“Are you all right?!” my wife asked frantically.
“Yes, love,” I said in a rush, “perfectly intact. Arivor though...
“We're going to need a healer.”
“What...?” Lirilith began. “No, never mind. I'll get Reive.”
“Hurry!” I shouted after her before returning to the depths of my lab.
I folded beside my friend, determined to be there when he eventually awoke. I laid my hand on his chest, hoping that the physical contact would, at the very least, comfort his unconscious mind.
A dim glow rose in the room, growing brighter with every second. As soon as I noticed it, I snatched my hand back and scrambled away from the epicenter of the previous explosion. Immediately, the lab plunged into the murky half-light that normally illuminated it. In the dim illumination, I frantically searched for the source of that terrifying white light and eventually landed on Arivor’s face.
The burns, the most critical wound on my friend, had vanished. I glanced at my hand, to the body, and back to my hand again. The scientist in me woke. I had a theory, and I needed to test it. I knelt next to Arivor and hesitantly placed my hand on his head.
And nothing happened. I flushed. How arrogant was I to think that I’d somehow fixed the burns? Most likely, I’d misjudged how bad Arivor’s wounds were. Even so, my friend needed help, and I hoped Councilman Reive, the district's most renowned healer, came quickly.
The glow returned! Below my hand, a white light spread over the skin and washed over Arivor's head. As it passed, hair sprouted from his scalp, and his missing ear regrew. The blood sloughed away from his eyes, and I chuckled in nervous wonder.
It reached his cheek, and I shrieked. Agonizing fire scorched across my face as it was broken, burned, and cut. It melted my skin away, and acid consumed my bones.
When it was over, I fell away, shuddering. My friend's perfectly normal face shifted toward me before I lost consciousness for the second time that hour.
Chapter Twenty
I sprinted down the familiar streets of my neighborhood, passing the burning houses and mutilated corpses of my neighbors and friends. Turning the corner onto my street, I skidded my hands against the opposing wall before pushing off again in a dead run. I reached our home and threw open the door, hoping against hope that since it looked so untouched on the outside that I would find Lirilith and the baby safe and sound.
Our front room was dark and quiet, everything in its proper place. Lirilith's paintings hung on the walls and her knitting needles lay on the table, the row of the baby cap she was working on halfway done. I raced down the hallway and up the stairs, searching every room of the house and discovering no one home and nothing disturbed.
Satisfied that all was well here but worried that my two women were missing, I almost missed the back door cracked open into our cramped little garden. I hesitantly reached for the knob and nudged it open.
The fires hadn't quite reached our street and so our meticulously crafted garden was still in perfect condition except for the various pots near the door that had been smashed to pieces.
A crumpled cloth covered a tiny body lying under a blood stained wall. It lay behind a tree trunk, just out of view of my beautiful wife laying in the ripped up grass and dirt. She’d been bound and gagged, crumpled around the sword I’d lost in the tragedies following my failed experiment. Mud caked her face, and her skirts had been ripped apart, underclothes around her ankles.
I immediately knew intellectually that there was nothing that I could do for the love of my life. The blade had entered her near her midsection and swept at a sharp downward angle through her back. If I was lucky, it had missed her organs and passed straight through, but even in that case, there would be high blood loss. More likely, the stomach itself had been ripped through, leaking acid into her body cavity, or possibly her intestines had been punctured. Either way, sepsis was probable, especially considering that I’d no way to know how long it had been since the injury.
I shoved the logic aside, dropping to my knees beside her. I fought my sudden and overruling instinct to use everything at my disposal to make her whole again. I lifted my hands in despair, remembering all of the tragedies that had befallen those that I'd helped since that failed experiment so long ago. Against my better judgment, I called forth that strange power I'd used to fix others in the past. A glow coated my hands, and at that moment, I heard muffled yelling through my wife's gag. Shaking my head distractedly, I hurried to loosen her bonds.
“Don't, Erianger,” she gasped, voice faint from shock and pain. “I don't want that.”
