Page 93 of Serpent and Shadow

At the blank stares aimed at me, I attempted to clarify. “Enlightened?” I tried next. “Holy people who’ve dedicated their lives to helping others?”

Alaric’s puzzled look faded.

“Yes,” he said, sounding relieved. “Exactly like that.”

I frowned as my exhausted brain tried to make connections.

Was that what those mages and witches meant, when they talked about an “Ascension” ritual? They’d said Malefic himself was going to ascend, sometime before he tried to collapse the human and Magical worlds. I seriously doubted they meant he was volunteering to become a new familial primal himself.

“What do you believe?” Jolie asked Alaric.

Alaric pursed his lips, seemingly in resignation, and blew air out between them.

“I think the royal ‘ascension’ story is likely a load of rubbish,” he confessed, tilting his head. “I think it’s far more likely… given what I know of my family, at least, and how primals work… they found a way to coax significantly larger beings from the Aether using the dead souls of one or more of their own relatives. So really more like a sacrifice than an enslavement. I also think, yes, horribly dark magic was used for this. Stuff they’d be sent down to the Pyramid for using now, if not the guillotine.”

Jolie grimaced.

Her eyes dropped pityingly to his centaur primal, which stood on the couch next to her, its muscular arms folded. The centaur held a green apple in one hand, an apple I strongly suspected had been meant for my monocerus primal, which still hadn’t made an appearance.

As if seeming to realize that himself, Alaric frowned, glanced at me, then down around at the empty carpet by my feet. His eyes shifted directions, scanning the rest of the room, as if expecting to find the monocerus asleep in the kitchen, or wandering around inside Bones’s massive closet or loo.

I opened my mouth, about to explain, but Jolie spoke up before I could.

“How can you use it, knowing that?” she asked, a faint disgust in her voice. “Doesn’t it give you the ick, knowing your primal might’ve come from a relative being murdered to give your ancestors more power? It’s like a zombie version of a genie in a bottle.” She looked at Luc then, pursing her lips. “Is that why you don’t use your family’s primal, Lucifer? I read somewhere it’s a hellhound. Is that true?”

Luc shrugged, glancing at Alaric apologetically.

“Yes.” Luc looked back at Jolie. “And no, we no longer use it in my family. Well, not my immediate family, anyway. But it’s different, Jo. My grandparents on my father’s side, along with my grandfather’s sister, her husband, her kids… my parents… all the way on down to me and my sister… they all gave it up. Other members of the family tree still use it. My grandfather’s two brothers, their wives and heirs, and their heirs’ children still use it. In my case, it was a decision made before I was born. I never used it growing up, or even saw it until I was seventeen, at one family event or another.”

Luc glanced at me, then back at Jolie.

“Familials are stronger than ordinary primals,” he reminded us. “That’s why those families wanted them in the first place. It’s a rough thing to let go of, when it’s all you know, and you’ve trained all of your magic that way for years. Heirs don’t usually get much say in that. I don’t know if my grandfather would’ve been able to do it, either, if his own father and mother hadn’t died so young.”

Alaric turned to Jolie, his expression taut.

His voice remained apologetic, but also earnest.

“I did speak to Forsooth about it,” he said. “He agrees with me that the ascended story is likely rubbish. He also assured me that the Aetheric beings attached to familials consumed those sacrificial Magicals ages ago. Which means, the ancestors aren’t enslaved in any meaningful sense. They’re just dead. However sick the process might’ve been at the start, it’s not hurting anyone now.”

Jolie made a skeptical sound, but didn’t argue.

My mind kept going back to the fact I’d heard the word “Ascension” twice today, each time referencing dark rituals. I couldn’t quite see the connection, though.

“So what else do you know about the ‘Ascension’ ritual itself––” I began.

“I want to hear what he was saying before,” Nyx broke in.

We all looked at her, but Nyx’s eyes remained on Alaric.

“About the divinities,” she clarified. “About why Caelum and Leda’s primals are different from familials and regular primals.”

“Oh. Right.” Alaric sat up straighter, still gripping his mug’s handle where it rested on his thigh. “Right. Well, it’s obvious what I was saying, isn’t it?”

He gave me an appraising look.

“I’m wondering if Leda and Caelum have divinity primals,” he said, matter of fact. “I’m wondering if Forsooth already knows, and if that’s why he gave me a virtual library’s worth of books on the subject simply because I asked one question.”

There was a silence after he said it.