Page 45 of Ceridor

The wizard smiled and extended his hand. "Wren of Helvetica. We didn't know Ceridor was hiding away a boyfriend somewhere."

A bit embarrassed, I shook his hand but then scratched the back of my neck, searching for the easiest explanation. "We're childhood friends."

Awariye cooed and Ceridor swatted him.

"Want to see them?" Wren quipped, waggling his brows conspiratorially.

He led us into the castle ruin. The small structure had a lofted ceiling as if it were built to be some kind of bell tower, but once Wren opened the door, I knew why they were using this space.

On a large wooden table stood seven bronze bowls with wire netting over them that allowed them to be carried. Windows were staggered up the walls, facilitating air circulation. That was definitely a good thing, considering how overwhelming the presence of the seven fires was, and how aggressively they sucked up all the oxygen in the space.

"Are they evil?"

I hadn't realized I'd whispered the question aloud, rather than just thinking it, until I heard my lover's swift intake of breath. Bringing my gaze back down from the high ceiling, I caught Wren looking at the lanterns with fire dancing in his gaze, and Marit appraising me with concern.

"Do they feel evil to you?" asked Marit.

Hesitating a moment, I recognized fear in my chest and belly, in reaction to the strong presence. "I don't know. But should I really be here? I want to claim my birthright and become a regional petty king. Could this power corrupt me..."

"You clearly sense the power," Wren conceded. "Can you see anything else?"

I relaxed my eyes and tried to imagine that I could see Dunu here with us. Then immediately I shut that thought down. I'd only been thinking of her to try to summon my etheric vision, but if Dunu had nefarious intentions with dispersing the beaded rosaries and having them lit with candles, then I did not want to accidentally alert her to the lanterns' location. She was clearly not human, and since she was only slightly verbal I did not know whether she was able to sense our thoughts or imagined images if they were generated clearly.

But then my eyes gave me the answer. The presence billowing off the table congealed into a pale flickering orange around the actual flames.

"The fires are larger than the physical flames," I said, "at least four or five times larger."

Ceridor nodded, and I let out an exhalation in relief. So he could see it, too.

Wren smirked. "They're larger than even that, but to answer your question, I don't personally think they are necessarily evil. There are gods behind these symbols, and gods have no obligation to adhere to human conceptions of good and evil. Rather they likely stand above such a polarity and their thoughts and motivations are only things we can guess at."

It unnerved me that they were out here in a simple structure in the woods. "Why not keep them somewhere more secure?"

"I actually keep them for most of the year in a hut up in the mountains, but once the snows close the passes, I need to bedown in the capital or I'll freeze to death. Awariye and I tried keeping them in Ulbrecht's castle in their own chapel, but when the power comes down, it ricochets off the stone walls and is absorbed by anything nearby that's...squishy."

That choice of words shook me out of my fear. My lover and I chuckled when Marit slung an arm around Wren's shoulders and touched his forehead to Wren's, saying, "And if that squishy thing is yourbrain, then what, my friend?"

Wren laughed. "Then I absorb the power into my body and brain."

The happy moment popped like a bubble on water, but its legacy served to lift my spirits. The two monks separated and Wren once again addressed me, though he stayed in Marit's side-hug. "The power that comes down when Uli fights has to be carefully funneled into the world, or else it just flies everywhere. It feels like trying to direct a raging river. With some experimentation, Awariye and I have found a few things that work. It's critical that the lanterns be near thick, lush forest whenever Uli goes into battle, so the soil can absorb the energy that comes into the material world."

I nodded, still unwilling to come in past the doorway, though thankfully Ceridor stayed right there with me so I didn't feel weird about it.

Ceridor

Every time I came into the presence of the lanterns, they appeared differently to me. Each time, they were more vivid, brighter, louder, larger.

I contemplated my words, choosing them very carefully. "Wren, if ever the power were to turn and go from how it feels now, to something unequivocally evil...would you know how to stop it?"

Thankfully Wren seemed to genuinely consider the question, scrunching his brows and pursing his lips. "If it's bad enough we'd be willing to invite a curse from the gods for abandoning their symbols, sure. There are ways to shut it down—just do the opposite of what we have been doing to encourage the flow. If nothing else, we take them somewhere far away from any village and bury them."

"There are dead zones in these lands," I added, shaking from the memory of passing by such a place. "Spiritual dead zones of such pain and grief that no humans would live nearby, though nature has grown over them and will slowly rehabilitate the pain left there. We could bury them there, decrease the chance of them being found."

Marit chimed in. "If the historical texts in the library are accurate, those dead places are from the Second World War, sites of mass extermination in the twentieth century."

"That's terrible," Johann whispered, making me wonder what version of our far-back history he'd learned as a sheltered prince.

I nodded to Marit, guessing that he was right.

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