Unravel

Maeve skidded around the corner of the dark, pungent alley, Malakai on her heels. She could hear his footsteps as he splashed through the reeking puddles of the previous night’s rain behind her. That he hadn’t caught up to her yet, despite the fact that they were evenly matched in every sense of the word, was bewildering. It meant that he was distracted.

She had never seen him like this. Even after centuries of fighting, she had never seen him unfocused, never seen him preoccupied with anything other than their rivalry or his own revelry. The Malakai she knew fought with laser precision and an absolute certainty that he would defeat her.

Of course, he never had. Maeve wasn’t one to cower before the impressive size or obvious power radiating from her enemy, and she detested losing. So it came back to this again and again throughout the centuries – always back to Maeve and Malakai fighting a battle neither of them could win. Maeve didn’t allow the cycle to continue for any particular love of fighting, though she did often savor the rush of adrenaline. She allowed it because she knew that she was the only one who stood a chance against him, and to decide not to continue this never-ending battle was to put the lives of humans at risk.

At this point, Maeve barely remembered her human life. The thought made her blink, almost causing her to miss dodging a blast of shadows coming from the corner of the warehouse they had entered. She’d long since forgotten the details of the village she grew up in and the faces of her loved ones, although she still held their names close to her heart. Their names were the one thing she refused to forget, a reminder of why she put herself through this time and time again.

Maeve muttered a curse under her breath as she dropped to the ground and rolled to the side, narrowly avoiding another of Malakai’s attacks. She came up on one knee and sent a burst of her own, shimmering power in his general direction. “I really need to get it together.”

She had just been mentally chiding Malakai for being unfocused, and here she was thinking about people who had been dead for centuries.

“Feeling a bit distracted today, darling?”

Malakai’s voice came from behind her, breath brushing up against her neck as he whispered in her ear. She hated when he did that – when he sent his voice traveling along the tendrils of power emanating from him to wrap around her body and make her think he’d caught her off guard. She’d fallen for the trick the first time he’d done it, when they were both newly created and still exploring their abilities.

Maeve snorted, throwing up a hard wall of her energy, or ireumen, around her to block out his voice. She didn’t bother responding to the taunt. Instead, she used the distraction of the sudden light coming from her shield to send other bits of her power creeping along the floor, searching the shadows for Malakai. He almost blended into the darkness thanks to the combination of his ireumen, dark hair and tan skin.

She felt a bit guilty for the destruction she knew they were causing in the warehouse, but it was better than fighting him in the run-down apartment building she’d found him lounging in a few hours earlier. Malakai fed, for lack of a better word, off of the darker ireumen that surrounded the more…unsavory characters of the city. But even the more loathsome residents of Creon didn’t deserve to get caught in the middle of a fight between the kelnikai – the term humans had grown to use to describe Maeve and Malakai.

The moment Maeve felt her ireumen brush up against Malakai she dropped her shield and pounced, knowing that if he had allowed her to sneak past his guard, she had won this particular fight. She’d follow her usual M.O., which consisted of tying him up with some of her energy woven together to create ropes, and running as far as she could so that by the time he could break out of his bonds it wasn’t worth attempting to chase her down — for a few days, at least. But typically, it took a lot longer for Maeve to get the upper hand. She was curious why he was indulging in this kind of behavior.

Looking back, she might have been a bit preoccupied with wondering what could have caused her nemesis to act this way. But in the moment, as she completed the final knot of her makeshift handcuffs, she felt only satisfaction.

“And here you thought I wasn’t paying attention,” she huffed, tightening the knot to ensure that it would take him a while to break loose. She made an effort to not meet Malakai’s honey gold eyes as she anticipated his response, because she already knew what he would say. It was the same tactic he attempted every time she got the better of him, and it never worked.

She should have known by now that today was different. If she hadn’t already been tipped off by his absent mindedness, the seriousness with which he was currently staring at her should have made her pause.

“Maeve,” he said. “We need to talk about something.” She scoffed, walking around and inspecting the pillar she had tied him to to make sure it was structurally sound.

“Sure we do, Malakai. As if I haven’t heard the speech you’re about to give me hundreds of times over the last few centuries.”

Malakai grinned, a saccharine thing that allowed her to see all of his teeth. “I can appreciate the fact that you might not be inclined to hear me out, given our history, but this is different – I found a way to defeat the gods and balance the ireumen. I just need your help to do it.”

It was the one thing he could have said that would have made her pause. This was a conversation they hadn’t had before, probably because it was insane and blasphemous to even consider. Only Malakai would be arrogant enough to believe that such a thing would be within their abilities.

“Absolutely not,” Maeve spat out through her teeth as she stalked towards the door of the warehouse. What he was talking about was treason, and she wasn’t in the mood to play along. "It's impossible, and you know it."

She didn’t pause to hear his response, instead striding out into the sticky, humid air that had covered the city since the storm the previous night. Running her fingers through her long, russet brown hair with a sigh, she turned east, towards the run down apartment she was currently renting.

Maeve walked through the city, past her apartment, and through the gates of Creon. But no matter how far she walked, she found to her chagrin that she couldn't get the idea out of her head. Overthrow the gods. Break the cycle.

She would finally be able to stop running, stop fighting. Maybe even live something close to a normal life. If they could find a way to keep the world balanced without the influence of the gods and their constant battles, wouldn’t that be worth whatever it took to get there?

It was insane. But…maybe all of the great events in history were based upon insanity, and there was only one way to find out. So Maeve did the one thing she never imagined she would do – she turned around, and went to untie Malakai.