Page 82 of Light Locked
Chapter 23
The Monster
THE JOURNEY BACK to Virday took less than two weeks when traveling through the night. The darkness he traveled through felt ancient, and in that darkness came that same haunting whisper:
We’ve done something terrible.
It called relentlessly and despite any reasoning or exploration, he couldn’t banish the thought without somehow solving its meaning. Strangely, his cien remained silent on the subject. It didn’t surface at all.
The walls of Virday greeted Ryson with a somberness like that of the grave, the bricks stacked like nameless tombstones that carried years of lost souls. His heightened senses introduced him to the rampant scent of decay that he’d been unable to detect from such a distance before.
He saw his past in everything, re-awakened by a light he now recognized arrested his heart. In Clea’s eyes, he’d seen wounds again. He’d seen blood as life rather than the paints of suffering, and his past was no longer an elaborate and complex picture but a cave of bloodshed, every edge and corner drenched with what he’d taken from the rest of the world.
Unable to die, he knew now why he’d collapsed into sleep in the end, emotion at last becoming indigestible suffering. Therewere few Venennin who chose to withhold their heart from cien and in the presence of his freed human heart, the words pulsed on every beat of his blood.
We’ve done something terrible.
The phrase paved every step he took through the bustling streets. The pounding sun, smoke and bustle of carts played emptily around him as he approached Alina’s cottage. His body felt heavy like it had been when he’d first arrived at her doorstep. Clea’s weight no longer poured over his shoulders, but the gravity of her memory lingered in a different way.
He stood in front of the wooden door, half expecting Alina to open it to him expectantly, but instead, he caught the lingering stench of rot.
He tossed the door open, the weak hinges snapping as the door collapsed to the floor, scattering dust through the room. The interior of the cabin swarmed with flies.
The broken corpse lay on the dirt, decayed and dry, the matted hair splayed across the floor as the ribs opened up to the sky, spread apart as if something horrible had crawled from them.
The body had expired.
Alina had moved on to the next.
Ryson backed away from the cabin, scanning the dusty streets. The city reeked too heavily of death for him to pin down her scent among the rest. Body still veiled in dark cloaks, he skulked back into the crowd, his ears opening to the vast world around him. He walked through the dust trodden streets, and soaked up the sounds of generic speech as he made his way tothe city square. Standing in the center, he took down his hood, stepping up onto a pedestal sometimes used for public executions or announcements. He removed the bandage from his eyes, allowing it to fall to the floor as he looked out at the crowds moving around him. No one lifted their eyes to him, as if his darkness made him invisible to society.
He knew what had happened here, and the realization filled him with contempt.
“You’ll find her in my stead, is that right?” he whispered aloud, knowing the new force that governed these streets would hear him.
The townspeople stopped and held their poses. A wave of quiet washed across the city until all of Virday was silent.
In the heat of the baking sun, Ryson waited for a reply.
Several of the bodies cracked and twisted back, withdrawing from a single path down the city’s center.
Ryson stepped down from the pedestal, walking warily along the path of the dead with his hands trained on his daggers.
“So this is you being helpful, Prince? Did you actually manage to kill Alina? Or did you just get distracted with the tempting notion of possessing the dead in Virday?” Ryson whispered under his breath, unable to hide a begrudging acceptance of Prince’s betrayal.
You see what she offered me.The corpses said in unison as Ryson followed their trail to the castle courtyard, lined now in cages.
“She eats their souls, their hearts, and their minds and leaves the vessels to you. I’m surprised to see you turn on me for such a small bribe, her scraps in exchange for all that power, even if it is a city full of death.”
You once gave me lands full of it,the corpses whispered longingly as if echoing their own feelings of betrayal,I was a nation, now I am a city, but before I was nothing but a ghost, felled by the self-inflicted nature of your sleep.Are you surprised I long once again for war? I do not want to fade to nothing.
Ryson didn’t reply, reaching the castle grounds. Lying in the shade of cages were still-living civilians and Veilin, grouped and huddled together in the quiet. They hardly turned their eyes as Ryson passed between them, beaten down by the struggles that had sentenced them behind the iron bars. The path of their enslavement brought him at last to what remained of the castle gardens.
The gardens had seen their share of conflict with broken stones and toppled columns. Despite it all, the greenery still struggled forward, a statue of the city’s hero, Oliver Padren, still stood in the center with bloodied kisses marking the face. Alina’s kisses. At the foot of the statue remained the few descendents he had left, distant relatives of the king, each with a knife in their back, their heads buried in the foliage of the dying garden.
No figure greeted him at the end of the path. All that remained was a pensive silence that swam through the remaining columns, columns that cast shadows like rows of bars. In their trappings, there was the sensation of paying penance.The silence was intentional, perhaps to give more room to those words, that reminder that whispered again,
We’ve done something terrible.
