Starfall (The Fables of Chaos Book 1)

by Jackson Simiana

  Half a dozen cressets had been lit against a single wall of the corridor along her left side, giving each cell a small amount of light.

  Most were empty, but a solitary guard was stationed outside the last cell along the line.

  The cell Katryna knew she would find Trish in.

  Katryna approached the Infinity Guard who, despite having to keep watch over such a dank, dark place, stood at the ready with his shoulders back and spear in hand.

  She peered into the mostly empty square-shaped cell. All that was inside was a small cot, a wash bucket of murky water, and old straw spread out across the cold stone.

  A shadowy figure was curled up in one corner, clothes soiled, ripped, and stained with dried blood.

  It was Trish.

  The handmaiden’s usual golden, shining hair was frizzled and dirty, and hanging over her face like a wild person.

  “You may leave, soldier. Take the night off,” Katryna said to the Infinity Guardsman.

  The soldier tilted his head, his helmet clinking. “M’lady, I have been ordered to keep watch over this prisoner until my replacement arrives.”

  “And who do you think gave that order?” Katryna joked.

  “Y-… you, m’lady?”

  Katryna winked at the man. “Do you have a wife, soldier?”

  “Aye, m’lady. A tavern maid in hightown, name’s Prudence.”

  Katryna pulled a small purse from her belt filled with gold marks, easily more than the man’s monthly wage. “Go surprise your wife at work. Take her out somewhere expensive, somewhere special.”

  The guard appeared sceptical, hopping from one leg to another. “Are you sure? We aren’t supposed to take bribes.”

  “This isn’t a bribe. It’s a reward from your princess for working down here so attentively.”

  The guard took of his helmet. He wasn’t as ugly as Katryna had initially suspected, given his gruff voice. He stroked his beard and took the purse after a moment of deliberation.

  “This is a very generous gift, m’lady.”

  “Enjoy it,” Katryna said, patting him on the shoulder.

  The guard smiled back at her before bowing, putting his helmet beneath his arm, and grabbing his spear before leaving back up the stairs that Katryna had come down.

  Katryna approached the metal bars, peering in at the huddled-up form in the corner. She used her torch to light the cell in a dim warmth, setting the bucket of water down before her.

  The smell was terrible, like decades-worth of grime and waste. It made her cough with disgust.

  “You get used to it,” Trish mumbled from out of the dark.

  “Lucky for me, I don’t have to.”

  “Why are you here?”

  Trish did not raise her head, keeping it buried between her arms and knees with her blonde hair hanging down.

  Katryna took a moment to collect her thoughts, ensuring she kept her emotions under control. She ran through how she felt, what she had been thinking on the way down to the dungeon.

  Why did I come down here?

  The light from the flaming torch in her hands flickered from an unfelt current of air.

  “You’re going to tell me where that boy’s mother is,” Katryna said slowly yet sternly.

  Despite their best efforts, no one had been able to find any valuable information on the stable boy’s kidnapped mother. Trish had been completed hysterical since being arrested, refusing to talk to anybody.

  As far as Katryna knew, Trish was the only person left alive who knew where Sniff’s mother was trapped.

  Trish snickered quietly to herself. “And what makes you think I’m going to tell you anything?”

  “Because,” Katryna said, “I have something you want.”

  Trish slowly looked up, peering through the thick strands of her greasy hair with piercing, forest-green eyes.

  Katryna unlocked the cell door with a ring of keys, holding the door slightly ajar.

  “You tell me everything, and you get to walk.”

  Trish wiped her nose. Katryna had never seen so much dirt underneath her fingernails before.

  “What’s the catch?” Trish said.

  “No catch.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “I don’t care if you believe me.”

  Katryna focused on staying firm and cold with the woman she had once called her best friend, reminding herself who she really was, the atrocities she had committed.

  But she needed to find Sniff’s mother. She was an innocent hostage in all of this, and she owed it to the boy for coming forward to her with the truth.

