Lydia pulled in a hiss of breath through her nose, fear clutching at her. A gloved finger lingered against her lower lip, and Aon shushed her once more. Even in her dream, the world swam dangerously around her. “You must fight to survive. I can feel your heartbeat struggling, even from here.”
“Please,” Lydia said through a delirious whimper, asking him to end this. Asking him to stop the pain and the fear. “I can’t…”
“Oh, but you must.” Aon leaned his head down and rested his masked metal forehead against hers, the surface cold against her. “Do not end this so soon. You are stronger than this, I can feel it. Fight back.”
***
What a curious little thing.
Edu stood over the body of the young girl where she lay in the meager cot of the cathedral’s lodgings. These chambers were meant for the weary pilgrim, not to serve as a makeshift infirmary, but it would do for the time being.
What mean you, Creators of Old? To take this girl from Earth, only to cast her away?
There was no doubt she had borne the mark of the chosen. There was no doubt she had been picked by the Ancients to join their world, to let her sin weave into their mighty tapestry of the damned. He had felt the pull of the mark that called him to take her to Under where she now belonged.
Cast into the blood of the Ancients, she should have risen as her true self, as her inner soul demanded she continue into eternity. Instead, she carried no mark upon her face—indeed no ink anywhere. Lyon had stripped the girl of her soaked clothing and redressed her in dry garb to keep her from catching a “cold,” or whatever nonsense Maverick had warned. Mortals were such fragile things.
In doing so, Lyon confirmed there was not a speck of ink upon her. Not even that which had labeled her as chosen. At first, he thought perhaps it had been merely a trick of the Gods, some new evolution of their kind. A symbol of progress, not a mystery. But she was clean.
A hand touched his arm. Ylena.
“What is it that lies there?” she asked in his mind. Ylena was blind, after all. It was the cost for her singular devotion to him and his sad attempt to create, in his jealous hunger, an effigy of that which he could not have. It was not her doing, or her fault, for what she had become. But he shared with her his sight to some degree, even as she shared with him her voice.
Edu reached out a hand and gently let his palm trace down over her long, black hair. He had removed his armor and sent it away with his squires to be cleaned and cared for the moment the ceremony had come to an end. His armor was meant for moments of grandeur, not tromping around in the halls of this irritatingly barren and cold cathedral.
Her hair was soft beneath Edu’s touch, and she smiled faintly as he stroked its surface. Ylena enjoyed his affection greatly, and he was loath to admit how long it had been since he had shown her any.
Empaths were curious creatures, by trade. They could communicate in silent words, yes, but most often they conveyed in memories or in feeling alone. Frequently, Ylena would speak to Edu in the sensation of a word if not the language placed upon them by one tongue or another. He could feel from her the ache of loneliness suddenly sated, the praise she paid to a tender touch from a loved one.
“As gentle as a bull,” Edu responded, chiding them both. While he could never take Ylena as his consort, she was bound to his soul in a way a wife may never be. It was a singular connection that made their souls barely indistinguishable.
“As gentle as you are capable,” Ylena said, playfully rebuking him.
“I do not know what has become of her,” Edu answered his empath’s question.
“I fear for her safety,” Ylena said. “All will come for her, to exploit what she may be, or to end her life to prevent it.”
The girl had been cast away. She had no gifts, no power granted to her. She was merely human. What purpose could she serve, as anything other than a jest paid to them by the Ancients? Indeed, the other option—to kill her, before she might prove to be a threat—seemed the safer course of action.
“Would that be so tragic, if she were to die?” Edu asked and tilted his head to the side as he watched the girl where she lay. His long hair fell in front of the eye of his mask as he did, but it did not trouble him. He was accustomed to it. “Should she live at all?”
“If you felt not the need to keep her alive, she would be dead. You know in your heart that the Ancients have not done this without any cause. There is meaning in this. Take a breath before you seek to undo their will.”
Ylena, his Ylena, always the voice of reason. The sounding calm to his raging sea. Very well. Might the girl live through her ailment, he would allow it to continue. At least until he was given a good reason otherwise.
***
“Do not end this so soon,” a voice purred close to her ear. Sharp and dangerous. “You are stronger than this, I can feel it. Fight back.”
The voice woke her up, but like her unconscious state, it drifted away. Lydia clutched a pillow closer to her and let her fingers wind into the cotton fabric. It was rough—slightly scratchy, honestly—but it was a pillow. And pillows meant sleeping, and sleeping was terrific.
Breathing hurt. It felt like somebody had taken a bottle full of sand and made Lydia swallow it all and then decided that “out the way it came” was more fun than through and made her hurl all of it back up. Or if somebody had wrapped a roll of sandpaper around a two-foot pipe cleaner and rammed it down her throat.
Cold water. That was what Lydia needed, suddenly and desperately.
It was that desire that finally forced her eyes open. Reaching out to the table next to her that she could barely put into focus, she tried to grasp the edge. Lydia knew she needed to move, to know where she was. She’d need to see, to know where she’d have to go, to get a glass of—
Her hand missed the table entirely and whiffed through the air weakly. It felt like a faster movement than it was, her beleaguered mind struggling to catch up, like the frames of a movie out of sync with the audio.
