“Are you all right, my love?” Aen asked as I stepped in closer to him. I took his hand, just rubbing my fingers across the broad span of his knuckles, feeling those hands that had roamed my body. His eyes flicked up as he took a deep breath, inhaling me and my scent, a smile spreading. “Just as we did before, but this time, together.”
Connection, trials, training, Aragide. These were all massive concepts my conscious brain tried to understand, but when I gazed into Aen’s eyes, I half remembered it. She’d spoken to me about this, the goddess, when I’d hovered so high above the earth. She’d prepared me for this, for—
When Aen shifted into what looked a bit like the warrior pose in yoga, my body moved with his. Our hands thrust out, our fingers outstretched as a massive plume of fire shot from the tips. I smiled at feeling it—a rush of power of the like I hadn’t felt before. We were more together. He nodded, then led the way, through the next form and the next. Moving as one, we sent filaments of flame and great rollicking whips through the air. We conjured fire balls, trails, zigzagging plumes across the mats. We spun and we spun, our flames growing tighter and tighter until finally we stopped, a massive blast pouring out of us to lick at the ceiling.
“Good, good,” Duke said, clapping as he came forward. “That’s how this has to be. Trust, a secure bond.” His eyes softened a little. “Love.” I flushed at that. “It’s what ties an avatar and her consort together, allows them to share power and touch the divine. Now, Bea’s going to talk you through the records we have of the last fire trial on record.”
The woman walked briskly into the room, toting a clipboard. She stopped and nodded to us all before beginning to explain.
“The records tell us that during the fire trial, you will face ‘She of the nine.’” She flicked a hand, and a mural of a statuesque black woman hung before us in the air, a long whip of flame curling around her body. “We are not entirely sure who ‘she’ is. Some evidence suggests it could be the orisha, Oya, but she seems to operate as a being who controls air, storms, lightning, as well as fire, so it’s difficult to know if that’s correct. The impression we were given from the records was that it was a fire trial and only fire elements were used, so—”
“Bea, let’s get to the simulation,” Duke said.
She looked flustered by the interruption but nodded quickly.
“We’ve worked hard with quite a few of the archive team to create simulations of each trial. They won’t show you exactly what will happen, but they give you everything we’ve been able to glean from the records in an interactive form you can practise with.” Bea pulled a gleaming red jewel out of her bag and then tossed it onto the ground.
She appeared moments later, towering over all of us, forcing our eyes up towards the ceiling. She gleamed like deepest ebony, a black woman, a warrior, as evidenced by her loose stance and the subtle shift of her feet. Her body was a picture of feminine strength, with her long, lean muscles, and she held a fiery whip in her hand, trailing limply over the floor but prevented from burning the mats by some mystical force.
“Fighting fire with fire?” I asked Aen.
“We absorb it, take whatever’s powering her, and suck it down. Also, just because she’s wielding fire doesn’t mean she’s immune to it.”
“OK, how do we start this?”
By asking that, evidently. Somehow, the room expanded exponentially, though everyone remained in it. Aen and I fell into loose stances, shoulder to shoulder, and waited for her to strike.
“She’s trying to separate us!” he shouted as the whip came down.
There were no issues working out what a fifty-foot woman was about to do, her movements comparatively slower, but I’m not sure the delay in action was any help as we leapt apart, the whip cracking down.
“Fuck!” I yelped, a wall of fire appearing between us in the whip’s wake, cordoning each of us off into separate quadrants.
“It can’t hurt you, remember?” Aen shouted back, walking through the fire like a flame haired god, but he quickly dived for me, throwing both of us free as her fist came crashing down.
“Any instructions to go with this thing?” I shouted to Bea, but she just skittered out the way, awestruck by her creation. God, had this been tested out on anyone before us? Oya leaned down, her eyes balls of flame in the sockets, her mouth opening wide to let out a huge blast of fire.
“Redirect!” Aen said as it barrelled towards us. “Catch the energy and thrust it away.”
Catch fire? What the actual fuck? I didn’t follow his instructions, instead watching him and imitating his actions. He was right though—we appeared to capture the stream in the palms of our hands, only a slightly warming sensation bleeding through, and then we spun, pushing the flames away, where they dissipated quickly.
“C’mon,” I said, grabbing his hand and rolling sideways as her foot came slamming down.
Any advice here? I asked Lilith frantically. We were able to avoid being hurt easily enough, but getting a strike in was near impossible. While we were defending against one attack, she was launching the next.
Take the power from the source, was her reply.
Gee, thanks! I said, dodging and weaving, Aen moving in tandem with me. But that wouldn’t last. We were both already panting lightly with the effort.
“We need to attack or she’ll exhaust us,” I called out as we spun the fire away. “This isn’t sustainable.”
“So, what? We—”
He didn’t get to finish the sentence as I took off at a run, meeting her next blast of fire head on.
It was like standing in a jet stream, the sheer volume of power battering me physically, the heat levels rising and rising. Fear spiked hard, Aen crying out my name as I heard my heart begin to skitter. Then I breathed in.
Did the Oya sim smile slightly when she pulled back as I took her power into me? I regretted it as soon as I did. It felt like I’d opened my mouth to swallow down a tsunami and it was gulp it down or drown. I swallowed, the sim wavering a little as I drained some of her power, the form glitching a little like a corrupted file. In response, my skin felt too tight, my head too full as Oya’s power fought me, and red blobs formed before my eyes, obscuring my vision.
“What the hell are you doing?” Aen snapped, appearing by my side, but I answered him by grabbing his head and slamming my lips down on his. The power flowed, and I felt him, her, their forms flickering as it poured into them, an equilibrium being sought, no matter what we wanted, and it wouldn’t stop until we achieved it. When I finally pulled away, she stood there, blinking, her eyes burning bright red. They snapped up to the orisha, who flicked her fiery whip.
“Let’s take this bitch out.”
In female form, Aen was much more nimble, skating around the giant sim in a series of dance-like steps I stumbled to keep up with, but try I did. This confounded Oya, her slower reflexes struggling to keep track of us, her attacks aborted or coming much too late.
“Bring her to her knees,” Aen said as we finally came to a stop behind the gigantic figure. “Ready?”
No, no I was not, but the two of us raced for the vulnerable joints as she began to spin, striking as one.
This is what they meant, about connection. Aen had thoroughly broken down all my defences against her, past my anger and fear and pain, until there was just this. She took my hand, the sense of rightness, of her, of him, throbbing in my heart always, but now also in every muscle. Our bodies reflected the other as we performed a flying kick, using all of our combined weight and stolen power to strike at Oya’s vulnerable joints.