Page 46 of Light Locked #1

A Path Once Tread

F ROM THE DEPTHS of the castle halls, Clea heard the door of the throne room break open with the snap of soldered metal.

She’d thought that every passing stairway and hallway would make her decision easier as she left the castle.

It was the opposite. There was a thread sown through her ribs, tightening with every step she took to leave.

The feeling worsened with time, splitting her body in half as some deep and pressing question expanded inside her.

The medallion was sore and cold against her skin.

This felt different than leaving her mother behind.

When her mother had sacrificed herself in the woods, Clea had been panicked and frantic.

She’d spoken often of her own death, telling Clea that death was a path to sainthood.

Until this moment, Clea hadn’t understood how in the wake of a lifetime of resenting such teachings, she’d come to see her mother’s death as a fate she had somehow wanted.

All her life, it had almost seemed like her mother wanted to die in battle.

Clea wanted to exist.

The desire to die whole had never been about the cause of her death.

She just didn’t want to die before knowing who she was .

She didn’t want to die a fractured symbol, known to the world, but never known to herself.

The words resonated with such an internal surge of feeling that they stopped her in her tracks.

The door to the outside world was just ahead, a murky shape down the torchlit halls.

She’d descended multiple flights of stairs, and was close to earning her freedom.

Daybreak would come in several hours and she’d have a day of safe traveling to get to the trade route.

The path ahead was laid out for her.

So, why wouldn’t she move?

Ryson had said it himself. Sacrifice. She had to make sacrifices. This was a repetition of what happened at the Kalex village, and he’d been right. He’d near demanded in the carriage that she leave him behind the first chance that she had.

So, why wouldn’t she move?

A rumbling sound reverberated faintly through the castle.

Clea placed a hand against a nearby wall to steady herself both against the uneasiness of her circumstances and her thoughts.

In the wake of her recent realizations, she didn’t recognize herself.

She’d entered that throne room feeling unified and determined.

Somewhere in the last hour, a wound had been dealt to her identity and no reasoning or justification could stop the hemorrhaging.

Ryson had dealt that blow, and while some part of her wanted to keep moving forward and salvage what she could, the rest of her knew that the blow had been fatal.

Ryson had told her to leave him behind, but he had also told her he hadn’t planned to die at the hands of Venennin. There was a way he wanted to die—not in the woods, not like this .

He also wanted to exist.

He could have come with her. She was almost out of the castle before she’d heard the Venennin break through upstairs. It would have been riskier, but there was no way it was impossible for both of them to escape together.

Instead, he’d stayed behind to increase her chances.

It hadn’t been a necessary sacrifice. It hadn’t even been a completely rational decision. It had been an emotional one.

Truth or survival. The question without an answer still echoed.

“That hypocrite,” she whispered, whipping around and racing back through the castle.

The journey back to the throne room passed in seconds compared to how long it had taken her to leave it. Just as her first entrance had been, the second was also preceded by silence.

Clea crept up to the broken wall, peering past the brick as she heard voices for the first time.

Adrenaline coursed through her. The medallion reacted to the intensity of her ansra with a burning and intolerable cold, forcing her to peel it from her skin.

Clea depended on this balance of cien and ansra between them to smother her presence.

She could feel the flow of energy course through every vein in her body, no longer forced to navigate around her illness.

Again, a pathway to the next level of her own power had been opened to her, and the feelings arrested her with an unusual and potentially dangerous boldness .

The first words bounced through the room in a calm, sultry voice.

“Are the bodies still warm?” a woman asked. Clea leaned forward to catch a better view of the room as her heart throbbed in her chest.

The throne room was in shambles, pieces of scattered brick and broken stone giving her a clear view of what had for the briefest moment been a battlefield.

Discarded torches still burned against buried glimpses of gold and silver.

Freestanding columns now expanded through holes in the ceiling.

Skylights were split wide open to an invasive moon that washed the room in silver light.

A beautiful woman sat with her legs crossed on a collapsed column. She rotated her ankle in rhythmic repetition, painting circles in the air with her scuffed boots as she leaned back on her hands and soaked in the light of the moon.

Her long, blonde hair cascaded back against the stone, bloodstained strands tracing paths to an open wound on her temple.

“Yes,” another Venennin responded.

Clea noticed the rest of them, cloaked bodies gliding through the room like shadows.

Ryson was kneeling near where fragments of the steps remained, a Venennin standing behind him with Ryson’s scythe poised over his shoulder.

Black, slithering bonds coiled around Ryson’s wrists in front of him.

His head was lowered and he looked completely still. Clea wondered if he was even conscious.

“Good,” the Venennin woman said, rolling off the column in one smooth motion and landing on her heels with a light clack.

Her illuminant blue eyes scanned the room as she walked through it, counting the bodies.

Full red lips parted to reveal fangs, and her piercing eyes rested above high cheekbones.

She moved with the grace of a feline, her arms and hips swinging with every step.

Coat tails swayed down to her calves, the shape of her body further accentuated by a tight belt around her waist and the hand axes strapped to her upper thighs.

“Give them the replacement souls,” she said, and the other Venennin moved from body to body, putting small, black beads into each corpse’s mouth.

Moments after, the bodies twitched and thrashed, a revolting cracking noise filling the room as creatures bulged and crawled from the bodies.

Clea flattened her back against the wall as she looked forward, holding her breath as she tried to stomach the sounds.

Grateful for the darkness but lightheaded from the noises, she gripped the wall behind her until it was over.

The sounds of forest beasts remained, their hissing and growling a foreshadowing before Clea leaned over and saw the horde.

The main Venennin walked through them unharmed, inspecting each one.

“An awful practice. It still disgusts me,” the Venennin woman said, “but it’s a good way to make use of fresh corpses.

I don’t have to tell you that though, do I?

It was the Insednians that invented it.” The Venennin waved them off, and the beasts followed obediently, skulking back into the halls and waiting there out of the way, their eyes still aglow in the darkness, but Clea couldn’t make out their distinct forms .

She tried to wrestle her mind into focus, arranging the scattered scene into a path of action. They were going to kill Ryson. She looked for an opportunity, but the entire room and everything in it was wrought with cien.

“It’s Shiloh, by the way,” the Venennin said as she stopped near the foot of the throne, her palms resting atop her axe handles as her eyes flashed across the room again, soaking up the devastation with little expression.

She didn’t seem to notice that her boot rested in a pool of blood.

“You’re the first Insednian I’ve fought.

It’s a shame you have no soul. I’d like to gloat about beating you, but you were already drained and killing yourself by channeling curses at all.

I’ll ask you again. What did you do with the cien object? ”

Ryson didn’t reply and so she walked closer, pulling his chin up with her hand.

“You act like you’re just waiting to die,” she said. “What’s your name? Or can you still remember it? I suppose, perhaps, you’ve left it with someone?”

“I can’t remember,” he replied without any sense of fear or dismay. “What does it matter to you?”

“It matters because you have an Insednian signet,” she said. “That weapon of yours. Did you take it from someone else? I bet you can’t remember that either, can you? It takes hundreds of souls and a very powerful curse to forge one.”

Shiloh straightened and walked back over to the column she’d been sitting on, her arms crossed as she gazed up at the moon.

“No? Okay, then your vice. At least tell me that and perhaps we can identify you. I, for one, favor weaponry. I’m a collector of it, obsessed with the nature of the metal and how it marres the flesh.

In Kaletik, I am Katel, translates as The Butcher, but that’s awfully mundane, I think. Do you recognize that name?”

Silence.

“Oh, fine. Now. What about you? What is your vice? Your name?”

The silence drew out again and she sighed.