Page 59 of Angel in Absentia (Light Locked #2)

“I’ve looked all my life for a place where I can exist. It’s here. With you,” she whispered, her eyes brimming with tears as she worked to keep any notable tremble from her voice. “I exist here.”

“You are all the same for me,” he whispered back. “Princess, I think you’ve won.”

“Won?” She asked, and wanted to laugh darkly.

“The illusion,” he whispered. “I was convinced that taking you into the woods, having you join us, become an Insednian was a solution. I tempted you toward that, but now as you’ve rejected it, I’ve realized what it would ultimately mean.

You would be free, but just as you said, no longer grounded.

I am sure, in time, you would lose yourself just as we all have.

You were right. I will do everything I can to protect that in you, moving forward. I see it clearly now.”

She paused, lifting a dirtied hand to wipe her eyes and push some of her hair out of her face.

They were both still ragged from the aftermath of yesterday, a reminder that today should perhaps have some modicum of celebration, but she couldn’t celebrate.

Even now, she felt like she was in the middle of the battlefield.

“Could any of it ever have been undone?” She whispered, swallowing. “The Insednian curse, for instance.” She approached the topic with the slightest shaking in her hands, clenching her fists as she tried to compose herself.

“The curse is final, even beyond my own power,” Ryson admitted. “It is an extension of my very presence.”

A tear slipped down her cheek, and she lifted a hand carefully to wipe it away. She took a breath, this time unable to hide the tremble in it. He shifted behind her as if to look at her more clearly, but she looked away. She could almost feel the question of his concern in the air.

“What is it?” He asked at last, and she turned to look at him, knowing that the light of the morning hid any silver in her eyes.

Unable to place her hands on his face, she rested them on his chest, tears streaming down her cheeks as she smiled sadly at him.

“I’ve lost so many people,” she said, “and you–you have always been so honest. I am the liar. How did I become the liar?” She choked through the emotion.

“You told me the real choices, and I made them over and over again while lying to myself about what I was choosing.”

He searched her eyes carefully as if trying to figure out what bothered her so deeply.

“Princess,” he whispered and pulled her close against his chest as she started to sob.

“You have been forthcoming in darkness, while my light is villainous as I insist on deceiving myself again. I have been convincing myself that I am the hero as I’ve made myself the villain.” She spoke hurriedly against his chest until her bout of crying calmed.

He kept her close in the silence, Clea staring blankly forward.

“Balance is nothing but the perfection of tension,” Ryson whispered, his voice measured and calm. “Sometimes getting there feels like being pulled violently back and forth.”

“I don’t feel back and forth, only one loss after the next.” She breathed and then swallowed hard as she wiped her face.

“You can see all change as loss, or all loss as change,” he replied easily.

“How does a warlord offer sage wisdom?” She whispered, exasperated.

“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. It is the 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.

Iris looked away the moment Clea’s eyes touched hers. Fear simmered there. And sorrow. The air of a fresh argument lingered between them, and she had a feeling that they’d fiercely debated the choice she was about to make now.

Clea kept her face still. She let the linen dress and sacred rites be her armor, hiding the chaos inside her chest.

She climbed the stairs, step after step, performing the familiar ritual. This time, she did not pray; each prayer knocked on the door of her conscience. It was a conscience she didn’t want to acknowledge.

Before the massive double doors, Clea paused. She let her hand rest lightly on the worn wood. Then she pushed the doors open and entered the temple.

Inside, the air smelled of clean water, iron, and stone. The fragrance of lavender was faint.

At the center of the room, the pool glimmered, and in it, half-submerged, waiting patiently, was Ryson. He lounged against the closer edge, arms draped along the lip of the stone.

He stirred at the sound of her footsteps, turned his head, and searched her face. He offered a soft smile, and Clea’s throat tightened painfully.

“You’ll need to be fully submerged,” she said, forcing steadiness into her voice as she issued the instructions. “So I can heal everything at once.”

Ryson nodded and slid deeper into the water, but said nothing. She wondered what he saw on her face, and couldn’t resist the notion that he saw everything, and still, he consented.

He doesn’t think you’ll do it.

A darker version of her own inner council stirred.

Because he loves you or because you’re weak? Both?

Clea approached the edge of the pool. The knife weighed heavily in her sleeve.

You can’t do this. You can’t. This is against everything you are.

She knelt at the water’s edge and placed her palms just above the surface.

You have to. He is also a slave to his vice. It doesn’t matter if you love each other. He’s a Venennin. His power came at a cost. If he stays alive, he won’t be able to resist ushering you to your doom. If not one illusion, then the next. When you become an Insednian, it’s over.

Closing her eyes, she summoned the ansra, stifled momentarily by her own malintent. To summon it, she had to let go of her destructive intentions for a moment and just focus on healing.

Her energy swirled into the pool, and she felt the wounds open, all at once.

She held fast to her abilities, and then came the difficulty of the healing.

She connected with each and every wound, and with him.

When she’d healed his abdomen in the forest, it had been a challenge, had drained her, reached through her soul, and introduced her to his, but this was another world of stifling grief, anger, and everything that lay at the bedrock that fueled him.

She felt and released every feeling, her teeth gritting as her heart seemed to find his, their rhythms locking as she drew him from the mire of his wounds.

The waters began to glow, swirling around Ryson’s body. Every wound, every hidden fracture, every poisoned scar opened under the light and repaired.

She felt the ache of old injuries, the pain of battles fought and lost and survived. She felt the deep loneliness wound into the very fabric of him.

She wasn’t just healing flesh. She was touching his soul. And he let her. He trusted her completely. She could sense it in the healing of him. He’d been telling the truth.

I’m sorry , she thought again, tears blurring her vision before they poured down her cheeks. They reached the end of the healing.

Sensing the openness of his trust, she reached for the knife, and unable to bear it any longer, she hoisted the blade above her head.