Page 35 of HeartTorn (WarBride #2)

ILSEVEL

There is nothing in my existence but pain.

So much pain over every inch of me, every atom. The physical suffering isn’t the worst of it, however. Though it is far more extreme than anything I have ever imagined, it is as nothing to the searing in my soul.

This, I think, with whatever is left of me capable of conscious thought, is hell. This is what the priests meant, when they spoke of eternal damnation.

I’m lost in a blazing world in which ongoing, broken dissonance clamors through every perception. This song—so broken, so burning—lashes my flesh and mind by turns. There’s nowhere I can hide, nowhere I can turn for escape. There’s nothing but a single pinpoint of light, which pierces my blindness, shining as though from a great distance.

Taar.

I don’t know how I know, but that light feels like his soul, his song. I can’t hear it, but if I could only get closer to it, perhaps I could catch hold of that melody and wrap it around me as a protection. With whatever strength I possess, I push my spirit toward that light, that infinitesimal glimmer in the vast expanse. It calls to me, desperate and so terribly distant. I try to reach out, but I have no hands here, no arms, no form. There’s nothing but my pain. I strive to aim my consciousness, to propel myself, but the harder I push, the farther away that point of light seems.

Then it vanishes altogether. The pain, the heat, and the dissonance compound, flattening me under their weight. If I had the strength, I would curse that light for offering me even the momentary lure of hope. What hope is there for someone like me?

I am caged. Trapped in the same prison to which I was born, the prison I have spent my entire life fighting to escape. Since the moment I became aware of selfhood, of personal identity, I have fought like a wildcat to find some concept of liberty I could claim as my own. Now? The caging is complete. My own body has become a torture chamber from which only death can liberate me. But death simply will not come.

A sense of abandonment plucks at my awareness. Some part of me knows that my body lies discarded on charred ground in a valley of blood-drained unicorns and decapitated warriors. That Taar has left me, ridden away with a dead woman into some unknown future. That my seared lungs struggle even now to gasp agonized breaths, while wind flakes my flesh away in clouds of ash.

I struggle to remember my last few moments. An image of Nyathri appears in my head. This burning in my soul . . . is this what Nyathri suffers all the time? Is this the hearttorn state which drives her and the other wild unicorns mad? If so, I don’t know how she bears it. Who could survive such an existence?

But this broken song isn’t entirely Nyathri’s. The unicorn’s explosion not only scorched my flesh, it also unleashed something inside me I’ve been fighting for so long to suppress. My own song—my own brokenness. The guilt of Aurae’s death and the deaths of all those priests, which always hovers just on the edge of my awareness.

“You know it’s not your fault, don’t you?”

Taar speaks from my memory, the timbre of his voice adding to the dissonance of my soul-song. “You cannot bear the weight of your sister’s death. It is too great a burden. It will crush you.”

It’s a lie.

It’s such a damned lie.

It is my fault. My weakness, my impulsive thoughtlessness. If not for me, Aurae and all those innocent souls would still be alive. I deserve to burn in this hellish soulfire. I deserve to remain trapped in this scorched corpse. I deserve this horror for as long as it holds me captive here.

Something moves in my blackened gaze.

Though I had thought myself blind before, I realize suddenly that there is darkness deeper than blindness. Branching fingers of oblivion streak across my mind in a flash. My soul jolts, like a startled heartbeat. If there’s one thing I fear more than this burning song, it’s what’s coming—the un-song. The ruination, the intentional destruction of all melody and harmony and resonance.

That black lightning was just a warning; I know what happens next. I’ve got to get away. I cannot stay here, alone and exposed in this valley of death. I need to . . . die. It’s the only escape left to me.

With a supreme effort, I drag my awareness down into the confines of my body. I cannot see, but I can feel the scorched earth around me. Gathering all my will, I move one arm. Shuddering, ash-flaked fingers search. Where is my knife? It must be close. I used it to cut Nyathri’s bonds, and it fell during the blast. It could be mere inches from my fingertips. If I can only find it, if I can only summon the strength to cut my wrist, maybe I can bleed out before—

Hell strikes.

After the burn of Nyathri’s soulfire, this sudden cold is a shock. I did not think I would ever feel cold again. It’s worse somehow. Worse than the fire, which at least I knew was alive in its destructive force. There is no life here.

But there is presence.

I feel it. Them. Singular and multiple at once. A being, a sentience, full of intent but without soul. A sensation of skittering creeps through my awareness, followed by the hissing of many voices. Voices without song, without soul.