A hand caught hers. Someone was sitting on the edge of the bed. Their voice was quiet, and it took a few words before Lydia caught any of them at all.
“…must be still,” was all she managed to catch. The voice wasn’t the same as the one who had woken her up.
Lydia tried to speak, and what came out was a hacking cough. Once, as a kid, she had come down with food poisoning and had spent several days retching violently and destroying her throat. This brought that memory back.
The hand that had taken hers shifted away. It was helping Lydia to sit up, if barely. It placed a glass against her lips and was coaxing her gently to drink. Thank god. The water that touched her tongue was astonishing. It felt like heaven against the burning in her throat.
A few more sips and the world sank away from her once more. Her mission having been accomplished, her mind decided it didn’t need her for anything else.
***
“Master Edu has come to answer your call, Lady Ziza,” Ylena said from Edu’s side. “He wonders what was so urgent to call him away from the Cathedral.”
Ziza stood in the center of the great hall. It sat across the stretch of the city of Yej from the Cathedral, and though it had not taken him much time to reach it, it was an inconvenience.
Edu despised the city of Yej and wished nothing to do with it on a day-to-day account. He hated its vehement adherence to society and etiquette. It was built to worship the false edification he loathed so profoundly. Platitudes and niceties and the desire to lay lace and gold upon that which deserved no such reverence. They were a race of violence, death, and murder. They should not seek to rise above such things.
Ziza gestured upward, toward the grand orrery that represented the movements of their world. Her role was to interpret the actions of the magnificent sculpture, after all. “I thought perhaps our king would be interested to note the change for himself.”
Casting his gaze up, Edu’s brow furrowed behind his mask. Change, indeed. It barely represented th
e structure he had seen but yesterday. It had shifted drastically from one axis to another. Earth was clicking faster out of alignment with Under than it had been previously.
This changed the hunt for the marked from idle sport to a dire emergency. If their timeline had escalated, they would need to redouble their efforts to gather all those chosen to descend before the worlds passed out of phase.
“Go,” he commanded Ylena.
The empath bowed to Ziza and turned and left without another word. Ziza did not respond. While she had not seen the empath bow her head, it was not for that reason the elder of the House of Fate did not return the gesture.
Ziza could see all. Her discount of the polite gesture from Ylena was only because Ziza did not respond to very much of anything.
“It is not for that reason alone you should take note, my king.” Her icy, placid voice filled the room easily, despite its light, whispering tone. She pointed a single finger and redirected his attention to the orrery above them.
The black orb. The impenetrable dark shape that represented the abhorrent warlock had changed its course as drastically as all the rest. It had been creeping unexpectedly closer—but now, it hovered dangerously near. This was an unnatural shift, even given how unpredictably erratic it could become. Edu had not seen movements this abrupt since during the Great War.
Edu’s fists clenched tight at his sides. He knew the warlock was going to rise early, but this meant Aon would rise in a matter of days. He turned and stormed from the room, but he had not quite taken his leave before he heard Ziza’s words echo from behind him in the expanse of the chamber.
“You know for whom this has come to pass.”
***
Lydia was dreaming. There was a faint smell of old books and leather, and the feeling of soft, warm fabric under her cheek. She was lying on someone, her head tucked under their chin. There were arms around her. But she was already waking up, already trading the dream for the sensation of the cot beneath her. Both were true at once, and the illusion was losing ground and fading away.
The voice that cut into her haze was becoming familiar to her even as it grew distant. The man in the black metal mask—Aon. “You lived? Good. You are strong, my dear. You will need every ounce for what will surely come.”
It took Lydia several moments of blinking away the dream before she felt like she had a brain in her head again. Where she was, though, made no sense. It looked like she was in a jail cell of some kind. Bars were the first thing she noticed, backlit from the other side by a row of torches, tucked into rings on a dingy stone wall.
She was lying on a cot that felt like it had been stuffed with straw. It was lumpy underneath her back. Two of the walls of her cell were made of stone, roughly hewn and uncaring for any kind of aesthetic. The other two walls were bars, creating a small, ten-by-ten box. She was in the corner of a much larger row of rooms that she couldn’t quite see in the darkness.
It took her a long moment to realize she wasn’t alone.
A figure sat in the cell with her on a rickety, thin-spoked chair, next to an equally pathetic looking little table. The tiny, spindly-legged table sported a candle, providing the man the ability to read. Lyon, the Priest, had his head lowered, looking down at a book in his lap. In the dramatic and faint lighting, he resembled a painting. Or a portrait of a statue of a man reading, maybe.
“Two thousand years, and you haven’t read them all?” Lydia managed to get out of her throat. Weakly but, hey, she succeeded. It hurt, but not like before. Her first question really should have been “what the hell happened?” or “why am I in a jail cell?” But with the couple days she’d been having, she knew the answers wouldn’t help her understand much in the end.
Lyon looked up, and his serene face was caught in a moment of surprise. He closed the book quietly and placed it onto the table. The expression was gone as fast as it had come. He stood and shifted to sit on the edge of her wooden cot. He was probably the one who had been at her side and given her water. Why did he care? Seriously, why?
