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Shannon O'Reilly was bullied and everything his older sister wasn't. When his sister Sarah gives him a chance to change things through a single wish things don't go as planned.
Chapter 3 Light and Shadow Amethyst |
Author's note: Here's chapter 3 of book five of I Wish. Thanks once again to my readers for their support and to the Big Closet staff.
I turned to gape wide-eyed at the hooded and masked figured who stood watching me. “Xuriel!” I gasped in one-part confusion and two-parts relief. Maybe she could help us out of this jam. “What are you doing here? I thought that you didn’t want to reveal yourself to the Demons yet.”
“The situation has changed,” the Celestial responded carefully. “I did not anticipate the possibility of you having no magick to work with while searching for Jalael’s power. If you are to live through this, then I must reveal myself now and ensure that you have the abilities to survive this world without magick.”
“What do you mean?” I asked uncertainly. “Didn’t you come to help us?”
“Yes, I did, but I cannot use magick any more than you can at the moment, Shannon. As I said, I am here to reveal myself.” Xuriel pulled back her hood and removed her mask and nothing could have prepared me for what I saw there. I was expecting the face of a Celestial with one of those unusual eye colors and matching head feathers, but that was not what I saw. I nearly fainted, and did fall to my knees as I recognized her face. I should have since I saw it every day, in the mirror.
“You’re… me? What… I…” I couldn’t seem to form the questions that assaulted my mind on my lips.
“It would be more accurate to say that you are me, at least in part,” my doppelganger replied calmly. “You have been since you made that wish. Please, allow me to tell you a story before I show you what you need to know and consign myself to oblivion.”
I was a child when the Demons first attacked Haven and our war with them began. My father was a farmer and my mother an artist of some renown. They were poorly suited to fight Demons, but they held them off long enough for my brother to get us to safety. By the time I reached maturity and was prepared to enter the Navaris Field to receive my mark and gain the power which slept within me, we had already had many warriors to fight the war but we were still losing. I was one of seven who would change the course of that war.
Even without my ability to passively gather and purify nearly limitless amounts of magick energy from the world around me I was an accomplished user of holy magick. With it, I was the most powerful of the Seven Sentinels. Despite our power and determination, the war dragged on and the Demons began to invade other Planes as well, so I came up with a plan.
The key to taking down the Demons was to deal them a blow that would leave them in chaos, fighting among one another rather than with us. We needed to kill the Demon King. I told the others of my plan and both Anjurael and Torphael agreed with my assessment. Jalael, Lunael, and Lunariel felt that we should focus on a stronger defense. Ysuriel was the deciding vote and she felt that it was reckless and foolhardy to try to attack the Demon King in Heil where he would have a distinct advantage, even if we all attacked him at once.
When the others decided to move on to defending our territories more vigorously, I went after him myself. I was a proud and somewhat arrogant man, so certain that I was right, and I was confident that I had the power to destroy him, even if I had to do it by myself. In a fair fight I probably would have been right, but Demons do not fight fair.
I had him weakened, I had him on his knees, and as I began to cast a spell that would finish him off I was felled by an attack from behind. A Succubus names Izhara cursed me, placing a Demon Brand over my Mark to take away my empowered form and its abilities and leave me trapped in the mortal form of a primitive creature that she discovered on another Plane. That was when something entirely unexpected happened, my Mark and the Demon Brand merged.
I was left a mere human, barely more than a child and unable to change forms, with the uncontrollable power of both Celestial and Demon barely contained in a mortal body. My arrogance and short-sightedness did not only cost me. Instead of defeating the Demon King and ending the war, the war raged on for two more years with the battle ground spreading to other Planes and displacing the Faery from their home.
I fled Heil, and they let me so that I could live in torment and remember my failure, and the Demon King named Izhara and six other Demons his generals and gave them the task of destroying the Sentinels so that he could not be attacked like that again. I was not prepared to give up and die though. I was determined to fight and defeat the Demons, and I discovered that I still had ways of doing so.