Hands crawl over my body, slow and exploratory, heedless of the way they slough off portions of my burned flesh. I try to scream, but the moment my lips part, something slips in across my tongue, slithering down my throat, stealing even my last weak cry.

Hunger surrounds me, pulsing in the atmosphere. The need to devour, to make all that is into un. Undone, unmade. Un-song. This is the horror which enveloped Licorna in the hours after the Rift opened twenty-five years ago. How many millions of souls were devoured in a matter of hours? Yet this hunger remains unsatiated. An eternal need for consumption.

And it’s eating me.

I feel it, peeling away my outer layers, searching out my bones and marrow. Many hundreds of fingers, digging deeper and deeper, down to where my soul cries out and struggles and seeks to hide. I have nothing with which to defend myself except . . . except . . .

I don’t know how I do it. Despair drives me, and I act on instinct, taking hold of Nyathri’s broken song—all that burning dissonance. It is the only real thing here with me in the darkness, and though it is reduced to almost nothing, it flares to life when my spirit touches it. Pain shoots through my body once more. I welcome it—it’s better than being made un. With a surge of desperation, I wrap that song around me before unleashing it, lashing at the hellish dark with bursts of light-sound.

Hell retreats, surprised. Maybe this is how the wild unicorns survive in Cruor. Their hearttorn songs are too great, too powerful for this entity to devour. The pain of their tortured souls is the very thing which keeps them alive. I lash again, wielding that burning song like a whip. Triumph flares in my soul. Is this the secret then? Is this how I will endure? If there’s anything I know, it’s song, and I—

The thought breaks off as hell surges over me once more. My soul screams, my voice blending with the burning song in eerie harmony an instant before the un-song cuts it off. I feel it invading me. Raping me. Consuming me. I feel the nothingness unspooling my rage and rendering it naught. This power is far too vast for me! How could anyone hope to keep it at bay?

Sudden light bursts off to one side of my awareness.

I don’t know how, but I’m conscious of my body once more. I cannot see anything—Nyathri’s blast scorched my eyes. But I feel that pulsing red light with an intensity I cannot deny. Straining what little muscle and tissue I still control, I turn my head toward it.

Like a burning star fallen from heaven, a sphere of light draws near, driving back the darkness, which screeches and retreats to make a path. The un-song writhes, tries to catch and smother that light, but it’s far too powerful, and its source too ancient. A unicorn stands in its center, singing her eternal song.

Nyathri! I try to cry out. The un-song catches my voice, strangles it to nothing. But the unicorn shakes her head, tearing at the dark with her horn. It shrieks voicelessly, hisses, and retreats again, allowing her to approach me. At last she stands above my burnt frame, gazing upon me with eyes like balls of red sunfire.

That is not my name. The voice which sings in my head does not speak with words. It does not need to. The meaning is clear in the sound, in the arrangement of notes and the unpleasant dissonance that pervades her soul. Nyathri—it is not right. I have no name anymore.

I understand. I feel that namelessness myself, cut off as I am from all that made sense of the madness of existence. I sing my sympathy to the unicorn, a line of fiery music all my own. And though I have tried several times before now, for once I detect a moment of harmony between my voice and that dissonant song of hers. It’s incomplete, but there’s the faintest hint of lyric tonality.

The unicorn responds at once, startled. She did not expect that moment of blending songs. She turns, and I fear she will flee yet again, abandoning me to hell. Please, I sing, reaching out with my spirit. Stay with me.

The unicorn bows her head, as though her horn is suddenly heavy. Why did you save me? she asks.

I try to reply but cannot find the right melody.

Why did you save me? she repeats, thinking perhaps that I’d not understood the first time. Twice you cut me free of those hell-tainted bonds, both times at great risk to your mortal frame. Why?

I don’t . . . know.

Strange, but I feel as though I’ve had this conversation before. It’s so familiar, and yet . . . and yet I don’t recall where or when or with whom.

The unicorn sings a blast of cacophonous music, which says clearly my answer is inadequate. I feel her frustration, but I’m not sure I can offer anything better. I’m sorry, I tell her. I don’t know what to say. I simply could not bear to live in this world knowing your song had gone out from it.

My song is broken.

But it is beautiful.

Your mortal body is broken too.

Yes. I know.

There was a time I could heal such wounds.

Despite everything I cannot stop the sudden spark of hope kindled in my breast. While a moment before I wouldn’t have thought it possible, it seems I still want to live. What would it take? I sing. What would you need to heal again?

Harmony, she replies at once. A joining of souls more complete even than that which I shared with my last Vellara. When she says the name, there’s a distinct lilt to it, and I know it is her own name for Ashika, the secret name shared only between the two of them.