  Trish smirked before biting some skin on one of her fingers. “You’ve always been week, Kat. You know that?”

  “Where is the boy’s mother?”

  “I spent half my life trying to teach you. To make you strong, to try and make you into a capable woman so that you could take back what was yours from your treasonous-”

  Katryna bashed her fist against one of the iron bars, creating a sudden bang which made Trish jolt.

  “Where… is… she?”

  Trish shut her mouth in defiance, turning away.

  Katryna huffed. “This will be your one and only chance at freedom, I can assure you. The people want you forcibly poisoned, as a sort of poetic justice. The High Sword claims that regicide in Camridia is punishable with hanging and beheading. Others, however, claim that such punishments are too… quick. Too painless. I am inclined to believe them myself.”

  Katryna noticed a slight twitch in some of the small muscles in Trish’s face. For the first time since their childhood, Katryna could see a look of fear overtaking her usually calm, collected demeanour.

  She is afraid to die. Afraid of the pain.

  “There is nothing left for me anymore,” Trish said rather sombrely, bowing her head down.

  “Please,” Katryna said unexpectedly.

  She felt her eyes beginning to sting as her stomach-churning emotions began to take the better of her. She clenched her fists as she stared at the woman she once would have died for.

  “Please, Trish. After everything we went through, everything we suffered together. Don’t make me do this. I don’t want you dead, even after everything you did. Just… tell me where Sniff’s mother is, and you will be given an escort out of the kingdom. You will never be allowed to return, but you will have your freedom.”

  Katryna wiped her tears away with a sniffle. Trish took a moment, seeming to consider the offer. She breathed in the stale, shit-smelling air, felt the dirt and filth smothering her skin, and the cold biting at her bones.

  “Tell me, Trish. Where is she?”

  Trish appeared to be getting more anxious by the second, perhaps from the realisation of her impending fate. She bit her lip nervously before deciding to respond.

  “The bitch is dead.”

  At first, Katryna thought she had misheard, yet the burst of sudden rage that was surging through her muscles could not be denied. She found her lips speaking before her mind could come up with something to say.

  “How?”

  “Chained her wrists and ankles to blocks of stone, the night we arrived back in Ravenrock. Figured she was a liability. So, Edrick and I threw her into Blackstone Rush under the moonlight.”

  Trish spoke with cold calculation, an emotionless tone. The action she described appeared to have no effect on her whatsoever.

  In fact, she almost sounded proud of it.

  “She’s… she’s dead?” Katryna repeated, unable to comprehend what she was hearing.

  She felt the loss real hard, for Sniff. All this time he had believed his mother to be alive and had participated in the attacks on her family only to save her.

  Katryna, however, realised that there would have been nothing anyone could have done. The cold-heartedness of Trish and Edrick’s actions could realistically only point to one outcome.

  But hearing it for real sealed the awful anticipation once and for all.

  There we
re no words she could say. No way to possibly comprehend or to empathise. There was only the pure hatred, the anger, the guilt, and the awful truth that in some sick way, Trish had already won.

  Katryna looked down at her shoes, shaking her head. “I knew there would be no saving you.”

  Katryna slammed the cell door shut. Trish leapt up from her huddled-up position in the corner of the cell.

  “What are you doing?” Trish said angrily as Katryna locked the cell door with her ring of keys.

  The clinking of the metal echoed down the long, torch-lit corridor as Katryna hooked the keys back around her belt. Trish held on to the bars in each hand, sticking her face between the gap to sneer at Katryna. Her greasy blonde hair was swept aside, her old scar down the side of her face clear as ever.

  “You liar,” Trish hissed.

  Katryna took one step back, crossing her arms calmly behind her back and staring back at her old friend.

  “You said you’d let me free if I told you,” Trish said. She began to thump her fists against the metal.

  Katryna nodded. “You were right about one thing, you know?”

  Trish grimaced, before tilting her head as she awaited an answer from her captor.