While I could no longer seem to change to my empowered form, I had not lost my ability to gather magick energy and manipulate it as Izhara had likely intended. I had new abilities as well, or perhaps it was that the merging of my Mark and the Brand had changed the abilities that I had already. While I found that I had to work harder to purify magick energy I also seemed to have the ability to taint it as a Demon would for their magick. I could cast curses as they did too, and I found that I could take on the physical attributes of a Demon as well.
This was the true curse which Izhara had bestowed upon me. To be a mere mortal girl in form, unable to ever take my empowered form again, but to still have power at my fingertips, her powers, the power of a Succubus. I had their strength, their speed, and I could change my body entirely to one of her kind or take on individual attributes such as wings or eyes to use their abilities, not as an empowered form but as an inherent ability akin to Succubus shapeshifting.
For a time, I had lost myself in shame to the freakish creature that I had become; half-Celestial half-Demon but truly neither, instead something neutral in a primitive adolescent and female mortal form. It was when I was lost in my own misery that I discovered that even that dark cloud had a silver lining. While I had to work harder at purifying magick energy to use in Celestial spells, I was no longer limited by casting those ritualistic spells. My mere thoughts and desires could reshape the world around me if I was not careful to control my magick.
And so I used my new abilities to help bring the first war to a conclusion. I used their own abilities and tactics and attacked from the shadows. I gave off no aura, neither demonic nor that of a Celestial in their empowered form and I while I could attain the strengths of a Demon I did not share their weaknesses. They couldn’t see me coming, I had a greater power than ever before, and I slew Izhara with my own hands, but this did not relieve me of my curse.
Unable as I was to return to my former body, I kept out of the public eye unless necessary among other Celestials, and even then I kept my true appearance hidden beneath a mask and hooded robe and remained cloaked in shadow and mystery. I kept my distance, even from the other Sentinels, and while I convinced them that I had been cursed and had my gender changed I kept the extent of that curse and my new abilities to myself. This, my penchant for working alone, and my ability to take the Demons by surprise where others could not, earned me the name Xuriel the Shadow.
My people managed to win the war, but it was not a clear victory, and both sides retreated to lick their wounds and rebuild their forces. Ysuriel knew that it was not truly over and that the Demons would come back some day so she came up with the plan to leave their power behind for others to use when the need arose. That was something that I could not do. I could not curse another as I had been so I fled to the Plane of Earth, where I attempted to make a life among the people whose form I now wore. I took the name Brighid and found a village that accepted me, until I lost control of my magick.
My magick had become more and more difficult to control each day, light and darkness battling inside me as my power grew ever stronger, already far too much for an adolescent mortal to contain without eventually killing me. It was as I fled the wrath of those who had taken me in that I met the Faery, who tried to help me to control my great power. They felt a kinship to me and they made me feel like I belonged for the first time since I was cursed.
It was the blood oath and Faery blood flowing through my veins that stabilized me. It created a balance of the light and darkness and allowed me to master my powers and separate the Celestial and Demonic aspects. The immortality granted me by their blood and magick allowed me to contain my power, even if I could only use a fraction of it and my empowered form was still lost to me. In time though, I found that I wanted a family and so I returned to the humans for a time to conceive a child.
When my first daughter had her sixteenth birthday she took on a similar appearance to me and seemingly inherited my ability to gather and manipulate magick energy and to use it to effect the world around her. She did not receive my curse or the abilities that came with it, merely the last vestiges of what was once the unique power of my Celestial Mark. It was then that I came up with my plan and sealed my overwhelming power, my knowledge, my memories, and my cursed mark, hiding them and a shred of my consciousness away, just as Ysuriel and the others had before me. Rather than hiding them away in a set place like others had done though, I hid them within myself and the bloodline that would follow.
I planned to wait for a magical prodigy who could contain and control my full power and then I would bestow that power upon her and awaken the other members of the Seven to guide that prodigy and take her to Heil to finish the task that I came so close to completing so long ago. Since then I have watched myself and my descendants grow and live their lives, a spirit of sorts watching the living and waiting to fulfill my purpose. I watched descendants live and die, none of them the prodigy that I required and then even my original self died as well, in a fire after completing your mother’s training.
