Page 61 of Angel in Absentia (Light Locked #2)

City of the Soul

HE NEXT MORNING, Clea awoke as an alien to herself and her own body.

She didn’t recognize her hands, hands that had explored and searched and savored.

She didn’t recognize her arms that had welcomed, her hips that had invited, her chest, her legs, her skin that had offered and yearned and clasped and begged so pitifully at every sensation.

Lying under the morning light, her body was cast out on the comfort of a blanket, embraced in the shell of another who was also alien to her.

Every memory of the night before was foreign, and she wanted to crawl away from his arms, fish her dress from the water, and somehow repair the irreparable tear that split it open, beyond any return to its former shape. She was that dress.

She was a stranger to the creature she had become the night before, a creature without restraint or dignity.

Hungry and pleading, it had begged and thrashed in the water.

By the time the water had cooled, they were on the stone, the carpeted path, open in the air, and he was no longer tender or gentle.

Their bodies argued against the ground in clashes of violence and worship.

By the time they’d managed to reach the bed, she’d suffered under his teaching and was eager to repay both folly and pleasure.

There had been such dreadful urges to both heal and punish, confusingly interlaced and exchanged when at moments he was the healer, and she killed for him in exchange, offering pain for pleasure as she scratched clean lines across his back and bit and clawed into him like an animal.

There was nothing he didn’t return in kind.

Watching her hand laid out against the morning light, she prayed the light had released her back to herself, that the night had been her penance paid for failure, and that after today, all could be forgotten.

The moment she was convinced of such freedom, she felt his hands move again over her, calling like they had so many times before.

In seconds, none of it was alien anymore, his touch least of all, and she turned in his arms, kissing and asking and giving, speaking a language without words, a language so powerful that the exchange made all but raw cries seem mute and useless by comparison.

Between every reawakening of such a wordless monster, she’d return to that lonely island of self that felt smaller and more distant with each repetition of nameless acts that arrested her in all of their mystery and power.

She was cursed. That thought lingered as she looked into his eyes, eyes that were black in the morning light, hiding the fierceness of his nature. Cradled in his arms, his warmth felt like a story with a dark and inescapable ending.

“You’ve turned me into a monster,” she confessed, and as she expected, he could only offer a pleased smile, pleased as he so was by devastation. She felt like a battlefield, boiling with smoke and broken weaponry.

“Even I am incapable of that,” he whispered back.

She stared honestly into his eyes, wondering if he meant it.

“Your eyes look warm,” she said, stroking his face. “I suppose I only see it because now I must love the darkness as much as you do.”

He laughed once, and she startled at the movement in his chest, and then he laughed again, burying his face in her neck as he stroked her hair. “Princess,” he chuckled, pulling away from her, his smile full. “You’re acting so dismal.”

She braced her hands on his chest. “I am dismal,” she said, “I am dismal. I—” She searched the space between them for the words. “I was supposed to kill you. I’m—”

“An awful assassin,” he said and then pulled her close, wrapping himself around her, entangling them deeper. “Or perhaps the best one.” He started to kiss her neck and then her chest.

She slid away from him with such haste that she stumbled out of the bed, taking a blanket with her from the adjacent bed.

She raked it up around her body, watching him wide-eyed before she ran to the pool and pulled her soaking dress from it.

She dove and fished out her blade, wrapping herself in the cold, soaking dress as she gripped the knife close to her.

Ryson watched all of this unfold from the comfort of the blanket until she stood in front of him, trembling in her soaked dress, the blade still clutched near her. Neither of them spoke.

Clea wasn’t sure what she was doing, until she noticed the full implications of the light, and said, “It will be a stretch to tell them that healing you took this long. Is this my punishment? What is my punishment? What will you do? You’re plotting something. You must be.”

He raised an eyebrow. “I feel like I’ve punished you plenty.”

“I’m serious,” she barked back.

They sat there for a long moment, and at last, he said, “You were right.”

“Was right?” she asked.

“To try,” he replied. “If you’d consented to simply going off into the woods, your conversion into an Insednian would have been your ultimate destruction, and you would have consented, had you not resolved to kill me instead.

I wanted you free of the obligations of your people.

You wanted that too. It seems you were right to make the choice you did.

I see now why it was the right one. Now, your clothes.

” He lifted his voice and called, “Prince.”

Clea nearly threw the knife, diving back toward the blanket and throwing herself into it before Prince materialized.

“Can you fetch the princess an identical robe?” Ryson asked.

I see the healing went well. Hello, Princess.

“Quite,” Ryson said with a laugh. Clea felt it with her body where she hid beneath the covers.

A vulnerable, natural thing. I’m surprised you don’t cover it.

“I suppose that’s why she wants the clothes.”

I meant your laughter.

“Prince,” Ryson said more firmly, and Prince consented. Soon, Ryson peered under the covers with a change of clothes and Prince dissolved. She snatched them, changing furiously under the blanket as she whispered, “I’m acting like a coward. A foolish, naked, coward—”

“You certainly weren’t last night,” he said, and she tried to kick him, but he caught her leg and pulled her toward him, trapping her back under his arms as his face hovered over hers.

“You’re leaving?” he asked and kissed her.

“Of course, I am,” she whispered back, straightening the top of the robe under the blanket before reaching for the rest of it. He pulled her under him, redirecting her arm and pinning it next to her head.

“And what will you tell them upon your return?” he asked as Clea tried to reach for the bottom of her robe with her other hand.

“That I failed,” she said sternly, already breathless again, her fingers snagging the corner of her dress and drawing it down as he wrapped her legs around him.

