Page 50 of Light Locked
Ryson was first, and the blessing wound halfway up one of his legs. He dropped his scythe and, in one forceful movement, grabbed Myken and slammed him against the blessing. The moment Myken landed against the ground, he vanished and reappeared beside Ralth at the other end of the field. He’d only brushed the ground, but Clea knew the blessing had touched him, for he hunched over as if he was in pain.
As soon as he vanished, Clea ran toward Ryson, who was on his hands and knees. She knelt before him, saying his name, but he didn’t reply. He was breathing more heavily and she recognized the worsening dangers in the struggle in his lungs.
“Let me see your wounds!” she demanded and pushed him up by his shoulders. She sat him back on his heels and held himthere. He closed his eyes and swallowed.
Clea examined the wound as best she could, and thought about attempting to heal it, but she would need to be prepared if the Venennin attacked again.
Just as she was tending to Ryson, Ralth was tending to Myken. She narrowed her eyes in search of a wound on Myken, but instead spotted two black marks on his chest. They spread across his body like a virus. Clea’s eyes widened as she realized the placement of the curses. They were on either side of his chest, shoulder-width apart, exactly where Ryson had grabbed him.
She turned to Ryson to find him watching her. “You’re a Venennin. You’re one of them.” Her hand loosened on his shoulder, but before she could let go, he snatched her wrist.
“Only half,” he breathed hoarsely. He heaved over as he started coughing. “This isn’t the time…” He stifled another cough. “To distrust me. There is a way that I wish to die, Clea,” he pleaded, catching her eyes, “and this is not it.”
She swallowed and glanced once more at Myken, who was recovering slowly. Using her free hand, she eased Ryson over. “You’re too weak to fight. You obviously don’t heal like they do.” As she laid him down, she caught sight of more blood staining his pant leg.
She stopped, remembering her blessing, and pulled the tattered pants back. Bloodied lines marked his leg, and knowing the source of his wound, she withdrew.
She glanced at Ryson to see that his eyes were closed. “Ryson?” No response came. “Ryson?” She leaned closer to his face and repeated his name. He said nothing, but she could feel his breath.
She wasn’t sure if she could heal a Venennin, or a half one for that matter, but she had to try. She dug her hands into the snow, casting a cage of light around them. It wouldn’t hold for long, but would at least give her some warning if the Venennin struck again. She had enough ansra to heal Ryson quickly and then cast several more carefully placed blows in order to buy him time to get to his feet. It was a tedious strategy, but the only one she had now.
Placing her hands on Ryson’s abdomen, she closed her eyes. Heat built in her palms, and she could feel it radiating off them as she pressed them over his skin. It took a moment for the heat to sink into his body and had she been a less practiced healer, she would have withdrawn her hands at the horrors that followed.
First, she felt the ansra sink through him for several seconds, but instead of wounds closing, his flesh and bones gave way under her palms. Skin unstitched itself as layers of old wounds bloomed to the surface in a horrid symphony of carnage. In black dismay, she remembered all his scars, and despite the human scarring, realized that all those wounds had been closed artificially by cien.
She steeled herself against the panic of killing him. If she removed her hands halfway through the process, she would.
Instead, she held fast as layers of wounds surfaced and healed against her hands, opening and closing across his body. It waslike reading a ghastly, brutal novel, feeling every stroke and slice peel open under her fingers, sensing their violence and then mending them only to have another page turn and bloom blood and suffering through her fingers.
She wanted to pull her hands away. She wanted to stop reading, stop absorbing the words.
She tried to recall the extent of the damage from his scarring. They had been real, open, wounds hiding under a bandage of dark energy. In trying to save him, she unraveled him, and to pull him back from death she’d have to heal him completely.
Her ansra was drawn deep from her body like a depleting well. The light that she had, emptied into the endless void of suffering that lived between his ribs. The minutes felt like hours, Clea sensing malice, anguish, and rage released from every wound as it healed properly. These wounds were not accidents like so many others she’d mended. She could feel every intention and emotion behind each stroke of a blade, some feelings so stark and intense that they were nothing but hot, white flashes through her body.
Healing him is going to kill you.
The thought echoed through her as she watched her hands, bloodied to the wrists, soaked in red, her sleeves drenched in it. Her previous strategy evaporated along with every remnant of her power, drawn from her body with an insatiable hunger until her soul ached and yawned in dry agony.
Something deep inside her cracked but she could not let go. Empty, her soul opened and reached far and wide to draw ansra directly from the world around them. She’d never feltsuch a thing before. She’d never thought it possible.
The strain carved a fiery path from her hands to her chest, like she was splitting open from her fingertips to her core. The tide of energies between her and Ryson almost started to reverse, as if her hands would absorb the very suffering she aimed to heal, drawing it directly to her innermost parts.
The wounds under his skin had gone from a hot boil of opening and mending, to a simmering stir of movement with minor cuts fluttering open and healing properly. The worst of it was over, but in the aftermath her soul felt open to his.
Rather, her soul felt open to a distinct emptiness inside him. It was a boundless crater, host now to a residual pool of darkness where an ocean had once been.
Her hands shook with ferocious exhaustion, Clea gasping for breath as she cultivated every intention to close that connection, to curb the reach of her own exhausted soul as it clawed at each figment of nearby energy to sustain her. Such emptiness had killed Veilin in the past, and her own soul refused to listen, as if closing itself off now meant utter collapse.
Her hands now braced themselves against the firm muscles of Ryson’s abdomen because without her elbows locked, she’d collapse on top of him.
Her breathing rasped. Her mouth felt dry, sweat dripping down her face.
What had she done?
The shield around her broke down, the drops of ansra used to create it absorbed back into her body. Those single drops gaveher only what she needed to withdraw, and she felt the reach of her soul coil back brokenly inside her before bolting closed in reserve. Her connection with ansra was severed and with it, her sense of all energies around and inside her.
She might not be dead, but she certainly didn’t feel like a Veilin any longer.