Tears blurred my vision, and I scooted back against a tree trunk, carefully pulling her head into my lap and making sure not to jostle the sword sticking through her. I knew better than to remove it. If a healer was nearby, ready to stitch Lirilith back up and flush her system with what passed for healing drugs in this city, then maybe I’d have made her endure the discomfort of withdrawing the blade. Alone, however, I had none of those things. Why cause her more pain?
“You're going to be fine, love,” I whispered to her, lying through my teeth and brushing my fingers through her hair.
She reached a rope burned hand up to weakly caress my face before letting it fall again.
“You… never were... a great liar,” she said, each breath gasped with increasing rapidity.
“I'm so sorry,” I murmured. “I should have been here.”
“You were... doing what was needed.”
I sat there with the love of my life while the sun went down, listening to her pained gasps and increasingly delirious mumblings. During her last moment of clarity, she grasped my hand with fierce strength.
“Take care of our child!” she whispered severely.
My vision blurred, and my eyes unwillingly passed over the spot where our precious girl's body was hidden from view.
“I will, love,” I said brokenly, stroking her hair. “I will.”
Reassured, she relaxed and gazed off into space.
“You have to forgive Arivor,” she mumbled, breathing shallowly. “He's dealing with a grief neither of us has ever known. I'm sure he didn't mean for it to go this far.”
I stayed silent and kissed her forehead. She was gone when I sat back up, eyes staring into nothingness.
“Sorry, love, that's a promise I can't make.”
I curled in a tight ball, encircling the object of my sorrow, and tried to keep the deep pit of pain in the center of my being from spilling out.
Raimie had never sailed before. The pitch and yaw of the ship below his feet, exacerbated by near constant storms, was an entirely new experience. He didn’t like it.
For the four days of their journey, he huddled in a corner, nausea preventing him from moving. At the end of the first day, a crew member kindly tossed a bucket at his head, promising a litany of undesirable consequences if his sick contaminated more of the ship.
The second and third day came and went in terror. The flash and crash of lightning and thunder peppered night and day, some coming so close together as to be instantaneous. If Raimie hadn’t been so concentrated on keeping his stomach under control, he might have had the energy to be frightened.
The fourth day passed, and the clipper’s rocking calmed, allowing him to drift into something deeper than fitful slumber. About midway through the night, however, soldiers jostled him and Eledis awake and clapped irons on their wrists and ankles. A wagon similar to the one they’d ridden in Sev awaited them on the dock. Around them, a massive city rose, shrouded by darkness.
Raimie was too exhausted to indulge his curiosity as the wagon bobbed down the city’s streets. A huddled ball had become his natural state. He wouldn’t have seen much even if he’d wanted to look. Daira, the capital city of Ada’ir was blanketed in a thick mist, and the black of night made sure that the strange, glass enclosed lamps on every corner transformed into fuzzy, balls of light whose reach could only extend so far before fading.
After an indeterminable len
gth of time, the wagon halted in front of an iron grated door dwarfed by the towering stone wall it allowed passage through. Dread clawed up Raimie’s throat at the sight of the hole behind the bars that led further into the earth.
As he stumbled from the cage, he craned his head to take in the colossal towers peeking above the wall’s distant parapets. He couldn’t take in much than a glimpse before he was roughly herded through the door and down a long hallway lined with tiny, barred rooms.
Eledis and Raimie were afforded separate cells, although that wasn’t much of a concession considering the extreme lack of privacy. After their manacles were released, Eledis immediately found the softest patch of stone flooring in his cell and dropped onto it. His snores soon reverberated throughout the prison.
When the guards had deserted them to the silence of the prison, Ramie considered joining his grandfather, but he wasn’t sure when he’d next be alone and in full faculties. He silently called for Bright and Dim.
“What did you do to land in prison?”
Raimie hadn’t seen Bright since the Withriingalm, too ashamed and afraid to find out what had offended the splinter so. Dim had shown up on and off since then, but he was mostly withdrawn and sullen, a startling change from his past demeanor.
