Page 18 of Angel in Absentia (Light Locked #2)
SUNLIGHT
LEA CHANGED INTO the long, loose cotton of a healer’s gown.
Traditionally white to expose stains or blemishes, it was the clothing of all healers in Loda.
Today, that was all she was, approaching the healing temple with her hair tied up simply and all paint removed from her body.
Every step as she ascended the temple required a prayer to slowly move the healer’s mind, body, heart, and soul into alignment with the healing.
As was the practice for a difficult healing, she meditated on each step and then took the next. By the time she reached the top, she felt well connected with the ansra stirring in her core and was prepared for the outcome.
When she had felt a profound break in her power and access to a new plane of energy, she’d attempted this healing.
That was when the temple, tucked in the back corner of the royal grounds, was renovated.
The healing temple, positioned next to others dedicated to the arts of expulsion, sealing, and weaponry, had been more symbolic than anything else.
Now, many healers frequented it to meditate and receive training.
A long hallway awaited with empty rooms on either side. Usually, they would be filled with patients, students, and teachers sharpening themselves in the art. Today, the place was quiet.
Clea found Yvan and Dae waiting at the final set of double doors in addition to her father’s standard guards. Catagard was standing with them as well.
“Everyone is supposed to be at the bottom of the stairs,” Clea said.
The more presences in the area, the more disruption there could be to the healing process, or so it was said.
There wasn’t really enough known about advanced healings to prove otherwise, but tonight, she needed everything to be perfect and wasn’t sure if they were all standing here because they knew it wouldn’t work or because they had absolute confidence that it would.
“We wanted to show our support,” Yvan said, wearing long golden earrings and a similar white garb that brought beautiful contrast to her dark-brown hair and skin. Her near-black eyes were alight with a determined fire. “If you tried this a hundred times, you know I’d be here every time.”
“Thank you, Yvan,” Clea said with a firm nod. Yvan’s unyielding optimism was always a nice complement to Dae’s skepticism and Catagard’s dryness. Dae and Catagard nodded.
“Good luck,” Dae said and seemed genuine.
Clea nodded and pushed through the doors.
The great room lifted high above and stretched wide with light in every direction.
She approached the pool of steaming water, colored gray and white with balm, healing herbs, oils, and lavender.
She wasn’t sure if they actually helped but enjoyed the way they smelled, and so she’d consented to the other healer’s suggestions to include them.
Her father, his body buried in the water with his head poking out, looked deeply disgruntled.
“You look uncomfortable,” she pointed out quietly. The room felt ill-suited for more than whispers. “You lie in your bed all day. Isn’t this better?”
“Then why move me?” he asked, though she’d explained the process multiple times before.
“The water is a conductor. It covers all of you. I can’t be sure the curse isn’t just dodging my ansra if I heal you in pieces. Are you ready to go under?”
He grumbled incoherently, pulling his hand up from the water.
“Good,” she said.
“Are you trying to heal me more for my sake or yours?” he asked. “I’m an old man. I’ve been preparing to die.”
“I’m daring to say that forties isn’t old anymore. We all need to be ready to live longer. Quit complaining.”
He grumbled again before sinking into the water.
He didn’t quite have to go under yet, but Clea sighed as she knelt beside the pool, sitting on a divot that made it easy for her to lower her hands into the water for an extended period of time.
Next to the divot was a bell she could ring to bring in aid if needed, and beyond it a carpeted path that led to a series of beds under a skylight.
The beds were arranged under a rotating ceiling so that they would absorb the light of the sun and the moon based on their full rotations across the sky. Clea also wasn’t sure if those practices helped, but was open to the theory that light could improve a patient’s recovery.
If all went well, they’d transfer him to one of the beds until he was ready to walk.
Clea prepared herself for the act, nervous but still focused as she closed her eyes and centered herself in the room.
Soon, she leaned forward and placed her hands in the silky, warm water.
Ansra stirred with her intentions and spilled into the water until the pool itself glowed brilliantly like liquid sunlight.
