Soul Reckoning

by Isaac Winter

  I blew on the parchment to dry it and tried to pick it up, but Fel stopped me.

  “Let him sleep.” Fel said, holding the book and parchment in place. I lowered myself back into the chair and took a breath. He was right. I was being too hasty. “He will have enough ordeals in the morning. Give him time to regain his energy.”

  I nodded, petting Auri’s head when he hopped up to see what we were doing.

  “Get him away from the paper,” Fel gathered the book and parchment into his arms. “Don’t want any accidents.”

  As if on cue, Auri belched and a tiny fireball flew out, singing the table right where the book had been. Fel let out a breath, eyeing the both of us. “See what I mean?” He said with a raised eyebrow and laid the book down on the shelf behind him.

  “I’m sorry,” I mumbled. “He just needs some training, is all.”

  “Then I suggest you get right on that.”

  I swallowed the lump of fear in my throat. He was right, again. Why did he always have to be right?

  “Thank you,” I said when I couldn’t think of anything else to say. “For taking me in. For believing in me.”

  Fel looked away, toward the door where we’d battled Alcazar just hours before. “It is our actions that define us. You helped us defeat Alcazar, even after getting mixed up with him in the past. That’s good enough for me.”

  I smiled. “Thank you.”

  “I need to see about strengthening the protective enchantments on this place. If he could get in,” he said with visible distaste, “There’s no telling where else we’re leaving wide open. Not just for us, but my business, too. My patrons count on me.”

  “Do you have to go right now? It’s the middle of the night.”

  “All the better time to put plans into action. Do show the book to Cael when he wakes. Perhaps he can make more sense of it.”

  “Of course,” I agreed. As he turned for the door, I called out once more. “Wait, are you leaving?”

  “I need to go see the mage who enchanted this place. He’s a bit of an insomniac too; he won’t mind.”

  I opened my mouth to protest again, but he’d already breezed out the door, leaving me alone with the crackling fireplace and the baby dragon beside me.

  25

  Cael

  Crash! Crash! Clang!

  I blinked open my eyes, a monstrous headache shooting through my temples. I’d fallen asleep?

  Rubbing the sleep from my face, I winced as the crashing sound came again.

  I paused as I saw the package laying on my nightstand.

  So it hadn’t been a dream, after all. The meeting of the night before still echoed through my mind, and even though I’d apparently gotten some sleep, it still felt like I’d been up all night.

  This was gonna be a long day.

  My foot felt a little better than it had the previous day, but it was still going to take some time to heal. I limped over to the nightstand with the makeshift crutch Fel had given me. I pocketed the Meliae’s gift, then opened the door a crack.

  Another crash came from down the hallway.

  “What are you doing?” I mumbled, staggering from the room.

  “Making breakfast,” Tris responded as if it was the most natural thing in the world. She still refused to meet my gaze. I looked past her to see the source of the noise. Dishes scattered the floor, but none of them were broken, luckily. Tris stood on tiptoe, reaching into the cabinet above her. A full plate of bacon and eggs sat beside her on the counter, still steaming.

  My mouth watered. I hadn’t had a proper breakfast in forever. “You made this?”

  “If I made this, you’d be poisoned right now.” She laughed. “I did manage to grab some goodies from upstairs, though. I just…can’t quite reach…”

  I stepped behind her, leaning on my good leg as I grabbed a stack of plates and a few mugs from the cabinet. My body pressed against hers as she tensed, drawing in a sharp breath. She was so warm…

  Liquid fire ran through my veins at the touch. She knew exactly what I was doing, but could she blame me? She’d been the one giving me the cold shoulder. I met her emerald eyes as I set the plates down on the counter gently. Her lips remained partly open, eyes wide with surprise—and something else…

  “There we go.” I drew away and the space already felt far too cold, far too empty. I had to control myself. I was just helping her fetch the plates because she was too short and dumping the contents of the cabinet on the floor instead. Not because I wanted to feel her skin against me again, see the fire in those eyes…

  Definitely not.

  Tris cleared her throat, a blush creeping up her cheeks. “Thanks,” she whispered, averting her gaze again. Ha. She looked so cute when she was flustered.

  “Thanks for the food,” I winked, grabbing a few slices of bacon and a dollop of scrambled eggs.

  I sat down at the table and tried to focus on my food. It didn’t work very well. My mind was all over the place. Tris. The Meliae. The Tears. The Runes. Tris.

  I looked up when Laurie came into the room, rubbing her eyes and looking just as confused as I had. “What’s with all the racket?” She yawned.

  “Tris doesn’t know how to ask for help.” I smiled into my mug.

