Page 47 of Light Locked #1

“No matter.” She said, defeated at last. “It seems like The Decline is after everyone. Over the past century, I’ve watched it happen.

Ancients like me wasting away into pieces.

The last ancient I met—must have been a decade or so ago—he was trapped and killed outside of Loda last year by six Veilin.

All my heroes have just vanished from the map without anyone talking about them.

Meridian Hart—the Veilin haven’t even been spared.

She was killed outside of Virday by a mere horde of reaping shades. It boggles my mind completely.”

Clea’s attention faltered as her mother’s name was mentioned on the lips of a Venennin. Had her mother truly been so well-known in the woods?

The Venennin turned and eased into her seat, leaning back and crossing her legs again.

She inspected her fingertips under the light, her darkened fingers laden in an assortment of rings.

“I hate to kill you even. If anything is symbolic of The Decline, it’s the Insednians.

Venennin used to shake in fear at the mere mention of you.

Old as I was, I still remember what it was like. ”

She put her hands back by her sides and inspected Ryson again. He was watching her now with some level of interest, as if genuinely curious about what she was speaking of.

“I wish you did remember,” Shiloh said, voice fading off with something akin to sympathy.

“Your people, they were…magnificent. Your people carried the warlord’s legacy and all his promise of a final death for us all.

Instead it’s—” She shook her hand as if frustrated with the available choice of words.

Clea forgot for a moment that she was a bystander to the scene, because even as the other Venennin and beasts lurked, this seemed like a private conversation between just Shiloh and Ryson, a discussion between two old friends.

“Now.” Shiloh shook her head, showing her disappointment as her hand still hovered in the air, the pointed claw with its palm to the sky like something were going to fall into it.

“It’s not an epic battle that ends us all.

It’s not a great and final battle between Venennin and Veilin.

It’s not the dramatic and fierce bloodshed of will and passion and sacrifice.

It’s just…decline. I would take a savage death at the hands of something brutal over this—this undignified decay.

Those silver eyes of yours that once knew power, Insednians that worship the warlord and all the destruction he represented.

” Shiloh strained, and it occurred to Clea that Shiloh was almost disappointed to have defeated him.

“You can’t tell me you also don’t feel this. ”

Details of this interaction, the mention of her mother’s death, the discussion of The Decline, it all seemed strangely human and deceptively casual in the wake of such devastation .

“Oh well,” Shiloh replied shortly after and hopped to her feet, legs locking as she bounded forward on a wide stride. “No point in dwelling on it, is there? Kill him.”

The Venennin behind Ryson lifted the scythe for the swing.

Heal. The word shook through her. Clea’s body acted without her, and before she could register the nature of the risks, she bounded from the cover of the alley and into the throne room.

With all the force she could muster, she threw her hands down against the stones and used the power she knew that she could.

Clea was not a warrior of great stature, not the stature that a situation like this demanded. She wasn’t sure what her healing blessing would bring. All she knew was that an assault of that kind was all she had to offer now.

She’d regained her ansra, an ansra tested by a life of training, a life of enduring her illness, a journey enduring the medallion.

She was powerful. The expulsion of power felt like it poured straight from her soul, and it immediately overwhelmed her.

She became the energy, unable to differentiate where her being started and ended inside of it.

An immense blast of light singed through the room without channel or direction, a brief warning of things to come.

Heat filled the air in billowing waves as nearby Venennin shrieked and peeled back before disappearing into the brilliance of the energy.

It covered everything, a sheer depth and power to the light that had been restrained for so long.

She’d never acted with such uncontrollable force, her body freed from the darkness and fueled by powerful intent to return everything around her to a more complete state.

She’d never imagined a healing blessing of this scale being cast. Everything was washed in it, Ryson’s bonds peeling free.

He grabbed the scythe and rotated it full circle.

He decapitated the Venennin behind him before the entire scene was awash with white and she lost sight of the end of the story.

The medallion pulsed, drawing her focus back to the present, and alerting her to an adverse reaction moments before she was blown backward with a shattering force.

Her head and spine crashed back against a pillar, excruciating pain singing across her chest as the medallion was torn from around her throat by the repulsion of the energies.

The wind howled as blinding pain seared down her body.

The entire world vibrated with an explosive combustion of saturated light and dark.

The air grew stale around her, causing her lungs to tighten as the bricks rippled in a wave at her feet.

The medallion hovered several feet away from her, and everything else was churning energy, dense like a howling storm.

Pain broke her vision into spots. Clea noticed the blood across her chest as the floor fell through. The gaping hole in the center of the room dragged the bodies of dead soldiers and wounded Venennin with it. Clea’s head pounded as the world sang, her body flush with pain and chaos.

The castle had been built by curses, and now it decayed from the inside out.

Stone pieces fell to her left and right.

The last remaining wall caved inward over her.

A broken half-column beside her stopped the wall’s descent.

