"This, this is your destiny."

Those words were what echoed within his mind as the world around him faded. It was almost as if he were passing into unconsciousness. Yet there was something else to it. He knew he was still awake, he could still hear, feel, but in a detached sort of sense.

Kaard had come to Raif, letting him know the Pantheon was growing restless with the fact that none of them had found the young one yet. They wanted him captured and they wanted him tried for the sins against them. Not his sins, but the sins of his father. The trial would be a lark, just to serve tradition. All involved knew that they were not judging Raif on who he was, but what he might become in time.

They were not about to give him the choice of free will. The Pantheon would damn him first.

Raif, for a moment, thought that Kaard had tricked him. That perhaps the odd one had brought him, instead of to a safe place, to the Pantheon's forest instead. At least, it looked and felt like the forest. The trees seemed to call to him, to pull his blood like a lodestone wrenches at the substance of iron. The ground was covered in a slight haze, and in the distance he thought he could see the Grandfather Oak. He turned this way, that way, looking, searching.

"Damn you, Kaard, damn you," he muttered out lightly, waiting for the Pantheon to appear about him and to take him down. To damn him as he now damned Kaard.

"What is it, boy? Do you really think I would turn you in after I've staked my entire existence on you? Foolish, I say," answered the soft murmur from behind Raif that belied Kaard's hiding presence.

"You brought me here!" replied Raif, nervousness, fear, and anger all clamoring to take precedence in the tone of his voice.

"Where, exactly, do you think here is?" A soft chuckle, a whisper from the form that stood behind Raif. The form was roughly the shape of a humanoid body, shadowy hints of angular features and elongated ears. Though the form was but a coalesced silhouette made of shades, mixed with flitters of light, mercury, and shining stars.

"Do not toy with me, you bastard. This is the Forest of the Pantheon!"

"Oh, child, how foolish you are. This is but a shade, a dream of that place. This is the place where we sprung from, now forgotten. This is where you will find out what you are. This is where you will learn. This is where you will live, or die, by your own choices.

"This, this is your destiny."

Those words, repeated, and Kaard was gone. Raif could see him nowhere, and the fear only grew as he realized he was alone.

Alone, as he had grown up. Isolated, as he had lived his life. Alone, in a place that was the root of all that was good, all that was evil to him; The Forest of the Pantheon.

The fear took him over. For all of Kaard's help, it may have been to lull Raif into a false sense of safety. These thoughts brought about anger. Feelings of anger that started as a small flame within the core of his being and grew second by second to an enraged pyre.

Never mind the fact that the Pantheon had yet to show up. Perhaps they were waiting, wanting him to be nervous.

As the hostility focussed at Kaard for this betrayal grew, it was added to by his hatred of the other gods, the Pantheon complete. Also he felt anger and hate towards Siadhan, his father, for what he had done, and his mother, for carrying him to term, for allowing this to be his fate. It grew to encompass the world in its entirety.

Hate, anger, they were all he knew. This one only knew fleeting moments of love, joy. The hatred born of his life, of the factors that made his life, it became whole; it became something more than he was. It became an entity before him.

A mirror image of Raif, complete with one jade-green and one fawn-gold eye and the raven locks, with the same clothes and the same sword strapped to his side. The youngling looked upon his own self, looked upon the image of his hate given life, made to breathe by this place.

This, this is your destiny, Kaard's words echoed once more within his head.

Raif's hand went to the hilt of his blade, wondering what sort of trickery this was. What is going on?, went through the youngling's head. And as his hand grasped the hilt of his sword, Hatred's hand made the same movement, grasping the mirrored blade.

"Look, I will not fight myself, Kaard, whatever illusion this is," he called out, scared now for the first time.

"Kaard is not here. You are alone here; you face yourself. You are alone," Hatred echoed, a slight smirk on its borrowed face. With a flash of moment, an action too quick for Raif to even react to, Hatred struck a blow. The mirrored-blade cut deep on the youngling's arm, bringing forth the precious lifeblood from his arm.

With a scream of pain, Raif looked to the ground as his blood splattered forth this way and that. Whereas before, when his life was spilt, the ground did not decay, it did not decompose before his very eyes. In fact, his blood did not have the black mixed with crimson; there was only the coppery red to be seen. In this world, in this place, for his Rites of Passage, there was only him, the echo of him. In here, he was not his father's son.

