This page is for my short story in the Ace Assassin world. It’s called Sanctuary Heart.
I wrote this one for me and for anyone interested in my writing who couldn’t read it because of the intimate scenes. This is a story that is safe for sex neg aces. There is a single closed mouthed goodbye kiss.
An ancient, sacred calling, a painful disability, and a dryad who won’t give up.
Gaia tasked The People with the protection of the Sanctuary Isles at the beginning of time.
Ea has always known they couldn’t actually follow their sacred calling.
Born disabled with a painful condition, their life seems destined to stay dependent on others.
Despite their family’s love, it’s stifling, their only escape the communion with the Hearttree’s soul.
When no one else can answer the call to serve a stranded Sanctuary Isle, they’re given the chance they never thought would come.
Faced with a choice to abandon the sacred precept of The People and everything they’ve trained their whole life for or to accept destiny’s call, Ea sets off on a journey that will test everything they know about their culture, their beliefs, and their abilities.
What they find on the Isle pushes them to the edge, challenging them past their limits. It may bend them, but Ea is determined not to break.
Content Warnings
Medical use of painkillers
Chronic pain
Depression
Anxiety
Chronic Illness
Kissing
Sea travel
Food
Alcohol
Graphic Injuries
First Chapter:
1
Drums thumped and ankle bells rang from the centre of my parent’s refuge. Night had fallen, dusting flesh with the glowing gold pollen the Heart Tree released when the sun went down. But the drummers kept playing and the dancers swirled like silk clad leaves in a rambunctious wind. From my perch, the glowing purple, blue, and green plants that floored the forest far below me made a kaleidoscopic panorama. I sat in the very top of our Heart Tree with my back to the celebrations. One of the few places I’d never felt like a burden.
To be clear, my parents and family are wonderful; they’ve never made me feel as if I’m anything but perfect. They love me, just as I am.
It’s me that doesn’t love myself. I see what others can do, and I can’t help but hold myself up to their abilities and find myself wanting. It’s just the reality of my life. I don’t reach for more because I can’t hold it. I try to be content with what I can do.
It’s just that… everything in me yearned for something I could never have. The thing the dancers were celebrating.
Tonight, the Heart Tree would release her pods and young Conservators would ask their saplings to release their roots from the main plant and drift away into a future I’d never know. One of the things that had been made eminently clear to me for my entire life is that I can’t survive on my own.
Born to be a Conservator, trained as one in an act of cruelty disguised as pity; but never to know the communion we were born for. That’s me. That’s my life.
The sound of claws in bark trembled up through the Heart tree, emitting from the whispering of the leaves around my seat. I placed a webbed hand on the side of the gargantuan rainbow barked centre of my parent’s Sanctuary and closed my eyes. I sent an empathic surge of calm and peace to our heart. She sighed and relaxed into my comforting flood of emotions. By her discomfort, I knew who climbed to my perch. I tried to calm myself now, but my gifts never worked on me. Only on others.
The branch I’d made myself comfortable on was too wide and heavy to tremble, but our heart sent the skitter of someone’s clawed feet making their way along the mossy branch to easily bend, place their hands on the bark and swing the rest of their muscular body around so they sat spraddle legged across the branch. Close enough that their body heat brushed me with remembered joys. My burning emotions hurt.
“I wanted to say goodbye.”
“Why?”
“Because of who we used to be to one another.”
“Goodbye.”
“Amane-Ea, please…”
“What do you want from me, Asco? You hurt me, we aren’t together anymore, you’ve made your choice.”
“I needed…”
“Someone whole and able. Yes. You said. Twice, if I recall correctly.” Relief swamped me that my voice didn’t shake with grief or the all too present tears.
“Does it have to be this way?”
“What way did you think it would be? That we’d just go back to being best friends? I can’t do that, Asco. It’s cruel that you ask it of me.”
He dropped his glowing, bottle-green eyes to his lighter leaf-green hands. He flexed his gleaming emerald claws once, almost but not quite piercing the bark of the Heart Tree. “I’m sorry. I know it doesn’t help the pain I caused. But I’m sorry, Ea, and I miss you. I hope…” He lifted his head to look out toward the dancers and the Heart Tree pods that clung to the edges of our Sanctuary Isle. His would be among them. I didn’t have one. And the roots of his pod were now entangled with another of the Isle’s residents. I hadn’t watched, but they would’ve sworn their handfasting over the council fire in the centre of where the dancers now frolicked, ecstatic at the momentous—once in a generation—experience taking place. When the pods detached, theirs would stay together.
Together, while I remained here, alone. No, there really wasn’t any getting past that.
