Page 30 of Light Locked #1

She nodded eagerly, glancing back and forth between Ryson and the others, concerned that Ryson seemed so distracted.

“You don’t know how to kill them?” he asked again.

“I don’t know what they are,” Clea replied frantically, hoping Ryson would return his focus back to the battlefield. Instead, a look of awe materialized on Ryson’s face.

“That’s impossible,” he said. “They are Venennin.”

“I heard you before.” She watched the Venennin from afar. It seemed strange that they weren’t attacking, seeing as Ryson had let his guard down. She voiced her concern after Ryson didn’t reply to her first comment.

“They are trying to understand the same thing I am,” he said, shaking his head at her.

“And that is?” She felt like she had an audience. No one was attacking, and yet here she was, poised for a dangerous battle against these unknown forces .

“If you’re trying to act like you aren’t a Veilin, it’s a bit late, Princess,” Ryson said, and she was offended that he felt any need to scrutinize her now.

“I’m being honest!” Clea snapped. “How do we defeat them, Ryson? I have no reason to lie to you! I don’t understand why you think I am!”

Ryson looked across the clearing, and Clea followed his eyes to see looks of amusement on their enemies’ faces. Frightened, confused, and embarrassed, Clea searched the clearing, like there might be answers to these questions she hadn’t seen before.

“Please, keep going!” Myken shouted from across the clearing, rattling her further. Ralth laughed.

“I favor this much more than a fight,” Myken added.

Ryson cursed, watching her now as if convinced that the Venennin wouldn’t attack them. “Venennin are the Veilin of the darkness. You use ansra to bless; they use cien to curse. Veilin are raised to fight Venennin. There is no possible way you don’t know them.”

“Ryson, I have never heard the name before in my life!” she said, and as soon as the words left her lips, the three Venennin appeared before them, closer and yet still too far away to attack.

Clea grew tense in their presence, widening her stance as she prepared for a battle.

“How fascinating,” Myken said, prowling back and forth in front of the others.

“Surely, fascinating,” Ralth echoed, easing down on his haunches.

“Marvelous curse, Ryson. Only an Insednian would be capable of crafting something so delightfully devious! You wiped even the memory of Venennin from her mind?” Myken laughed at a joke they all seemed to find amusing, and yet Clea drew no answers from it.

Clea turned to Ryson, eyes brimming with accusations and unanswered questions. He reacted with an explanation, as if she’d looked to him for guidance.

“Pure energy can’t waste them like normal beasts.

Unlike forest beasts, their bodies aren’t dead but are living human bodies empowered by cien.

Blessings will expel cien from them and allow them to be wounded or will return wounds that cien has previously repaired. Bless the dagger before you cut them.”

Clea looked forward, understanding now that her blessing had banished the cien from Ralth’s wound, undoing the unnatural repairs cien made to his skin. Blessings did not kill them, but it did neutralize their power.

Ryson whipped his scythe behind him as Myken vanished. He bounded forward, anticipating where Myken would appear next. Myken dodged, but the blade scathed his clothes. Ryson, despite his wound, moved faster, attacking again.

Clea fell into the pace of battle. She could not see Ryson, but she heard Myken’s voice taunting him as she charged for Ralth and the wounded Venennin. Clea’s blessings reached the wounded one first, and he crumbled against the earth with a scream and fell limp in the snow.

Rattled by the nature of his death, but determined, Clea laid another blessing, but this one Ralth countered with a curse. He leapt for her, and she blessed the dagger in her hand, striking for him again before he appeared behind her.

Clea dodged his hand, and as he thrust it past her, her palm went for his heart. He was gone in a second and behind her, so she followed. It was a repetitive dance until Ralth wasn’t there at all. He’d appeared behind Ryson.

She blessed the earth as quickly as her hands allowed, feeling the surge of power leave her. The blessings spread like lightning, and Ralth fled from them. They found Ryson and Myken instead.

Ryson was first, and the blessing wound halfway up one of his legs.

He dropped his scythe and, in one forceful movement, grabbed Myken and slammed him against the blessing.

The moment Myken landed against the ground, he vanished and reappeared beside Ralth at the other end of the field.

He’d only brushed the ground, but Clea knew the blessing had touched him, for he hunched over as if he was in pain.

As soon as he vanished, Clea ran toward Ryson, who was on his hands and knees. She knelt before him, saying his name, but he didn’t reply. He was breathing more heavily and she recognized the worsening dangers in the struggle in his lungs.

“Let me see your wounds!” she demanded and pushed him up by his shoulders. She sat him back on his heels and held him there. He closed his eyes and swallowed.

Clea examined the wound as best she could, and thought about attempting to heal it, but she would need to be prepared if the Venennin attacked again.

Just as she was tending to Ryson, Ralth was tending to Myken.

She narrowed her eyes in search of a wound on Myken, but instead spotted two black marks on his chest. They spread across his body like a virus.

Clea’s eyes widened as she realized the placement of the curses.

They were on either side of his chest, shoulder-width apart, exactly where Ryson had grabbed him.

She turned to Ryson to find him watching her. “You’re a Venennin. You’re one of them.” Her hand loosened on his shoulder, but before she could let go, he snatched her wrist.

“Only half,” he breathed hoarsely. He heaved over as he started coughing. “This isn’t the time…” He stifled another cough. “To distrust me. There is a way that I wish to die, Clea,” he pleaded, catching her eyes, “and this is not it.”

She swallowed and glanced once more at Myken, who was recovering slowly. Using her free hand, she eased Ryson over. “You’re too weak to fight. You obviously don’t heal like they do.” As she laid him down, she caught sight of more blood staining his pant leg.

