Page 48 of Light Locked #1
Hands
I N THE WAKE of the proposition lay a crossroads. Each path led to some version of relief, and yet what lay beyond were unknowns. The only difference was that in the fear of impending death, there was also the reality that she would walk the path alone.
She’d at last been given the freedom to make the choice she wanted, and now knew with great clarity what choice she would make.
She’d resented her mother’s martyrdom and yet here she was, preparing to make the same decision.
“I can’t,” she said at last, her breathing quieter now. Her pain was lessening, but so was her energy.
Ryson searched her eyes as if he could see the reasons behind her objection. “You’d be able to get the medallion back to Loda. You’d be able to see your home again. You’re afraid of death.”
She didn’t reply, searching his face in the impending silence. She couldn’t deny the strength of her doubts. Ryson had objected more than anyone to the life of a Venennin. Her parents hadn’t even told her about them.
Now, it was Ryson who, with the presented stakes, offered the option.
Was the process really so simple? Could it really be such a terrible life? If she did live, would it really be her that lived?
She wanted to live, and that resolve resonated through her body.
She half laughed and half choked in pain at the irony, tears flowing fully as she smiled at him.
Maybe he could already see the answer.
She didn’t want to die, but she would die anyway.
Despite Ryson offering the choice to her, she’d freely given it back.
It had been a mistake to go back and save him.
It had cost her everything, but she couldn’t regret it because she had made that choice in alignment with something inside herself that felt true.
She’d released control and burden of the outcome.
It had been reckless and it had been foolish, but at last it had been her.
She accepted that now with a lingering sense of peace, and closed her eyes.
Clea’s pain faded completely. She waited for consciousness to follow, but instead clarity and energy breathed through her.
She blinked, searching Ryson’s face with the question, feeling a renewed aliveness in all her parts. Her hand drifted to her chest but found no wounds or tenderness.
Ryson eased away from her and stood up, searching the darkness around them as Clea leaned forward and took a full breath .
She inspected her body, touching every bloodied spot to find it healed.
“Ryson?” she whispered in concern, but his gaze was still focused on the darkness.
“Tsk, tsk, tsk,” a wave of voices said in unison from the night.
Clea scrambled to her feet as they continued.
“I thought your soul had returned. Eyes crowned by the moon, pushing and pulling the tides. You proposition our path to the girl in the pattern of your old ways, and yet your killing has no class.”
A hand burst from the rubble and grabbed Ryson’s leg. It yanked him down before a massive claw of darkness swallowed him into the night.
“Ryson!” Clea now stood alone, with nothing but the scattered torches to give her any glimpses of their new enemy. Ryson’s words about healing her through malintent surfaced as she searched the darkness around her. She was completely revived but was unsure what threats would follow suit.
“Ryson?” she repeated, whipping around as the torches flickered and shapes shifted in the darkness. She extended her hands out, prepared to use her ansra again, and noticed the handprints on her arms. The bloodied prints across her body.
Her hands fell by her sides. She remembered falling, and the hands she’d once thought were hallucinations came to life as reality. When she looked up again, she was in the presence of an audience.
They stood up from the rubble and wreckage of the castle’s walls and bricks. Their bodies, busted, torn, and broken, rose with new life. Clea pressed her back against the column behind her. They were the dead soldiers and Venennin from the castle’s collapse.
“Ryson is sleeping now,” all the bodies said in unison, causing her to search the crowd frantically. “Nothing but fractured parts. Channeling cien was killing him, and yet he still could not resist the path to his former self.”
A silhouette materialized in the darkness beyond the bodies and swam toward her. As the stranger walked, she failed to hear the sound of his feet or his armor. His body was lanky, his frame thinner and taller than any man’s she had ever seen.
He wore strange clothes with long, tattered sleeves and a large black hood.
Upon his face was a peculiar mask of a pale human visage.
Markings painted the cheeks, and there were only small slits for the eyes and mouth.
The figure wore a chest plate, and slabs of metal and strips of cloth shaped his legs.
His joints swayed like a cloth being blown by a light breeze.
“I remain his most true and humble servant,” he continued, towering over her like a giant but casting no shadow. She noticed how the slit for a mouth formed a thin smile.
He reached forward, and the medallion twirled and spiraled in the web of his long fingers.
It sailed through the air, skipped on debris, and landed only a foot from her.