“And that I let you live?” he growled, almost laughing with pleasure before curling his fingers through her hair. “Maybe they’d believe you,” he said, his hands exploring. Clea fished a tie of her dress across her stomach just as he pulled it back over her arms and undid her progress.

A groan of exasperated protest quickly became breathless as he took her again, hands coiled through the linen of the new dress.

“Just a few more minutes,” he begged playfully.

Promptly after the feigned plea, she lost words again and the animal was back.

There was no longer a world outside of the temple, and when it returned, she was staring straight at his chest.

“I’m not so naive to not know what you think of me,” Clea said, and he pulled her chin up to his. Her body felt ragged and hopelessly relaxed. Now their time here was truly beyond explanation.

What would they all think?

“When we met, we were in many ways the same. Now, we couldn’t be any more different,” she said. “I’ll spend my life making up for this, I’m sure. This—this, whatever this was.”

“You think me so indifferent?” he asked, puzzled.

She sat up beside him, sliding her legs over the side of the bed as she continued braiding her hair furiously.

“You are indifference. All of the power in the world and without an ounce of will to use it. I forged myself for years for a moment like this and failed. You won your war, and at the peak of your reign, you slept. This grand game has ended for you, but for me, cast still in the throws of it, carrying the burden of thousands of people aching to live normal, safe lives, I’ve failed, and I will have to lick my wounds and stand up again.

We are bound, you and I, and I did not succumb to this illusion, but what about the next one?

And the next one? I’ll fail one day. I can’t live like that.

And the curse, the Insednian curse,” she said.

“Princess, you aren’t in this alone, and the Insednian curse applies to your eyes, perhaps to your will, but it will not convert you into a Venennin.”

“Not yet! And yes, we aren’t in this alone. Yes, you too are a victim of these same things and now so am I!” she said.

“There is a way for both of us,” Ryson replied firmly.

“Then prove it,” she demanded, looking over her shoulder at him. He was sitting up now, the blanket still covering his body. “Make my dreams your dreams. Help us secure humanity’s future.”

“You know I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m not convinced it should be secured,” he said.

She swallowed hard, unable to hide the fact that those words painted the deepest picture of her doubts.

Some had once speculated that The Decline was a natural process, that humanity was meant to die out.

She couldn’t blame him for aligning himself with such a belief.

He was, in many ways, an embodiment of death. He would see no crime in it.

She swallowed as she finished her braid, staring down at her lap and feeling defeated.

“That said,” he replied, “you can’t leave this room without something.

” His arms wrapped around her and pulled her back into him.

He invited her back into a timeless oblivion where she had forgotten about the war, and struggle, and pain altogether.

She wanted to fall asleep against him and rest forever.

“Even if you’re not convinced it should be won,” she whispered back, “fight it anyway. That is my ask. It’s the only thing that I want, and to deny me that is to deny me everything.”

He hissed through his teeth as if wounded, but then she felt him smile against her neck.

“To ask me to help you win this war against cien in all its finality is to ask everything of me,” he said.

“Then I will ask for everything.”

Strangely, his smile only widened and then he released her at last. She turned, watching him curiously.

“Very well,” he said, “then so begins the end.” His fingers found her chin.

“I suppose you gaining an agreement to usher in the close of things is more believable than escaping alive after a failed assassination. That will satisfy them and clear you of suspicion .” He looked her over slowly.

“Though of what, I’m unclear. Aren’t we king and queen as of the Solar Solstice?

I think your people would rather you celebrate the night’s festivities,” he said with a grin.

She watched his face and exhaled slowly. “For a moment you’d think it possible for us not to be such a catastrophe.”

He seemed charmed, responding only with the whisper, “We were always meant to be the end of each other. You came here wielding the knife, not realizing that you are the knife.” He kissed her one last time, her mind lingering on words she didn’t quite understand.

He stood, grabbing a change of clothes folded on the adjacent bed. She watched as he put them on while she finished changing as well.

When they were both done, he spoke up, “Prince.”

Prince appeared again. It took a moment for Alkerrai to share his next words. “She’s asked everything of me, it seems. I suppose this was your hope from the start?”

The mask shuddered almost in excitement as if Prince knew exactly what the words meant.

Lovely, lovely choice, Princess, Prince said, his voice full of so much eagerness and hunger that it sent a chill down her spine.

An eerie feeling of her own autonomy moved through her; she could almost feel the strings of fate guiding her form like a puppet. She got the sense that time was nonexistent and she had a strange window into the past and future.

Her request no longer seemed like a request of chance.

Ryson looked at her, and they exchanged glances. She could hear Prince and Alina’s words, whispering from another place in her mind.

She understood, now, the truth.

In attempting to follow through with her obligations and kill him, she’d confirmed that she was unwilling to yield to her own vices.

She had passed, and had she succumbed, escaped with him instead into the forest, she would have ruined herself to the darkness and failed in all the ways he had.

She realized then that there was a chance Ryson had waited to give everything, waited for her to ask for it, and whatever everything meant, there was a picture much larger than herself that she’d only just set in motion.

“It’s time,” Ryson said. “Let’s find your body.”

Prince vanished, and Ryson looked at her one last time.

“I’m afraid and pleased,” he said, “your request has urged me to pursue what may very well be the greatest illusion of them all. The illusion of my own origin, and the one that felled me,” he explained.

Intently, his voice quieted, and in the silence of the temple, he imparted like a sacred prayer the very same history Tenida had told her in Ruedom.

It was, at last, the truth, and in it, he finished the tale, saying what they’d needed from the start was a healer more powerful than the one they had, one who would not be consumed when tempted by the darkness of The Eating Ocean.