised they were angels and Beasts both. A fight had broken out here.

Ying approximated Jemi’s location, dropping to the dirt. It was relatively low in the mountains, around the first peak, close to the woodlands. The pixiu sniffed the air keenly. Her sharp sense of smell soon picked up what it was best at detecting: the metallic whiff of blood. 

Soon, she found Jemi. The girl was alone, a small figure crouched in the scree. She had been twenty at the time, barely out of her teens, though the Cockatrice made it easy for people to forget. Just how young she had been. Only now and here, did she look it. Buckled to her knees, she was curled up against the side of the mountain, her body shaking like a leaf in a storm. Her elbows raised, she was clutching the back of her head tightly.

“Jemi?” Ying whispered. “What's wrong?” It was the first time she had seen her like this. She believed, too, that no one had ever seen the Cockatrice like this. 

 At the sound of her voice the Cockatrice turned her head to look at her. Her eyes were unfocused. Cracked lips trembled, as if she was trying to say something, but Ying couldn't hear her. Concerned, the pixiu bounded over and shifted to her anthropine form. Quickly, she shedded the coat she was wearing and wrapped it around the girl's shivering shoulders.

“Hey, it's okay. Do you have an injury? A headache? Let me see.” Ying knelt beside her, unwrapping medical supplies. Meeting some resistance, she pried the Cockatrice's gloved fingers away from the back of her head. They came away sticky, clinging to the flaxen tangles of her hair, and suddenly, the thick metallic scent wafting through the air intensified.

It was not Ying’s first time picking up an injured Cockatrice. However, this was…

Parting her hair, she saw red… red… and some straw-coloured fluid, viscously shimmering in the starlight. Ying’s night vision outlined the wound in terrible clarity. It was like looking inside a cracked egg, the centre of her skull crushed into little pieces, revealing the bloody yolk within, broken and oozing. Dabbing blood away from the wound site, Ying began to see exactly how deep the puncture went. It must have been two-thirds of the way through her head at least, a gory path lined by crushed fragments of bone and shorn brain matter, and it was just by small grace that it hadn’t come straight out through her eyes. The former lionness was used to gruesome imagery, but when it was her friend, it was different. 

Finally, Ying heard what Jemi was saying.

“Looks bad?” the girl chuckled. “It was a javelin. An angel got the drop on me… it was so rude of him. At least I managed to hold it together until Ennanis left…”

She had stopped shaking. Her voice was oddly stable for someone who had just gotten near-skewered through the head, but brain injuries probably made people do weird things. Fearful of how much time she had left, Ying ceased her fruitless first aid efforts, and put her hand to Jemi’s shoulder. Silver glowed, and she began to transfer Lunaki to her as fast as she could. 

“I’m fine,” Jemi said as she did so.

“I’m going to get you help,” Ying said, channelling her more Lunaki. “Can you climb on my back? Or, if you can’t, can you promise to stay put here until I get actual medics?”

“I said I’m fine,” Jemi raised her hand and batted her away. She sounded annoyed. 

“Yeah, you have a giant hole in the back of your head. I don’t think so.” Ying was just short of wrangling the princess onto her back. But then, Jemi pointed to her head and said, “Look.”

Ying glanced over. If it weren’t for all the blood on her hands she would have rubbed her eyes in disbelief. 

Ying had seen angels healing before. When she had just been initiated into fighting for the Beasts, she hadn’t been used to hunting prey that could resurrect after a crushing bite to the neck. She had seen the way their tissues danced and knit together, bone that grew from nothing, restoring the break without even a scab or scar left behind. 

Right now, the same thing was happening to the back of Jemi’s head. Ying watched as the gaping wound shrank smaller and smaller, until it disappeared into the thick of her bloodstained hair. Ying reached out and parted the strands, trying to find the remainder of the injury. Unlike with angels, she did find a mass of scar tissue where the hole had been, curdled and black. 

“How… are you feeling?” Ying asked uncertainly. 

 “I’m fine,” Jemi repeated. The colour was back in her face. She looked just as uncertain as her. “Uh. I have no idea what is going on.”

 “Your wound kind of… healed itself,” Ying told her. “Has this happened to you before?”

“I should be dead,” Jemi murmured.

“Well, whatever just happened…” Ying said, “there still could be an underlying concussion or internal bleeding or something. We should get you to a hospital, get a professional to look at it. You’re human, they’ll take you.”

“No,” Jemi shook her head vehemently. “Don't tell anyone about this. Please, take me to Medusa.”

What good would taking her to Medusa do? Then again, it was a good idea. It was too much to explain what had happened to a human medical professional. And the goddess was a goddess—maybe her Highness knew something about it. So Ying brought her there. Jemi then told her to leave, and so she did. The topic was never brought up ever again. 

It was only eight years later, walking through the Cretan Labryinth with her and the son of Aegeus, that Jemi revealed the reason behind what had happened, that day.

***

The life debt spell.

It was the same reason why the immortal prince was adamant on never entering the labyrinth again. The real reason Theseus could not—rather, did not—kill Ariadne.

This was what Jemi and Theseus spoke about, back in the Shifting Sands:

“Don’t kill her!”

“Why? Because you love her? If you really loved her, why would you have escaped from the Labryinth without bringing her? What kind of person wouldn’t go mad stuck in a place like that? Maybe there was something that could have cured her here. Certainly, freeing her from the Labryinth could have put an end to her spiders’ vengeance.”

