Page 36 of Petals for Vicious Secrets

“My personal advice is to challenge yourself. To push your own boundaries. Only you can find out what is your limit. How much is too much on your personal scale. How far you can go. What is the depth of your core. And how to stay alive even when your harmony is uneven. And if you never discover that, you will just be a mediocre panom. Like so many others.”

Lenna swallowed, keeping that advice safe to analyze later. “It seems wrong, though. There are five Houses, five Cardinals, five parts of the panom, but only four magics?"

Jake walked calmly towards her, eyeing her from bottom to top. Lenna became a bit too conscious of her completely translucent top as he slid his eyes over her chest until he met her eyes.

“There is no record of anyone alive with the Fifth Power. It's mainly a myth, at this point in history. But it existed. And it was the curse and blessing of those who gained it.” His voice was deep, as if this topic was relevant to him.

Lenna almost felt bad at the amount of times she had cursed the Fifth and every single one of the Cardinals.

“What about the... sparks?” she asked, lifted her open palm, facing upwards as she made some golden sparks appear on top, dancing with each other.

Jake nodded. “There are some fun perks that come with our gifts. Sparks and inking are the most common ones. They have the color of the panom’s inner core, and no two colors are ever the same.”

Jake walked towards the center of the room as he opened his fists again and a line of over ten orbs appeared in a neat row in front of him.

“Now let’s see what you can do,” he said. Lenna’s chest tightened, probably due to the fact that it was her first time attempting this, and at the pure challenge in his eyes.

20

Hope

After days working together, Hope knew two things: Marcus had been preparing the escape to Thyria for more years that she had been alive; and there were so many things from his plan that could go wrong that she had almost lost track. And maybe that was a Cardinals’ blessing, for the sake of her bravery not faltering when they departed.

Hope was still not used to being inside the vessels, and she felt somehow relieved to not be the only one. The circular tunnels filled with air in the middle of the ocean were so unnatural. They were unnatural, Marcus had told them, since the Cardinals had created them when Thyria was formed.

Nina’s steps next to her were as cautious and silent as her own. The fact of stepping over what looked like a thin membrane that protected them from falling into the vast depth of the ocean underneath them was breathtaking. And regardless of how many times Hope had walked in the vessels underneath the courtrades’ quarters, she still did not trust that said membrane, transparent with just a smear of turquoise shine, would not vanish, leaving them to drown.

“I still can’t believe that this is safe for anyone to walk in, least to say for vehicles to go in it and not make the membranes collapse,” Nina said, putting a strand of her silk-white hair behind her ear. It had only taken a couple of days for the natural brown dye to completely fade and her natural white to shine again.

Hope silently nodded, kneeling for the tenth time that day, poking with her finger at the surface that separated them from the waters below. From the waters and from every single creature that lived in them.

“As if cellholts are small and light,” Hope’s voice was hoarse. She hadn’t been talking much and the air down here… It was rough. A normality in the vessels, apparently. That no one else seemed too concerned about.

Nina exhaled sharply. Hope stood up and stroked her hand. A silent reminder that she also wished they had a better alternative.

A few minutes later, they had returned to the blind spot that connected the quarters to the vessels. The blind spot that they all relied upon for this plan to work.

The vessel in this area was so narrow that any roixers or Thyrian officials traveling in a cellholt wouldn’t notice anything unusual. Not unless they stopped their transport despite not having an official station nearby, tried to get off it however they could in the small space left around its cylinder shape, and looked to the roof of the vessel. Only there they would notice that the blueish membrane was perforated, the end of a rope hanging in the middle of a vertical tunneled hole that could fit one person and a half.

Hope interlaced her hands so Nina could jump and grab the rope they had tucked in safely after they landed. A couple of attempts later, she pulled the rope down.

“After you,” Hope smiled. The amount of strength Nina’s legs had had to gather in these past days since they had been working with the courtrades was immense. Hope knew very well how much the legs of her friend had hurt, the pins and needles that made her moan every time she turned in her sleep in the bunk bed below hers.

But there was not much choice. Not when it took two people to walk in the vessels and be able to return. And especially not when, after climbing the rope until they were out of the vessel and out of sight from any passing cellholts, they had to climb a metallic ladder drilled into the wall of the tunnel for long minutes. Until they reached the interior of a room in the building where the courtrades lived.

Hope climbed the last step with a final push, jumping into the control room where someone always was on duty, ensuring that the building stayed safe and unnoticed by unwanted beings. Nina was panting, sitting on the floor with her hands on her head, her elbows on her bent knees. She opened her mouth as if she was going to say something, but decided against it and closed it.

Hope sat on a table and started removing some of her sheathed knives and daggers from her belt, carefully placing them next to each other. She did not remove all of them, obviously, as danger could become present anytime, anywhere. Just enough to sit comfortably with no unnecessary spiking.

When Nina opened her mouth again but said nothing, Hope asked, “Are you okay over there?”

Nina started nodding slowly and then changed her mind and shook her head vigorously. With her hands still covering her forehead, she gasped, “Water.”

Hope chuckled, grabbing a glass from a cabinet and filling it with cool water.

Marcus was pressing some buttons on the screens that showed the live feed of the cameras monitoring the blind spot.

“We had outer-vessel cameras twice, but the sea creatures ended up eating them pretty quickly.” He scratched his haired chin distractedly. “Definitely not worth the effort and risk to put them up again if they only last a couple of days. But it had... interesting views.”

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