“You have no idea of the pain you will suffer before you die…” Silas hissed with barely-suppressed fury, well aware of how greatly he had been humiliated in that moment. “You will beg to be burned at the stake…”
“Maybe…” she conceded, managing to keep her tone light and control her own rage. “Bet you’ll get someone else to do it, though…” she added, knowing with all the innate viciousness of a teenage girl exactly how to plunge a verbal ‘knife’ into someone’s heart. “…You wouldn’t have the guts…!”
“You little whore…!”
Silas almost screamed those words, so incensed with rage now that he was actually shaking as he took another involuntary step forward, his right hand struggling to force its way toward her with the crystal suspended from its palm. The old man had no experience in the use of physical violence – he’d never needed it – and his first instinct was always to fall back to the power of The Shard, either in defence or attack. To be deprived of that power now for the first time in his living memory left him feeling completely defenceless in the face of her verbal assault.
“Think you’re so tough while we’re tied up and helpless, don’t you…?” She taunted scornfully, nodding her head faintly at the quaver in his right arm. “I see you thinkin’ about it. Big, tough guy you are when no one can fight back…!”
“For the Crystal’s Sake, Brother Silas, we need not endure any more of this drivel!” Baal called from the other side of the table, taking a step away from the wall now and resting his hand on the sword at his belt. “Give the word and I’ll cut out that tongue of hers… give us all some peace…”
“Do not presume to interfere…!” The old man barked savagely, momentarily casting a fiery glare in the prince’s direction and very unhappy about any suggestion he was unable to fight his own battles. “You think I am incapable of dealing with this creature?”
“I know you’re not capable…” Nev muttered, just loud enough for everyone to hear. “Is that what it is…?” She added, suddenly seeing the trigger her sub-conscious had been searching for all along. “Is that why you like torturing women and little boys…?”
“I will destroy you…!” He snarled as loudly as his old lungs could manage, but there was the quaver of uncertainty in the words now too, as if his sub-conscious was silently pleading to be left alone.
“Go on, then…” she goaded, almost drunk on the power as Nev realised it was she who was completely in control of the current exchange. “Cut me free and try to take a swing at me…” she paused then, glancing momentarily toward the bench to her right before returning her gaze to Silas, a thin, smug smile spreading across her face. “Pick up that sword and we’ll see who’s tougher… you, or a girl…”
“She’s goading you, brother,” Baal warned, taking a few steps toward them and half-drawing his sword, but Silas heard none of that as Nev continued to speak, his entire, enraged focus solely on her words alone.
“…But you’re not going to do it, are you?” She sneered, forcing derision into her tone and expression as she added in a hiss: “You don’t have the balls…!”
Something inside Brother Silas broke in that moment. In all his years of solid service to The Shard… with all the terrible, unforgiveable things he knew he’d done in Its name… no one had ever been allowed to speak to him in such a manner. No one had ever disrespected him or derided his authority so blatantly and without fear of retribution. That this attack should come from a woman – from one who was barely even a woman – magnified the insult far beyond the capacity of his self-control.
Silas’ rage pushed him beyond any rational thought. Had he been a soldier or an assassin, his first instinct might’ve been to reach for the decorative dagger at his belt and had he done so, Nev’s life would almost certainly have been over very quickly. He was no warrior however, and Silas instead made use of the most powerful weapon he had at his disposal – a weapon that had served him flawlessly over many decades in the service of The Shard.
Do not attack… Step away: I command it…! Those thundering words boomed in Nev’s mind, filled equally by anger and fear, and the power of it was enough to leave her dizzy.
Silas was beyond any ability for coherent thought however, and the strength of his rage was such that he was able to shrug off the restrictive, mind-numbing force that came with its command. Releasing a guttural roar of primal rage that seemed to explode outward from his small, wizened frame, the priest stepped forward, lifted his right hand and pushed his open palm down hard on Nev’s forehead, the glowing crystal pendant pressed beneath his fingers.
