Page 96 of A Dusk Of Stars

“Just keep moving,” Bane growls at him.

I don’t see any of them, I’m huddled in his arms, but I can hear the sound of a cane against stone.

Finally, I open my eyes and I see Bane stopping to let Serra take a look at me. “She’ll be fine,” she says with a frown.

We keep walking, Serra’s footsteps joining the other three pairs.

“Whatdid you do?” Serra comes to whisper in my ear in a voice that betrays this desperation I’ve never heard in it before. I sense Bane tense up, but he doesn’t say anything.

She pauses before she adds, in an even lower voice, “There are over ten people dead in that village, Anna.”

Pain and regret sear through me.

“Alright, that’s enough,” I hear Bane mercilessly cut her off. “What’s done is done.”

They all keep walking to the Elevator, but I can no longer hear or see anything, that’s how much my tears blind me and the sound of my own heartbeat drowns out all the other sounds.

Chapter 29

It’s been more than two weeks since we went to Kinwick. It’s eleven PM on a beautiful May night and there are no other students except for me in the Library. I keep sitting here in desolation, flipping pages with a bunch of materials I haven’t even touched yet scattered across the table before me.

It startles me, when my phone pings and I see it’s a text from Alaric. “Come hang out before you turn in.”

For a second, I consider accepting the invitation and transforming from a tortured Library troll into a normal student who hangs out with her friends and talks about the exams. But despite Bane’s entire routine thing working wonders, I’m still so devastatingly tired, numb and restless at the same time.

There’s the fact that I’m not any closer to shifting than I was two weeks ago.

There’s the fact that I can’t seem to figure out the goddamn ritual no matter what I do.

There’s the fact that we’re not any closer to figuring out where the third piece of Baldur is buried, knowing only that two have already been awoken and that one of them was the rib.

And then…

Then there are the eyes of that sweet old man haunting every moment of my existence, my mind adding to the torture by trying to picture the remaining twelve of the thirteen dead Kinwick residents.

Instead of wallowing in guilt, I decide to do exactly what I’d been doing for the past two weeks — use all the emotions to push myself even harder.

“There’s nothing I’d like more in this world right now,” I reply to Alaric, “but I don’t have a single minute to spare. You two enjoy yourselves.”

Hopeless, it rings in my ears. But I go back to my work, going through lists and lists of symbols, trying to find either one or three squiggly lines among them.

Give mesomething, please, I tell the old tome.

But the only squiggly lines that ever appear are said to symbolize water.

No, itcan’tbe. What would fucking water have to do with it?

I look up from the book to stare ahead, thinking. Maybe it just signifies the medium through which the ritual is conducted.

No, you’ve had that idea already and no, it doesn’t work.

Maybe… I flip back to the page talking about the basics of performing rituals. Interpretation, gathering materials, execution… And there’s the conclusion, in which the author is talking about the difficulties in each of the three steps. Interpretation… Some rituals can’t be properly interpreted because everything can be done in countless different ways and if the knowledge is lost...

Then it hits me. Maybe, just maybe I’m going about it the wrong way, presuming this is a ritual that evencanbe interpreted using existing knowledge.

Yeah, as if I haven’t already hadrevelationslike this one.

Alright. Still worth a try. I draw a breath to push myself to keep going. If I knew nothing about rituals whatsoever, what would I think about these indecipherable squiggly lines?

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