Clea scrambled to pick it up, clutching it to her chest. A nearby corpse presented her bag to her and she took it hesitantly, putting it over her back .
The bodies all whispered, “Tenderness bares bruises, Princess, but soft flesh absorbs impact. Two hard bones break one another, and there is nothing but pain left in the wake. This hollow world is falling apart at the seams. Its parts are clinging together by the heartstrings of your Veilin people. Keep your heart focused on lighter things. Its nectar is poison to a beast of hatred. Its beat is the savory rhythm of hope.”
When she didn’t reply, all the bodies turned, limping by her as they stumbled out from the concave pile of rubble. The masked figure followed, fading into the blackness of the night. They were leaving her there, healed and alive, with the medallion sitting in her palm.
Clea uttered a nearly inaudible, “Why?”
The masked figure stopped and turned to her. She felt that he saw her past and future, her dreams, and her fears.
He spoke as if engraining the next words into her heart.
“You have a sordid lineage, Princess of Loda. Your mother was a proud and fierce Veilin, and yet your grandfather was one of us. You’ve stumbled unexpectedly onto a great stage.
You would be surprised what forces are in your court.
I do not seek calamity, only that Ryson get his name back.
For that reason, Princess Clea Hart, I have let you live. I entrust the Deadlock to you.”
He turned to leave, floating over the procession of the dead. Their heads and arms hung as they walked, still bearing their wounds.
“Wait!” Clea exclaimed before the last of the dead marched over the hill of rubble. “Where are you taking him? ”
The last corpse turned, speaking the most clearly as she heard others echo the words behind it.
“To dig out the heart buried by his lashings. As he is now, he is poisonous to you. You must take his heart for yourself. It will secure your safety in the disasters to come, but be warned of what he might take in return.”
The words crippled her and she stood there, wanting to protest Ryson’s departure but caught in his warnings as she tried to decode them.
Clea tried to sort her scrambled self in the silence, standing in a broken, bloodied gown, alone among the fading torches. Recognizing a lingering urgency, she hiked up the slope of dislodged bricks and castle rubble, noticing Ryson’s scythe buried under the debris.
She scanned the area around her, half expecting to see another corpse on its way to retrieve the weapon, but there was no one left. Unable to leave it behind, and still too scattered to mull through the implications, she wrestled it free, hoisting it over her shoulder.
The weapon mirrored the weight of her thoughts as she climbed out of the collapsed castle and started north. Charting her path with the stars, the long walk to sunrise was governed by a peculiar silence. Several minutes in, she spotted blood in her path.
It was a small, organized spattering, much like the constellations that guided her. Determined, she proceeded north, only to find more, and then more, with no body.
She had the sense that the masked figure had marked her path for her with one of the corpses, confirming this when she found the corpse at sunrise, lying in a heap on the ground. No doubt, he had secured the safety of her final night.
Traveling for the rest of the day would bring her to the trade route Ryson had spoken of.
The recognition of her own safety did not coax out an immediate reaction. As Clea stared at the soldier’s corpse, face down in the earth, she recognized an emptiness and a sense of unfeeling they now shared. Her mind and emotions were locked in an entanglement of numb disbelief.
She removed her clothes, taking a moment to trace the bareness of her skin in the morning light. There was the faintest discoloration where her illness had once been, but the skin was smooth and new. She tossed her clothes aside and put on her travel clothes, sinking down against a nearby tree.
She watched the corpse as she methodically removed a stray, gold pin from her hair and rebraided it. With every practiced movement of her fingers, new memories flashed through her brain, the events repeating themselves over and over.
As she continued to braid, her hands started to shake. Her heart raced without provocation as an overwhelming surge of emotion poured through her. Panting, she inhaled through her nose, pushing the breath back through her mouth as she released her braid and clutched her knees close to her chest.
The body and her discarded clothes were the only evidence of all that she’d experienced the night before.
The birds chirped behind her as sunrise washed over the clearing.
Fingers of morning light turned the earth into blooms of lush grass.
The corpse became a bed of white lilies.
Her bloodstained clothes transformed into moss.
They were part of the forest now. Clea expected the light might transform her as well. She was relieved when it did not.
Her mind flew to the foretelling of her death behind the golden door, and she couldn’t shake the sensation that it had been her fate to die in the castle last night.
She had little energy to make sense of it all now, but she knew without a doubt that the events had changed her forever.