by Azalea Ellis
A shadow leaned over me, whispering, in the darkness,
Thoughts without sound;
Sorrowful thoughts that filled me with helpless wonder
And held me bound.
— Alfred Noyes
I woke up curled into a fetal position on a stone floor. I instinctually reached for my claws, and the protection the natural weapon provided me. But nothing came. I flexed my fingers, then had to clench my jaw to stop myself from screaming at the pain the movement brought.
Startled insects scurried away into the corners and cracks of the stone walls.
I lifted my left arm slowly, staring in horror. A manacle surrounded my wrist, a chain connecting it to the wall. But the real problem, the cause of my pain, were the razor-like segments jutted from the inside of the manacle at regular intervals, slicing deep into my flesh. If I moved too much, or tugged too violently, I would probably end up freeing myself, at the expense of tearing off my own hands.
My stomach clenched, and I swallowed back bile. I stared at the torturous bindings. Thin-looking blood, as if maybe it had been diluted with saline, seeped out around the razor segments, dripping down my arm and onto the floor. At least I could still feel my hands, which meant I might be able to use them again with some help from Sam. That’s when I realized there were only five fingers, and they were shorter, almost stubby compared to the modifications Chaos had made to me. I frowned. The skin of my arm was smooth and pale. My chest felt tight. Was I dreaming? I’d never felt pain like this in a dream.
I looked around at the stone room I’d awoken in. There was no door, and the single small window was barred over to prevent escape. The dim light of the single bulb in the cell showed dark brown words smeared onto the stones all around me, as if someone had been writing with their own blood. It said things like, “In the sea of change, even time and place are lost,” “The flames of the abyss give no light, only darkness visible,” and, “Where once was flesh, stone bloomed instead.” They’d also drawn a bunch of watching eyes. It was creepy, to say the least.
I reached for the Wraith Skill, but found nothing.
I almost let out a whimper, but I choked it back. I looked around with my eyes instead. Seeing nothing else of note, I scrambled backward, pressing my back against the wall. Had I been drugged, maybe? It would have made sense, except for the reversion of all the changes my body had made after getting Seeds. Nothing anyone could have done to me should have taken away the new structure of my rebuilt hand and arm. Unless they’d used some exotic Skill?
I didn’t bother to try Tumbling Feather. I could feel the lack of Grace, the leaden feeling in my feet that meant I could no longer flip and twist through the air like an elven dancer. I would have tried to consciously activate Voice, but I didn’t want to draw attention to myself with the noise, and the symbol wasn’t melded with the skin of my throat.
I tried to send a Window to the rest of the team.
UNABLE TO CONTACT SUBORDINATE VIRTUAL REALITY CHIPS.
I’d seen that message once before, when NIX had captured me and jailed me in that cell cut deep into the mountain. But there was no buzzing in the air, no indication of a signal scrambler like there had been that time.
I switched to the Status Window. Maybe there would be some sort of clue, to why I couldn’t access any of my Skills. The VR chip had been smart enough to update spontaneously before, especially since the Oracle had taken over from NIX.
PLAYER NAME: EVE REDDING
TITLE: BEARER OF TESTIMONY
CHARACTERISTIC SKILL: SPIRIT OF THE HUNTRESS, TUMBLING FEATHER
LEVEL: 38
SKILLS: COMMAND, WRAITH, CHAOS, VOICE
STRENGTH: 23
LIFE: 76
AGILITY: 32
GRACE: 28
INTELLIGENCE: 32
FOCUS: 24
BEAUTY: 16
CHARISMA: 33
MANUAL DEXTERITY: 10
MENTAL ACUITY: 29
RESILIENCE: 70
STAMINA: 26
PERCEPTION: 33
The strikethrough slashing my Skills and Attribute levels confirmed something was wrong, but the fact that Chaos was still normal gave me hope. I reached for the Skill tentatively, just enough to feel if something was there. Whatever Perception boost I’d had that allowed me awareness of myself on a meditative level was gone. But even so, I could feel the barest wisp of Chaos moving through my blood. I reached for it, and it dissolved away from me like mist through open fingers. I tried again, this time pulling a little harder, and it came, spilling out of the cuts around my wrists along with my blood, as if the wounds were a tap, though the tendrils came out thin and wispy instead of their normal dark haze.
