by Chloe Cullen
Those wounds currently felt like they were freshly open, exposed and festering in the wake of seeing Thoren again for the first time in over two years.
The day after he had found her in the Weary Fairy, Cori reigned in the animosity she felt towards the Legion. Because Thoren had been right, much to her chagrin. Even though she had run away from them, ignoring a direct summons from the Legion President was a dishonourable act, and her blood sang with the need to answer the summons, regardless of the terror she felt at going back to the Compound.
So, there she stood, the gates of the Legion Compound standing tall over her. Cori stood on the stone walkway outside of the gates, and watched the people mill about.
People walked past her, most disregarding her presence, and some glancing at her for a moment, as though they recognized the blonde hair, green eyes and high cheekbones.
It only took an hour by carriage ride to get from the East Markets to the Royal Quarter, which housed the Legion Compound and the Royal Palace. She hadn’t travelled far to start her life over, and she knew a small part of her had struggled on a deep level to let go of her old life entirely. Cori had always thought that she would one day return to the Compound to confront the nightmares she still had and to say goodbye to the person she had used to be. This was the first time Cori had been able to look upon the gates that lead to the only home she had even known before leaving, and the churn in her gut told her that she wasn’t yet prepared for that confrontation, that it was too soon.
But Maveron Swarbrik, Thoren’s father, had requested her presence, and after everything he had done for her family in the past, she would give him this one final meeting. Even if it were to tell him she would not consider her return to the Legion.
Cori had made the decision in the early hours of the morning to make the trip into the Royal Quarter. She had found it impossible to sleep, instead she had replayed her conversation with Thoren over and over in her head. She had known that she would be looking upon the large stone walls surrounding the Legion Compound with a heavy heart and a knot in her stomach, but she prepared herself and hired a carriage anyway.
Looking through the metal gates in front of her, Cori was surprised that amongst the fear, there was also nostalgia gripping her memories tightly, and that she wasn’t angered by them. Cori instead felt a deep sadness and a longing for a life she had once considered perfect, a life that had been filled with purpose and love.
She had belonged here once.
Cori watched as a man and a woman walked together past her, speaking to the guards momentarily, before the gates were opened and they moved through them. The way the female moved through the opening, her steps precise and with purpose, drew Cori’s attention. It was her clothing that caused stabs of yearning – neat black slacks under a grey tunic, just like what Thoren had been wearing the day before, and what Cori had used to put on every day for almost a year after she had passed her initiate training and taken the tattoo. The five-pointed starburst insignia on the back of her tunic, the symbol of the Gods and the Legion, was stitched as a pure white into the fabric, and Cori found herself staring at it. That symbol had been ingrained into her brain from her earliest memories and seeing it while standing on this street was the strongest reminder she’d had of her family in the longest time. The breath caught in her lungs, threatening to choke her.
Steadying herself, Cori followed the woman’s steps to the front of the gates. The gates stood tall above her, connected to the even taller stone walls that spanned the entire Compound. When she stood by the metal framework, a guard peered through them at her.
“Can I—” The guard broke off, his eyes narrowed with confusion as he looked her up and down. After a pause, recognition flared in his eyes.
Before he could utter a word, Cori said, “I have a meeting with the President.”
The guard opened his mouth, then closed it and nodded. He signalled to a fellow guard, and the metal gates opened from left to right in front of her.
She muttered her thanks to the stunned guard and forced her way forward until she was looking up at the main building of the Compound that sat on the top of a hill, surrounded by a thicket of trees.
Each foot forward on the grass beneath her feet brought forward old memories. Cori had grown up here, running up and down this very hill, hanging out with Thoren on the stable rooftops, or lounging underneath the statues of the Gods that towered over the grounds in the front courtyard.
She walked slowly up the grassy hill until she was walking over the white stones of the courtyard in front of the main building. She stood for a moment to admire the five stone statues of the Gods, each set out in a circle and facing inward. On the stonework at her feet, there were intricate lines carved there, which started at the base of each statue and met in the middle. She had always admired how the pattern created the starburst – the same that each Legionnaire wore proudly on their unforms. Cori had loved this spot, beneath the spread wings of Andromeda, Goddess of the Earth. Each God had wings carved into their statues, but Andromeda was the only one whose were on full display, making her the most beautiful of all in Cori’s opinion. Almost every day, she had lounged in this spot under her statue to study or joke around with Thoren and her friends. Almost everyone she knew had a God they had prayed to, and still did pray to, even after they had stopped answering all those years ago. Being of her bloodline, Cori had always preferred Andromeda.
Cori bowed her head to her likeness and the other Gods before continuing past them, through the series of bench seats and topiaries to come to the large front doors of the main building.
This was where Cori paused, willing steel into her bones so that she had the strength to walk through those doors and across the white marble floors that she had last seen covered in blood and broken bodies. She just needed to get past the front entrance, and she could manage from there. She would need to walk up the main staircase and would be able to find the rooms where the President and their families had resided for hundreds of years. With a jolt, Cori realised that Thoren would now be in the same rooms that she had once lived in when her father had been the President. She could hardly imagine what those set of rooms must look like now, with her own belongings probably either stored away or thrown out into the streets after she had abandoned them.