No…! The booming voice howled in desperation, far too late to be of any use. This cannot-!
Nev had recoiled back into her chair as those words rang in her mind, convinced the next seconds were the last of her life in spite of all her anger and bravado she’d been displaying (although some small, raging part of her inner mind nevertheless howled in jubilation over the absolute mental victory she’d just won). She felt his hand touch her head… felt the rough shape and faint warmth of the crystal as it pressed against her skin… registered a muted flash of brilliant blue through her closed eyelids, and then…
…nothing, to begin with: silence… darkness… and an overpowering sensation of somehow being nowhere and everywhere at the same time. Seemingly unbidden, a vision rose in her mind; a memory of her childhood, long-forgotten and shrouded in the camouflage of hiding from family pain and anguish. A memory of when she was just six years old and her world was a very different place.
Nev thought Grandpa Anders talked funny, but that was okay ‘cause he was an old man, and anyway, Mummy said he came from a country all the way around the other side of the whole world. Daddy said it was a place called Iceland, which sounded really cold, but he’d also told her that there was lots of volcanoes and bubbly, hot pools there (which didn’t really make much sense, if the whole place was made out of ice…). Grandpa Anders was taller – much taller than Daddy – and he always talked about how his thick hair and beard had been bright red when he was younger, not grey like it was now – and he always talked about funny people called ‘Vikings’ who rowed everywhere in long boats with dragons at the front. At six years old, Nev was already incredibly bright and well-spoken, and her paternal grandparents spoilt Drake and Nicole’s only child shamelessly whenever they visited.
Sometimes, when they were in alone in the spare room and they thought no one could hear, Grandpa Anders and Grandma Jeannette argued and shouted at each other (…you really could hear them through the rest of the house anyway…). Nev didn’t like it when they shouted. They were so nice, and she couldn’t work out why nice people would even want to yell and scream at each other.
The strange thing was, even though you could hear everything, Mummy and Daddy always acted like they couldn’t. At first, Nev had wondered for a while if she was the only one who could hear: like maybe it was her own, special ‘superpower’. As she’d grown a little older however, she learned how to pick up the subtle changes in her parents’ body language during those private arguments and she eventually realised they were only pretending not to hear. Mummy and Daddy shouted sometimes, too, but that wasn’t very often at all. Nev really didn’t like it when that happened, and when it did, she pretended too.
She loved all her grandparents dearly, but everyone knew that when the Gunnarsons visited, Nev was ‘Grandpa’s Girl’. Drake’s father could think of nothing better than to spend time playing games with his only granddaughter, listening to her childlike ramblings with sincere interest and delighting in her squeals of enjoyment as he carried her about on his huge, bearlike shoulders while her parents called warnings about banging her head on the lounge room light fittings.
It was one of the games they’d played one day that had been only time Nev had ever heard Daddy arguing with Grandpa. They’d been playing in her room with a deck of playing cards; a well-worn, chequered blue Queens Slipper ‘500’ pack with all the extra elevens, twelves and thi
rteens, and the colourful jokers that Nev loved the best. Nev didn’t really know any proper card games – her parents had forbidden her learning poker or pontoon, she was too young to grasp five hundred or euchre, and she simply didn’t have the patience for patience – so Grandpa Anders had instead hit upon the simple idea that each of them take half the pack and hold single cards up in turn, facing away from the other player, who would then attempt to guess which card it was.
Nev tried her best. Grandpa would hold up a card and she’d think really hard, trying to imagine a picture of its face in her mind. Sometimes she’d guess correctly (most of the time, she didn’t), but Grandpa was always encouraging and supportive, urging her to try again and again. Grandpa was really good at that game. Most of the time he’d correctly guess which card she was holding, and even sometimes when he made a ‘mistake’, Nev got the feeling he was giving a wrong answer on purpose.