I let out a shaky breath. At least I wasn’t completely helpless. But if I was going to escape, or be able to fight back against whatever had put me here, I would need my hands. Even if my claws were inaccessible.
I moved my fingers just a little, to help judge exactly how deep the razors went. I hissed at the renewed spike of pain. They were deep, and I wasn’t sure, but I thought from the sensation that the tips of them might have been hooked, to make removal impossible without mutilation.
My breath started to come fast, and the room spun around me, so I tucked my head between my knees and focused on finding a solution. I had used Chaos once before to heal, through burning away the old and creating anew in its place, in the valley of the God of Knowledge. But while I still technically understood how to use the black flames, the fine control the initial rush of Knowledge had given me was gone, along with a lot of other things I’d understood at the time, but which had buried themselves away. I really didn’t want to end up like the squirrel I’d tried to heal. Even so, if my hands were ruined either way, it couldn’t hurt to try.
I would practice first, though.
I reached for Chaos again and it filtered out around the razors, flowing up to the outer manacle. I urged Chaos till it took on the characteristics of the black flame, and it ate away at the metal. “Flesh,” I murmured to it, focusing hard on the image of the end product in my mind, the suppleness, the feel, the organic nature of what I needed it to become.
The flames ate the metal up and slowly receded, leaving a flap of shimmery, pale skin behind. It detached from the razors, and slid off onto the ground with a dull plop, leaving my wrist still impaled, but lighter without the weight of the surrounding manacle.
I poked at the ring of pseudo-flesh lying in front of me, careful not to hurt myself again with the movement. It was too stiff, and that metallic sheen definitely wasn’t normal.
I tried again with the manacle on the other hand, concentrating harder as I mentally went through every property of my skin that I could think of. The flesh-manacle slid off, this time glistening red in the places it had been attached to the razors. It was even warm. It was still too stiff, and off-color, but it would work.
This time, when Chaos filtered up through my wounds, I set it onto one of the embedded razors. Where it touched me, it hurt, and I jerked, biting down on my tongue to muffle a scream. I gathered myself and concentrated with everything I had, pushing at the boundaries where my flesh gave way to metal, trying to connect them. There was an instant where Chaos had burned and eaten away what had been there before, and I was able to reverse the destruction.
I changed the shape of the metal and my flesh both, connecting the foreign substance to my muscle and bones and skin. I smoothed away the part protruding out of me and created paths through the part inside me, connected to my veins, to allow blood to flow. I tried to make it malleable, like flesh would be, but succeeded only in making it softer. It didn’t have connecting tendons, wouldn’t contract in bunches like my muscles, and wouldn’t stretch like the flesh surrounding it.
It was quite a poor job, in fact. But it sealed off the wound, and left me with something I’d be able to move a little. After a minute of recovery, I examined the shimmery slivers on the back of my wrist, the only outward sign of what I’d d
one. “It’ll be good enough for now.”
I repeated the process for each of the remaining barbs jutting out of me, and, though Chaos weakened till its tendrils were almost transparent, I improved with practice. My fingers wouldn’t do delicate work, and some of the sensation was dulled, but I could grasp things and attack with my fists without worrying my hand would fall off.
I stood gingerly and moved to the window, looking out through the barred opening.
A row of dim yellow bulbs lit the hall beyond, which stretched out a couple hundred feet before turning a corner. I listened for signs of anyone else. Were my teammates trapped in the cells around me? Was it safe for me to call out to them, to try and find out?
I could probably use Chaos to eat through the walls of this doorless cell, but, in my current state, it would exhaust me. If I needed to break multiple people out, my plan would need some more thought.
