Posted on: Friday, 27 February 2009
They talk about me behind my back, thinking that I cannot hear them. They call me a madwoman, and say that I am crazy. I am not deaf to their words. I have led them for nearly a year now, yet still they watch me with fear and suspicion, and whisper in the darkness that I am cursed and possessed of demons.
And they are right: I am possessed. Of demons, no, but possessed all the same. My curse is the voice I hear inside my mind, the words that come to me alone, day in and day out, advising me, taunting me, manipulating me. Her voice, Ilandra's voice, the voice of a woman dead and rotted for a thousand years.
It amuses me, in its way, that my own predecessor as leader of this rag-tag band of soldiers, the man I killed to gain my position, was the very one who began it all. It was Ashan who placed the silver bracelet around my wrist, unaware that it served as a vessel for Ilandra's immortal soul, and it was he who dragged me from the rocks and revived me after, in a desperate attempt to rid myself of her presence, I had hurled myself off a nearby cliff. Without realizing it, Ashan had introduced us, his murderer and her accomplice, and sealed his fate with the gentle click of the bracelet's clasp.
My changes — "improvements," to hear Ilandra tell it — began mere days after I started wearing the bracelet. I heard voices when no one was speaking, remembered details of a life I had never lived, and could speak and understand languages I had never heard. Ilandra told me of people and places long lost to the living world, taught me the wisdom of ancient sages, and trained me in the arts of warriors who had fought and died long before my grandfather's grandfather first drew breath. But behind her careful lessons, her first interest lie, as always, in herself. Everything she told me, every secret she whispered into my eager, naive ears, was just one step further towards her ultimate goal, the prize which she coveted above all others: a rebirth into the realm of life.
Ilandra needed me, needed my physical form as a host for her own immortal soul. She promised me power and riches beyond all imagine, should I co-operate, and such was my awe and fascination of myself and my new companion that I readily agreed. But with what I have come to know as typical Ilandra shrewdness, she neglected to tell me that in order for her to lay claim to her prize, she needed an empty body, one vacant of mind and spirit; and now that I was within her grasp, my own soul became forfeit to her whim. And to think I once wondered at the source of her laughter…
Once I realized this myself, I fought her in every way I knew how. I removed and crushed the bracelet, prayed for days on end for some heavenly force to drive out the evil within me, even threw myself from a cliff in the hope that, in killing myself, I could kill her as well. All to no avail. By now Ilandra was possessed of considerable strength. She was anchored firmly in my mind, and was no longer dependent upon the bracelet. My attempted suicide gained me nothing save a few broken bones, and my physical wounds had no effect on her spiritual health. In my hour of most desperate need, God seemed to desert me. She could control my body as if it were already her own, and I was forced to keep constant vigil against her attempts at domination. Between her incessant meddling and my fatigue-induced apathy, my relations with Ashan declined from occasional lovers to outright hatred. Yet despite our mutual inimicity, it was he who first noticed my external changes.
