Page 78 of Eternal Ruin

All her life, no three symbols could conjure emotions in her better. She started with the broom closet, drew a circle in blood under a bucket. Then she traced another circle at the point of her neck to seal away the emotion.

Don’t, a voice said, followed by aclink.

Kidan whirled, and for a second, she saw GK’s soft brown eyes.

This will hurt. Your mother wouldn’t choose this.

“How are you doing that?” she asked aloud.

He slipped out of reach too quickly. A trick of her mind.

Ice pressed to the base of her spine.

Her mother’s ghost appeared to be over her shoulder, watching in disappointment. Kidan was tired of wading through her mother’s worn notebooks, trying to understand what to do. They were nothing but a collection of messy, incomplete thoughts with the number twenty-one written so many times in one book, they’d created a disturbing tessellation art. Then there were the sketches of lions—six of them—that climbed over the corners of the pages like eerie figures. Depictions of Demasus the Fanged Lion, Kidan assumed.

But on a relatively clean page, with neat handwriting, House Locking was mentioned once by her mother.

If a house can repress emotions through House Locking, can it then repress visitors’ emotions too? A horrifying prospect.

But what if magnifying can have the same effects? What if I can enhance not only my own emotions but also those of others?

I’ve done it once—manipulated the emotions of a visitor. I infused a room with my own sadness, flooded my body with so much grief that tears appeared in their own eyes. As long as a fragment of an emotion lingers in a visitor’s mind, I believe I can magnify it to epic proportions.

This is the purpose of a house—to enlighten and expand, not shrink.

Professor Andreyas says we can name a technique we discover ourselves.

I think I’ll call it Obsculion.

The process of seeing into one’s soul.

Maybe this was why her mother was exceptional. She’d allowed herself to feel everything to the brim, then extended her fingers into another’s soul and forced them to do the same. Kidan was tired of feeling.

With a sobering breath, Kidan completed drawing the wet circle on her neck. She didn’t want tomagnifyher emotions, she wanted clarity.

Her mother’s ghost vanished like a lit match in a howling lighthouse.

It was quiet at first.

Then a horrible wrench in her gut made her stumble. She half wanted to vomit. Her very soul was being cleaved in two. Tears in her eyes, she sensed the broom closet dim, the fireflies burn out of existence. Joy withered away, running to another place, shrinking even smaller, perhaps a box this time, before… nothing.

Kidan touched her neck and the soft flesh, the weak elasticity of her skin had hardened. Crystallized.

Grabbing an old broom, she took off a splintered piece and brought the sharp end to her neck. There was resistance but no pain. In fact, she could not feel the edge at all.

Kidan stared at the stick in wonder. This was the same burst of strength she had accessed when June showed up on her doorstep. Back then, she had dented a doorknob, her hand becoming as strong as concrete. The house could armor her body.

Tightening her jaw, she continued with her symbols—a square in the hallway, a cross in the observatory, each hardening a part of her body, sealing off emotions until she was nothing but armor. Solid and unbreakable.

A blissful calm had taken over her mind. She could think clearly, see the necessary steps she needed to take to acquire her votes. There was only logic. No wavering, no hesitation.

And she loved it.

Kidan stood without feeling the floorboards and went to the study. She grabbed the Amharic textbooks Slen had loaned her and threw them in the trash. Attempting to inherit this house’s culture would be impossible. She’d always known that. It was time to sever and ensure all Four Points of Culture differed. All that was left to do was make sure Kidan’s faith, political view, and language went nowhere near Mahlet Adane’s.

30.

KIDAN