Some of it fell off and tumbled into the growing void to her right.

Stone blocks slid from their places as if pushed from the inside.

They tumbled down and crashed into the huts and tents camped around the castle base .

Blinding light continued to flash over the chaos in the room, her eyesight wavering as her head throbbed from the sheer vibrancy of it. She’d shattered everything.

The bricks beneath her collapsed, and Clea was in too much pain to protect herself. She fell into the decaying pit that swallowed the rest of the world.

She felt a pair of hands catch her and release, and then another, drop, grab, and drop until at last, she fell hard into the rubble, gasping for breath in the darkness only with the hope that once the silence settled, she’d still be alive.

When silence finally came, suffering convinced her that death was on its way.

She refused to move, resting against layers of brick and a tilted column behind her.

Her chest, side, and back all throbbed. Clea’s attention was drawn to the worst of it, blood on her chest pouring through the layer of brick dust that had settled over her body.

She couldn’t see where the wound was. It singed across her chest and neck, and she gasped for air, convinced that she was seeing figures only to realize it was rubble reflecting the light of nearby torches.

Hands had grabbed her in repetitive motions, but there were no hands here, no living ones, and she wondered if she’d hallucinated in her terror, mistaken brick that had broken her fall for hands that had saved her.

As she lay gasping in the now quiet darkness, nothing else seemed to exist.

She closed her eyes and started to cry from the pain, hissing through her teeth as she pressed her head back against the column. Every breath hurt. There was so much blood. Her body wasn’t healing.

She was going to die.

“Clea,” a voice said.

She opened her eyes, and relief swept through her at the sight of Ryson kneeling in front of her. She gritted her teeth as he checked her neck, brushing the hair from her face as the blood on his hands marked a line across her cheek.

She tried to speak between each seizing breath, “It’s not”—she gasped sharply—“healing.”

“Breathe,” he said with complete and soothing calm, looping his hand behind her neck.

She listened, that single word was the most settled and collected thing in all the chaos.

In the wake of what calamity had just taken place, the weight in his voice became an anchor.

“There’s cien embedded in the wound,” he said.

Clea choked on one breath, but managed another until her breathing was quick but even. She focused on the feeling of his hand, keeping her eyes closed.

“You triggered an explosive reaction,” he said.

“Am I going to die?” she asked between breaths, unable to understand the severity of her own wounds. The pain was unlike anything she’d felt before.

“I can’t heal you,” he replied, and it bothered her that he hadn’t addressed her question. “Look at me,” he said.

She opened her eyes and there he was, still somewhat hidden in the darkness with eyes like the moon. Torchlight framed his face in flickering hues of red. She wondered in that brief moment how he seemed completely okay.

Where was Shiloh? Where were the other Venennin? The beasts?

“Cien can only act on malintent,” he said, “just as your ansra was bolstered so powerfully by your intentions to save someone else. I cannot heal you, unless my intentions are to ultimately cause some kind of harm as a result. Do you understand?”

She nodded, clutching his hand as she strained to breathe through her nose and gather herself. She hung on his words, his explanations an escape from the searing nature of the wounds.

“But it doesn’t mean you have to die,” he whispered.

Clea now noticed the medallion clutched in his other hand, and that there was something different in his disposition. Just as the abuses done to him had sent him into some other version of himself, the cataclysm had further resurrected those pieces.

The person in front of her was not Ryson.

He knelt before her, the medallion clutched in one hand, contained and controlled. He hadn’t avoided the damage; he’d embraced it, and while the others had suffered, for him it had been transformative.

“How badly do you want to exist?” he asked. The question had a peculiar weight, like he’d asked it a thousand times before, to a thousand other people .

Her breathing steadied, the pain still blaring through her as her mind reached a strange sense of clarity, instilled in her by the calm in his eyes.

“You’ve asked people that before,” she said, certain of that truth and yet unsure how she recognized it. She swallowed hard and wrestled her lungs down.

He didn’t seem surprised, replying with a simple, “Never a Veilin.”

The silence that lingered between them was filled with the presence of some dark gift, a bridge between their worlds. All she could think of were the bodies, torn open by the monsters.

“I don’t want to be a monster.” She shuddered.

“Never,” he said, seeming to have some sense of what she referenced. “Those bodies were planted with infected souls.”

“I don’t want a life full of suffering and hunger,” she whispered back, thinking next of the life of a Venennin.

His expression softened.

“What is your life now?” he asked, his eyes flickering over her again.

All she could see was red; she resisted the urge to glance down at her body.

He looked deeply into her eyes, as if speaking to her soul as he said honestly, “There isn’t anything wrong with wanting to live. It does come at a cost. ”

He had paid every price for his freedom. He had paid every price to have a life of his own.

The words unlocked a groaning door inside her, and deeper tears bloomed in her eyes. Not tears of sadness, but of release.

“Do you want to exist?” he asked again.

She nodded.

The silence that followed felt infinite.