Whatever had caused the two’s guise to shatter after he’d closed the tear near Allanovian seemed to have fixed itself. If anything, Bright and Dim looked more vibrant than ever, but Bright’s disapproval radiated from him so strongly that Raimie couldn’t meet his gaze. Dim, on the other hand, appeared ecstatically pleased to find his human in a cell.
“I followed my prescribed destiny and my grandfather’s guidance, and it attracted my paranoid queen’s attention,” Raimie murmured in answer to the question.
“Your queen?” Dim asked with astonishment. “Aren’t you supposed to be royalty in your own right?”
“That’s what everyone says,” Raimie murmured quietly. “Not that I take that assertion seriously or that it would do me much good right now. We’ve lost the only scrap of evidence we had to prove whatever weak claim to royalty we might possess. In any case, I doubt an ancient sword would change the Queen’s mind about executing us. Shadowsteal wouldn’t help even if it hadn’t been taken.”
“Shadowsteal?!”
Both Bright and Dim lurched toward Raimie, hands reaching hungrily for him.
“You had Shadowsteal? And you lost it?”
Raimie took a step back, and his shoulders hit metal.
“It’s not lost! The Queen’s personal guard confiscated it. I’m sure it’s around here somewhere!”
The explanation calmed the splinters, if only slightly.
“Why didn’t you hide it?” Bright asked.
“Hide it where exactly? Our captors searched us pretty thoroughly. Besides, it wasn’t on me,” Raimie replied irritably. “I gave it to Eledis shortly after I found the damn thing. Shouldn’t you two know this already, what with the whole parts of all powerful entities and all?”
They exchanged an unreadable glance.
“We’re only small pieces of our separate wholes,” Bright explained as if to the family’s idiot child. “When we’re not incorporated into the whole, we can only act as conduits and as aspects of them. We don’t have access to their full extent of power or knowledge.”
“And now we know the source of our communication problem,” Dim added. “Like an idiot, you gave away one of the two things that might have let us work together fully. Shadowsteal is –zzz-“
Instead of throwing a temper tantrum at the interruption, Dim merely closed his mouth and waited, fully aware from experience that he’d regain the power of speech soon enough.
“That’s all well and good,” Raimie said in the meantime, “but it won’t help if I can’t snatch Eledis and myself from the Queen’s clutches. I don’t suppose you’ve any helpful hints for getting out of a metal box.”
Bright shrugged, but Dim nodded emphatically. Nothing but buzzing emerged from his mouth, however, when he attempted to explain. Obviously frustrated, the splinter moved on to mimicry.
The guise covering his hands and arms vanished, leaving behind nothing but the dark hidden beneath. Sliding his black, mist-like hands between the bars of the cell, Dim pretended to pull them apart.
Raimie grasped what the splinter was trying to convey, but he doubted that he could copy the example. He’d caught that pulling from Daevetch made him immensely stronger and more powerful, and it wasn’t too difficult to believe he could pry the metal apart when empowered like that. The idea that he could actually draw the power such a feat would require was a little improbable, however, considering he’d only ever pulled primal energy to himself one time when he wasn’t in a heightened state of combat or general agitation.
Well, it couldn’t hurt to try again. Raimie felt for the seething mass of angry energy distantly raging somewhere behind Dim. He hesitantly teased on an end, expecting the same absence of reaction he always encountered when his ire wasn’t raised, and he wasn’t disappointed.
“Oh my me, stop asking nicely!” Dim groaned. “Sometimes I’d swear you’re exclusively his human.”
He jerked a thumb at Bright.
“How do you suggest I do it?” Raimie asked sarcastically.
Dim buried his face in his hands.
“I’m dealing with a simpleton,” he said through his fingers. “Think about what I represent. Do you think it’s more likely to respond to a wimpy plea for help or to a demand for what’s rightfully yours?”