She felt the shape of his illness, much worse than during her last attempts. Small strains, muscle tightness, and other minute ailments burned away through his body until all that remained was the curse like a massive black scar that shaped his organs.
This was the barrier she’d felt in the past. It was impenetrable blackness, resisting any tugging, prodding, or visions she had of a whole state. No matter how hard she tried to clear the path for her father’s recovery, the illness stayed.
She did not relent, buckling in for a long and tenuous healing as she felt her heart start to race with the steady exertion of the energy.
Minutes passed in such a state, her ansra restoring her father’s lungs and relieving any need to breathe.
She felt her father shift in discomfort, knowing that by intensifying the healed nature of the rest of the body, he felt the curse more profoundly inside him.
She remembered how the curse had felt to her, like a separate entity, consuming her, a parasite. She remembered, as Ryson had pulled the darkness from her and broken it down, how it had howled and screamed.
The warlords in the Wraithlands are at it again , he’d said. In the memory, his words changed and shifted, made more explicit as he delivered the message. Someone put their soul into this curse.
Clea resisted the urge to open her eyes, the light lessening slightly with her focus before she reoriented the nature of her healing.
She stopped focusing the light on the illness as if it were an ailment.
Instead, she healed the curse as if it were a separate person trapped within her father’s body, her energy shifting and intensifying with her focus.
Instead of willing it to leave, she imagined uncoiling it, and after another moment, she felt it quiver slightly. Her father’s body jerked in response.
She followed the most powerful tool of her intuition, speaking through feeling as she opened herself to the presence within the curse.
I am not afraid of you. You do not disgust or appall me.
I see you. She repeated the words, not sure how much she believed them, but willing herself to believe them.
Open. Unravel. She continued to prompt the curse with warmth, Be free.
That’s why you’re killing him. To be free from his body.
I’m inviting you to be free now. I am giving you another way. I see you.
The curse cracked open at her words, and she reached deep into it like a chasm beneath the sea.
She extended herself far, stretching her mind, heart, and soul beyond her body.
Her mind searched its mind; her soul searched its soul.
Her body remained grounded while her other pieces opened like fingers in a grasping hand to envelop this dark force.
She felt the blackness reach back through her hands, into her soul, and grab her, using her like a tether to pull itself free. She felt the curse crack loose, the withering soul released into freedom, allowed at last to die peacefully.
She prepared to withdraw back into herself, feeling the vulnerability of how she’d extended herself, but something chased the path of the soul, reaching inside her and seizing her.
She gasped into another room, staring as she searched a place surrounded by darkness and ice and a tremendous hunger. She couldn’t breathe, searching the empty air beneath her.
She knew without recognizing any specifics that she was back where Ryson had transported them when he’d removed her curse, at the source of the darkness.
She inspected her body, or the faint outline of it, shaped in light.
She wandered forward across a black, icy surface, and ripples of warm light extended out in rings with her movement, crackling like fire against the cien that filled the world around her.
Her heart raced, no longer in her chest but in her ears.
These were the Ashanas.
She looked around and saw vines of the illness, connected to souls all across this vast cavern of darkness. The vines pulsed, pumping the illness through the extended corpses to vast roads across the sky.
She realized then that she was standing in two worlds. Standing as her own soul, she balanced precariously on a plane where the soul and body met.
She saw the network of illness, strewn infinitely across the sky, reaching into other victims, not just her father. He was free, but this web spoke of a hundred other victims, dying slowly in the way that she too had been dying.
A graveling, dark voice groaned, startling her, and she turned.
This place reeked of desolation and sickness.
The illness that had once rotted her body, and rotted her father’s, covered this world in alternating layers of decay and ice.
Frost-coated bodies, frozen in cannibalistic postures as if seized with an unbearable hunger, covered the world like statues.
She saw it now much clearer than she had before.
This place was no longer just darkness but a vast and terrible wasteland where Venennin ate one another alive, their acts preserved in the ice.