Nev loved it. She laughed and giggled and clapped her hands, pleading with Grandpa to tell her how he did it, but all he would say was that it was ‘magic’, and that magicians didn’t tell their secrets. Nev replied (not very certain about the whole thing) that she didn’t think magic was really real, and Grandpa told her in return that magic was just stuff that people couldn’t explain yet: that there were lots of things today that people in ‘The Old Days’ would’ve called magic or witchcraft.
That was when Daddy came into the room and saw what they were playing. He got angry with Grandpa, shouting louder than Nev had ever heard before and telling him that it ‘wasn’t fair’; that Grandpa had ‘no right’… Grandpa yelled back that Daddy was turning his back on something called his ‘ancestors’, and that someone had to do what was ‘best’ for the family. Nev didn’t understand any of it. It had just been a card game after all and it seemed really unfair for anyone to be arguing over some silly game.
Grandma Jeannette had joined in then, standing in the doorway and telling Grandpa off too, and Nev had pleaded and pleaded for them all to stop and be nice… but no one would listen to her at all and Mummy had to come and take her to another room. Nev cried and cried, saying she was sorry over and over because playing cards had been her idea, and now Daddy and Grandpa were shouting because of it. Mummy tried to tell her that it wasn’t her fault but she knew that wasn’t true.
It wasn’t long after that Grandpa Anders and Grandma Jeannette started visiting on their own instead of together, and Grandma didn’t come as often as she had before, which was very sad. Grandpa still visited regularly, but he also seemed a little sadder and less talkative than he had when they’d turned up together. He and Daddy never shouted at each other again like they had that day, but even Nev could tell things weren’t the same… that something had changed.
Nev had no idea why that memory had suddenly flared into such vivid life within her mind, and as she fought to clear her thoughts, sadness flowing through her thoughts, a single, booming word thundered in her consciousness, louder and stronger than anything that had come before:
Interesting…
“What… who are you…?” She demanded angrily, flailing wildly and unable to see a single thing in the blackness surrounding her, but there was no answer… only a continuing, oppressive silence as she staggered forward into nothingness. With tears streaming down her face, she raised her fist and shouted: “Answer me…!”
A thin arc of blue-white electricity sparked from her hand and crackled away into the darkness around her, shorting on random, invisible points of light with diminishing intensity as it spread out in all directions, and for a fraction of a second it was possible to see the faint, flickering movement of ill-defined, shadowy shapes as they shied away from the flash. There seemed to be a faint glow at the edges of her fingers now and as she opened her palm, she inexplicably found Silas’ pendant lying there, glowing brightly with the chain coiled around it in a tangle. Tiny crackles of static electricity arced from the gem to the tips of her fingers, making them tingle, and coiled about her wrist as she stared down at it in wonder.
“What are you…?” She asked softly, almost mesmerised for a few seconds by the miniature light show as she ran her other hand over the top of the pendant and the intensity of the discharge increased, creating a translucent ball of energy that sparkled and flickered much like the tragic old plasma ball her father kept in his room as a night light – the same one he’d picked up as a kid in the 1980s when the thing was still thought of as a cool novelty item. The momentarily pleasant memory of her father was then followed by memories of all the other, far less pleasant experiences she’d survived since arriving in that strange, new world and the fleeting smile that appeared briefly on her lips disappeared as quickly as it had come.
“What are you…?” She screamed, the words a demand as much as they were a question.
The crystal flashed brilliant white, leaving a flare at the centre of her vision as a faint shockwave of blue light surged away from her in all directions, a ripple of time and space following in its wake. The blackness itself parted fleetingly and for just a moment she was able to see something else before her… something that seemed small only because of the vast distance that lay between them.
Translucent to the point of being almost invisible, it glowed faintly with the same azure hue as the crystal in her palm; an ill-defined, amorphous shape that seemed to change and shift without warning. As the darkness coiled about her once more, her last impression was of it lashing out toward her across that vast expanse of nothing and she was suddenly engulfed by a wave of pure, unadulterated hatred.