“Oh.”
Raimie delved into the point behind Dim once again, but instead of attempting to tease it out like before, he simply yanked on it with the expectation of immediate compliance. Darkness flowed over his hands and arms like a sheath, as, for the first time, the energy eagerly came when called.
The exhilaration of holding immense power brought a manic grin to Raimie’s lips. Taking hold of the bars of his cell, he tugged them apart like they were made of sand, creating a hole large enough to slip through.
He stepped out of his cell and jauntily strolled down the hall it bordered.
“Release the leftovers,” Bright quietly suggested.
“Why?” Raimie asked with a smirk. “Are you jealous?”
“No, he’s right, much as I hate to admit it,” Dim concurred while making a face. “You’re still a baby when it comes to using us. The emotional carryover will affect you to a higher degree.”
“Such as loudly striding down a hallway that could quickly fill with prison guards without a care,” Bright added.
Reluctantly, Raimie released his hold on Daevetch, his overconfidence quickly replaced by dread and dismay. What did he think he was doing? He’d only been treated with a modicum of dignity up to this point because he’d behaved. Yes, he’d have to break some rules in order to have any chance at escape, but he could be smart about it. No need to immediately alert the guards to the fact that he could get out of his cell.
From that point on, he crept down the corridors of the prison, ducking around corners and into rooms whenever patrolling guards came near. He quickly departed the cell block, passing into a hall lined with room after room of underground storage.
When no simple means of escape quickly revealed itself as he traversed the unfamiliar hallways, Raimie’s anxiety spiked as he considered the possibility that he and Eledis were stuck here. Fear clawed at his guts at the uncertainty of the Queen’s plan for punishing them.
He glanced at Dim calmly trailing behind. With the power that splinter allowed Ramie access to, he could easily escape, and he might be able to get Eledis out too. He’d reveal the fact that he was a primeancer to the old man in the process, however, and he didn’t think Eledis would appreciate the fact that his grandson, the person he’d pinned his hopes on, could play with magic, something he despised.
Lost in thought, he almost wandered straight into a patrol. At the last minute, he ducked into a tiny, unlit room. He was at an impasse. He could c
ontinue exploring, risking discovery of the hole in his cell’s bars, or he could go back, risking the chance that the Queen decided to execute them in the early hours of the morning.
His splinters made the decision for him.
“We should tell him,” Bright whispered to Dim.
“Are you stupid?!” Dim harshly whispered back. “If he does as he did before, we’ll be cut off again. I don’t know about you, but I despise forcing my way onto this plane of existence.”
“If we don’t tell him, you fool, he could decide to destroy us. You don’t think he’ll be upset if he finds out we hid it from him?”
“He won’t find out if you don’t tell him in the first place! So keep your enormously wide trap shut, you tattle!”
Raimie squeezed his eyes closed and shook his head, giving up on listening for the next patrol.
“You two know I can hear you, right?” he murmured.
The silence behind him spoke volumes.
“Of all the times for lack of understanding to abandon us,” Bright said at the same time as Dim let loose a string of curses.
He let the two of them stew a moment longer before he faced them.
“Are you going to tell me or not?”
They exchanged a glance.
“This is your fault, oaf. You can deal with the consequences,” Dim told Bright venomously.
“Maybe if you hadn’t so vehemently disagreed with me, he wouldn’t have noticed,” Bright spat back.
“Whoa! Break it up!” Raimie whispered fiercely, checking nervously for guards. “No one’s at fault. Now, someone please explain what has both of you so concerned!”
Bright hugged himself tightly.
“There’s a tear here.”
“What?!” Raimie exclaimed loudly. “Where?”
“Lower your voice!” Dim hissed, flapping his hands. “You’re such a child sometimes.”
Raimie stuck his tongue out at the splinter, and Dim made a face back.
“I can take you there if you feel the need,” Bright said quietly, “but I have to know it’s what you truly desire.”
The Undying Champions (The Eternal War Book 1) Page 39