She stopped, remembering her blessing, and pulled the tattered pants back. Bloodied lines marked his leg, and knowing the source of his wound, she withdrew.

She glanced at Ryson to see that his eyes were closed. “ Ryson?” No response came. “Ryson?” She leaned closer to his face and repeated his name. He said nothing, but she could feel his breath.

She wasn’t sure if she could heal a Venennin, or a half one for that matter, but she had to try.

She dug her hands into the snow, casting a cage of light around them.

It wouldn’t hold for long, but would at least give her some warning if the Venennin struck again.

She had enough ansra to heal Ryson quickly and then cast several more carefully placed blows in order to buy him time to get to his feet.

It was a tedious strategy, but the only one she had now.

Placing her hands on Ryson’s abdomen, she closed her eyes.

Heat built in her palms, and she could feel it radiating off them as she pressed them over his skin.

It took a moment for the heat to sink into his body and had she been a less practiced healer, she would have withdrawn her hands at the horrors that followed.

First, she felt the ansra sink through him for several seconds, but instead of wounds closing, his flesh and bones gave way under her palms. Skin unstitched itself as layers of old wounds bloomed to the surface in a horrid symphony of carnage.

In black dismay, she remembered all his scars, and despite the human scarring, realized that all those wounds had been closed artificially by cien.

She steeled herself against the panic of killing him. If she removed her hands halfway through the process, she would.

Instead, she held fast as layers of wounds surfaced and healed against her hands, opening and closing across his body.

It was like reading a ghastly, brutal novel, feeling every stroke and slice peel open under her fingers, sensing their violence and then mending them only to have another page turn and bloom blood and suffering through her fingers.

She wanted to pull her hands away. She wanted to stop reading, stop absorbing the words.

She tried to recall the extent of the damage from his scarring. They had been real, open, wounds hiding under a bandage of dark energy. In trying to save him, she unraveled him, and to pull him back from death she’d have to heal him completely.

Her ansra was drawn deep from her body like a depleting well.

The light that she had, emptied into the endless void of suffering that lived between his ribs.

The minutes felt like hours, Clea sensing malice, anguish, and rage released from every wound as it healed properly.

These wounds were not accidents like so many others she’d mended.

She could feel every intention and emotion behind each stroke of a blade, some feelings so stark and intense that they were nothing but hot, white flashes through her body.

Healing him is going to kill you.

The thought echoed through her as she watched her hands, bloodied to the wrists, soaked in red, her sleeves drenched in it. Her previous strategy evaporated along with every remnant of her power, drawn from her body with an insatiable hunger until her soul ached and yawned in dry agony.

Something deep inside her cracked but she could not let go. Empty, her soul opened and reached far and wide to draw ansra directly from the world around them. She’d never felt such a thing before. She’d never thought it possible.

The strain carved a fiery path from her hands to her chest, like she was splitting open from her fingertips to her core.

The tide of energies between her and Ryson almost started to reverse, as if her hands would absorb the very suffering she aimed to heal, drawing it directly to her innermost parts.

The wounds under his skin had gone from a hot boil of opening and mending, to a simmering stir of movement with minor cuts fluttering open and healing properly. The worst of it was over, but in the aftermath her soul felt open to his.

Rather, her soul felt open to a distinct emptiness inside him. It was a boundless crater, host now to a residual pool of darkness where an ocean had once been.

Her hands shook with ferocious exhaustion, Clea gasping for breath as she cultivated every intention to close that connection, to curb the reach of her own exhausted soul as it clawed at each figment of nearby energy to sustain her.

Such emptiness had killed Veilin in the past, and her own soul refused to listen, as if closing itself off now meant utter collapse.

Her hands now braced themselves against the firm muscles of Ryson’s abdomen because without her elbows locked, she’d collapse on top of him.

Her breathing rasped. Her mouth felt dry, sweat dripping down her face.

What had she done?

The shield around her broke down, the drops of ansra used to create it absorbed back into her body.

Those single drops gave her only what she needed to withdraw, and she felt the reach of her soul coil back brokenly inside her before bolting closed in reserve.

Her connection with ansra was severed and with it, her sense of all energies around and inside her.

She might not be dead, but she certainly didn’t feel like a Veilin any longer.

Her elbows buckled and she fell onto the muscles of Ryson’s chest. Her entire body felt numb and feverish.

He would live. Would she?

Why hadn’t she stopped sooner?

No. She couldn’t have let him die.

Her arms and face were wet against the blood on his chest, vision blurred as she saw him breathing restfully again.

Wake up. She urged, feeling sick as she heard the voices of the Venennin.

Wake up. She urged as their footfalls approached, dragging them up where they lay.

Myken’s voice sang in her ear as he hoisted her up. “You’re so ignorant as to the reality that awaits you in these forests. I will personally give you a tour of the world that your people so deeply fear. Pain like none you have ever felt awaits you.”

Her dread spun deeper and she ached to move, but her body had become her own cage, numb to everything else around it. She could only focus on breathing.

Ralth came through the woods with the carriage, led by a horse, or the broken, dried corpse of one, still animated by what she imagined to be curses.

They chained their hands and threw Ryson inside first. They prepared to throw her in, Clea’s dizzied gaze catching a figure sitting up in a tree not far from where they stood.

It sat with one leg hanging from the limb. Thick shackles with broken chains adorned its wrists and ankles. Another large shackle hung around its neck. Broken bandages and ripped cloth covered its body, and a broken mask hid all but a single silver eye.

It tossed Althala’s talisman up in the air and caught it.

She craned her head to hold the figure’s gaze when she landed in the carriage. The carriage door sealed her off in the early morning darkness.

“What was she looking at?” Clea heard one of the Venennin say outside.

“I didn’t see anything,” another replied.

A chill crept up her spine.