One of the bulbs at the end of the hall burst with a strange sound.
I jumped and, as I caught a glimpse of a form stepping around the corner, threw myself back from the little window.
I scrambled back to other the side of the room, keeping low to avoid being seen through the window, and curled up around the chains that had once been attached to my wrists. Maybe they wouldn’t notice I’d freed myself.
I listened as the person approached, the light from the hallway dimming steadily, each time accompanied by a sharp crack and then a tinkle and splash. I pushed outward again instinctively, trying to activate Wraith. It didn’t work. It grew warmer, though I couldn’t tell if that was just my body heating up from the strength of my pounding heart pushing blood through my veins, or if the temperature was really increasing. I kept my eyes almost closed, watching the door out of a slit between my eyelids.
The last bit of light outside the room disappeared with that strange wet sound of breaking glass. The figure stopped in front of my cell, looking through at me. Dark hair, pale blue eyes, and a smirk.
Something inside me squeezed, shriveling in on itself with dread I couldn’t quite comprehend. But I felt it. I began to whimper, despite my resolution to pretend to be unconscious. I couldn’t control it.
I saw the shift of their shoulder as they lifted their arm, and I watched as a familiar dark power ate through the stone, following their hand as they drew a large doorway around the window. Black flames left behind sturdy hinges, and then, a door handle.
They pushed at the stone, and it swung open easily, revealing the silhouette standing in the darkened hallway. The figure stepped through the doorway and smiled down at me. I recognized it. How could I not? It wore my face, moved in my body. My familiar claws extended from its fingers, its left arm sported the honeycomb scale Chaos had rebuilt, and it was taller than any human female had a right to be. There was nothing off about it, nothing to say that something else was wearing my skin. That dark look in its eyes was all mine, that smirk was the one I wore, and that strange emptiness…
It chuckled with my voice. “Hello.”
My voice cracked as I screamed. I clamped my hands over my mouth to try and hold back the involuntary reaction, my head shaking back and forth in desperate denial.
“I left some hints for you. Were they helpful?” She waved a hand towards the words written in blood, but before I turned my head to look at them again, Chaos burst forth, rushing toward me with familiar glee.
I brought my arms up, crossing them in front of my face and drawing my knees to my chest. Chaos butted up against the barrier of my skin, as if trapped inside.
But the attack didn’t burrow into me and unmake me like I’d expected. It flowed around and underneath my body, seeping into the floor.
For half a moment, everything was still, and my eyes caught her gaze again.
“You’re a slow learner,” she said. “You’ll come to hate that about yourself. I know I have.”
Then dark blood bubbled out from the floor around me, warm and thick and richly dark.
The single remaining lightbulb in the ceiling above grew a drop of red inside it, and then welled with blood, dripping down the inside of the glass and filling up, till it popped. The glass fell down, cushioned by the blood that gushed down with it and the softness of the floor. Impenetrable darkness pressed in around me.
I lurched upward, but my hands and feet sank into pulsing flesh. I screamed again.
The mass below me surged, and I sank, as if it had swallowed half my body in one massive convulsion.
I bit into my tongue, letting my blood flow out and Chaos with it, desperately trying to change the floor back into stone.
The other Eve sighed. “It will take more than that. Someone so useless doesn’t deserve this power.” The floor gulped me under.
Coppery, salty, hot blood poured into my nose and mouth, and the flesh squeezed at me, crushing and suffocating.
I struggled till I could struggle no more.
Chapter 11
Even after nights
that lasted far too long,
Morning presses on
with new hopes, new songs.
— Morgan Harper-Nichols
I shot upward with a panicked gasp, my claws lashing out at the person holding onto my shoulders.
Torliam closed his eyes and turned his head away as my claws scratched the dark armor over his chest, but he didn’t release me.
I reached desperately for Wraith, and it exploded out of me, checking for danger. It found no danger, only the military cargo pod, with everyone seemingly asleep but myself, Torliam, and Jacky, who was driving.
