Page 15 of Monsters in the Museum (Defenders of the Light #1)

Chapter fifteen

T he next morning dawned, gray and foggy, with Nora tramping down the sidewalk toward the park before the sun had fully risen. She was sure there were dark circles like bruises under her eyes, and she hadn’t even brushed her teeth, but she couldn’t bring herself to care. Nobody was hanging around the Bean this early in the morning to see her disheveled state anyway.

She mechanically stepped through the portal and weaved her way through the hallways of the Sanctuary to the training yard. It was odd to enter the space and not find Ezra waiting for her at the other end, eyeing her as he considered the best way in which to put her through her paces.

Nora positioned herself in the middle of the ring and fell into her usual warm-up routine of kicks and punches. Her limbs heavy with exhaustion, she pushed every hit as hard as she could. She imagined every blow connecting with the sickly gray Shadow from the plane yesterday until it dispersed into clouds of mist.

With every kick that she performed that didn’t meet her standards, she pictured Adam’s blue lips as he lay sprawled on the cabin floor. She kicked until the sweat ran into her eyes, burning until she could barely see, but still, her strikes weren’t strong enough. She spun around, hands flying to her sweat-matted hair as if to tear it out.

A polite cough echoed from the far end of the courtyard, and she froze. She lifted her eyes to find Antony perched on the edge of the fountain. In the bright sun, his softly curled copper hair shone like a new penny.

“Hello, Nora,” he greeted her, his voice warm.

“Hey, Antony,” Nora looked around, wondering how long he had been sitting there. To her surprise, a peacock was hovering around Antony’s feet, picking at what looked to be pieces of torn-up bread. “I’m sorry to bother you.”

“On the contrary, I just came out to feed Pags here, and I’d enjoy some company.” He turned his face up to look at the sky. “Although, I’m afraid if you’ve come out here to find shapes in the clouds, you are out of luck. We don’t have any clouds here.”

Nora followed his gaze upward and found that he was right. The sun was shining in a clear azure sky, and there wasn’t even the slightest wisp of cloud to be seen.

“It makes me sad that we never have clouds here. I always did have a good time pretending they were dragons or trying to spot Pegasus.”

Nora couldn’t help the smile that tugged at the corners of her mouth, and she made her way over to the fountain to perch on the lip next to Antony.

“Well, if you miss them that much, feel free to visit us in Chicago. We have more than enough clouds to go around there.”

“Maybe I will sometime.”

They enjoyed the sunshine in silence for a moment, but even the quiet company and the warmth could not banish the anxiety still gnawing at her gut.

“How do you find it in yourself to watch clouds go by when you are constantly at war with the Shadow?” she asked him eventually.

Antony dropped his eyes and tilted his head. “How do you mean?”

“I just mean that—well, Adam told me about what the Shadow can do, and then we were attacked on the plane and…” she struggled to articulate her thought, but pressed on anyway, “Well, it’s all so terrifying. How do I go on with my normal life when I know what’s out there, constantly endangering everything I care about?”

“I guess that’s the point, isn’t it?” Antony’s dreamy eyes grew serious. “If we don’t take the time to enjoy our lives then the Shadow has already won. By being afraid, we give it exactly what it wants.”

“But you march into battle to fight the Shadow. Isn’t fear and hostility part of the whole package when you’re in battle?”

“Well, yes,” Antony conceded. “But when your enemy is fear itself, you can’t just fight it with more fear. You can’t forget that we also express our connection to the Light through poetry and art and music. People don’t talk about that as much because it lacks the same drama as hacking Shadows to bits with a spear. Between you and me, though, I think it’s the more important part of what we do.”

“So, you are saying we can fight the doom of the world with… art?” It sounded a little ridiculous to Nora when she said it out loud, but Antony nodded seriously.

“And love and joy and hope. The best part is that normal people do it every day, and they don’t even know it. You fight the Shadow by putting so much of yourself into your work at the museum. All that beauty and history—it keeps the Shadows from taking over everybody’s minds.”

Nora considered. “I suppose that’s good, but… I could do more to fight back. To help stop the Shadow.”

Antony peaked at her out of the corner of his eye. “Then I’m sure you will. But don’t forget that it’s the little acts of beauty that add up to save the world.”

“You guys really take being warrior poets to the next level, don’t you?”

The twinkle returned to Anthony’s eyes as he responded, “Don’t forget dancers. We used to have the best dances here.” He turned his dreamy gaze back up to the sky as he talked. “Adam was always a fantastic dancer. It’s too bad that it has been so long since he’s had a partner.”

Nora was glad that Antony was looking at the sky when her cheeks turned hot, and not just from the sun.

“Well, it’s too bad I don’t know of any good dance partners for him then. The best I can do is the chicken dance,” Nora deflected.

Antony just hummed knowingly and continued to study the sky.

They remained in the courtyard for a while longer, Antony once again feeding Pags the peacock. Now though, Nora was not quite as overwhelmed by the threat she knew waited for her beyond the walls of the Sanctuary.

When Nora showed up for her training with Ezra on Monday, the sight that greeted her made her want to skip over to the big man and give him a giant hug. She contained herself, however, and settled for a brisk walk over to where he was standing with a spear clutched in each meaty hand.

“Today’s the day?” she asked by way of greeting, inclining her head toward the weapons in his hands: two long wooden spears.