Still staring at the front doors, Cori only let the hesitation and fear hold her in place for one more second, and then in the next moment, she was pushing open the doors and her feet paused the moment they stepped through into the entrance way.
A convulsion of her stomach threatened the possibility of her being sick all over the white marble she now stood upon. Because suddenly, Cori could see the lines of dark, red blood smeared all over the ground, and she felt as though she were still that girl crawling on blood-stained knees and grasping the hand in front of her, shaking with grief. The scent of blood was strong, the taste on her tongue.
Forcefully blinking the images away, Cori wrenched her eyes upward from the flooring and forced herself onwards, steps becoming hurried to leave the memories far behind.
Cori practically ran up the stairs at the end of the entrance hall, and as she turned the corner leaving those floors behind her, she felt her lungs loosen, her breathing becoming easier.
As she kept moving down the corridor, all the woodwork, colours and paintings hanging on the walls snatched her breath away with memory. Cori averted her eyes from a line of pictures on the wall. They represented past Legion Presidents, and she knew that seeing her father in the last one would make her lose her composure.
Cori rounded another corner, and she spied a girl with long red hair walking towards her. A shock of recognition rippled through her as she took in the features of the girl. It was Soraya, a female in Thoren’s age group. Soraya had used to seriously dislike Cori.
This was going to be fun.
As they moved toward each other, Cori watched as Soraya’s eyes roamed over her body first and then found her eyes. Soraya stopped in
her tracks, face a display of shock.
“Corisande?” Soraya asked, her voice a little deeper than Cori remembered, but still remarkably familiar. Cori and Soraya had used to get along when they were a lot younger, but that had changed when adolescence began turning into adulthood for reasons that Cori still didn’t understand.
Cori walked the remaining distance between them and stopped in front of her. “How are you, Soraya?”
Then, in a twist Cori didn’t expect, a wide grin stretched across her face and Soraya shot forward to pull her into a tight embrace.
“Oh, my Gods, Cori,” Soraya said loudly next to her ear before pulling back, with a hand on each shoulder, “we all thought we would never see you again. Where have you been? What have you been doing over the past few years?”
Cori didn’t know which question to answer first, so instead she said, “it’s good to see you, Soraya, but I have a meeting with the President.”
The wide smile on Soraya’s face slipped a little, but she nodded. “I was just with him, he’s – I mean if you… well, you know where to find him.” Soraya’s face flushed red and she let go of Cori’s shoulder to stand back a step from her. That was when Cori saw it.
The grey tunic she wore was trimmed with a royal blue, a sign of being one of the Legion Five. Cori sucked in a sharp breath and unconsciously took another step away from her. Soraya looked down at her own chest, at the uniform she wore, the blue trimming that sang to the world she was an elite warrior. If Cori could force herself to look to Soraya’s wrist, she knew she would find a ‘5’ tattooed in black ink beside the ‘L’ that had already been there. Above the Legion insignia, her name was stitched into the fabric.
“You’re… one of the Five?” Cori asked a little weakly.
A small, sad smile appeared, and she reached up to touch the fabric of the grey tunic, fingers brushing the stitched five-pointed starburst over her heart. “Um, yeah. We had trials at the beginning of last year to replace Maxyn. I… uh, won.”
Soraya shifted uncomfortably as she spoke, and Cori was both stunned and impressed. The trials to become a Legion Five, to be deemed a warrior, were harrowing and dangerous. She had known the trials would occur shortly after Cori had removed herself from the Legion. She had been there to watch Maxyn die, after all, and each Five member was to be replaced with another within a year. She had heard when it had taken place, the trials were always the most newsworthy event whenever they occurred, but it had been during her darkest days when she still scrounged for survival on the streets. Before she had been saved by Adeline and the Weary Fairy. Cori had never asked after who had won.
Cori pushed down on the jealousy bubbling up, for the dream that she had held on to so tightly from such a young age and had given up when she had chosen to leave.
She forced a smile for Soraya, and bowed her head respectfully, because she was now, for all intents and purposes, of a higher ranking than Cori would ever be. The Legion Five were just a step below being Royalty and the Legion President, and that demanded Cori’s respect, so she gave it.
“Well done, Soraya. I wish I could have seen the trials to watch you take your place among the Five. You were always one of the best and deserve that recognition.”
Soraya looked to the floor, and Cori could swear she could see tears welling in her eyes, but when she looked back up, she was smiling sincerely and moved towards Cori again to place a hand on her arm.
“Coming from you that means a great deal to me. Thank you.”
Cori, still surprised Soraya hadn’t insulted her yet, just nodded before she stepped to the side to get around her. “I need to go, but it was nice to see a familiar face.”
“Likewise,” Soraya said, and gave a small wave before heading in the other direction.