There’s a gap in her song—it’s been there all along, just outside my range of perception. A new line of melody must be inserted into that gap for her song to be made whole. She reveals it to me now in invitation. I hesitate. Who would have thought, after everything I’ve been through, I could find new ways to be afraid? But I am.

My song is imperfect, I sing. My harmony is broken.

Perhaps we are each the broken parts the other needs.

And there it is: the revelation I’ve sought from the beginning. I know now what was lacking every other time I tried to fix this velrhoar song. I could reach out all I wanted, with as much strength and earnestness as my soul could summon. But until Nyathri—or she who was once Nyathri—reached back, no harmony could be formed.

My spirit looks upon the unicorn, feels the song-soul of her vibrating through my gods-gifted awareness. Her fire is terrible, destructive, and wondrous. It nearly killed me—it might still.

But what would it be like to join my voice with such flame?

Almost before realizing I intend to do so, I begin to sing. My body is too broken to make a sound, but my gift was never contained in a mere physical form. If anything the limitations of tongue, throat, lips, and lungs only ever got in the way of the true song I was meant to sing.

My spirit opens wide, exhaling melody in a line of blue fire that stretches out from me toward that raw, red flame of the unicorn. This time she neither lashes out nor retreats. This time, though she flinches once, as though afraid of the connection and all it might mean, she stands her ground and lets my song approach hers. They wind together—blue fire and red. The broken parts in the unicorn’s song blend with the broken parts in mine until, abruptly, they become one. A triumphant symphony of sound and color and spirits joined. Red and blue flame explode in a purple light which fills up the whole of this spirit-space around us.

With a dreadful shriek, the vardimnar shudders and flees, dragging its darkness behind it. What a strange sight that is—hell turned on heel and running like a frightened little rat. How sad, I think, even as I ride that billowing sound, suffused in soulfire and glory. How pathetic and sad that un-song is when faced with true melody.

The crescendo reached, our two spirits begin to drift back down into a simpler, calmer lyric of light, a natural exchange of one soul to the other. It’s delightful, almost freeing. My mind catches on that word—freeing—and everything it means for me. All the sad years of my life I’ve spent struggling and fighting for a freedom I could never envision. And now . . .

Aurae. My sister’s face appears before my mind’s eye. Her face, her laugh, her screams of terror. That pyre which burns forever in my memory. That scorched prayer veil. I force myself to look upon it now, with this new song wrapped around my soul. And I realize that moment in time, and all the chains of guilt which accompany it, are part of this song. A dissonance which adds to the greater harmony of the whole composition. If I chose, I could let that dissonance grow and create greater discord.

But there are other choices now. I may also choose to accept. To let the darkness remain where it is, let the wound scar over and even heal. To let that moment, that pain, that guilt, become part of the ongoing song that is my life. Neither to be forgotten nor dwelt in.

The unicorn stands beside me in this space of acceptance. I feel her own guilt over the loss of her rider flowing into me and back out again. We share that burden, share that pain. And in the sharing we take the first steps forward into a life forever changed.

I turn to the unicorn. She no longer appears to me as she did, burning red flame erupting from a skeletal body. Now the truth of who she was beneath the velrhoar is visible once more. A delicate purple sheen of fire gleams from blue-black flesh and flickers from the corners of midnight-deep eyes.

What is your name? I sing.

She tips her head to one side, as though listening to a voice singing from far away, a voice even I cannot hear. Then she answers with certainty: I am Diira.

Diira, I sing back and wonder how that trill will sound when spoken with a human tongue.

And you, Diira sings on with confidence, are my Vellara. It’s not the same sound she used when she sang of Ashika, but the song denotes a similar sense of claiming. I like it; it suits me somehow. Better than the name my father gave me, surely.

Suddenly Diira’s soul quickens with tension. Your body will not last much longer.

I’m rather shocked to realize that I do in fact still inhabit a mortal frame. But the moment Diira says it, I find myself dragged back down, out of this spirit place, back into a body which is rapidly failing. My song struggles as a renewed surge of pain overwhelms me.

Help me, Diira! I cry, not quite in song but in a surge of panic. Teach me the healing song!

A tremor of uncertainty ripples out from her. I gasp. Pain and my own mortality drag me down, down. Darkness closes in, and the soulfire light which had seemed so bright but a moment before begins to fade.

Then she starts to sing. A strange, complex melody that speaks of ancient times, of an age before this world was created. A song of stars and dancing constellations, a song of heavenly beings and celestial graces. It’s devastating—I’m not sure where my own voice is supposed to fit. Then something inside me shifts. I don’t know how to describe it: like a piece of my heart turns slightly and realizes what shape it was meant to be all along.