There was a sharp, sudden shock to her consciousness, like the shunting of her train of thought, and Godfrey, the torture table and the rest of it all snapped savagely back into focus with brutal reality. Silas still stood before her, right up in her face, however the rage he’d previously displayed seemed to have been supplanted by an expression of abject fear. There was complete silence otherwise and Nev realised within that first fraction of a second that the eyes of every conscious person present were currently focussed directly on her. It was at that point she realised that the fingers of her left hand were tingling.
Her arms had been tied behind her, and they’d seemed quite secure when she’d tested the rope earlier. The bonds that had held her now lay in pieces on the floor however and she was surprised to discover that rather than locked down and unable to move, her left hand was instead clamped firmly about Silas’ wrist, the dangling pendant caught beneath her palm. He was struggling desperately to pull back from her vice-like grip, all to no avail, and all the while, tiny crackles of energy arced across both of their hands, leaving the hair on her arm standing straight and tall with static discharge.
For her part, Nev knew she should have been terrified right now and part of her sub-conscious was very surprised that she actually – surprisingly – felt nothing of the sort. Experiencing a level of clarity she’d never known, she instead felt sharper and more aware than ever before and as she glanced down, she could already quite clearly envisage the exact amount of strength necessary to crush the old man’s wrist – a level of strength that she was certain she could apply if she so desired. Turning his arm away and pushing him backward with a single, sharp flex and twist of her muscles, she rose quickly from the chair (no one had bothered to tie her legs) and forced Silas backward to her left, her right hand clamped firmly around one arm of the chair for extra leverage.
“Release me, hag…!” He croaked in fright, knowing the true meaning of fear for possibly the first time in his entire life. “Release me, I command you…!”
“My pleasure…!” She hissed in reply, an evil smile flashing across her face as she fixed him with a steeled gaze and squeezed down hard on his frail wrist.
It didn’t take much to force Silas’ hand open –pain and the fear of a broken wrist were incentive enough – and she deftly caught the pendant as he released it completely, its glow increasing to almost blinding intensity as her fingers closed fully around it. A turquoise glow
flared between her fingers and writhing bolts of tiny lightning crackled and flashed in all directions as the old man staggered backward, crashing into the corner of the table and collapsing to the deck beyond with a cry as agony lanced through his lower back.
“Baal…! Your sword…!” He shrieked, terror filling him now as he realised what had happened – that Nev had taken the crystal from him as easily as one might steal a toy from a newborn child.
“At once, Brother…! Guards…!” The prince acknowledged immediately, casting away the dagger in his hands and reaching for the rapier at his belt. The shocked tension of those first moments broke then as they all came to their senses, the two guards also reaching for their weapons as they charged forward.
“Guards…!” Nev snapped at Godfrey, the young man staring up at her with no small amount of shock and fear in his own eyes as his mind tried to process what he was seeing. With a single nod of warning, she cast her eyes across the ropes tying his wrists and instinctively swept her left hand down across the point where they disappeared beneath the table’s near edge. There was a flash and tiny crackle of lightning and the ropes tore apart in a burst of flame that stank of smoke and of something intense and almost chemical in nature.
Godfrey needed no further urging: he launched himself from the table the moment his body was free, sliding nimbly off to Nev’s left and planting a heavy boot into the groin of the nearest guard in the same, fluid movement. The man fell backward, waves of pain and nausea sweeping over him as Godfrey snatched the short sword from his loosened grip and dived forward under the swing of the second guard, driving the blade deep into his chest.
As he dealt with the guards, Nev turned her attention toward Baal as he rounded the other end of the table with murder in his eyes. Without even really thinking about it, she dodged around Silas’ fallen body, spinning through 360 degrees and bringing with her the chair that was still clamped in her right fist. The prince had expected the girl to flee… that she came at him instead was a mild surprise to be certain, but what he truly hadn’t expected was the manner in which she attacked.
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