Page 40 of Light Locked #1
A powerful surge of revived determination flooded her body, and she rose to the challenge as she heard the maids’ feet scuffling toward her from outside.
The servants were back with their tight, sallow faces and their ruddy, burgundy clothes.
They circled her as they entered and closed the door behind them.
The first had a series of devices used to mark and measure the radiance of her skin, and then two more wheeled in a cart full of cloth strips and layers of clothes.
They seemed content with the extent of her power, impressed even.
It was confirmed. They were going to sell her.
Clea allowed them to move her like a doll, her mind locked onto a new future she was determined to create for herself. She wasn’t just powerful now. She was more powerful than she had ever been.
She thanked the sleeping tonic as they took measurements of her body.
She thanked the medallion for how its challenges had strengthened her as they matched jewels and pieces of clothing with her skin.
She thanked the humiliation, watching her eyes in the mirror as they painted her to tan the rest of her skin, and violently cinched a corset tight around her ribs .
She thanked all the adversity for the renewed strength in her blood.
She planned her escape.
Clea’s broken understanding of Kaletik told her that the maids were experimenting with her clothing for the auction tomorrow night. She was the prize of the auction, but that didn’t matter.
Tonight was her night. She would find the medallion. She would find Ryson. She would escape.
Clea patiently bided her time as the maids compared and exchanged materials, dressing her, doing her hair, and painting her face. After several hours, the look that materialized made their intentions clear.
The attire was still in pieces, but they were all white and gold, and tomorrow they would look something like a mockery of a Lodain royal gown.
The top was white silk, but deeply cut with a layer of golden lace that wrapped along her breasts in false modesty.
The skirt was the same, made of long, white silk that reflected the dimmest light with a pearly sheen.
It too, would hide her if not for the long slits of golden lace that reached along her thighs, attire meant to provide brief glimpses of bare skin through the gold, for moments only as long as her steps.
With their eyes trained on such fleeting glimpses, they would not notice the paint or the disease it hid.
The only thing that covered her wholly was the corset, beaded with pearl and gold. It choked her protectively, covering the worst of her illness while tightening in her ribs and highlighting the flare of her hips .
Her own people had poised her as a sign of hope, and now she was meant to be a rare and coveted object. Perhaps the two weren’t so different after all.
The similarities of the feeling struck her.
Clea restrained the surge of isolation as the maids worked her hair into strings of pearls and golden pins.
In Loda, she’d worn robes that hid any semblance of a human figure.
Her body was a mystery if not a myth, but the use of white and gold and light had all been the same.
Clea wondered then if her parents had also sold her in such a way.
After her oldest sister’s death, such use of symbols had become impossible to escape, but even before it, she and her siblings had complained to each other about how stifling their parents’ demands to represent hope could be.
Her eldest sister had once compared it to prostitution.
Clea had thought it awful to say, but now she understood.
She understood and her heart reached for her siblings.
The servants stepped back and observed her.
They spoke to one another with satisfaction as they mixed a paint and tried to match it to the newfound tanness of her dyed skin.
They brushed it across the darkness of her disease and measured how much would be needed to hide the rest on her legs.
Two maids left for more paint as the final one sat Clea down, finished her hair, and finalized the painting on her eyes.
By the time she was done, red light of the sunset filtered in through the window.
Clea did not recognize herself when the maid stepped out of the way of the mirror.
As she looked into her reflection, she saw what many others surely saw.
Beauty and luminance, but in a way that made her feel a step removed from herself.
She didn’t look real. Now, she too wore the face of the forest. She’d become an alluring creature that hid its decay with a thin veil of delicious fabric.
The maid waited for the others to return as if to get final opinions and confirm that Clea was now suited to present back to the king and whatever appraisers or advisors helped him.
They did not come back.
The maid paced anxiously for a few minutes. At last, she stepped out, spoke to the guards, and then left, leaving Clea sitting alone in the chair.
Staring into the mirror, Clea counted down the minutes to darkness.
Survival or truth. She thought again as she stared at this false version of herself. She still didn’t understand the choice, but couldn’t leave the question alone. She walked it like a path, unable to divert to one side or the other, to answer one way or the other.
Her mind found its way back to Ryson despite his requests. She’d tried to sift through the presences in the castle, hopeful that she’d be able to trace him.
She tried not to imagine what abuses they’d delivered to him if their attempts to revive her had been so aggressive. Maybe he was being largely neglected, too much of an inconvenience to bother with.
One could hope .
His request to leave him behind, or possibly even kill him, had been insulting.
Clea took in a breath as her anger stirred. She exhaled through her nose steadily and tried to diffuse it. She’d been angry every waking moment and didn’t need more reasons to be.
Something had changed between them in the carriage. The veils had unraveled and in a strange way he’d become obvious to her. Genuine. Only a few seconds of that and she’d known in a moment that she’d never truly felt it before.
He’d wounded her with the truth and had become a tether to something real in the world. She clasped that thread of honesty as if the universe hung from it. The irony of it was strange. The forest, despite all its illusions, had unearthed something real between them.
She wanted to explore it more. When she escaped, when they both escaped, she would.
A sound outside made her jump from the depth of her thoughts.