Cori watched her go for a moment, confused by the jealousy still running through her veins, having thought she’d given up on those dreams. But she couldn’t linger on those feelings or she might never move from where she stood. So, Cori turned away from her and resolutely climbed the stairs at the end of the hallway and up four flights until she came to the topmost section of the building.
Without pausing or turning her head, Cori walked past the doors that had once held her rooms, and then she was there, standing in front of the doors that lead to the office and living quarters of the President.
The last time she had stood in front of these doors was before the worst moments in her life had happened. Cori had been happy, loved, on a path that she had desperately wanted to walk. She’d had a family, a purpose. Now, she was an orphan barmaid with no goals except to get through this day and this meeting with the new President.
Because she couldn’t think of a good enough reason to put it off any longer, she raised her fisted hand and knocked on the door, before placing her arms respectfully behind her back, the way she had been taught when standing before her betters.
It was only a few heavy heartbeats later that both doors were swung wide open, and standing in front of her was Maveron Swarbrik, the President of the Legion and successor to her own father.
There was a beat of comical silence, where Maveron’s mouth was open as if to greet the person at the door, and seeing Cori, was struck dumb. His mouth shut slowly and was replaced with a faint smile filled with many emotions that Cori struggled to identify.
Maveron had always been a handsome man, tall with a strong jawline that was resembled greatly by his son, Thoren. With his salt and pepper hair and kind grey eyes, Maveron was akin to a second father to many of the Legionnaires, including Cori.
“My dear, Corisande,” Maveron said, his voice bringing up many memories. He placed a tentative hand on her shoulder, and when she didn’t immediately shake him off, he gave her shoulder a squeeze and his smile brightened a little. “I have missed you.”
Cori looked down, working her jaw while trying to summon a response. She had an inexplicable knot of emotion working its way through her, as though if she were to speak, it would be less than intelligible. Cori hadn’t known what to expect of herself at this reunion, but an inability to speak had not been at the top of the list.
Looking back up to meet his eyes, Cori could only give him the smallest of smiles.
He nodded with understanding, as though he didn’t expect Cori to be chatty, and then he stepped back and gestured into the room beyond.
“Please, will you come in and talk with me a moment? I’m thrilled you were able to join me today.”
Cori moved past him and into the room. It looked and felt different from when her father had been there. The room was set out differently, with a large desk sitting in front of the floor to ceiling bookshelves that had used to sit in front of the windows. There were a series of sofas in the centre of the room surrounding a low table that hadn’t been there before. The wall to her right held a door that Cori knew lead onto the living area where her father had once slept. It all looked so different, felt so different, and yet it still smelled the same. The scent punched Cori right in the gut and made her want to double over in pain and breathlessness.
One thing that hadn’t changed was the luminous long sword mounted onto the wall next to the President’s desk. The Godsblade, a weapon from the time of the Gods, which had been forged in the fires summoned by Nixos himself. It sat, looking ethereal with it’s strange blue tinting to the steel, red stones glinting on the hilt.
After taking a few moments to breathe in deeply and to glance around the rest of the room, she turned back to find Maveron still in place by the entrance and watching her with a quiet sadness.
Cori cleared her throat before speaking. “Well, Thoren took the time to find me, and he all but dragged me here with his condescension, so…”
Maveron gave a low chuckle as he closed the doors behind him. Cori lowered herself into a chair nearest to the doors and folded her hands in her lap. She couldn’t help but feel somewhat awkward sitting in this room, with this man that she had used to know so well, and now didn’t know at all
. He didn’t know her at all anymore, either.
Cori’s eyes wandered to the bookshelves, taking in the coloured spines of the volumes while Maveron took a seat opposite her.
“It’s so good to have you here, Corisande.”
Cori looked over to where he sat. “Please, I prefer to go by Cori.”
“Yes,” he said with an agreeable nod, “I do know that. I fear I’m a little caught off guard. Even though I summoned you, I half thought you wouldn’t come.”
“I half thought the same thing.”
There was a small twinkle in his eyes, before his face turned more serious. “How are you?”
Because she couldn’t possibly provide an honest answer that made her come across as sane, she said, “I’m doing well. How are you?”
“I’m just fine, my dear,” Maveron answered, and a look passed across his face, as though he was very aware that they were both lying to each other, “will you tell me about the past two years? I have been very curious.”
Cori raised her brows sceptically. “Are you going to pretend you didn’t know where I have been? Which I find curious also. Will you tell me why you didn’t approach me for two years?”
“Ah,” Maveron said, shifting forward in his chair as though he found the question discomforting. His eyes moved around the room for a few moments before they rested again on Cori, looking grave. “Now, you know how close I was with your father. I made a promise to him long ago that I would always look out for you. So, yes. I was aware of what… activities you were getting up to in the Eastern Markets.”
Now it was Cori’s turn to avert her gaze, unable to meet his eyes.
“Cori, I never had any intention to approach you and demand a return or a de-branding from you. At least… not for a comfortable while.”