Page 75 of Prisoner of Darkness and Dreams
I’m lying on the altar in the high temple, pain searing though my nerves. My hands are bound, and I’m surrounded by Caledon’s surgeons. No matter how hard I tug on my bindings, I cannot escape the slicing of the clerics’ blades. I scream as another piece of flesh is ripped from me.
“The potion’s working, Your Highness.” A voice cuts through the memory, a voice that doesn’t belong in the high temple in Qimorna. I focus on it, clinging to each word to try to stem the tide of terror. “The memories will come to you naturally, but try to order them. Start with the earliest one and work your way through, methodically.”
I want to tell him I’m not sure I can, but his voice has already shaken loose the memory of the Temple. I wait, letting more thoughts rise to the surface, until I’m aware of an old, distant image calling to me.
With a deep breath, I let it in, and all of a sudden, I’m nine years old, banging on the manor doors, begging to be allowed to see the visitors I believe are my parents. Then the guards’ strong hands are holding me back as I watch their carriage leave, and I feel as if I might break into pieces. I fight the men as hard as I can, screaming and sobbing as I plead with them to let me run after it. I know I can’t survive this, not if they abandon me again, but if my parents could just meet me, if they saw me, they mightremember they love me, and then they wouldn’t leave me here in this prison…
“Use the gaidonesti, Your Highness.” Diomi’s voice comes to me through my tears. “Burn the pain away.”
It’s there, waiting for me—the fathomless depths of the gaidonesti’s power. I let it course through me. The magic feels as alive as a lightning bolt, striking at the memory. A pure, white light pulses across my mind, and the memory disappears for just a moment. When the light fades, the memory is there once more, but it feels somehow brighter and less heavy.
“Good,” Diomi says. “Now, move to the next one, Your Highness. You’re making progress.”
I can already guess the next memory that will come to me. My throat tightens when I find myself in my room at Gallawing, Bede climbing on top of me as I suffocate. I’ve relived this many times before in my nightmares, but the potion brings a new intensity to it. The weight of Bede’s hands as they paw at me and the burn of the water in my airways is as real as if it were happening to me right this moment.
I know they’renot.But it’s barely a relief to think this is all happening inside my head, or to know that soon Bede will be lying dead and smoking on the bedroom floor.
The celestial power. Use it.
Once more, I let the gaidonesti’s magic run through me, obliterating the memory with light until it’s a pale imprint of what it was before.
“Keep going, Your Highness,” Diomi calls encouragingly as I plunge into the next memory.
It continues on like this. Every moment I felt like I could die, every time I watched the life drain from someone’s eyes. I revisit all of them until they start to merge together—here’s an assassin lying dead on the floor, here now the aisthekis plunges its pincers into my shoulder. I watch Eryx get murdered by an acolyte, and my friends from Otscold get cut down by a cleric. I stare into the dead eyes of a young cleric, executed because of me.
I burn all the memories, searing them with celestial magic until they holdno power over me anymore. But it’s a long, grueling process, and my resolve starts to waver.
Leon cleaves a man in two in the woods. Swarms of the ruined—with torn skin and dead eyes—rampage through the streets of Hallowbane. The mortifus stalks toward me again, its skull exposed and wriggling with worms.
You’ve missed some.
The thought stops me short as I burn through the image of the mortifus. I’ve been going over the memories more or less in order, as Diomi said, but something’s absent. There’s a corner of my mind I’ve been avoiding since I lay down on this altar: what happened in the high temple.
I wait, but unlike the others, it doesn’t come to me naturally. I keep my eyes closed, trying to summon it, and Diomi’s voice reaches to me through the empty darkness.
“Try not to resist it, Your Highness.”
I frown. I didn’t think I was, but I suppose giving in doesn’t come easy after all these weeks of pushing this memory away. I’ve gotten so good at burying it in my waking hours that it won’t come when it’s called. Taking a deep breath, I try to relax, letting the hum of the gaidonesti’s magic soothe me as I go looking for the memory.
Once I start actively recalling the bite of the surgeon’s blades, it comes to me like a flood. I’m writhing in pain, then I’m begging Caledon to stop. My hands are covered in blood, and a pale face lies in my lap, all life drained away. I’m drowning in it, unable to breathe or see or feel anything but this agony, my heart breaking over and over.
No…Kit. I want to be out of this nightmare—I want to blow this whole memory to smithereens.
I call on the celestial magic thrumming beneath my fingertips, expecting the bright light to sweep through the awful scene and burn away the pain.
But nothing happens.
“Keep trying, Your Highness,” Diomi says. “This is the key—the main trauma blocking your magic. Don’t let it conquer you.”
I watch my hand lift the scalpel to kill Kit, again and again. Still, the celestial magic only hovers at the edges, refusing to purify the memory.
Why is this so hard to burn away compared to the others? Why was this loss, above everything else, the thing that sealed the lock on my magic?
Because you still won’t let yourself face it. You won’t even tell your best friend about it.
But I can’t do it. I can’t. If I purify this memory, if I take away even one ounce of the pain, I’ll have to move past the worst thing I’ve ever done, and I’m terrified of what that means. Do I deserve to purify this? Can I forgive myself that much?
“You can do this.”