The maid had left the door cracked, perhaps with some intention of returning after a few short minutes. Through that window, Clea saw the bodies of her guards lying across the stone.
She slipped the golden heels from her feet and eased toward the doorway. The guards were lying unconscious outside. She looked down the hallways, sensing a heaviness in the air.
Something was wrong.
This was her chance.
Clea rushed back into the room, pulling her bag out from under the bed and slipping her boots on. She packed her clothes and stepped out into the hallway.
Her heart pounded as she snuck through the silence, finding herself at the first staircase in less than a minute. She descended it carefully, and for what seemed like hours, navigated the castle that by all appearances was sleeping.
Clea could feel the medallion’s power growing as she tracked it, and it reminded her of when she’d taken it from King Odell.
Its power had been strong. In Virday, it had been feeding off King Odell for months, maybe years.
It hadn’t had long enough to attach to a new host, had it?
Whoever it found, it shared a striking compatibility with them.
She slowed as she reached the final stairway. She knew at a glance that it didn’t lead to the treasury. By all appearances, it seemed to be the way to the dungeon, and the medallion pulsed inside.
More guards lay unconscious on the stairs.
With a timid foot, she nudged a helmet. The guard’s head rolled to the side, but she did not awaken.
Maybe one of the guards had taken the medallion when they’d rummaged through her things?
Clea could only hope that whatever had happened, the thief was unconscious like the rest.
She pulled a knife from one of the guards before she descended down the stairs to the dungeon, holding fast to that hope.
It was a dim place, lit by only a few torches. More guards were lying on top of one another. Clea felt the presence of the medallion draw her forward to a bolted door at the far end of the hallway, searching the cells for Ryson as she passed one after the other.
Glowing eyes stared back at her from the corners of the cells.
The creatures, large or small, beast or Kalex, watched her.
Those that weren’t unconscious seemed highly disturbed.
One behind her cawed. In response, one to her left growled.
Another released a bark, another a howl and a squeal.
Babbling in foreign tongues erupted from other cells.
The nearer she drew to the final bolted door, the louder the beasts grew, until many of them were beating on the cages and screaming.
Some tried to reach their hands or claws through the bars toward her, while others gripped them and shrieked through them.
Clea remained focused on the door until she was right before it.
It was fashioned from thick layers of rust-coated iron.
One lock was still done. It sat right above the handle.
She examined the door, and unsure of what awaited her, she attempted to ignore the frantic calling and beating of the prisoners.
She undid the lock from the outside, and the loud clang silenced the entire dungeon.
As if every one of them had vanished, the prison became as quiet as a winter night.
The unnatural cold of the door handle sent shivers down her spine, and she could almost feel her body temperature dropping.
Clea forced the door open with a single, violent jolt.
Emptiness. The presence of the medallion vanished in a blink.
Two soldiers lay on the floor, their fresh blood still making its way through the cracks in the stone beneath them. Bent shackles were sprawled across the cell.
Her heart pounded. She took a breath and swallowed as she closed her eyes, trying to retrace the medallion’s presence, but just as she did, a hand landed on her ankle and she jolted back.
The guard at her feet groaned before he let her go, unconscious again.
She turned and walked sharply to the exit of the dungeon, refocusing again as she traced the presence once more.
The medallion was already several floors above her.
Had she misread the location? It had begun to permeate the castle so heavily that it was becoming more and more difficult to pinpoint the source.
After a fruitless search for Ryson, Clea slipped from the dungeon and into the nearest room as she heard new guards storming the castle, racing up the stairs as if in pursuit of the medallion as well.
She remained tucked away in one corner or another as she made her way up one staircase and then the next, sitting quietly in the dark of nearby rooms as she tried to understand the chaos that after several minutes settled into another bout of silence.
The medallion’s power was radiant now. Clea traced its core through waves of cien that sunk the castle in a dark and frightening mire.
The ansra in her body churned in anticipation of battle, a battle that seemed to be shaping up for what could be the fight of her life.
When she was near the last staircase, she tucked her bag away and tried to use her knife to cut her corset free.
The back of the corset was impossibly cinched and so she worked her knife along the side, gold beads and pearls popping off and rolling out into the room.
The fabric beneath only gave a couple of inches on her side.
Relieved to at least be able to breathe the slightest bit better, the pressure of time urged her onward.
She stopped at the base of the final staircase. There were no sounds, and in the darkness, she had to rely on the sense of her ansra more than anything else. It was a light she’d missed for so long, but the stronger it blazed, the darker everything else seemed.
Clea started up the stairway that reached like open jaws. She slipped the knife through the side of her corset. If she couldn’t wrestle it off, at least it could be useful for something.
Her hands relaxed by her side. They were gentle, quiet weapons.
Steel would only help her so much, and escape wasn’t an option.
Not yet.
The Deadlock Medallion, with all its untold secrets and the poison of its legacy, beckoned her.
It represented all her burdens for the past several years.
It represented the death, the suffering, the oppression of The Decline.
At the start of her journey, she’d been running from death, but in some ways, she now realized, she’d been running from her life.
She wouldn’t run any longer.
In facing the medallion, she now faced it all.