I began to lose hope of ever finding the prodigy to inherit my power. Your sister was close, certainly gifted and very clever and, other than you, she was the last of the lineage. I very nearly chose her but then something amazing happened, you made your birthday wish on that candle. So I took the opportunity that that wish presented to remake you into the prodigy that I sought, a girl of my bloodline infused with great potential for magick and a natural ability to use it. Then to ensure that you remained that way I exercised enough control over your body and magick to light the candle.
“It’s your fault that I’m stuck like this?!” I practically snarled as I clenched my fists at my side once her story was finished.
“Yes,” she admitted reluctantly. “Though I did everything that I could to help you to adjust and feel better about the situation. Is your life not better now than it was before?”
“That’s not the point!” I snapped, even though I knew she was right. I loved my life now, I loved my job, my friends, my fiancée, and especially the relationship that I had with my sister. Sure, our current situation sucked and there had been a lot of bumps along the way, but I was happy and everything was better.
“I have been watching you, Shannon, I have been watching your life through your own eyes since you made your wish. You have adapted quickly and done something that I was never able to truly do in my life, you have become genuinely comfortable and happy with being female, it is who you are,” Xuriel told me gently. “I did not grant you that, nor did the wish that I guided. We could help you adjust and adapt and give you the necessary tools, but that happiness, comfort, and sense of self cannot be granted from a wish or anything that I could impart, it is part of who you are inside. The wish making you more like Sarah could have had some part in contributing to you getting to this point sooner, but it was only uncovering what was in you all along.”
“So, what? You’re just in my head and now you’re going to give me your mark and disappear?” I asked, trying to ignore the implication that I probably had repressed gender issues before being changed. I didn’t want to think about that and I had so many other things to occupy my mind right then. So much made sense now, like how Xuriel was able to watch me all of the time, why she only ever spoke or showed herself to me, and why the others couldn’t sense her appearances.
“You have had my Mark all along, Shannon. I have merely kept it under a seal so powerful and subtle that not even an accomplished Celestial magick user such as Ysuriel could detect it, and out of sight until you were ready to fight the Demon King. I have been slowly giving you my memories and knowledge as you sleep so you would not be overwhelmed when the time came. Most of it is behind a barrier in the deepest recesses of your mind but I have released some of it as you had need of it,” she conceded.
“The dreams I’ve been having!” I sputtered in realization.
My head nodded atop her shoulders. “Yes, and you very nearly stumbled upon the truth the night when I attempted to warn you about Demon Brands, test you, and prepare you for the realities and temptations of bearing my Mark.”
“But you destroyed the records at my old school, made up new ones for homeschooling online, changed the old transcripts at St. Catherine’s for the new ones, and you altered the memories of my agent, Jen’s parents, and Mother Josephine to believe that it was all real,” I argued in disbelief.
“Technically, you did those things,” Xuriel countered, “the night before your volleyball tryouts, and your first date with Bethany that led up to the battle with Varas and Aarianna. As you and your sister slept I fed my memories and knowledge into your dreams, kept you asleep, and took control of your body to do what was required. I used my experience and your practical knowledge, combined with a bit of creative magick use, and I briefly unsealed the mark to give me the power to do so without detection.”
I felt kind of violated after that revelation, as much as when she had admitted to being behind my transformation, and she knew that, being in my head and all. She looked away, and said with a sigh, “I did only what was required to ensure your safety and that magick remain a secret, and you were still adjusting to your new form and magick. I could not reveal myself to you then, you were not ready. I am uncertain that you are ready now, but you will need the full scope of your abilities to survive here.”
“If I’m understanding you, I’ll be more powerful and able to gather more magick when the seal is removed but that won’t help me at all if there’s no magick energy to draw on. I would only have the abilities of your curse to work with and… those are Demon abilities.” I really didn’t feel comfortable with that.