Ezra nodded. “Don’t get ahead of yourself. Normally, you would train in pankration for a full year before you even got to hold a weapon, but considering the circumstances, I have been persuaded to make an exception. Knowing how to use a weapon sooner rather than later might prove to be… beneficial for you.”

Nora reached to snatch the weapon from Ezra’s hand, but he yanked it out of her reach.

“Don’t think you get out of your warm-up exercises just because of these. Show me your forms before I change my mind about letting you use this.”

Nora huffed but settled into her stance without further complaint. She progressed through her punches, moving on to her kicks, which she managed to complete without overbalancing even once. By the time she was done, and Ezra approached her with the practice spear in hand, she was bouncing on the balls of her feet in poorly contained anticipation.

“Calm yourself, young firecracker. It’s a weapon, not a piece of candy,” Ezra grunted, but Nora could still sense his pleasure at her excitement. It must have been many years since he had gotten the chance to train anybody.

He handed her the weapon, and when the smooth wood touched her palms, she smiled. This felt real. This felt like she could make a difference.

Nora blinked, and her hour of training was over. As Ezra instructed her to begin her cool-down exercises, she griped.

“We just covered the basic stances and grips,” she argued as she flopped down in the dirt.

“And that is a quick progression for the first day with a spear. You had barely learned the basics and now you have to adjust to accommodate three meters of wood. If we go much further, you’ll hurt yourself,” Ezra pointed out.

She began stretching her arms and hissed to find out that he was right. She may have gotten used to exertion, but her muscles seemed permanently knotted from the added weight of the weapon. As she moved to stretch her other arm, she silently thanked Ezra for starting her with a wooden training spear instead of the bronze ones traditionally used in combat by the Eteria.

Still, as she took stock of her aches and pains, she was pleased to find that she had accumulated fewer bruises today than she had in prior weeks. It seemed that training with a spear involved far less of her getting dumped on her backside. She mentally added another tally in favor of the weapon.

Over the next week, Nora continued to train with the spear. Her suspicions that this would go much better than her initial training were confirmed. She found that she was granted a surprising amount of confidence with its length in her hands, almost as if it were an extension of herself that she didn’t know she had been missing until now. The stories from her favorite childhood fantasy novels about heroes who slept with their weapons started to make a bit more sense to her. She only trained with her battered practice spear a few hours a day, and she had already grown attached to it. It did not seem that far-fetched to think that she would never want to be too far from her weapon if she had trained with it her entire life. With more practice, perhaps she could prevent herself from acquiring more injuries that would necessitate a trip to the emergency room. The scar on her thigh did have a roguish appeal, but she had no desire to repeat the experience.

More often than not, Nora found herself too invigorated from her training to consider going home immediately after. On those nights, she would wander to the library and pull tomes off the shelf, absorbing knowledge on every bit of history and combat she could get her hands on.

One evening, she found herself sprawled on the ground across the bronze symbol embossed on the floor, having given up on the hard stools and opted for a more comfortable, if slightly less dignified, posture. She was thumbing through a book she had found, bound in plain brown leather with no title on either the spine or cover. Curious, she peered at pages that were not neatly printed as if by a professional scribe, but instead hastily scrawled in a looping cursive. She blinked in confusion for a second before realizing that it was, in fact, a diary of sorts.

Reading on, she found that it was mostly a personal record of battle strategies from a commander, but she could not help but be drawn in by the small personal details she found in the accounts. The commander mentioned a fellow Warrior a few times, whom he seemed to disagree with while still respecting. He also mentioned his wife, who would sometimes accompany them on assignments as a battlefield healer.

Nora flipped through the pages rapidly, the battles becoming darker and more desperate. In later entries, the man began describing a council of leaders, meeting to discuss the future of the Eteria in the face of the growing Shadow. In the end, the decision of how to handle the conflict came down to a vote, which the man and his wife lost by a close margin of five to four.

Nora felt the last line in the entry describing the vote like a punch in the gut.

While I abide by the decision of the Eteria and will fight the Shadows to the last, I only pray that Seraphina and our unborn child will survive this confrontation and live to see days of peace once more.

With shaking hands, Nora flipped the page to find out what happened next. Nothing. There were no more entries.

Feeling a lump in her throat, Nora snapped the journal shut. She rose and stalked back to the shelf, intent on shoving it back where she had found it. She had learned enough of the tragic history of the Eteria for one night.

She stalked out of the library, meandering through the hallways pointlessly to burn off her sudden restlessness. She didn’t bother to remember where she was going, feeling as though getting lost would be a suitable distraction from her current melancholy. Improbably, she found herself in a set of corridors she did not recognize. How could she still find new places after the amount of time she had spent wandering? Maybe she was just skilled at getting lost.

Nora stopped, as one of the paintings on the wall caught her eye. It depicted a Warrior, dressed in full battle armor, like the set that Nora had stumbled across in the armory, and a bronze spear held aloft in their hand. The Warrior appeared to be glowing, the light emanating from them pressing against the edge of a sea of darkness. Leaning in closer, Nora saw a small plaque under the painting engraved with the title of the work: The Last Stand.

Something about the painting was hauntingly beautiful, and Nora stared at it for a long time before eventually wrenching herself from it to go home and get some much-needed sleep.