He looked at me, regret in his eyes. “I hope we see one another again, someday.”
I finally turned my head to meet his gaze. “Goodbye, Asco. May the sea gift you good things and cradle you to her heart. May your Heart Tree grow, prosper, and shelter those who need her beneath her branches.” The traditional goodbye tasted like ashes on my tongue, but no one would ever be able to claim that the Sanctuary Elders’ child had spoken rudely to anyone, much less a Conservator.
I froze as he lifted his hand and slowly, giving me time to avoid it, reached out and settled it into its accustomed place on my cheek. Tears fell when I dropped my lids. I sniffed once and bit my lip. Tears continued to fall, rolling over his knuckles. He leaned in and with a sad, shuddering breath pressed his lips to mine in a chaste, heartfelt kiss. The salt of my grief tasted like the sea as it slid around our sealed lips.
I kept my hands on the tree, not reaching for him like I wanted so badly to do. He wasn’t mine anymore, if he ever really had been. I hadn’t seen his choice coming; it had been a huge shock, so perhaps I’d never known him at all.
He pulled back, pausing for a moment, waiting for me to open my eyes and give him access to me, to my soul, but I kept them closed. I wasn’t his anymore. I wouldn’t give him that bit of me. He’d already taken enough.
“Goodbye, Ea.”
“Goodbye.”
I didn’t lift my lids as he kipped himself to his feet and walked away, as graceful and smooth as the motion of the branches of a Heart Tree. And nothing like me. “Goodbye,” I whispered.
Goodbye to the child I’d been. To the love I’d thought would last forever. Goodbye.
Some time later, the nine moons rested against the breast of the sea in descending order, sinking as they did each night, into the dawn. When the last kissed the waves, the green moon, I sighed and repressed a yawn. The drummers and dancers had finally retired, and the late night weighed heavily on my skin. I untangled myself from my butterfly-silk blanket, folded it, and stored that and my woven grass pillow in the hollow of the Heart Tree. She kept them safe for me.
I caught my breath as I sat straight up from leaning against the trunk. My back spasmed, tightening every muscle from neck to hips to the tips of my wings so tightly you could’ve used them for planks. Dropping my lids, I waited with teeth clenched, compressing the agony into a ball I could control a little better. I built a wall in my head and tucked the pain behind it. Then I lifted my gaze, placed my clawed hands on the bark of the branch I sat on, and painfully pushed myself to my feet. Even my soles ached as I flexed my toe talons to gently grip the bark. Burning, shooting electrical pains ran over my skin and drove like nails into my muscles as I purposefully stretched my entire body. It hurt more, but if I ignored my conditioning, it would only get worse. Sometimes, I had to hurt myself to keep myself moving. Even used to it, I bit my lip against the pain. I really shouldn’t have stayed in one position so long, but I’d needed the contact with our heart to make it through the night.
I turned and rested my forehead against the red ridge of bark closest to me. I sent thanks to her. She sent comfort back, in the sleepy, slow ways of trees.
I turned, and after straightening my trews; I made my way down out of the tree. Each step, each handhold, each movement hurt. Sometimes, it made me wonder if my body was just trying to come up with new ways to make me ache.
When I got to the bottom of the tree, I rested for a moment to let my heart-rate calm down, then found my path through the vertical backs of her roots—standing like walls half my height—down to the earth surrounding her. Walking through the forest eased my soul, and for a moment, I could pretend that this Sanctuary was mine and that I belonged to it. I brushed the tips of my pale-green fingers over the rainbow striped barks of the trees. My feet came down on softened leaves, gone frail with the passing of time and making a carpet beneath my feet.
I came to the edge of the trees and made my way to the village centre. Coals still gleamed in the communal fire pit. Grey ash dusted the sullen orange ovals. The air had chilled, and I wrapped my arms around myself as I stood there, warming up. My entire body stiffened and cramped at the shock when the voice of the oldest person I’d ever heard of came from the other side of the pit.
“And so. You sulk in self-pity.”
I’d thought myself alone. Once I’d gasped myself back to being able to suppress my pain, I looked up. Annoyed. “It’s not like I have a choice. I do my best not to wallow in my disappointment. If that’s not good enough, I don’t know what I can do about it.”
She cackled, her forest green hands wrapped around an ancient branch of the Heart Tree. Carved and smoothed by her hands over the generations, the staff was a mark of her station. She was our wise-woman; and my great something grandmother. Not that it had ever mattered, she was wise-woman first, relative last.
Her voice cracked and creaked like branches in a storm. “Do you think, you, that I insisted on your training just so you could mope about while others do the work you’re perfectly capable of doing?”
“What? You…” Confusion swamped me.