“No, Shannon,” Xuriel said with a shake of her head. “They are your abilities. You are a Witch descended from a Celestial of great power, but in essence you are and always will be human. You do not have a Demon’s dark soul nor their aura, just as you do not have the aura and soul of a Celestial. I lived with this curse for many years and in doing that and in watching my lineage for all of this time I have learned one very important thing, no power is truly good or evil in and of itself. This power will not define you. What will define you is how you use it and why, and I know you well enough to be certain that you will always try to do the right thing for the right reasons.”
“So, what do we need to do then? Am I gonna pass out after this like Sarah and the others?” I asked after taking a deep breath and a moment to think.
“No, your mind already contains enough of my memories and knowledge that I can safely remove the barrier keeping it from your conscious mind and give you the rest along with it, though it will take some time to process all of the information. It should all come to you as you require it though. Once both that and your Mark are unsealed I will bother you no longer,” she told me with a sad smile.
“You’re going to leave us alone here?” I asked, feeling a surge of panic.
“It is long past time that I rest, Shannon. You have my knowledge and memories and the power to help you survive. Before I go though, I would ask that you share your curse with Rebecca.”
“You want me to curse her?! How?! Why?! Wouldn’t that make her no better than my slave?!” I sputtered, in shock and disbelief.
“Curses are granted by feeding on a person’s negative emotions, drinking in those emotions will connect you to her and allow you to imbue a mark upon her. You should have much to work with, she is in a dark place right now. Yes, some Demons make those that they curse no better than slaves with their Brand, especially weaker ones, it gives them a sense of control. As I said though, you do not have their dark soul or aura and no power is good or evil on its own, it is intent that matters,” she told me seriously.
Then she gave me a weak smile as she turned her gaze toward where Rebecca was sitting carefully looking away from me and said, “My curse was to be bound in the body of a human female, unable to ever take my empowered form again, my only ability to change that to take on the powers and appearance of a Succubus. Had the Brand not merged with my Mark and altered my ability to gather and use magick energy, then it may have very well been the torture that she had intended for me rather than just a severe discomfort. There are some though, I think, who may not see such a thing as a curse.”
As much as I hated to admit it, she was right. It would give Rebecca what she desperately wanted and increase our chances of being able to survive on this Plane. Not only was it the sensible thing to do, it was the right thing to do. We would deal with figuring out a new identity for her if and when the time came. “I’ll do it, but I’m not calling it a curse,” I muttered as I looked toward Rebecca.
“Call it what it is,” Xuriel said with a smile, “call it a blessing. I will release the seal and the barrier over your unconscious mind now, but I will leave the protections upon your mind in place, you may yet need them, Shannon. I know that you will do me proud and fulfill your destiny.” With that I fell to my knees, a searing pain in my lower back and my mind assaulted with new memories and knowledge as I felt Xuriel’s presence fade from my mind with one final, “Good bye.”
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Comments
I've been looking forward to this chapter,
So Shannon now has a celestrial mark of her own. Loving the story.
Technically
Shannon was the first to have one, it's just been hidden and sealed since her birthday, though Xuriel's mark isn't really a Celestial mark anymore since she doesn't gain any of their standard abilities like the others do. It's a strange fusion of a Demon Brand and a Celestial Mark. She'll be more powerful and have some benefits from it though such as the Succubus abilities and physical attributes, plus Xuriel's knowledge and memories, which could help a lot in their current situation.
*big hugs*
Amethyst
Don't take me too seriously. I'm just kitten around. :3
As you know
I suspected it was Xuriel, but I certainly didn’t expect this interesting twist. Wow, you just never disappoint us with your ability to keep it interesting. Onward and upward!
Stoney1
FANTASY IS ALL IN YOUR HEAD, BUT THEN SO IS REALITY. SO WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?
lol
I've been planning this particular twist since the beginning of the story. It just took a while to get here lol
*big hugs*
Amethyst
Don't take me too seriously. I'm just kitten around. :3
Back in book 4
When you said there would be a book 5, that told us you had something major planned for the story. Now the anticipation for more chapters is nearly overwhelming. ;-) This series has been a great story, and is only getting better.
