Rebirth of the Nephilim

The discomfort of being stared at wasn’t unfamiliar to Jadis. She had mostly gotten used to being the focal point of attention in any crowd ever since she had first stumbled into a mercenary camp a year ago and came to the realization that her new body was a bit taller than she had expected. Still, there was no way to completely ignore the feeling of countless eyes following her every movement. It was an uncomfortable sensation, like being put onto a stage with no script to read or even an idea of what the audience wanted from her. Most times, Jadis was able to push that discomfort aside with the help of either her refracted mind letting her talk to herself or having her lovers to lean on. At that moment, however, her Syd self didn’t have anyone to draw strength from. Not even her other selves.

Syd floated four or five feet off the ground in front of the clan head’s tent, high enough that she could see across the whole of the camp. There was a decently wide space around the entrance to the three-story tent, and she had positioned herself in the middle of that area so that she wasn’t crowding the guards who were still standing watch at the front door. Naturally, that meant there was no cover for her, and the literal thousands of people who were milling about the edges of the open space all had an easy view of her. The sun was starting to set, and it didn’t seem as though there were any street lamps being lit in the camp, so Syd’s glowing wings were standing out even more.

No one had approached her since Kerr and her Jay self had gone inside of the tent over half an hour ago. A few of the women who had been inside when they had entered had come out and spoken with various other people, including Vidor and Raisa, but they had gone back inside not long after. With her Dys self sitting on a rock with Alex outside of the camp, and her Jay self sitting with Kerr at her father’s deathbed, her Syd self unusually alone. A bizarre thought, since Jadis was literally right next to two of the people she cared most about in the world at that same moment, yet the feeling was there all the same. Having multiple bodies with a refracted consciousness led to some bizarre, perhaps even existential, circumstances.

“Greetings, ah, Jadis of Clan Ahlstrom.”

Syd swung around, turning to face the voice who had called out to her. As she did so, her long plasma tendril wings flickered and stretched through the air, causing many in the quietly murmuring crowd to flinch back. Jadis would have preferred to have dismissed the wings, but she needed to keep the ability running so that her Jay self wouldn’t fall through the floor inside the tent.

Looking down, Syd saw that the voice belonged to Raisa, the middle-aged and scholarly-looking therion woman who had used a detect stone on her at the gate. Kerr had seemed mildly friendly towards the woman, or at least not hostile towards her, so Syd lowered herself to the ground, so she wasn’t looming so high above her.

“Hello. Your name is Raisa, right?”

“Da, correct,” Raisa smiled hesitantly up at her. “My name is Raisa, of Clan Nox. I am Fourth of Sixth.”

Fourth of Sixth. Jadis recognized the term. It was a way of denoting lineage in a harem. That was how Timur, Vadim, and Raya, Kerr’s three siblings who had found her in Glanum, had referred to themselves.

“Are you Kerr’s sister?”

Raise’s smile faltered a little at the question, as though she had been struck with some disappointment.

“Yes, I am Kerr’s older sister,” she agreed, forcing her smile back onto her face. “Did Kerr, ah, not speak of me?”

“Sorry, no,” Syd admitted truthfully. “Kerr doesn’t talk much about her siblings at all.”

“Mm, ah, I understand,” Raisa mumbled a bit as her hands twisted together. Then, she brightened and motioned behind her. “For you, we have brought food! Will you eat?”

Syd glanced around her. She was still surrounded by hundreds of therions, all staring at her with a myriad mix of expressions that ranged from open curiosity to suspicious hostility. No one else was eating anything, and it didn’t look like anyone was going to offer a chair or a table. The whole thing felt awkward, but rejecting the offer seemed like a bad idea. Raisa was being nice, and Jadis didn’t want to slap away a hand that was reaching out to her.

“Yes, thank you,” Syd agreed.

With a word or two from Raisa, a trio of younger women came out from the crowd carrying steaming platters of heavily spiced foods. On one plate was a pile of sauteed vegetables, dripping in a dark glaze, and on another plate was a mound of dark and hearty bread rolls. The last platter had four whole shanks of red meat still on the bone. The roasted legs looked like something out of a cartoon, and Syd couldn’t stop her mouth from watering. She was a carnivore, through and through, and the sight of so much meat was damn near seductive.

