Page 75 of Light Locked
“You act like you’re just waiting to die,” she said. “What’s your name? Or can you still remember it? I suppose, perhaps, you’ve left it with someone?”
“I can’t remember,” he replied without any sense of fear or dismay. “What does it matter to you?”
“It matters because you have an Insednian signet,” she said. “That weapon of yours. Did you take it from someone else? I bet you can’t remember that either, can you? It takes hundreds of souls and a very powerful curse to forge one.”
Shiloh straightened and walked back over to the column she’d been sitting on, her arms crossed as she gazed up at the moon. “No? Okay, then your vice. At least tell me that and perhaps we can identify you. I, for one, favor weaponry. I’m a collectorof it, obsessed with the nature of the metal and how it marres the flesh. In Kaletik, I am Katel, translates as The Butcher, but that’s awfully mundane, I think. Do you recognize that name?”
Silence.
“Oh, fine. Now. What about you? What is your vice? Your name?”
The silence drew out again and she sighed.
“No matter.” She said, defeated at last. “It seems like The Decline is after everyone. Over the past century, I’ve watched it happen. Ancients like me wasting away into pieces. The last ancient I met—must have been a decade or so ago—he was trapped and killed outside of Loda last year by six Veilin. All my heroes have just vanished from the map without anyone talking about them. Meridian Hart—the Veilin haven’t even been spared. She was killed outside of Virday by a mere horde of reaping shades. It boggles my mind completely.”
Clea’s attention faltered as her mother’s name was mentioned on the lips of a Venennin. Had her mother truly been so well-known in the woods?
The Venennin turned and eased into her seat, leaning back and crossing her legs again. She inspected her fingertips under the light, her darkened fingers laden in an assortment of rings. “I hate to kill you even. If anything is symbolic of The Decline, it’s the Insednians. Venennin used to shake in fear at the mere mention of you. Old as I was, I still remember what it was like.”
She put her hands back by her sides and inspected Ryson again. He was watching her now with some level of interest, as if genuinely curious about what she was speaking of.
“I wish you did remember,” Shiloh said, voice fading off with something akin to sympathy. “Your people, they were…magnificent. Your people carried the warlord’s legacy and all his promise of a final death for us all. Instead it’s—” She shook her hand as if frustrated with the available choice of words.
Clea forgot for a moment that she was a bystander to the scene, because even as the other Venennin and beasts lurked, this seemed like a private conversation between just Shiloh and Ryson, a discussion between two old friends.
“Now.” Shiloh shook her head, showing her disappointment as her hand still hovered in the air, the pointed claw with its palm to the sky like something were going to fall into it. “It’s not an epic battle that ends us all. It’s not a great and final battle between Venennin and Veilin. It’s not the dramatic and fierce bloodshed of will and passion and sacrifice. It’s just…decline. I would take a savage death at the hands of something brutal over this—this undignified decay. Those silver eyes of yours that once knew power, Insednians that worship the warlord and all the destruction he represented.” Shiloh strained, and it occurred to Clea that Shiloh was almost disappointed to have defeated him. “You can’t tell me you also don’t feel this.”
Details of this interaction, the mention of her mother’s death, the discussion of The Decline, it all seemed strangely human and deceptively casual in the wake of such devastation.
“Oh well,” Shiloh replied shortly after and hopped to her feet, legs locking as she bounded forward on a wide stride. “No point in dwelling on it, is there? Kill him.”
The Venennin behind Ryson lifted the scythe for the swing.
Heal.The word shook through her. Clea’s body acted without her, and before she could register the nature of the risks, she bounded from the cover of the alley and into the throne room.
With all the force she could muster, she threw her hands down against the stones and used the power she knew that she could.
Clea was not a warrior of great stature, not the stature that a situation like this demanded. She wasn’t sure what her healing blessing would bring. All she knew was that an assault of that kind was all she had to offer now.
She’d regained her ansra, an ansra tested by a life of training, a life of enduring her illness, a journey enduring the medallion. She was powerful. The expulsion of power felt like it poured straight from her soul, and it immediately overwhelmed her. She became the energy, unable to differentiate where her being started and ended inside of it. An immense blast of light singed through the room without channel or direction, a brief warning of things to come. Heat filled the air in billowing waves as nearby Venennin shrieked and peeled back before disappearing into the brilliance of the energy. It covered everything, a sheer depth and power to the light that had been restrained for so long.
She’d never acted with such uncontrollable force, her body freed from the darkness and fueled by powerful intent to return everything around her to a more complete state. She’d neverimagined a healing blessing of this scale being cast. Everything was washed in it, Ryson’s bonds peeling free. He grabbed the scythe and rotated it full circle. He decapitated the Venennin behind him before the entire scene was awash with white and she lost sight of the end of the story.
The medallion pulsed, drawing her focus back to the present, and alerting her to an adverse reaction moments before she was blown backward with a shattering force. Her head and spine crashed back against a pillar, excruciating pain singing across her chest as the medallion was torn from around her throat by the repulsion of the energies. The wind howled as blinding pain seared down her body. The entire world vibrated with an explosive combustion of saturated light and dark. The air grew stale around her, causing her lungs to tighten as the bricks rippled in a wave at her feet. The medallion hovered several feet away from her, and everything else was churning energy, dense like a howling storm.
Pain broke her vision into spots. Clea noticed the blood across her chest as the floor fell through. The gaping hole in the center of the room dragged the bodies of dead soldiers and wounded Venennin with it. Clea’s head pounded as the world sang, her body flush with pain and chaos.
The castle had been built by curses, and now it decayed from the inside out. Stone pieces fell to her left and right. The last remaining wall caved inward over her. A broken half-column beside her stopped the wall’s descent. Some of it fell off and tumbled into the growing void to her right. Stone blocks slid from their places as if pushed from the inside. They tumbled down and crashed into the huts and tents camped around the castle base.
Blinding light continued to flash over the chaos in the room, her eyesight wavering as her head throbbed from the sheer vibrancy of it. She’d shattered everything.
The bricks beneath her collapsed, and Clea was in too much pain to protect herself. She fell into the decaying pit that swallowed the rest of the world.
She felt a pair of hands catch her and release, and then another, drop, grab, and drop until at last, she fell hard into the rubble, gasping for breath in the darkness only with the hope that once the silence settled, she’d still be alive.
When silence finally came, suffering convinced her that death was on its way.
She refused to move, resting against layers of brick and a tilted column behind her. Her chest, side, and back all throbbed. Clea’s attention was drawn to the worst of it, blood on her chest pouring through the layer of brick dust that had settled over her body. She couldn’t see where the wound was. It singed across her chest and neck, and she gasped for air, convinced that she was seeing figures only to realize it was rubble reflecting the light of nearby torches.