  She whacked me on the back of the head as she took her seat, throwing a smirk in my direction.

  “Ow,” I moaned, rubbing the tender spot.

  Laurie stared at us with her hands on her hips. “Get you some food,” I offered.

  “Not hungry.” She took a seat next to us. “Been thinking all night. I couldn’t sleep, so I came down here and did some reading. There’s something I need to tell you.”

  My fork froze on its way to my mouth. It couldn’t wait till after breakfast?

  She dropped the book on the table with a crash. The silverware and mugs vibrated with the impact. I looked at the book and then to her.

  “What was that for?” Tris asked, her face dripping with cider. Apparently she’d sloshed some out when jumping at the sudden noise.

  “Just making sure I have your attention.”

  I scowled and took a breath. Once Laurie had her mind set on something, she refused to give it up. She’d been like that at the Academy, too. The only thing to do was indulge her. I took another bite of bacon to steel myself and finally said, “All right, what is it?”

  “Fel checked this out from the library. Explorations of Veil Arcana. It’s mostly a dry read, but it’s chock full of info about how things work around here.”

  “And...?”

  “And it looks like someone left a message in here, under the endpaper. Discovered it last night.” She flipped open the cover and pointed at the faded handwriting.

  I snapped to attention. She’d found more information on the Veil? And a hidden message, at that?

  “Whoa,” Tris said, leaning over me to inspect the book. “And here I thought it was just another boring academic tome that no one actually reads.”

  I glared at her. Tris simply shrugged in response, but a flicker of mischief burned in her eyes. She knew just how to push my buttons.

  And I hated it.

  “If you two don’t mind,” Laurie said through gritted teeth. “This is important. Now, I transcribed what I could, but a lot of the numbers are faded or missing.”

  “What do you have so far?” I asked. Old manuscripts were my specialty, and the discovery of this message was enough to wipe any other feelings away for the moment. My chest surged with adrenaline the way it did when I started a new project back at home. Finally, something I was good at. “Give it here.”

  She hefted the book toward me and I grabbed at it hungrily, careful not to bend the pages. I brushed the hair out of my face and took a closer look.

  Incredible.

  The writing wasn’t very well preserved, sure, but it was the idea of secret messages and hidden gems that had got me into linguistics in the first place. I wished they had consulted me before removing the endpaper, but it was too
late now. I’d seen manuscripts in worse shape than this before. I just had to focus.

  Columns of numbers dragged down the page, with no apparent rhyme or reason. To the untrained eye, they would just be gibberish. And that was exactly the point.

  I dragged a lamp on the table closer, hoping a little more light would illuminate the unseen. Tris and Laurie stayed silent for once, although I doubt I would have acknowledged them anyway. When faced with a new puzzle, my mind shut off everything else.

  At first glance, the numbers didn’t seem to make much sense, no. But what if they were simply keys to a larger message? The book was huge and dense with information. Who knew what kind of secrets it held?

  I reached way back into my memory banks, trying to recall the cryptographic puzzles I used to do in the newspaper. I hadn’t touched them in years, but they were a standby of my childhood. I visited my grandma every Sunday, and she always had the newspaper and a pen laid out for me. Doing those word puzzles entranced my mind and imagination, and before I knew it, I was looking for patterns and secrets everywhere I went.

  And then I went to school for linguistics and became a scholar.

  Thanks, Grandma.

  I smiled at the memory and one of the more obscure ciphers came back to me.

  Sometimes people would use books to encode their secret messages. By directing the decoder to different locations in a book, one could put together a message, almost like a scavenger hunt. Only problem was, you needed to have the right book.

  The fact that this code had been scribbled hastily on the front cover and then papered over made me think perhaps this was the book in question, and whoever had found it had copied it there for easy reference. But that would be too simple, right?

  I eyed the list of numbers and letters again. What if this code were like that?

  I scribbled down the first triplet:

  155.4.10.

  Usually in these kinds of ciphers, they went by a hierarchical numbering of page/paragraph/word, or chapter/page/word. I’d even seen some where the target word underwent even further transformations to create the decoded message.

  Taking a deep breath, I flipped to page 155. Text split across the page in two columns, like a dictionary. A small circular diagram was inscribed on the bottom right, and I recognized it as one of the magical orbs Tris so often carried around.

  Okay, 4 was next. Did it mean the fourth line on the page? The fourth word? I trailed my finger across the parchment, holding my breath in anticipation. The fourth line on the left column had only one word, three letters long: end. I frowned. That didn’t fit with either of my ideas. It couldn’t be the tenth word on the line because there was only one word on that line. Perhaps if I checked the other column? Nope. I thought maybe it could refer to the letter on the line, but that didn’t make much sense either.