Setting the tip of her sword staff into the ground, Syd worked on unlatching her helmet while Raisa politely filled a large plate with the food from the platters. As unhappy as things had been upon arriving in the Nox camp, she couldn’t help feel a little bit of earnest anticipation as the therion put a whole shank onto the plate for her. Syd was so focused on the food that she almost missed the way Raisa’s eyes went wide as saucers when her helmet came off. Pausing for only the briefest of instants, Syd scanned the crowd with her eyes, noting the gasps and shocked expressions.

Carefully, she set her helmet on the pommel of her sword staff so that she had both hands free to take the offered plate from Raisa’s slack hands.

“Thanks again,” Syd repeated herself neutrally as she took in the delicious scent of the meal.

“Ah… ah! Da, you are welcome!” the middle-aged scholar shook her head and looked away from Syd. “We send, mm, we will send more food to… to you and the Demon? On the Hunter’s Stone.”

“That is appreciated,” Syd said politely as she picked up the shank by the bone like a handlebar. “But you don’t need to bring out anything for Alex. She doesn’t need to eat.”

Raisa seemed to take that information in stride, though she kept glancing up at Syd before quickly lowering her eyes.

This was another reaction Jadis was used to. Sometimes, it was easy to forget that she was not just physically attractive, but beautiful on a quite literally supernatural level. People who were around her all the time got used to her, and some people were just good at keeping their focus. But if someone wasn’t expecting to see her, they tended to get extremely… distracted by her looks. Jadis had seen it happen many times in the past, but she hadn’t had such a strong reaction from such a large crowd in a while. She supposed the fact that she had been giving off far more intimidating vibes with her armor and wings a moment before was causing some mental whiplash.

With nothing else to do, Syd took a bite of the roasted meat she had been given. It was, as her nose had told her, heavily spiced with flavors she wasn’t used to, but the taste was delicious, nonetheless. While the food was enjoyable, eating a meal while standing in the middle of a crowd that was entirely focused on her detracted somewhat from the experience.

After taking a few more bites, Syd realized that Raisa and the three women who had come up with the platters weren’t going anywhere, nor were they saying anything, either. They were just standing there, somewhat awkwardly, while she ate the food. It was almost surreal.

“Okay, this is getting uncomfortable,” Syd finally blurted out. “Can we all agree that we aren’t going to attack each other? Maybe sit down and have a conversation somewhere? Or should I just float back up and forget about talking?”

Raisa looked utterly distressed by Syd’s questions and fumbled over her own words as she struggled to get out a mix of incomprehensible syllables. However, from out of the crowd, Kerr’s uncle Vidor pushed his way into the open space. He, along with several older male and female therions approached Syd, while a handful more turned and began barking orders at the gathered crowd.

“We apologize,” Vidor said as he came close enough to speak with Syd at a normal volume. “We are being poor hosts. Our confusion is no excuse. Please, wait just a moment.”

In short order, the crowd was partially dispersed. Not fully, but far less of the clan was present than there had been at the start. A large canopy was quickly set up, and a long table with benches was set underneath. It was all too small for Syd to comfortably fit her legs underneath, but she accepted the courtesy in the spirit of goodwill and settled herself onto two creaking wooden benches that valiantly fought against the weight of her full plate armor. Soon, not only were the original three platters in front of her, but several more dishes she didn’t recognize, along with several wooden flagons of bitter ales and something stronger that smelled vaguely of plums. Vidor and Raisa joined her at the table, as did many of the older therions who had stepped up with Vidor initially. Introductions were made, and two things became clear right away. The first was that hardly any of the people who had surrounded Syd spoke more than three words of Imperial. The second was that almost all of them were Kerr’s older brothers and sisters.

“First of First,” Syd repeated as her eyes flicked between Raisa and the old man she was introducing her to. “You mean, you’re Nox va Ratosh’s oldest son?”

“Yes, he is,” Raisa confirmed. “Vasyl is Kerr’s oldest brother.”

Syd put on a friendly grin as she shook the old man’s hand. Vasyl had to be over sixty years old, maybe seventy, and was nearly as gray as his father was with age. Jadis internally marveled at the gap in years between this man and Kerr, who was only twenty-seven. To have a sibling who was forty years older was just… bizarre. Then again, when Jadis thought about it, the age difference between Kerr and her brothers and sisters was probably a vision of her own future. She could be having children with her lovers for a very, very long time. Especially Eir, Severina, Meli, and Alex. How big would the gap grow between Hope and her younger siblings?

“Jadis, may we ask you to give us news of the world beyond the Verdant Sea?” Vidor asked after the many introductions were over. “Word on the war, the Empire, Volto, or anywhere else you may have traveled?”