No stone cell walls, no torture devices or cryptic messages written in blood, and no horrific alternate version of me.
My pounding heart slowed, and I calmed. The stress of my panic and the subsequent relief made me weak. I slumped forward till my forehead hit Torliam’s chest.
“You were having a nightmare,” he said, his voice low enough not to wake the others. “I could feel it, and sense your panic, as if you were reaching out to me as you once did. I tried to wake you, but you were not responsive, though your terror only grew.”
“It was a dream?” That was obvious now, but I still needed the reassurance. It had seemed so real.
“It was merely a dream. Yet it must have been impactful, for you to react strongly enough to reach out to me past the warrior’s-technique that guards your mind.” He’d slipped an Estreyan word into the English, and though I understood the word, I didn’t know what he meant.
“The what?” I pulled back to look up at him and caught Jacky’s gaze in the rearview mirror. Chagrined, I settled back against the wall of the pod.
Torliam sat beside me, close enough I could feel the heat from his body. “It is a shield of the spirit that protects your mind from outside influence, like skin-jackers, or, to some degree, those Skills that might influence your thoughts. Did you not know of this? You placed it around your mind while I was still trapped by NIX, in the long stretch of time where we were on different sides of the break between worlds. When you attacked them for the second time, it was there, blocking some of the blood-covenant-bond.” His voice got even lower at the end, as if he were embarrassed to speak the words.
I frowned. “That doesn’t make sense. We were on Estreyer during that time, and I got the Seed of Chaos, but—oh. Adam helped me…make this mental construct thing to help control Chaos. I built this mansion-like house, and then…I put a wall with no gate all the way around.”
Torliam huffed out sharply through his nose. “Of course. Adam.” He looked away, then back to me, staring silently.
I felt a brief moment of jealousy for the thickness of Torliam’s eyelashes, as my mind struggled to settle back into normalcy. “What is it?” I whispered.
“I had thought you chose to ignore some of the other aspects of the bond. Truthfully, I do not mind. Sharing so much can be…intimate. However, if you do not even know how to reach out to me if danger makes it necessary, I cannot fulfill my duty as your blood-covenant-champi
on.”
My eyes narrowed. “What other aspects of the bond? And what exactly are these ‘duties?’”
He grimaced. “It is my duty as your champion to serve and protect you, in the simplest of terms.”
“To serve and protect?”
His jaw clenched. “Do not expect me to bow and scrape at your feet, a slave to your every whim. I may be bound to you in blood-covenant, but my will is my own, tradition be damned.”
I shook my head quickly. “That’s not what I meant. I was just under the impression that we had some sort of ‘allies-forever’ type of pact, like…blood-brothers, or something.”
He let out a sharp burst of air, and pressed his lips together to conceal a smile. “You think of yourself as my brother?” His smile grew even wider as he saw my growing scowl, and he began talking again quickly. “As for the other aspects of the bond, they are varied, but you have taken advantage of them before. We have touched minds several times, before we met. Once, I fueled you with anger when you were falling to despair. We will always be able to find each other, or know where the other is in relation to ourselves. We share a portion of our blood-borne strength with each other. I am aware when you project a piece of yourself outward and send it to me. I believe you call this your Wraith Skill?”
I nodded slowly. “That…makes sense. I recognized you, when I saw you for the first time, even though we’d never met. I didn’t know what I was doing with the mental wall. Should I…take it down?” The idea of opening my mind up wasn’t exactly pleasant, but I’d found the connection useful before.
He shifted, then looked away. “If you wish.” It was obvious the idea made him uncomfortable, too. “Without it, our bond would connect us more freely, but if you wish to maintain your shield, it does not mean the bond is completely severed. It simply requires more effort to breach, just as you did when you called for my help in your sleep.”
I shifted my feet, and noticed a drop of fresh blood on the floor. Had I managed to nick Torliam in my panic?