Holy Opposites 8

	Faint footsteps approached us as soon as I said it.  I felt a tremor of trepidation in my stomach as I felt something of immense power approach me, but the male nymph leaned over and pressed his lips against the crown of my head.  “She likes you already,” he whispered.  “Be comforted.”

	“Hello,” a voice said.  The world rippled with that single word.  I felt miniscule again, as if I was standing beneath the Balor and the Planetar, but that was nothing compared to this.  “I’m glad you’re well now.”

	I tried to speak.  I couldn’t.  I tried again.  I failed.  I tried one more time, squeezing the hands of the nymphs for support.  “Thank you, Ryaire,” I finally managed, in a mouse-like squeak.

	I hadn’t turned to face her yet, and she took no efforts to walk around in front.  “You know me?”

	“My… my false…” I cleared my throat.  “My false memories tell me to hate you,” I confessed.  Tears welled up.  “I have…”

	“Do you hate me?”

	“No,” I whimpered.

	“Then why do you avert your eyes?”

	The tears spilled.  “I am… an unclean thing,” I managed.  How was she doing this?  Her words alone were cutting me deeper than the shards of glass Asmodeus had embedded in my back.  The angel had spoken in a celestial tongue that had nearly driven me into the ground with its sheer force.  The Noble Eladrin had been a very piece of the world and hadn’t imposed on me like this.  How did her words drive me to confession?  “I am so dirty…” I cried.  The male nymph kissed my hair again, and I managed to calm myself.  The angel made me feel clean and good, and now, the goddess’ mere words felt like torture.

	“You have bathed in the blood of River Styx, true, girl, and the clean waters of Deep Sashelas, and now my own Waters of Comfort,” Ryaire observed.  “Are you so unclean?”

	“I am a thing of blood and sin,” I wept.  “I am cast of the blood of devils and the damned.”

	“And your first conscious act was to save a child,” Ryaire said gently.  I felt her hand on my back, and I nearly leaped out of my skin.  Why was it physical?  “Devil-girl, you are born of sin, and absent of it.”

	I simply wept.  I had never felt so conflicted.  Then, I was perhaps seven days old.  Ryaire was quiet for a moment, but then her hand withdrew.  “What happens next is determined by how well you overcome your irrational fear of me,” she said, her maternal tone shifting.

	I swallowed.  I forced myself to rise and turn, shrugging off the comfort of the spectral nymphs.  I faced down my second god in a week as I did so.

	Ryaire was certainly not visually frightening, like Asmodeus.  She was a human, by the look of her, or maybe a half-elf.  She had a simple white dress on with colored trim, red and yellow and black.  She had a yellow and black sash on over it, and white slippers.  She smiled at me.  “Not such a hard step, was it?”  Again, I boggled.  How did she have a physical body?  Gods aren’t supposed to have those!

	My teeth were chattering.  “Yes, it was, Lady Ryaire.”

	She sighed sadly.  “I see.  Your soul recoils from me.”  She produced a scrap of cloth.  “Here.  Will this make you more comfortable?”  The scrap expanded to an entire robe and hood, with shoes in her other hand.

	I hesitated.  I wasn’t ashamed of my nudity, but perhaps it wasn’t acceptable here.  “Uh… no, but I appreciate your gift, Lady Ryaire…”

	The goddess stepped back and let me dress.  I didn’t feel different after dressing, save the loss of the feeling of the bare ground on my feet.  I looked around, feeling rather helpless.  “So… the… er, the Noble Eladrin I spoke to, he… well, he said I would face a choice here… what did he mean?”

	Ryaire nodded.  “First, child, you need a name.  A real name.  I can’t call you devil-girl forever.”

	I hesitated.  The only names I knew were Asmodeus’ servants and enemies.  “I… what else is there?”  I had my Truename, but that was a dangerous thing indeed.  I could be controlled with it.

	Ryaire pondered that.  “Well.  I serve Ilmater.  One of his oldest saints was Cavria, a preacher-woman of great resolve and nobility.  She could turn minds towards things they hated addressing, and do so in a way that didn’t diminish them.  It suits you, I think.  Do you find that acceptable?”

	I swallowed my tongue, but forced out the words.  “Cavria?  I… I will be Cavria.”

	“Then it is.”  Ryaire beckoned me to follow, and I did, still afraid, but less so.  She clearly wished me no harm, even if merely standing near her was almost painfully intense.  The nymphs faded to nothing behind me as we strode through the mists.