Syd hesitated for a moment, thinking over what she should say. Her Jay self was still sitting with Kerr inside of the tent. Ratosh had fallen back into a labored slumber, and Kerr was silently watching. A group of therions led by Kerr’s brother Kesh had delivered a meal to her Dys self and Alex, and they were currently watching them from a distance. The welcome out there was still cold, but the food was hot and no further aggressive actions had been taken. It seemed likely that they would be there for a while, so Jadis saw no reason not to pass the time that her Syd self had open to her in giving Clan Nox a bit of news.

“Well, we just flew here from Thracina, in Volto, and—”

Syd spent the next hour recounting as much non-sensitive information as she could think of to the assembled therions. Vidor and Raisa acted as translators, repeating Syd’s words while occasionally voicing the questions that others raised. While much of what she told them about was the general current events of the world, the mostly one-sided conversation eventually steered towards news of what Kerr had been up to since she had left the clan five years ago. By the time all of the food had been eaten and the flagons replaced multiple times, Syd had told them of how she and Kerr had met, the fight in Alawar and the escape through the tunnels under Weigrun, the many encounters with the cultists, and the Battle of Glanum.

“Kerr helped slay a Demon Prince?” Raisa repeated the question asked by one of her older sisters, Second of Third, Syd thought. “An actual Prince?”

“She did,” Syd nodded in confirmation as she smiled at the memory. “Used an arrow to pierce its ugly maw and we blew its jaw right off. She was amazing.”

As Raisa translated the response and the many older siblings murmured among themselves, Vidor shook his head with a wry smile on his wolf-like face. The man was sat on Syd’s right side, opposite to Raisa on her left, and he had just finished translating the answer to a different question asked by one of the brothers on that side of the table.

“Kerr has done well for herself. I had hoped she would find success on her own, but I had not expected to ever hear such a story about her. She is a strong woman, just as her mother was.”

The moment the last sentence left Vidor’s lips, his expression fell as his posture went stiff. He quickly looked away from Syd, turning to speak with one of the others, in an obvious effort to steer his thoughts away from a subject that he had not meant to broach.

With narrowed eyes but a calm voice, Syd turned away from Vidor and leaned closer to Raisa, who was in the middle of taking a drink from a cup of ale.

“Raisa, is there a taboo among your people that prevents you from speaking about the dead?”

Clearly confused, the woman swallowed her mouthful and shook her head.

“No, there is not. We honor our dead with stories and song.”

“Then, is there a reason why no one seems to want to talk about Kerr’s mother?”

Despite not having anything in her mouth, Raisa still managed to somehow cough and choke herself in shocked surprise. As the sister sitting next to her gently patted the woman on the back, Syd turned back to look at Vidor, who she had known would hear the question. His expression was stern yet also held sadness as he regarded Syd.

“Maybe you can tell me?” Syd asked in a neutral tone.

“Nox va Ratosh has decreed that we shall not speak of Ksyusha,” Vidor replied quietly. “So long as he still draws breath.”

The moment the name Ksyusha was spoken, the rest of the table went silent. All eyes were on Vidor and Syd, and the pained expressions on their faces told Jadis that the story they were hiding was one that needed to be told. Not from them, though. Jadis needed to hear what Kerr had not been telling her, and the reason why she so hated a father she had once loved dearly.

“Well, going by how he’s doing right now, I don’t think that prohibition will last for much longer,” Syd said quietly as she sipped at the cup she had been given. “I can wait.”

“Has Kerr not told you anything?” Vidor asked, his expression softening.

“No,” Syd admitted. “She doesn’t like to talk about her mother. Actually, most of her stories are about the amazing things her father did when she was young. All I know is that her mother died.”

Vidor hesitated, a silent conflict in his eyes. Then, he tilted his head to one side, almost as though he was bowing to a thought that he could not deny.

“Ksyusha did not simply die. She took her own life. And it is Ratosh’s fault.”

“Vidor! Tak govorit’ nel’zya!” Raisa hissed in panic as she leaned towards the older man. “To say such things is forbidden!”

“It is what Kerr will say,” Vidor shrugged before taking a large gulp of his ale. “I do not think she will hide her truth from her mate.”

Turning to look up at Syd with an aged and tired smile, he nodded his head once.

“When she tells you her story, ask me again, and I will tell you what I know. You can then decide for yourself what is truth, what is grief, and what is both.”