Page 99 of Angel in Absentia
Iris was staring. She then bit her lip and smiled, crossing her arms.
“So,” she repeated, “the healing went well?” Her lips broke free into a shameless smile. She glanced down at her hand. “Let’s see, you went in for the healing in the late evening…” She lifted a finger and then lifted one after the other as if counting the hours.
Clea grabbed her hands and pulled her away. Iris leaned back toward Ryson’s direction and shouted after him, “Fabulous work!”
Ryson turned back, and Clea was surprised and horrified to see him crack a genuine smile before she yanked Iris in the opposite direction. “Stop that!” she said. “Both of you are so public.”
Iris simply laughed. “Don’t worry, your poorly hidden secret is safe with me,” she said, crossing her arms. “Though who could be surprised?”
Silence settled as they moved toward the castle courtyard.
“I’m glad,” Iris said quietly after a few minutes, and then paused, her arms crossed. She watched Clea for a long moment and thenplaced a hand on either shoulder. “I was worried, for a moment, that you might—”
“I did,” Clea confessed, and then for the first time, she realized the illusion to which she could have fallen victim. “But I nearly made the wrong choice,” she said, lifting a finger to her eye as if she could sense the growing silver in it. “My illusion was not that he was dangerous,” she whispered, and then looked back up at Iris. “The illusion was that he might be the answer to my own freedom, the freedom that I have craved all my life, that he could solve any of the problems that all along I needed to solve for myself.”
“So, you were meant to kill him?” Iris whispered, her brow furrowed in confusion.
“I was meant to sacrifice him for the sake of a greater purpose, at least in his words, because it seems, all along, if I had the strength to do that, then I might be capable of overcoming the grand illusion that he says ensnares us all,” Clea whispered and then shook her head. “You were right, Iris. There is so much more to the story of our heroes and our cities. The four heroes set out to defeat something, but it was not the Warlord of Shambelin,” she concluded, glancing down at her fingers. “They set out to defeat something much worse, and I’m afraid they failed.”
“Yes,” Iris said, to her surprise. “Because their healer fell into darkness at the moment they needed him most.”
Clea’s expression faltered, and Iris sighed before at last imparting the truth of her and Ryson’s relationship, one which had long preceded his conquest of Loda.
“Ryson had me keep an eye on you,” Iris admitted. “He didn’t want to get close. He was respecting the distance, and your wishes. Imagine it. I’m minding my own business in my cottage and an Insednian appears with my cat in his silver claws. It’s comical now. Terrifying then,” Iris laughed.
Clea stared, her lips parted.
“He has an odd way of switching between seeming harmlessness and severe threat,” Iris defended her secrecy. “I know you know that, but imagine my position when an Insednian says he has your heart and shares this secret tale of your journey with no ask in return but to keep an eye on you, which I already was by default. Not to mention, he was powerful enough to open a rift directly into the city without being detected. I’d never even imagined that before.”
“And he threatened you?” Clea asked.
“To kill my cat,” Iris replied, raising an eyebrow, “and possibly my cousin.”
Clea straightened, staring forward as she tried to process the revelation. Clea supposed it wasn’t out of character.
“Though, after a while, I cooperated because he also told me truths about history which I then began to verify. I pulled on threads and then everything just started to unravel. I became addicted to the truth,” Iris explained. “I couldn’t stop digging,” she added and with it, she imparted the very same history that Tenida and Ryson had told, verified in all her studies.
“Our heroes became Venennin in their failed attempt to defeat the heart of all cien,” Iris finished. “The healer, however, left a crack in the door for someone else to finish what he could not.It seems like my guess was right after all,” Iris whispered after a while, calling Clea’s attention fully back to her before she said, “the last attempt has been saved for someone like you, someone connected enough to ansra to channel it into the very heart of darkness.”
†††
The council room was empty when Clea arrived. She’d eaten, changed, and was ready to go back to sleep, but eager to finish the conversation they had started before going their separate ways. Ryson invited her to sit down, and she noticed one last piece had been added to the board, a scorched omen in the center of it all. She already knew what it represented.
“It is vacancy, an open wound,” Ryson said. “It cannot be killed, but it can be healed. The problem is that healing something means connecting with it, giving it a chance to touch you.”
“And that’s what changed all of you,” she whispered.
Ryson met her eyes. “This thing is a wound from another world, a creature that craves and eats, desires to exist again from beyond death.”
“Like a ghost,” she whispered.
“In a manner of speaking, a ghost that has haunted our world now for centuries, holding us as it strangles us, unable to reconcile with its very nature and constantly trying to consume, to become something else, something alive, something that exists. I imagine it came to us because it recognized our own tendencies to do the same. It was able to infect us with its intentions because it, too, had similar cravings. It is like mankind, but of a different realm, a wounded god. After wewere defeated by it the first time, we struggled against our own transformations into Venennin. We knew we wouldn’t be able to kill it, and so in one last effort, we aimed in the end to seal it. Oliver put his blacksmith work to the ultimate test, crafting a weapon capable of such a feat, but we needed something vast and powerful to make the weapon work. For that, Vanida laid down the use of her very soul,” Ryson said, glancing over at his weapon, which Clea now recognized leaning against the wall.
“Her soul,” Clea whispered.
“This weapon is not just a weapon. It is a key. It was a weapon Alina, Oliver, and I were destined to use one day, but our natures could not last, and in our climb to power, we lost our way. Oliver lost control. I was tasked with killing him, and the war broke out. In my own rise to power, I was at risk of losing my heart, and Alina lost her humanity. Oliver became the Lord of the Ashana.”
“And you tricked him with a false alliance?” Clea asked.