I sing. I sing as I have never sung before, first little trills of sound, then a greater melody, stronger, surer. It blends in with Diira’s song so naturally, one would think they were born from the same source.

Slowly, fearfully, I let my awareness sink back into that body of mine. I must connect this song with that body if I hope to bring healing. The pain is so great, for a moment I can feel nothing else. Then faintly my ears detect a trace of song. It sounds different here, from this mortal perspective, filtered through physical senses. But it is still beautiful.

Diira’s horn rests against my breast, the tip aimed straight for my heart. Flame encases my body once more, but not the flame which nearly destroyed me. This is healing fire, drawn from heaven itself. It is both like and unlike that healing power I channeled with Elydark when I sang over Taar, only this song is fuller, deeper, and more perfectly harmonized. The difference between singing with another soul and truly being one.

A sudden inhale. A constriction of muscles. Then a gust of air from released lungs, expelling a sigh through parted lips.

I blink and slowly open my eyes. I can see again—see all the way up to the endless blue sky arching overhead. The sunlight, which had seemed so sickly before, now glows with brilliance unmatched. Or is that glow not from the sun at all, but from the mighty being standing over me, singing from the depths of her newly-repaired heart?

I gaze up at Diira. Glorious and shining, more beautiful than anything in this or any world. My heart swells with such an abundance of love for her, I cannot stop myself from opening my mouth and singing. By comparison to my song in the spirit-realm, this is certainly a poor thing, but compared to any other human voice it is a magnificence akin to that of angels. A true gift of the gods. My song and Diira’s fills that valley of death with the hope of renewal. And just for a moment I almost believe I hear the voices of the dead unicorns singing back to us from somewhere beyond the veil of this world.

When the song eases at last, I look down at myself. My body is suffused in purple fire, but it doesn’t burn. Instead I watch the scorched flesh and oozing blisters close up, reknitting into whole, healed skin beneath the tatters of my burnt dress. I lift my hands, turn them this way and that, admire the beauty of whole fingers. I touch my neck, my shoulders, my face, my hair. Gods! I have hair again!

Diira backs away a pace or two, lowering her head. Her song resolves, at least that which I hear with mortal ears. But I feel it still in the soul-tether now shivering in the ether between us, a constant hum of divine melody. Is it well, Vellara? the unicorn asks wordlessly in my head.

It is well, Diira, I sing back.

Then I gasp. A sharp stab shoots up my arm and bursts in the back of my head. Now that the far greater pain of my near-death by burning is past, the velra reasserts itself with terrible force.

What was that? Diira asks, sensing my distress.

It’s my husband. He’s in trouble. Suffering. But not dead, I add to myself. If he was dead, our bond would be broken. Shanaera is keeping him alive for some twisted purpose of her own.

I scramble to my feet only to sway hard as the world pivots on its axis. Healed or not, my body has just undergone a tremendous ordeal and isn’t ready for any sudden movements. I steady myself, close my eyes until the world stills. When I open them again, a gleam of metal catches my eye. Moving with a little more caution, I hasten to reclaim my dropped knife, slipping it into its sheath before turning to Diira.

I must find him, I say. I must help him. To be parted from me causes him terrible pain. Even as I say it, another stab jolts up my arm. It doesn’t do me much good either.

Diira nods solemnly. We can follow the velra to him, she says. Then to my surprise—though in retrospect, I don’t know what else I expected—she kneels. Hurry. Get on my back. I will carry you swiftly. There are none among the licorneir of this realm who can outpace me!

I stare for a moment at the blue-black, dappled back. A thrill bursts in my gut. It’s as though somehow, something I was born for is finally about to take place. I feel like a fledgling eagle, poised on the edge of the nest, the whole wide world spread before me if only I dare open my wings.

Breathless I climb onto that warm back, little heeding the fact that Diira is still burning bright with purple soulfire. I’ve danced in that fire, healed in that flame. I know for a fact that it will never burn me again.

Grabbing handfuls of mane, I find my center of balance as the unicorn rises smoothly to her feet. I hold up my arm and can almost see the shining cord stretched before me in a straight, taut line.

“That way, Diira,”

I say out loud, for the first time pronouncing her name with my tongue. It sounds strange, but I like it. “That way, as swift as you can.”

As the unicorn leaps into motion, I bow over her neck and picture the rotten face of the woman who stole my husband. My jaw sets grimly. Time to steal him back.