	The trees parted after a few minutes of walking, and we found ourselves on the edge of a large field.  I shielded my eyes against the light and then looked about in confusion.  Where was it coming from?  There was no sun I could see.  The light just came from above, throwing harsh shadows all about.

	Ryaire stopped at the edge of the clearing and waited for me.  “We shall talk now, you and me, Cavria, and we shall choose your fate.  Do not fear it.  We will be thorough, but honesty has its own rewards.”

	I flinched, but I followed her.  When I emerged into the light, I found it almost painfully bright, but the sensation faded to nothing, and I could see clearly.  The field was vast, beautiful, with a hill in the middle and thousands of people all around.

	I squinted.  No, not people.  Petitioners.  The souls of the dead.  Whole clusters of them, shimmering in the sun.  They sang in the light, sat on the soft grass, wandered about, ate and drank at great tables, rested with the nymphs in the pools around the edge of the trees, and disappeared into the pit in the middle of the field, from which the hill arose.

	Not just petitioners, either.  Enormous angels, some merely human in stature but projecting mighty auras, and some others even bigger than the Planetar in the Abyss had been, strode like sentinels through the crowd, exchanging words with some people, but mostly just walking.

	“This is the Arbor?” I asked, overwhelmed.

	Ryaire smiled.  “No, this is the outermost ring of it.  The Arbor is below us, in the pit in the middle of the field.”  She turned to me.  “Your presence is unusual, but it merits discussion, I think.  You are a devil, but there is no malice in your heart of your own design.”

	I stayed silent.  What else could I say?

	She waited for me to speak, but continued when I did not.  “The process you have undergone to come here is grueling, of course, and none would turn aside a lost soul like yours, but it begs the question.  Why, exactly, do you have a soul at all?  Are devils not projections of elemental Law, turned to Evil?  That, or the tattered remnants of nupperibos and lemures, elevated to manifest form?”

	“Generally,” I mumbled.

	“Then you are more like a human child, or perhaps an Illithid child,” Ryaire mused.  “Given soul, but the body of an adult.  You have magical memories, do you not?”

	“I do.”

	“Whose?

	I looked away.  “I don’t know.  Somebody very old and bitter.  I see rivalries, crimes…”



	Some flashed before my eyes, there, in Axiopistos’s office.  I buried my head in my hands as memories of ugly, savage conduct, seen through the eyes of perpetrators and victims alike, ran before my eyes.

	I felt a hand on my shoulder and flinched, but it was just the old friar, trying to comfort me.  I took some heart at his gesture.  I had fallen in with good people.



	“And do you have the means of harm that all of the first clade of Succubae held, Cavria?” Ryaire asked.

	I sighed heavily.  “Weaponized intimacy, yes.  I can kill with a kiss; I can send a soul to Hell through sex… I can summon a Vrock, though why I would ever do that is beyond me.”

	“Intriguing,” Ryaire said.  “You can summon your own foes?  Can you control it?”

	“Not that I know of.  I…” I paused as a thought occurred.  “Could I have been given another’s soul by accident?”

	“It would be unprecedented for a Fiend, but not impossible, given Asmodeus’ relative lack of control over his powers,” Ryaire suggested.  “A soul he had recently seduced or perhaps one of his mortal Chosen who had passed away.”

	“I have memories going back thousands of years, though,” I protested.

	“Perhaps an Eladrin or Sarrukh,” Ryaire said.  “Regardless, the fact remains: your body is built for evil, but your heart is as pure and innocent as a baby’s.  I will not kill you, though I suspect some will demand I should.”  She narrowed her eyes at me, and I felt the barest mote of her divine power press against me.  It nearly blew my mind to scraps, but I managed to stay on my feet.

	“Tell me,” she said, and suddenly her voice was a world and I but a dust speck, “tell me, Cavria of Nessus, what you want.”

	I spoke, compelled.  “I want to live and be free.”  She wasn’t using my Truename, and yet she still managed to force words from me.

	The pressure remained.  “And what do you want to be?”  Her voice wasn’t a word of ruinous power like the one the Planetar’s had been, but it was inescapable.  It was coming from the ground, from the air, from the light.

	My eyes teared up again.  “I don’t… know.  I don’t know what I can be.”

	The pressure vanished.  She smiled, and whatever test had been set to me, I had passed.  “Then stay a while, Cavria, and learn from me.”