Page 93 of Angel in Absentia
“Oh, I’m very wise. Doesn’t mean I follow any of it.”
She closed her eyes. “Loss is just change,” she repeated tiredly. “You never speak of your losses.”
“I would never close my mouth again, Princess. They’ve too often defined me. I’d rather leave them behind forever. I was created out of loss. I am loss. All I want now is to reflect the world of the living.”
She understood his resistance to discussing his losses. She understood that he gravitated toward her in some ways to escape his own nature, and so she approached his story in a different way.
“Tell me the story,” she said, “of the Prince of Salanes. The healer. Tell me of his sacrifice. Was it worth it, to sacrifice a part of one’s self in order to protect the world? Tell me how he recovered from that.”
Silence lingered in the wake of her request, but she didn’t rush it. In time, Ryson spoke without her urging.
“The Hero of Salanes,” he started with a deep breath, “as he was lost in the waves of The Eating Ocean, he felt it infect his soul, and demanded that he would do whatever needed to be done to open the door for the next hero to accomplish what he could not.”
Clea focused on the sound of his voice as he told the story, hands still clutching his clothes as she remained curled up in his arms.
“With all of the light remaining within his soul, he walked deeper into the ocean, seeing a door where others would not. Intuition often guides healers to higher truths, and he recognized that the root of the world’s problem must also be its solution, just as the path to healing is often through the heart of pain.”
Clea recognized Tenida’s story in Ryson’s, hearing similar truths in the message.
“His soul became a channel for something beyond cien and ansra. He transformed himself into an emissary of death. Ansra is not the opposite of cien. Ansra is life, a partner to death. Cien resists death. Itisthe resistance of death.”
“So, the healer embraced death,” Clea whispered, not fully understanding the implications of the story but not wanting to think deeper into it than she already was. Her entire body ached with the implications.
“Death is not the enemy,” Ryson replied, “life stales without it. The war has never been against death. Cien is the refusal of death, the willingness to distort and mutate life in order to control it instead of letting it go.”
“I see,” Clea whispered, swallowing hard. Her tears returned with the silence as she lay against him.
“Let's go,” Ryson said from beneath her, perhaps sensing her weakness. “Get something for you to eat.”
“No, no, not yet,” she whispered. “Your healing is tonight,” she reminded him, not wanting to add that she wanted to savor every second as it was right now.
Ryson had suggested that the illusion they shared was her escape into the forest. It had been tempting. She’d almost succumbed to it. Without the collapse of Ruedom, perhaps she would have. Even now, it tempted her. She could tell him now about the Insednian curse, and they could do their best to mitigate its effects. He would go through every effort to salvage her. She recognized that, but beneath it all, she feared the illusion she’d fallen for was much more pervasive.
It was not the illusion that Ryson was her freedom.
It was the illusion that he was her home.
†††
The ceremonial linen clung to Clea’s damp skin as she stood before the mirror, water dripping from her hair onto the cold stone floor. The chamber was silent save for the faint crackle of the torches lining the walls.
The hours preceding this moment had been the longest of her life.
Clea’s gaze dropped briefly to the corner of the counter, to the knife lying in wait, its plain handle gleaming dully in the firelight. It was simple, long, white, easily hidden beneath her sleeve.
She tore her eyes away, forcing herself to look at her reflection instead.
The woman staring back was a stranger wrapped in ghostly white. A killer. A liar.
Her gaze flicked once more to the knife.
The decision she had tried so hard to avoid was now inevitable.
Clea reached for the blade. Her fingers closed around the hilt with surprising steadiness, hiding it within the sleeve of her robe. She inspected the fine lines of silver in her eyes, barely visible in the darkness of night, invisible in the light. She wrapped her hair up and proceeded toward the temple where a small audience waited for her.
At the base of the stairs stood Dae and Iris, like two counterweights on her conscience. When they had heard she planned to perform the healing that night, only they knew what it meant.
Dae met her gaze first, steady, unyielding. His jaw was tight, his hands folded behind his back. There was no uncertainty in him. Only grim expectation. His eyes were still darkened with the horrors of the Ashanas, barely recovered from the onslaught he’d witnessed.