  “You did teach me. More than you care to realise, and perhaps more than I care to admit. But now, I can finally have some peace, knowing you will be down here forever. My people have suffered enough. My family has suffered enough.”

  Katryna spoke without a hint of feeling, taking the handle to the bucket of water she had brought down to the dungeon before turning to leave.

  “Wait… wait!” Trish begged, but the princess did not turn back. “You can’t leave me like this! You can’t leave me down here!”

  “I think I have decided an appropriate punishment for your crimes,” Katryna said. “The rats will be justice enough.”

  “Get me out of here!”

  With Trish banging against the cell door, hurling all sorts of curses and threats to anyone who could hear it, Katryna approached the nearest lit cresset. She lifted the bucket of water before tipping some of it out over the flames and fuel.

  The fire was immediately extinguished with a sizzle.

  It was then that Trish began to panic, her horrific fate becoming starkly real.

  Katryna went up to the next cresset on her way to the exit, dousing the light as she had the first.

  “Wait! Please, don’t!” Trish howled, interspersed with cries of horror.

  At the top of the stairs, waiting where he had been told to wait and listening in on everything that had been said was a teared-up boy with a torch of his own.

  It was the stable boy, Sniff. The boy cried to himself, his lip trembling hearing the horrific truth of his mother’s fate.

  Finally, both he and Katryna had the answer they had feared, but the answer they needed to hear either way.

  Katryna did not reach the stairs leading up from the dungeon until all the cressets had been extinguished, her bucket of water finally empty.

  She could feel the weight she had been burdened with since returning home begin to finally lift from her shoulders. It was almost as if, despite knowing that she would never be free from her traumas, she could finally begin to come to some sort of a resolution.

  Willem’ death. Her mother’s horrific abuse. Her father’s neglect. None of it could be changed, but she could finally lay some of it to rest.

  Some closure was better than none.

  Sniff looked at Katryna, wiping a tear from his cheek and nodding. Katryna patted the whimpering boy on his shoulder, scrunching her face up as his raw pain transferred to her.

  Katryna tossed the empty water bucket down the corridor which had been completely consumed by a terrifyingly deep darkness, before leaving the dungeon with the stable boy at her side.

  Katryna and Sniff took the only torches left.

  Trish was completely enveloped in blackness, alone for the rest of time with no one but the demons she had sown and the starving rats that would soon return for their feast.

  Chapter 46 - The Way Ahead

  Tomas shuffled forwards in a great deal of pain with Lynn around his arm, helping her to remain steady as they travelled down the frozen river.

  His legs were stiff and aching, and the impact to his back that he had suffered in the fall was excruciatingly painful. Yet he pushed on, determined to get himself and Lynn as far away from jeopardy as he could.

  Lynn was nearly a deadweight. Her body was weak, and mind was floating in and out of consciousness. After having sipped the black liquid to fight the giant spiders, Tomas was fearful of what was happening to her body.

  He pictured the twisted, blackened forms of slop from the Repository, malformed into barely distinguishable horrors after being exposed to Blight.

  For all he knew, she had signed her own death sentence.

  Is she going to die, all to save me?

  The idea was repeating in Tomas’s mind. He was feeling even more angry towards her than he had previously. This girl’s fate meant that Rilan had died, and now he was responsible for taking care of her. He felt mad that she had not run when he told her to.

  The conflict in his head was waged as he trudged through the snow-covered ice along the ravine, staggering and struggling to keep Lynn from collapsing every few seconds until the point of near-exhaustion.

  When dawn finally arrived and the sky shifted from black to a brilliant violet colour, Tomas was beyond relieved. The warm rays of sunlight were a welcome blessing upon his wind burnt, frigid skin.

  The light fought the shadows of the previous night away. Finally, they could take a moment to catch their breath.

  Tomas carried Lynn to a steeper part of the ravine’s bank, beneath an overhang of large tree roots that had broken through the earth and created a sort of protective shelter.

