by Jane Merkley
“Your kiss was enough. I’ll walk you back to your room.” Taking her hand, he pulled her down the path back toward the inn. He led her straight to her door.
“You will not leave your room tonight, understand me?”
She felt like she was being cajoled by her father, but she nodded. “Thank you, Torren.”
“Leave again and I’ll sleep here in front of the door.” He shook a finger at her and left. She watched him saunter down the hall until he vanished into a room. It was actually a couple doors down so he must have really good hearing to have heard her leave her room.
She laid on her bed, hating herself for letting him kiss her, hating herself more for wanting him to do it again. She had kissed Jessom, but it was more of a stamp of approval, as if they had to kiss to remind themselves they were dating. But Torren’s… it was filled with an honesty she had never tasted. Just her luck, she sighed, finding a good man she couldn’t have. Jasper. Torren. But she already knew it was her luck and so she was already settled into the knowledge that she could never have the good things that everyone else had. She didn’t have bad luck. She had anti-luck.
She accosted herself for allowing herself to be so flippant. It was impossible to go any further in whatever Torren was trying to create. She had to tell him no tomorrow if he refused to part ways, even if she temporarily wished she was not the Head of State. She had warned him, after all.
Her attempts to walk herself to sleep had failed and she was so agitated that she didn’t want to go to the lobby down stairs to get a hot beverage, so she rotated from tossing on her bed and pacing the floor to reviewing her notes. By morning she was much more proficient in what she was going to say to Athenya and much less awake to do it.
She emerged from the roadhouse and Torren took one look at her blood shot eyes and asked if she wanted to share his saddle. For more reasons than one, she accepted and was promptly asleep against him. She was going to miss his company on the way home.
Undertemple
Jaryd hustled as quickly as the weight in his arms would let him. Lorn seemed more or less asleep but still maintained a grip on the front of his uniform as if he were an anchor in her wild desperation.
He finally made it to the top of the cliff via the switch back footpath, out of breath and his arms quivering. He walked swiftly toward town. His horse had found itself a green patch of clovers and was oblivious to anything else. Jaryd repositioned Lorn into one arm and pulled both of them into the saddle. The horse was unwilling to move from its green treasure until a sharp stab in its flanks reminded it why it was even allowed to live.
The horse turned toward town and Jaryd kept it at gallop until he reached the watch towers on the outskirts. A fellow ranger posted there was already looking out onto the ocean.
“Hullo, Jaryd. Do you see those ships?”
“I do. I think we should sound the alarm.”
“I already did.”
Jaryd hadn’t noticed before through the haze of adrenaline, but the town was in a buzz about the streets as people either bunkered down in whatever secret holes they had beneath their houses or were saddling horses and loading wagons. There were plenty of such secret places scattered throughout all of Blindvar. When the old kings would come riding through, sometimes the people needed a place to hide.
“They are traveling pretty fast,” shouted the ranger in the tower. “Are those Ruidenthall ships?”
Before Jaryd could give his opinion, Lorn arched her back in a shriek. Jaryd repositioned to keep a grip on her. Her body relaxed but her fingers dug in the air like claws.
“What do you have there?” called the ranger from above.
“A mental female. I found her along the shoreline just now and was taking her to the infirmary.” It was only half the story but it still reached the same conclusion.
“I don’t need an infirmary!” Lorn’s otherworldly shriek turned back into a desperate tone of a sixteen year old girl. She wreathed in Jaryd’s arms. “I need to get to the temple!” Lorn worked her arm free and swung a backhand at Jaryd’s head.
That strange mental strength slammed into him and all of his limbs went to catching his fall to the ground. He landed in a position that could have been worse. With stars spiking his vision, he looked up to the girl dashing away on his horse.
“JARYD!”
“I’m fine!” he shouted to the ranger in the tower, and ran after her.
The girl’s path of travel stayed on the main road to the temple. She pulled the horse to a stop in front of it and leapt off. Jaryd reached her as she was pounding on the door.
“LET ME IN!” she shouted. “Please let me in!”
Jaryd grabbed her and she sagged in his arms in a mess of tears.
The temple door opened and a priestess in a white dress robe with short black hair stepped out.
“Sorry.” Jaryd gained control of her hands. “She’s mentally unwell and needs a hospital.”
“They want me!” Lorn sobbed. “They want to hurt me!”
“Who wants to hurt you?” the priestess asked.
Jaryd turned from the priestess with Lorn in his arms. “Sorry to bother you, priestess. I’ll get her –”
“No, no, no.” The priestess grabbed his arm. “Her fears may be imaginary, but they are still very real to her. Let her speak.”
Jaryd huffed. This girl was not worth Jaryd’s pay. He had just about decided to leave her and let someone else deal with it.
“They want me!” Lorn continued to cry.
“Why do they want you, child?” the priestess asked.
“Because Huilian is inside of me!”
Jaryd watched the priestess stiffen and take a step back. Just at that time, a large roar burst out of a massive wave of armor and swords down the street from where Jaryd had just come. Jaryd would have liked to believe they were just following the road, but a strange knowing tickled his fear that they were heading straight at him.