“I fear I have read that one before, yes,” Lyon admitted as he helped her sit up, adjusting the pillow behind her back until she could rest against the rough stone wall. “But it has been long enough that I have forgotten the details. There is joy in it, still.”
“I’ve done that,” she said with a faint smile. “And I’m not nearly your age, so I guess that’s fair.”
He leaned down to the ground, and she followed his movements as he reached for a pitcher and a glass that was sitting on the floor next to the cot. He poured water into the glass, set the pitcher back down, and straightened, holding the glass out to her. Every movement he made was measured and careful, every gesture with purpose. Of all the people she’d met here so far, he felt ancient. Somehow, she didn’t doubt his claim to be nearly two thousand years old, even if it sounded like insanity on the surface. Slowly but surely, she was starting to become more adjusted to the idea that the bizarre world around her was real.
Lyon helped her as she held the glass with both hands. It wasn’t until she nodded to say she was pretty sure she wasn’t going to dump it all over herself that he let go, though he kept his hand lingering nearby, in case her theory proved to be wrong. She raised the glass carefully to her lips and took a sip. Her hands felt weak, but she managed. Seemingly content with that level of success, Lyon lowered his hand to his lap.
“Was that normal?” Lydia stopped to cough for a moment before resuming. “What the hell happened?” Gary had come out of the pond looking a little wobbly but none the worse for wear. Everyone else had walked themselves out, even if they emerged with more legs than when they went in. It didn’t take a genius to realize what happened to her hadn’t followed the pattern.
“It was certainly not normal.” Lyon’s face creased for a moment in an expression she could not quite understand before smoothing back to the visage of a statue. “We do not know what transpired.”
“You don’t know.”
He paused, seeming unsure of what to say. “When you entered the pool, you did not resurface. Instead of emerging as one of us, you nearly drowned. You have no marks upon you, nor have you been changed in form. You remain human.”
Lydia tried to resist the urge to tell him how wonderful that was. Judging by the way Lyon said it, the topic was dire. To her, it meant she still had some strange, fleeting hope of going back to her normal world with her normal life. Well, except for one thing that popped into her head like the proverbial lightbulb. “What happened to Nick?”
“We ceased the ceremony immediately after your ordeal. For now, the others wait in the chamber. Nick is unharmed.”
Looking down at her arm, she saw that the symbol that had appeared on her right forearm was gone. “Does this mean I get to go home…?”
He placed his hand upon her wrist as he spoke as if to soften the blow. “I would not recommend you foster much hope in such things. It is for Master Edu to decide. To be frank, it is highly unlikely. He has called a council to determine your fate. They meet on the morrow to decide if you should live or die.”
“What?” Lydia exclaimed. “I’m no threat. I’m still human. Look at me. That stupid lake thing almost killed me. That doesn’t make any sense.”
“I would not discount that you may be a threat. Though you appear to have no power, you are…unnatural,” Lyon explained dutifully. “We do not think you play a willing part in this, for what it may be worth to you.”
Lydia couldn’t help it. She just started laughing. Lyon blinked, his brow furrowing slightly at her reaction. Her laugh was raspy, and it hurt. She had to stop after a moment to cough. She took another sip of water before trying to explain why she had burst out laughing.
Lydia had the kind of morbid sense of humor that found the worst things funny at the worst possible times. “Sorry, I’m just reflecting on how typically awful my luck is. Only I would wind up being triple-screwed.”
“I do not understand.”
“
First, your weird mask-wearing monster cult gives me a mark. Great. I get chased around by some asshole in a suit of armor and abducted. Great. Then you put me in your weird blood puddle, and then it decides to change its mind? Now you’re telling me Edu might kill me anyway, for shit I had nothing to do with.” Lydia shut her eyes, her anger and humor threatening to fade into fear and grief. Lydia let out a long, tired sigh.
“I am sorry.”
“Where the hell am I now? Not that it matters, really, I guess.”
“You are here, now, in Edu’s keep, contained in this cell to protect you from others who may not be so inclined to wait for an official verdict.”
“You said he was going to kill me.”
“I said there was a possibility. The matter is still very much up for debate.”
“He’s locked me up to protect me so that he can then decide whether or not to kill me?”
“Yes.”
Lydia sighed heavily. The big suit of armor was a king, and he could do what he wanted. In some ass-backward way, locking her up kept her in one place. It kept people from getting in, just as much as it kept her from wandering off. Whatever.
Lyon continued speaking while she paused to try to make sense of it all. “If he wanted you dead, he would have done so without hesitation. I believe he wishes to understand what has transpired.”
“And then he might kill me.”
“Yes.”
“You’re not helping.”
When she looked back at him, he had a faint, barely there smile on his face. At least he seemed to understand that her frustration was not aimed at him. He reached out and put his hand gently on her shoulder. It was about then she realized she wasn’t wearing her regular clothes. Instead, she was dressed in a long, gray cotton dress with laces up the front, keeping the panels together. “What the hell am I wearing?”
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