Page 2 of Angel in Absentia (Light Locked #2)

“Very well,” Catagard began, and the room quieted at the sound of his voice echoing through the vaulted ceilings.

There was little to absorb sound. There were only a few Lodain landscape portraits and the large board in the center of the tables with the map of Shambelin and an array of stone and wooden representations of landscapes, enemies, and armies.

Clea remembered trying to play with them when she was a child and being reprimanded severely.

Her eldest siblings had gotten away with it under the lie of practicing war strategy.

“You’ve provided multiple reports that were consolidated by our scribes,” Catagard announced. One councilmember to Catagard’s left, Ivy, flipped through the stack of reports slowly.

The wild blasts and heat of the battlefield seemed like they’d happened in a different world here. It was so quiet.

Two others seated on either side, Fillip and Ignat, watched her contentedly as if they knew exactly how this entire meeting would play out.

Clea was somehow relieved by that. Fillip and Ignat, both dark-haired cousins from the south end of Loda, were of easy humor.

Ivy, who also happened to be Dae’s aunt, had a temperament as sharp as her words.

Steely blonde hair and gray eyes made her as imposing as her family’s long history of weaponry and military leadership.

Catagard scribbled something in his notes; Clea could hear the scratching quill from where she stood.

Light streamed in from above and danced across the center war table.

The symbols and figures that looked so small now were so large in reality.

It was odd to have her world reduced to such tiny representations that councilmembers moved with their fingers.

The silence drew on painfully.

“We counted 2,321 Virdain refugees, 300 of which are Veilin,” Catagard read, his light-blue cloak, sewn with gold, glimmering faintly against the late morning light. Morning shimmered on his bald head as he looked up at her from the notes he held with a mangled hand.

Due to their blood and their healing ability, no Veilin had scars, but there were certainly a fair share of them missing pieces.

“And 405 Veilin casualties,” he finished.

“Yes,” Clea replied firmly.

Even the details of casualties were staunch and empty in this room.

Catagard scribbled some more with the feathered quill. They didn’t need her confirmation. The wealth of Lodain spies both in the Golden Army and the city had confirmed it. Her verbal confirmation to the council was only part of the ritual.

All of the councilmembers at last straightened and provided their full attention. Clea stiffened. This was where the true examination began.

“The Iscad Venennin came from the Wraithlands to the north and laid siege to Virday, but no Virdain captives seem to have any recollection of the events before that. You conducted extensive interviews to confirm this, which seems to suggest a curse may have been used to disorient the population before the invasion,” Catagard recounted.

“Yes,” she confirmed.

It was unspoken that a curse of such vast and powerful reach was absurd, but Clea was sure the councilmembers had already debated such a detail privately in order to spare this audience the discomfort. In Loda, all emotional debate happened behind closed doors.

“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 carving of 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 he marched forward.

His sword burned at his side, the weapon hot from the Veilin discipline of weapon reinforcement, which he had mastered.