Page 3 of Angel in Absentia
“You laid siege to the city with the help of Virdain forces who had managed to establish a covert network during the city’s captivity. You broke through the walls, killed many of the Iscad Venennin, and vanquished their lord. This confirms that the Iscad Venennin Kingdom has been conclusively dissolved?”
“Yes,” she said.
Dissolved. Such a clean word that captured so much carnage. She’d been there when their late general, Achor, had slain the Venennin, thrusting a luminant sword through the Venennin’s side, twisting it, and tearing it through. It had been a bloody, messy wound. By then, the Iscad Lord had already lost his hands.
Clea glanced down at the war table as one of the council servants moved forward with a long rod and toppled a small carving of a reaping shade meant to represent the kingdom in question. The Iscads had apparently been known to partner with hordes of reaping shades. Clea had learned in her studies of this particular kingdom that it likely meant the Iscads had planned her mother’s death.
In the simple act of the servant toppling the piece on the board, Clea was snapped back into the moment they’d taken the Virdain castle. A single second expanded into hours and she was outside the walls of the inner castle, taking shelter with Dae as strikes of black lightning rained down from curses that threw cold, deadly webs across the expanse of the city. Every stroke resulted in severe, dark burns.
“We need better cover!” Dae shouted through the chaos as he sliced through a building web of curses above them with a blessed weapon.
“We’re almost through the inner walls!” Achor shouted back, leading the row of soldiers ahead of them as they struck at the doors. Venennin atop the wall were sending curses down the broken stone, black vines capable of burning anyone who touched them. Drops rained down across their armor, sizzling against the blessings that reinforced them. Clea was trying to dive deeper into the open street to heal Yvan, who’d been burned across the throat with a particularly violent strike. Clea pushed beyond Dae and out from cover just before a strike of black lightning nearly hit her.
The Venennin atop the inner castle wall launched a massive, collective assault of curses that began to descend in a crushing, black wave. The Veilin around them lifted their hands in preparation to create a barrier from the blow. Clea recognized that defending themselves from an aerial assault would only open up their flanks and compromise a near victory.
“Don’t stop!” Dae and Achor shouted at them like echoes to the voice in her head, urging the Veilin around them to keep slashing against the weakening doors.
“Yvan!” Clea called through the insanity and chaos as Yvan pulled herself up. Miraculously, Yvan drew her hands up in a blast of light so vibrant that it hurt Clea’s eyes even in the broad light of Virday’s scalding sun.
In an immense display of training, talent, and passion for the salvation of her people, walls of blinding, woven light climbed up over their Veilin forces, waves of darkness crashing against it and dissolving as the Veilin then broke into the barricaded castle courtyard with a crashing of the doors.
Clea remembered watching in complete awe at Yvan’s sudden release of a new caliber of power when she looked to be at her weakest. The Veilin discipline of barriers and seals was Clea’s father’s craft and discipline, another homage to his title, the Walls of Loda. Beyond his power, she had never witnessed anyone call up such a fierce and powerful shield, one that eclipsed the sky and ultimately broke the tide of the battle in their favor. Pools of blood in the sand had reflected Yvan’s light and set even the carnage aglow.
Clea healed her throat shortly after, and Yvan had simply looked up at her from the bloodied earth where she lay and laughed, a single, stark laugh at the end of it all.
Many had died, but Yvan had saved many more in that moment.
“And a small team tracked a caravan to the North to scope out the Kingdom of the Belgear?” Catagard’s question drew Clea back into the present, and she could feel her pulse in her throat as if she’d only just relived the battle in Virday.
“Yes,” Clea said, eyes following the table pieces as a carving of the Lodain sun was pushed up into the North next to a carvingof a full chalice that represented the imposing Belgear Kingdom, twice the size of the Iscads’.
Another memory.
The darkness was full and loud with beasts. Dae, Clea, and a few others huddled together in a prison of trees and monsters. One massive creature loomed beyond them with a row of others kept barely at bay by a barrier several Veilin maintained. Clea was healing a freshly wounded Veilin, her fingers she’d once thought fragile as porcelain now cradling intestines and delivering them back into the cavity of the body before mending it closed.
One Veilin stepped too far from the barrier and was snatched into the darkness by its head. A violent crunching and spray of blood caused two others in the scout team to huddle deeper into the cover.
Dae sent another surging blessing through his sword, so hot that it felt like fire on Clea’s face, diverting her attention from her nearly healed patient. A second later, Dae drew a second blade from his belt, and she called his name in alarm before he dove into the darkness that was foreboding to everyone else. He vanished directly into the presence of the greatest of the beasts preparing to eclipse them. The lights in his hands danced as he transferred blessings from weapon to weapon. The blades seemed to levitate in the darkness and clash against fearsome teeth and claws submerged in the murky night. Gurgling, tearing crushing sounds erupted through the blackness.
The other monsters scrambled at their alpha’s death, and Dae emerged, soaked in blood. Most of his armor dripped and sizzled with the cien of its blood, and he drew back from the darkness with the clean poise of a statue, his breath controlled as hemarched forward. His sword burned at his side, the weapon hot from the Veilin discipline of weapon reinforcement, which he had mastered.
He took his blade promptly to the Dark Market caravan they had been tracking before the ambush, using his glowing weapon to cut free Veilin captives and Kalex slaves alike with tactful strokes. The Belgears, another northern Venennin kingdom, were the masterminds and beneficiaries of the infamous Dark Market that fed through the country in poisonous veins.
In that moment, Dae had saved the scout team with his mastery of Veilin weaponry, defeating a monster four times his size in the submerged darkness. His weapon broke through cursed chains and dismantled the caravans. His movements grew progressively more violent and drew Clea from the fading barrier of ansra as he slashed at bottles and cases that trapped human minds, hearts, and souls that were being trafficked across the country.
They burst free in waves of light, but Dae’s strokes only grew wilder until he was shouting in a rare show of emotion. He collapsed at last in the wreckage. The other Veilin stayed back as Clea approached and placed a bloodstained hand on his heaving, dripping shoulder.
His breathing calmed, and in a few minutes, he was up again, wiping the ash and blood from his face. Only then did she notice the searing red wound across his abdomen, gushing from the battle and only accompanied by Dae’s silence as she healed it there in the quiet of the forest.
In her eyes, Dae and Yvan were giants of their own kind, and they now stood at her back as she took both blame and credit for the events of the past year. She was, after all, the symbol.
“On your way back, the remaining survivors from the Iscad Venennin army ambushed you,” Catagard recounted as someone dragged the image of the sun across the map, representing the Golden Army’s movement back to Loda in its return journey.
She blinked and she was in that moment again. The final battle.
She heard the sharp collisions of blades that sang like bells and breaking glass.
Sparks of blessed energy were hammered from her long dagger with every heavy stroke, the light dimming progressively as it warded off the smoking poison of a cursed sword. The initial blows of a shocking ambush had grown tired and bloody, disintegrating into a groggy scramble as she danced on the line of death against the oppressive darkness of the enemy’s final forces.
