10.3

Once he was alone in his chambers, Dirk pulled the note from the book. He hesitated to open it. He could not imagine what she could possibly have to say after what she had done.

Her handwriting gave him pause. It looked more like one of Vector's magical texts then conventional penmanship. There was nothing slovenly about the writing. On the contrary, each letter seemed artistically carved on the page. It was beautiful to look at but difficult to read. It took his eyes a moment to find the strange symmetry and logic to its flow. It was peculiar, like everything about her.

"Dearest Dirk,
I have marked a passage in the book that will explain why I left the way I did. It was not the way it should have ended.
Zyrdicia."

Dirk read the short message three times before he set it aside. The title page of the book read "Zyrdicia. The Authorized Biography. Vol. 1. By Dr. Philip Teufelkens. University of Lyr Press." It was numbered 13 of 666. He would not be surprised if every volume printed bore that number.

A purple ribbon marked a page deep in the tome. He flipped to it and began reading. The sun was up before he set the book down. He had read it in its entirety, unable to stop. It described the first twenty-five years of Zyrdicia's life in intimate detail. It fascinated him. Why she would have shared such secrets with this Teufelkens, the prince could not fathom. He picked the book up again and went back to the author's foreword, which he had skimmed only in passing previously.

The author, a professor of demonology and magical history, claimed to be a confidante entrusted with the task of chronicalling her existence. She allegedly gave him unlimited access to the details of her life, and in return, he promised to wait at least a quarter century before publishing them. She feared that as the centuries passed, she would forget her life. Recording it this way was her effort to preserve it forever.

The glowing language with which Teufelkens wrote of his personal interaction with "a creature continuously unfolding into her divinity" made clear that his was not a critical examination. To the author, she was an entity existing in the gray zone where cosmic laws met and slipped apart, a creature at once outside those laws and yet fundamentally born of them. It was a history told from her perspective. As such, it was like a manual for understanding who she was.

Fully half of the book described the first sixteen years of Zyrdicia's life, her years under Azriok's tutelage. To describe her education as brutal was a tremendous understatement. The demon had systematically indoctrinated her into an unholy culture of destruction, and thereby eradicated any human capacity for pity or mercy in her. She had learned dark magic not as a skill but as an intrinsic attribute of being. The same could be said for her penchant for violence. She was taught to kill as naturally as to breathe.

The demon first taught her to hunt as a child by turning her into a wolf for a few months. She learned the wolf's cunning and its need to kill to survive. To Azriok's surprise, she had also brought away its need for companionship in the pack.

Her instruction in weaponry was unusual, to say the least. The demon summoned the greatest warriors of past ages from the dead to teach the child by confrontation. She learned her skills not through instruction and practice, but through absorbing and synthesizing opponents' attributes and stealing strategy from their minds. And through it all she always emerged alive. The demon controlled the danger, carefully escalating it and protecting her from genuine harm.

The level of control this creature had exercised over her was breath-taking. Dirk respected the artistry of it, and envied the demon. Azriok jealously prevented her from interacting with humanity. With the exception of the dark elves who cared for her in his absence, he was the only creature to whom she had access. She occasionally summoned ghosts and spirits to keep her company when he was away. When he discovered that one of the spirits she communicated with was that of her dead mother, he was outraged. He found her arguing with the shade about whether Sephiroth were evil. Her mother's ghost tried repeatedly to warn her not to trust him. In his rage he took the child to the underworld and instructed her how to destroy mortal souls, using her mother as a demonstration.

And yet for all the harshness of the teaching method, he was obsessively protective of her and intensely affectionate. In her more rebellious teenage moments, she used this to her advantage, flinging herself happily into danger when he was away, knowing she would force him to intervene and return immediately. She came to perceive herself as indestructible in this way.

When they became intimate, she learned that Sephiroth crave mortal blood for its warmth. She knew he loved the taste of her blood. Once, after arguing with him about something trivial, the instant she was alone, she slit her wrists in order to let herself bleed out. It never occurred to her that she could actually die from such an action. It was purely an act of spitefulness. He returned to her and interceded, as always, but she had discovered a bizarre sense of power in the action. She could lose all her lifeblood and still know with certainty that she would defy death.

Interwoven with the violence were tales of genuine wonder. This creature had unlocked the mysteries of the universe, showing her parts of the cosmos known only to gods. He endowed her with an angelic obsession with dark aesthetics and tactile sensation.

The latter half of the book described the first decade of her reign of terror as an independent entity. Lyr was enmeshed in civil war at that time, as the citizens tried to rid themselves of the foreign scourge of the inquisitorial Crusaders. Zyrdicia's return to the city inflamed the passions of the citizenry and turned the tide against the occupying invaders. She orchestrated their defeat as at the age of sixteen, and then hunted every one of them. A close-knit group of her followers formed the core of the city's new order, reshaping it into its modern incarnation. Her return marked the start of the greatest cycle of economic prosperity in the city's long history.

Dirk reread the passage she had marked with the ribbon. "As Azriok's physical manifestation on earth perished, his dying breath exacted vengeance for his murder by his pupil. He invoked a magical Edict, forbidding Zyrdicia from ever copulating with a mortal. His Edict fettered her sexuality inexorably to the sexless Sephiroth. It reflected Azriok's intention to claim her for all time as his personal possession, to prevent her from ever finding fulfillment or companionship apart from that which he devised.

"An Edict is a Greater Sephiroth's most far-reaching magical pronouncement. Its effect is tied to the very being of the creature uttering it and flows through his lifeforce. Once uttered, it cannot be revoked or altered. It is eternal, as timeless as the Sephiroth himself. Each angel may issue but one such utterance in a millennium. "

The prince set the pretty tome on a bedside table, thinking about her as he fell asleep. In light of all that he had discovered today - from her actions, from the book, from Portia's statements to his seneschal, it was obvious to him that she was in love with him. He fully intended to exploit that.