The road was empty now, the citizens having done well to hide or rid themselves in the urgency of the alarm.
Lorn’s body stiffened in an arch again and shrieked as if being tortured, and it made Jaryd’s heart race in fear. He did not known that such a sound could be birthed from any creature.
The priestess clutched the girl’s arm. Immediately, Lorn fell limp and Jaryd had to catch her before she collapsed onto the street.
“Hurry inside!” the priestess barked, and went there herself.
Not bothering to stick around to find a motive for this invading army, Jaryd scooped Lorn in his arms again and dashed inside the temple. The heavy iron strapped door slammed closed and two priestesses slid three wooden beams across it.
Muffled shouting began on the other side of the door, followed with metallic pounding. Jaryd turned to survey the inside of the temple as he realized he had never actually stepped foot in it. The priestess that had brought them inside was reaching behind a colorful wall canvas which stretched from floor to ceiling, and pulled downward. Behind her, a wrote-iron portcullis roared from the ceiling and clanged downward in front of the door.
Jaryd wasn’t expecting the sound and jumped foreword with a half contained yelp, wondering as he looked at the defense if this temple had not been converted from one of the castles that were supposed to have been torn down in the Old Wars.
Lorn was still limp in his arms. The short black haired priestess approached him.
“Follow me,” she said, and led Jaryd to the pulpit. She fumbled around it for a moment, and after a series of clicks, she tilted the pulpit forward, still attached to the floor on a hinge, revealing a very small set of stairs leading downward underneath it. “Hide her down here!”
“Why is she –”
“Ask questions later!” The priestess sliced her hand through the air, then pointed. “Down there.”
Jaryd bristled at being told what to do but was out of options to argue. He trudged down the stairs with Lorn in his arms.
When they had both disapp
eared, Miraha was met with scowls from the town’s people that had also sought refuge in the temple; caught too far from their homes to make it there. Two men, an aging lady, and a younger woman surrounded by children which only a few were actually hers.
To these people she motioned for them to follow. She led them to a long painting of Gildeon. Reaching underneath with small fingers, she flicked a switch and pulled one edge of the painting toward her. It swung out like a door and revealed a tunnel behind it.
“This passage empties out to the river. Lock the door behind you and proceed with caution. Go with Gildeon.”
With prayers and tears of gratitude, the townspeople filed through the opening, the door closing behind them with a metallic click.
Two additional priestess stood calmly by, waiting for Miraha to approach.
“Is it true?” asked Juquan when Miraha came near. “That that girl harbors a piece of Huilian’s soul?”
“Why would she claim something that grotesque if it were not?”
The muffled shouting and pounding through the door echoed through to them.
“This army seems to desire entry,” Miraha indicated.
“But Huilian… he is nothing but a fallen angel according to what you saw in your insight. Why would Huilian break his soul and stuff a piece inside this random girl?”
“Does she not look familiar to you? It’s been sixteen years but a picture of her mother hangs in the hall.”
The two priestesses gasped.
“She was the one who gave birth on the spot, on the minute that Gildeon fell?”
“And died subsequently. Her child was sent to relatives and that is the last we knew of her. So if there is a piece of Huilian’s soul inside her –”
“Then Huilian is still here!” Sashaia looked away bashfully as her excitement interrupted Miraha. “But why?”
“Because he wants to be a god,” Miraha answered.
The three stood about in their small circle, the missing piece finally discovered.
“It makes sense,” she continued, “the vision I saw of him approaching Gildeon and Gildeon becoming upset, and then fleeing. I didn’t see what happened to them after they fell, but this girl stands testament that Huilian still lives –”
“And so Gildeon lives too!” Sashaia’s excitement overcame her again and she pranced a moment to expel the rush of truth that had swarmed her.
Miraha hadn’t had a moment yet to appropriately tell her sisters what her council with Priest Herten had revealed, so she did so now. The two listened intently as she relayed everything she could remember from her meeting with the Good Priest. They nodded when she was finished. Her explanation was the only obvious one.
“I do pray the Good Priest is safe.” Sashaia bowed her head.
“But if the truth is that he is not, it is no secret that you would replace Priest Herten on his passing, Miraha.”
No secret? Miraha turned surprised eyes upon her sisters who gazed back with a reality she was not ready to accept. She was faithful, but she was far unready to answer questions of her own, let alone those of an entire church.
“What will you have us do?” they asked her, as if Priest Herten had already bowed to his grave. Even if he hadn’t, their lacking his guidance was equal to just that.
“Not what I would do. What would Gildeon do? Let us pray for insight for ourselves and this girl who claims to have a piece of Huilian’s soul.”
As if the sermon had already begun, the three sisters filed humbly into the antechamber to pray.
Jaryd had set Lorn in a crate full of blankets. She had fallen asleep again. Or was simply in an unconscious daze – he couldn’t tell for sure.
They were in an underground storage chamber, but the vastness of it expanded beyond what he could see. Pillars of stone held the temple’s floor above them, and interspersed between the pillars were more boxes, crates, sacks, and barrels labeled apples, potatoes, flour, beans, blankets, water, and on and on. The wall nearest him had tunnels that snaked into the deeper dark and doors with large padlocks. It made Jaryd wonder to what other reaches the undertemple actually spread.