  He leant Lynn up against the wall of dirt and rock before sitting down himself.

  There was so much, too much, to comprehend. The attacks against such horrific abominations, losing Rilan, Landry and his squad, his village being destroyed, his father who was now probably dead, and of course, Lynn’s actions to save his life.

  He gazed over to the fire-haired girl, her chin against her chest and eyes still rolling around as she sucked in sharp breaths of the chilly morning air.

  She had not been sick for some hours, yet her skin had grown as pale as the ice on which they sat upon. Her veins were still bulging, far darker than usual as if her very blood had transformed into shades of maroon and black.

  But Tomas was hoping that the most life-threatening part of the reaction had passed. He could not keep carrying her like this.

  As her head continued to wobble, Lynn’s tricorn hat fell into her lap. Tomas did not want her getting any colder. He reached over, taking the unique hat, and placing it back on her head.

  Lynn’s eyes shot open, tinged with broken blood vessels. Suddenly awake, she grabbed a hold of Tomas’s wrist so fast that he didn’t even see her arm move. Her grip was tight, so tight that he growled in pain.

  Unnaturally tight.

  Lynn, upon hearing his groan, quickly recognised that she was not in danger and released him.

  “What was that for?” Tomas shouted, rubbing his wrist.

  “Sorry, I…” Lynn murmured, trailing off in thought.

  “That hurt, you know?”

  Lynn looked down at her forearms, marvelling at the blackened blood vessels beneath her pale skin. She began to feel her face with her fingertips, as if she were assessing herself.

  “Where are we?” Lynn asked.

  “I carried you down the river all night. I don’t know where we are,” Tomas said.

  “You… you carried me?”

  Tomas shrugged. “Not like I had a choice.”

  “You could have left me.”

  Tomas huffed. “It was the least I could do, after what you did for me.”

  Lynn gazed down at the vial of Blight still hanging from her neck, noticing t
hat its volume had decreased. It all seemed to come back to her at once.

  “Oh… of course.” She released the vial, scrunching her face up as she surveyed their surrounded and sorted through her many thoughts. “Well, it appears you saved me once again, peasant boy.”

  Tomas nodded graciously, looking his new companion up and down with an air of mistrust and concern.

  “I guess we’re even, then,” he said.

  Some nesting birds in the pine trees lining the ravine were beginning to rise with the sunshine, singing a symphony of harmonic tunes to each other to end the stark morning silence.

  Lynn was still preoccupied with checking herself over. She examined the blackened skin on her fingertips and her dark veins around her body. It was as if she were exploring her body for the very first time.

  “So, what happens to you now?” Tomas asked.

  “To be honest, there is no way to tell.”

  “You are Blight-stricken now, aren’t you?”

  Lynn bit her lip. “Yes.”

  So, it was true then, Tomas realised. She had made some sort of sacrifice to save him from those horrific giant spiders.

  “Will you die?” Tomas said. Despite being straight-faced, his tone was rather solemn.

  “I only took a sip,” Lynn said. “If I were to have had an adverse reaction to the Blight, I would have died within minutes.”

  “But instead, you…” Tomas gestured with his hands, imitating the ripping of the limbs from the spiders’ bodies which he had witnessed.

  Lynn nodded. “Magister Prime Impatus’s hypothesis was correct, then.”

  Tomas recalled the conversation he had had with Lynn when they were locked away in the cell beneath the Repository. She had described the experiments the leader of the Imperium was conducting on those children.

  “The Magister Prime told us all that drinking a few drops caused strange, powerful, unpredictable changes in his own body. So, it may depend on the host, and the dosage of Blight that one drinks.”

  It was an incredible story that Tomas would never have believed, but after seeing it first-hand, he was without a doubt certain that Lynn had been telling the truth all along.

  Tomas stared down at his scruffy-looking shoes. “I’m… I’m glad you didn’t die, for what it’s worth.”