“Yes. Me. I insisted you be trained in your birthright. Didn’t know that, did you?”
“No.” Rage filled me up like a boiling puddle of water rising higher and higher. My voice held it when I spoke. “Why would you do that to me? Tease me, train me, torture me with something I’ll never have?”
“Tcha. Never have. Has anyone ever told you that you can’t? Has anyone ever prevented you from asking the Heart Tree for a pod of your own?”
“I…” Come to think it, no, no one had ever outright said I couldn’t. “It’s always been quite clear to me that the life of a Conservator is not mine to take.”
“Why not?” She lifted the staff in bird-wing thin arms and slammed the end of it on the earth, snapping her wings open, then closed in an echo. The sharp thwack of the wood on the crystallized sap that made up the cobblestones of the circle startled me. I kept myself from jumping this time. Gods knew I didn’t need even more pain.
“Child. Listen closely, for I will say this once.”
I looked across the coals into her wizened face. Moss coloured, smooth skin turned to wrinkled leather by time and exposure to the elements. Ancient, wise, and canny, her eyes gleamed like greenish raisins from her sunken eye-sockets.
“You don’t need anyone’s permission to commune with the Heart Tree. You do it all the time. I feel where you disappear to. Yet, you’ve never asked her for a home of your own.” The old woman shook her head from where she sat on the special stool one of the shell-singers had sung for her. “Tell me why?”
“I can’t.”
“You can. There is nothing stopping you. None of this Sanctuary will stop you. None of our people would ever question you. So tell me the truth. Tell yourself the truth and tell me why.”
“I can’t do it. The work. The physical strain. It’s too much to ask of someone—”
“Like you? Wasted sap, child, where do you think you got your condition from?”
I didn’t understand. I was the only one I knew of who had my problems. I stood with my mouth open like a fish gasping for air.
“You know my story, child. Everyone knows my story. Of how this Sanctuary came to be.”
“Of course, as a young Conservator, you set off from your family and built your Sanctuary. Just like all the others who left last night will try to do.”
“Yes. And I ask you again. Who do you think you inherited your conditions from?”
I blinked, the mystery finally coming clear. The question of ‘why me’ finally getting an answer. “You?”
“Yes, me. Child. I know exactly what you cope with, because, unfortunately, you inherited that from me.” Sadness graced her raisin eyes now. “I would’ve prevented it afflicting you if I could’ve. I’d hoped it had passed all my descendants’. Genetics are weird, you know.”
I dug my fingers deeper into my biceps, even though it hurt. I swallowed. “Why wouldn’t you tell me?”
“Do I seem the type to expose secrets or wallow in my pains?”
“Is that what you think I’m doing?” The rage was back, burning like a flame under my heart.
“That’s it. Get mad, child. It will serve you much better than the self-pity you’ve been wearing like a cloak for the past half-year. Ever since—”
I lifted my hands to my temples, squinched my lids shut and enunciated each word—interrupting her—so I wouldn’t scream them. “What. Do. You. Want. From. Me.”
She cackled, which just made me more angry. “It’s not what I want that’s important, child. It’s what you want. You want a home of your own? You want to follow your inborn destiny to be a Conservator? You want your life?”
She could’ve been reading from a list of things I’d secretly scribed on my soul, and sadly put away as being something I’d never achieve.
She lifted a hand and waved the swollen, arthritic fingers at me. Her webbing was as wrinkled as her face. She used her sacred staff to steady herself on as she hauled her ancient bones to her feet. No one knew exactly how old she was, but she’d settled this Sanctuary hundreds of years ago. Watched it, guided it, protected it. As the Conservator, she was the sanctuary, in many ways.
I waited. She never wanted help. Now that I knew, I could see the hitch in her step that wasn’t caused by age, but by the game we played in our heads to suppress or hide our pain enough that we could function. It shamed me I’d never noticed it wasn’t just age causing her difficulty. She made her way to me and reached to lay an ancient palm on my youthful shoulder. Tall. She’d always been tall, even hunched with age, and I didn’t have to bend to look into her eyes.
“Child. This is the best advice I will ever give you. Hark to me now.” She let her gaze run down my body and back up to my face. Nothing of my conditions showed on the outside. “You are young and strong. Seize what you want, do it now… for none of us are promised tomorrow.”
She turned without a goodbye and shuffled off to her home in the Heart Tree.
Why the hell did the wise-woman have to be my grandmother? Due to our family connection, she hadn’t bothered to sweeten her message to me. Instead, she’d made me mad, then told me to make a choice.
I made my way to the edge of our isle and stood, letting the soft salt waves wash over my taloned toes. What did I want?