His eyes eventually adjusted to the dimness so he could keep an eye on the sleeping girl without worry of her lunging at him out of the dark. So he saw when she stirred back to consciousness. She lifted her body, her black hair spraying out like frozen strings of black water from a fountain. Her eyes were especially dark, so they were no longer eyes, but voids.
“I don’t feel Huilian so close,” she said, seemingly to Jaryd but she wasn’t looking at him. “I feel safe here.” She looked up. “Jaryd?”
Again, that brief moment of clarity that seemed to glow weakly from her even in the dark and across the chamber. The tone in her voice gave it away; still innocent under the heavy cloak she could not remove.
“I’m here,” he answered dolefully, rubbing his eyes. It was long since past dinner. He had been in the middle of eating his lunch when Lorn escaped her cell. His stomach grumbled. He looked over at the crates of food and went to them, the click of his boots echoing loudly. He picked out an apple and potato. “Do you want something?” he asked over his shoulder.
Lorn only stared at him.
He grabbed another two of each and delivered them to her, dropping a potato and an apple on her bed of blankets then found himself at his original seat and bit into the potato. Starchy, but it would fill him for a while in case the next meal had an even greater space between it.
Lorn picked the food up, one in each hand and studied them. She looked up at Jaryd. “Thank you. Huilian has never been this kind.”
“Who is this Huilian?” Jaryd asked with a mouth full of potato. He wiped juice from his chin with his sleeve. If he was to be trapped down here with her, he might as well entertain himself with whatever sadistic story her fevered mind could fabricate. But the priestess who accepted them into the temple grew anxious upon this girl’s mention of this Huilian, and he had just now remembered that the priestess touched Lorn while in her state of possession and the girl went limp. Even now, she was still pacified.
“Huilian is the one who fell with Gildeon,” she responded, as if it were obvious.
“Gildeon fell with him, you say?” Jaryd nodded as if deeply interested, but the moment stretched out as she watched him and Jaryd found he was just a little more curious. The story was too absurd to believe, but then it would replace the empty pain in his heart with a knowledge that Gildeon did not just abandon his people. If this Huilian was somewhere – inside this girl – than surely Gildeon was somewhere still, too.
His broken faith put angry, unjustified thoughts in his head. If for some, bizarre reason this girl was right, then the very cause of Gildeon’s fall and Jaryd’s broken faith sixteen years ago was inside her. Was her.
“You are certain that this Huilian is inside you?”
“Yes! Yes! He tells me all the time.” Her eyes lit up, as if excited that someone else believed.
Jaryd drew his dagger. “Then you must die!”
He rushed her. She gasped and recoiled, holding her hands in front of her, cheeks streaking with tears.
“But I don’t want to die.” She cried, and Jaryd stopped. She scooted back from him, her eyes dark. “Don’t hurt me. I don’t like to be hurt.” She sobbed into her knees. “Huilian always hurts me.”
He stood dumbfounded, his heart in his throat. Jaryd was ten when Gildeon fell, still old enough for it to wound his budding chance to believe in the god. Huilian needed to die, die because he had crushed Jaryd’s faith who had taken a chance to believe in something above him, believe in something he could not see, to know he came from somewhere and went there again after he died, to trust he had reason to live. People complained there were gaps in the religion, and so chose not to believe. Jaryd thought those gaps were leaps of faith to see how much courage they had to brave the dark.
Gildeon knew the answers in the gaps. Perhaps the god just wanted to see how lazy people were, to see if
they’d find a flaw and move to something easier instead of figuring it out. Jaryd wanted to kill this girl to kill Huilian, but as much as he wanted to plunge his blade into her chest, he could not do so much as draw it forth.
Her sobbing continued and he sheathed his blade, ashamed that he had considered committing murder beneath the temple over something that was still not verified. Guilt overwhelmed him as she continued to hide her face and cry. He went to her pile of blankets and sat next to her. Sliding an around behind her, he pulled her in close. Her body shuddered and she stopped crying. She clutched the front of his uniform again and was soon asleep.
He leaned against the wall with her nestled against him and reserved himself to accept that he would be there for a while.
Lord of Ruidenthall
When she was satisfied with the quality of sleep she attained in her nap, she relocated back to her own horse and saddle.
Torren was relentlessly describing all the wonders Ruidenthall had to offer in great detail. Altarn didn’t much care because it was going to make it that much harder to fight its Lord. But she let Torren prattle on anyway, smiling when she expected he wanted her too, laughing in company to his own.
Athenya was another three hours away and already she was dreading the journey home without someone to accompany her. She kicked herself every minute for not allowing her guards to follow, even though she still wouldn’t know how to do it and still keep her identity a secret. She supposed she could sit in Athenya and send a bird back to summon them to escort her home. But that would only prove two things, that she was incapable of taking care of herself and that she couldn’t make wise decisions the first time. She supposed it wouldn’t be hard to convince Torren she needed his escort back, but that would only complicate the poor man’s heart when he found out he could not stay with her. She would have to wait for a caravan. Being attacked twice already, she would not chance even a third.