Stoney1
FANTASY IS ALL IN YOUR HEAD, BUT THEN SO IS REALITY. SO WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?
Yup
I had been planning to really throw a wrench in things for a while and change the story direction for book 5 so it's nice to be writing that :)
*big hugs*
Amethyst
Don't take me too seriously. I'm just kitten around. :3
the truth comes out?
cool, but it is a lot for her to take in
Yup
There is a lot there for Shannon to process but right now she's going to have to put hers and Rebecca's survival first.
*big hugs*
Amethyst
Don't take me too seriously. I'm just kitten around. :3
Cool
So now Shannon is to become super powerful even though she won't be able to transform into her celestial form. And Xuriel wants her to share her curse with Rebecca. Will Shannon be able to accomplish the same sort of data manipulation that Xuriel did for her? So looking forward the the next chapter(s).
>----(^_^)----<
Rach
quis custodiet ipsos custodes
That's about the gist of it
She can't change to a Celestial empowered form but she can change entirely or partially into a Succubus form with the advantages and abilities that come with it. As for data manipulation, well, she has the memories of how Xuriel did it for her so it may be possible. Though Xuriel only changed school records, not an entire identity.
*big hugs*
Amethyst
Don't take me too seriously. I'm just kitten around. :3
Xuriel
Damn, I wish that Xuriel would have stayed for a few more chapters. *sniff* I think that could have been interesting.
Thx again for another great chapter^^
Re: Xuriel
I felt kind of bad about having Xuriel just up and vanish but she's done what she set out to do. Shannon has everything she needs for the final battle and her staying in Shannon's head a bit longer on a world she knows nothing about wouldn't make a lot of difference. She has been waiting a long time to entrust her power and mission to someone and now that that's done she can rest peacefully, trusting that Shannon can do what is needed.
*big hugs*
Amethyst
Don't take me too seriously. I'm just kitten around. :3
Campfire
I had hoped for a campfire scene like in Star Trek V, with Xuriel telling a few stories from her childhood (provided they'll find enough wood to make a campfire). ;-)
aww
That could have been nice, but only Shannon could really see her and as it is Rebecca is probably going to think she's nutty as a fruitcake for talking to herself if she was paying any attention.
*big hugs*
Amethyst
Don't take me too seriously. I'm just kitten around. :3
Talking to Xuriel
Now that you mention it, yeah, seemingly talking to herself would be, at the very least, strange. I'm woundering if Shannon would have been able to project Xuriel in the air using magic. But since in this plane (at least the part where Shannon and Rebecca "popped up") there's no magic it wouldn't have worked, anyway.
On another matter: if Xuriel didn't know that there was no magic in Nhekar (at least in some parts) then either the Celestials didn't do extensive research in that plane or nobody came back from there to report such things. And if 1 earth day is ~2 months in Nhekar that'd mean that the planet (and the sun) there is at least 300 billion years old. o.O So in order for the sun there not to be already long gone the physics will have to be really interesting there.
Yep
That could be a long and awkward conversation between Shannon and Rebecca and it's going to be awkward enough already if Becca noticed Shannon's little 'conversation'. As for the sun, remember that these other planes are essentially alternate universes and things might have occurred differently, so there's nothing saying that their sun is a low mass star like ours. We've already seen that this version of 'Earth' has two moons after all. It's still twilight when Shannon and Xuriel have their conversation so we haven't definitively seen the sun yet.
*big hugs*
Amethyst
Don't take me too seriously. I'm just kitten around. :3
Star life
In order for the sun on that plane to exist much longer, the mass would have to be actually lower than our sun according to this chart: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_evolution
(provided, of course, that the physical laws are the same as on our plane). But now I'm curious what you have cooked up for us. ;-)
stars
Yup this world definitely has some surprises in store ;)
Don't take me too seriously. I'm just kitten around. :3
Xuriel
Damn, I wish that Xuriel would have stayed for a few more chapters. *sniff* I think that could have been interesting.
Thx again for another great chapter^^