Page 21 of Swords of Soul and Shadow
Throwing her shoulders back, she led the way into the village. “Just let me know if you think anything feels off.”
Niels’ footsteps followed shortly after. She didn’t look back to see what sort of face he made, but she could imagine. It probably rivaled the one he used to wear whenever Jack made him do something particularly dangerous.
Jack.
The flash of memories tasted bitter, like cheap wine left in the sun all day. Each and every memory from her childhood felt that way, even like it belonged to someone else.
Hallie chewed her lip and pressed on, running her fingers along the first home she came to. The roof was missing—either destroyed in the attack or with the passage of time. Cracks riddled the foundation like blood vessels. Dead vines crawled up the wall. The pads of her fingers scraped against the rough and crumbling mortar between the eroding bricks.
The last time Hallie entered an abandoned village, she’d gotten herself kidnapped. Whatever drug they’d given her had muddled the few memories she’d retained of the incident. All she really remembered was leaving Kase outside the inn. Then she’d woken in a leaky dungeon cell without him.
Kase had done his best to save her, had even concocted an entire plan to rescue her with Niels’ help…only for it to go terribly awry.
Heat traveled from her chest to her fingertips once more. She curled her hands into fists and gritted her teeth.
No way to save me this time.
That was, if she didn’t figure out a way to separate the Essence power from the wielder. If she didn’t, she knew she couldn’t hold the power forever. It would drain her, little by little, until there was nothing left of her. The inevitability of it all made her sick.
On paper, Ravenhelm was much smaller than Stoneset, but with the debris still littering the ground fifty years after its downfall, it felt much bigger. There were more nooks and crannies to check. More walls to hide behind. More mysteries and whispers on the wind she couldn’t pick out.
They searched everywhere. Niels was particularly handy when she needed to lift a chunk of crumbling debris in front of a blacksmith’s cottage. The forge lay just behind a caved-in roof, the bellows tossed aside and smothered with detritus.
It was all for naught, but the scholarly side of her brain switched on anyway as they wove through the past. What an interesting tableau of Jaydian history. Only a smattering of years prior, society had relied on livestock to go anywhere—horses, oxen, or mules being the best choice in the mountains. No wonder the Jaydian forces hadn’t arrived in time to save the village on their fanciful ponies.
The mountain had reclaimed most of Ravenhelm by now. In the summer, it was probably rife with mountain flora and fauna, an oddly beautiful portrait of such a tragic scene. Now, though, the snow was midway through melting, and it seemed stark, less picturesque, better suiting the history.
With each step she took through the tangled maze, she wished she hadn’t. Half-melted brown slush squelched as they checked a little nook in one of the toppled houses near the front of the village. Another winding side street allowed for moonlight to reflect upon the silver patches of snow that had survived the day’s spring sunlight.
Hallie wasn’t sure if it was the village’s aura or the threat of someone else following them, but she felt unsteady. They hadn’t seen or heard anyone since the caverns, but her neck prickled with anticipation. With each step she took, her heart ticked up in fervor. The morbid side of her wondered if she was walking over graves. She hadn’t done much research into the attack in the past. She’d nearly forgotten about it when she’d been at University and had the resources to do some digging. She’d simply assumed that the Jaydian forces had cleaned up the bodies afterward and sent the souls to the stars.
But if they’d done that much, why not clear away the rubble? Why not let nature fully reclaim the area?
The moss-covered streets might’ve hidden the worst of the massacre, but what if the crunching sound she heard every so often was the sound of still-decaying bones snapping under her feet?
She turned a corner and heat flared in her body—not painful this time, just an almost-comforting pulse, like fire on a bitter winter night. She stopped, Niels barely catching himself as he ran into her, his lantern swinging.
“This way,” she whispered. She took a step forward, and a pleasant tingling began—soft at first, but with each step, it grew. She tried not to think; instead, she let instinct guide her as she wandered over upturned cobblestone and slushy snow. The mountain wind painted her cheeks with pain, stinging her uncovered face and tangling her messy braid as it whistled through the alleyway.
The image of the archway flashed in her mind, fuzzy and glowing around the edges like light gathered in a tangled, fraying rope.
The archway wasn’t made of stone, she realized. It was of light and…time.
How she knew that, she couldn’t say.
On the other side of the alleyway, a rotting carriage lay toppled on its side. Most of the wood had decayed away. The leather leads were buried beneath snow patches and the fallen wall from the next cottage over.
The tingling disappeared.
Bone-chilling cold soaked her body. She gasped.
Niels put a hand on her shoulder. “Hal, what—”
A blazing blue fire zinged above Hallie’s head, blasting out the remnants of the broken window on the decrepit home beside them. Before she could process anything, Niels dove on top of her. He pressed her against the aging wood of the home next door. The wood groaned with the impact, threatening to splinter.
Niels’ heart pounded against her back. She recoiled as he growled and turned, firing the flashpistol in the direction of the blue fire and pushing her out of the way with his good arm, the other one working to keep his aim as steady as possible.
All of it happened in less than three seconds, but time seemed to slow as Hallie pulled herself off the door. She looked toward their attackers.