As Hatred pulled back, suddenly where he was before a few feet away, Raif felt the effects of the piercing wound. Hatred, the feeling, the emotion, coursed through his body as if it had become part of his blood. It made his muscles tense to the point of aching, it made his vision go as scarlet as his blood that flowed down his arm. Hands clenched at the hilt of his blade and tore it free as he charged with a brutal scream.

Blow for blow, Hatred matched the young one for every step. Slash for slash, thrust for thrust, step for step, none Raif's attacks could make it through Hatred's mirrored manners of attacks, borrowed from the young one.

Yet a myriad of small cuts, small slashes appeared on Raif's forms, given out by Hatred. Blood continued to flow, continued to spill, weakening Raif. This continued on well past the point where any normal body would have fallen for the wounds, for the exhaustion. For what must have been days, for what might have been years, for what could have been seconds, the fight continued on.

Then came images to Raif's mind. Memories unbidden broke through the bloodlust brought on by Hatred. Images of his mother holding him close to her breast, crying over how she could not care for him; stealing him away from Siadhan, ensuring her son, at the risk of her own life, the chance to live as he would and not by his father's will. To give him the chance to live and to not be raised by the bastard god Siadhan, who would have killed her, had he caught her taking her son back. Images came of the priests of the Father Oak that his mother had left him with. How they had blessed his mother with love, with care, and had taken her baby to care for as their own as she fled. Siadhan would come after her. Images came, showing the love they gave him, lavished upon him.

He saw his mother then, for the first time. Never before had he known what she looked like, known that she had loved him so. Lengthy raven locks, long enough to reach her lower back even with being braided, matched Raif's own hair color. And her eyes were of the most startling green, almost as if jade had been cut into small orbs and placed into the eye sockets of this mere mortal woman. She wore a simple dress of long, flowing snow white silk that moved like liquid, complementing the grace with which she moved. She was of the long-lived ones; the ones who were traced back to the gods themselves. They were the elves, with their exquisitely crafted ears, elongated from the sides of their heads, giving them much more keen hearing than the humans of the world.

He saw her love for him, saw how she cared for him. All he had ever thought was that she had abandoned him in the world. He had grown an orphan, had been beaten many times within an inch of his life by the one who had adopted him from the priests of the Father Oak.

With images of love in his heart, his blade swung true. The fight had been raging as these images flooded through his mind. He parried a blow by Hatred, but not far enough and yet another small cut was given, loosing yet more blood. He thrust back at his opponent built by emotion and dreams, but was thrown back. Dodging, dancing away from Hatred, for it was simply too much, Raif waited for the beast that held his form to come. And his blade sang true.

The tip of the blade skewered the shoulder of Hatred in humanoid form, liberating blood as black as night, with bits of shining specs in it, almost as if the vitae were night with stars bright overhead.

Next he saw Kaard, his uncle as such things could be figured, protecting him from the rest of the Pantheon. Risking his own existence as a god, to keep Raif out of their traps, to keep him out of their grasp. Kaard risked it all to keep him free, to allow him the chance to live life as best as he could. As best as he could with the Pantheon wishing to damn him. The love he had shown to the young one as the gods tried this way and that to get him, to bring him to trial, to judge him for the sins of his father. Kaard did not want to see one of his own blood persecuted for a sin that he had never done, a crime had brought him about, that he had not caused.

And again, as these images came, Raif's blade struck deep, struck fast, and struck hard. Right along the ribs of the monstrous Hatred, now bleeding as much as its human counterpart. For every image that Raif saw of love, Hatred was nicked, was cut, and bled.

Then one last image came to Raif, the image of Liona. Liona who fought against the karuchs, who were in turn sent by the gods, put on the scent of Raif, to bring him to the Forest of the Pantheon. She, she who denied them, who would not tell them where the hunted one ran; she, who gave her life for him, out of love; she, she who he would never hold again.

With these images, these feelings of Love, there came one last strike, one last parry, one last explosion that rocked the world. Hatred's sword met with Raif's in midair, the two blades clanging with the sound of bells. Bells as broad as mountains, giving off the sound of thunder. The blades shattered in the air, sending crystalline shards of metal this way, that way, a cloud of iron bathing the two combatants.

And then there was only one. And then there was only Raif.

::November 28, 2002 10:21 AM

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