“......”

“Well, I must congratulate you for your efforts. You might have been able to fool any other person, but not me. Because I’m someone who already knows about it.”

“About what?”

“Ariadne told you, didn’t she? About the life debt spell.

“You couldn’t kill her, because she saved your life once, and now your life belongs to her. Ariadne is the one and only thing that can take that from you… so if she dies, you’ll die too. She, immortal prince, is your mortal weakness.”

Jemi took a while to explain it to Ying, but explain she did. It wasn’t every day she laid her thoughts so bare, so many of her cards spread out on the table. It probably still wasn’t her entire hand, but it was something close. Perhaps after everything that had happened, she had finally gotten tired of hiding.

No matter what she was, human or Beast, a war commander or sicky girl, mortal or immortal, Jemi was a person. And no person can keep running forever.

This was what Jemi explained.

Magic came from the stars in the sky. Once in a while, when someone made a wish, and a star felt so inclined, it would grant the human’s wish. However, it seemed every time a wish was granted, the person would be cursed in return. Quite logical a concept, really: there is nothing in this world is free. You cannot have good fortune without being plagued with something else. When a hero seeks out treasure, they can only expect to pay a hefty price for it.

The life debt spell was simply an extension of this. Someone made a wish, and this wish happened to be a fervent desire to live. However, before a star could grant it, a different person came to save them. This created a particular problem. You see, when a star grants a wish like ‘saving a life’, it has to take the life from the person to mould its curse into it, then return it to them. But if the wish was granted before the star could return it, then there was nowhere for this new life to go. The star could not return it, because the star had not actually been the one to grant the person’s wish. The same way there were no free wishes, there could not be free curses, either.

Therefore, the solution was for the star to leave the life behind with the saviour. For the saviour was the one who had actually granted the wish, which permitted them the authority of holding onto the survivor’s life. This way, the survivor was also not subjected to a curse they did not earn.

This created a very interesting situation. With their life being held onto by someone else, the survivor became technically immortal. They could be run over by trains, crushed under mountains, chained to a rock and thrown under the seas, and they would be fine. Much like an angel. Only that, where the angels’ mortal weakness was their wrist, their mortal weakness was not a body part, but a person.

Their saviour would be the only one capable of killing them. And should the saviour be killed themselves, the survivor would pass on, too.

Reasonably, Ying took a while to put all this information together. It was a lot to wrap a head around.

“So you’re immortal?” Ying asked her, referencing that battle night, the hole in the back of her head. “Who saved you? When did this happen?”

“......” Jemi exhaled. “Do you remember when I said I convinced an angel into freeing me from the sunprisons?”

“Yeah?”

“It was not just any random guard,” Jemi muttered. “It was Ennanis. We were…” she paused, “something like friends. Ever since then, I had been immortal. But not anymore.”

“Not anymore?”

“I mean that, for a period of time, I used to be unkillable. Except for by Ennanis’ hand, nothing could kill me. Now, that is no longer the case.”

“What do you mean?” Ying cocked her head. “Is immortality the sort of thing that can reverse? A time limit? Or…”

“No. I was the one who reversed it,” Jemi said simply.

When met with Ying’s blank stare, she continued, “I triggered the life debt spell again, but this time the other way.”

By saving Ennanis Zoleil from death on the night of the Battle for Fifth Peak, Jemi had torn her life back from Ennanis’ hands, and with it, taken the angel’s life for herself. A re-enactment of the spell.

But it didn’t make any sense. “Isn’t being immortal a useful thing? Why ever would you give that up?”

“Obviously, because she’s Ennanis,” Jemi stated. “Why would I have wanted my life in the hands of my worst enemy? I’d rather die.”

“But is she really still?” Ying probed. “Your worst enemy? In fact…” she pondered, “...was she ever?”

“......” Jemi was silent. “Don’t ask me that.”

“‘Kay,” Ying shrugged. Then, “Does Ennanis know? About the spell.”

“I told her before coming here.”

“How did she react?”

“She looked at me…” Jemi trailed off. “She just looked at me. And then she said, ‘okay’.”

The gold-haired woman’s fists curled by her sides. With a start, Ying noticed that the woman was suddenly wearing a glove now; short and black, covering her left hand.

“I told her I was her mortal weakness, and she said okay. She didn’t mind that I held her entire life in my hands. That if I wanted, I could snap my fingers and end her in an instant. I don’t understand. How could she be fine with that? It was… as if… knowing that fact changed nothing for her.”

Ying had said nothing. After all, there was nothing she could’ve said that Jemi didn’t already know for herself.

And right now…

***

*****

***********

Spider venom seeped into Jemi’s veins.

Trapped in the cage of her claws, Ariadne’s smile was a simpering one.

The Cockatrice’s face was as white as a sheet, her eyes through her mask wide and dilated. No one could tell what she was seeing, right now.

Shortly after, silver claws retracted from the wall.

The Cockatrice could not muster another word; she could not tell her friends to run, or say anything else of use. She merely collapsed to the floor in a heap. The glow faded from her body, melting her battlewear away, leaving the Beast once again human. Unconscious, but still breathing, as if in slumber.

Almost tenderly, Ariadne gazed down at the head in her lap. She stroked her hand over the woman’s tarnished-gold curls, brushing them out of her face.

“I’ll look forward to learning about you…” Ariadne whispered to her. “Jemi.”

~~~

END OF ACT 3