  I leaned forward, cupping my hands around either side of my face as I honed in on the numbers. If it wasn’t page/paragraph/word, then what was it?

  Looking at the rest of the triplets in the message, I tried to form some sort of pattern in my mind. Nothing was working. They all looked pretty random to me. The numbers never went negative and never went above 1172. I checked—that was the last page of the book. While that made me reasonably certain the first number referred to a page, I still didn’t know what the other two could be.

  One thing that stood out to me was that the numbers in the middle of the triplet often oscillated between even and odd numbers, and they were always in between 1 and 10. That was common enough, I supposed. Even with a random sampling there would be roughly equal numbers of even and odd values. But what if the number itself didn’t actually mean anything? What if the encoder meant for me to focus on the parity of the number instead?

  I glanced at page 155 again and the two columns on the page. Perhaps it was a way of distinguishing the column of the text. That would be clever, for sure, and provide an extra layer of protection against prying eyes.

  Okay, so 4 was an even number. But did that mean the left column or the right? I checked the left first, scanning down the page. The 10, in this case, perhaps meant the tenth word? I mumbled a count under my breath and settled on the word “The.” A common enough starting point, but what was next? Breathless, I wrote down the next triplet of numbers.

  371.9.54.

  If my interpretation was correct, that meant that the next word would be on page 371, in the right column, the 54th word. I flipped the pages as fast I could, desperate to know the next answer. My finger stopped on the word “Veil.”

  The Veil.

  I sucked in a breath as a chill ran down my spine.

  “Are there any other copies of this book here?” I asked, emerging from my trance. There were hundreds of triplets here, and decoding them all myself would take time.

  “Just the one.”

  “It’s a code. A secret code. Whoever wrote this...is trying to tell us something.”

  “How can I help?” Laurie asked.

  “Not gonna make me do your translations for you this time?” I teased her.

  “This isn’t the Academy,” she retorted. “Give me that book. We’ll work together. What do I need to do?”

  With two heads working at decoding the cipher, the transcription process went much quicker. Laurie took to it pretty quickly, and soon we’d fallen into a sort of rhythm, the only sounds the crackle of the fireplace and the flipping of pages as we scrawled down the next clue.

  Within an hour, we’d managed to put the pieces together. Tired and sporting a few new paper cuts, I read the message that appeared aloud.

  The Veil exists as a barrier between worlds, a crossroads to the .

  A giant rent in the sky appeared. We called it the Dark Day. But I found the source of this imbalance.

  The Veil operates on a system. In order to stay in alignment, the amount of energy flowing in and out of the Veil must remain roughly equal. Those who walk between worlds, known as Veilwalkers, must .

  A strange set of Runes seems to underpin this reality, though where they come from, I cannot say. They appear to be directly linked.... When I experimented with the Runes, the world changed before my eyes. I felt powerful, for once. But something else happened that day.

  The further I use my magic, the weaker the Veil becomes...

  Earthquakes, strange glitches....

  The temptation is strong. But to indulge my fantasies would be to damn us all.

  I must resist.

  I looked up at Tris and Laurie, who stared at me open-mouthed. My heart hammered like a drum in my chest, blood rushing up to the very tips of my ears.

  Tris spoke first.

  “So what you’re saying is...the Runes are causing all this? I thought they were good. Hell, they saved us more times than I can count.”

  “Languages don’t have a morality,” I said almost on instinct. It reminded me of the questions my students used to ask. She wasn’t wrong, but...

  “I think we’ve been greedy,” I admitted. “I don’t know why I got this power. I don’t know why Crane did, either. But clearly, it’s not meant to be used this way. It’s throwing things all out of balance. And if that book is any indication, this isn’t the first time it’s happened, either.”

  Laurie spoke up next, re-reading the transcribed message.

  “If the Runes are the cause of all this...and you can’t use them anymore, that’s good, right?”

  I frowned, shaking my head. “It’s not that simple. I’m not the only one that can use the Runes, remember?”

  Tris gulped. “Crane’s big event...”

  “Whatever it is, it’s going to bring the whole place down if we don’t stop him. Maybe he doesn’t know that he’s tearing this world apart. Maybe he does. But we can’t let him get away with it.”

  “Well, that’s for sure.” Laurie agreed, baring her fists. “He still owes me money!”

  The party broke into nervous laughter. Even t
hough a current of fear wove its way through me like poison, at least in this moment, I had friends.

  Aurelius flew over our heads, squawking in alarm as the door opened and Fel shuffled back through. He looked from the dragon, to Laurie, then to Tris and finally me. “Any news?”

  26

  Cael

  Tris took the time to explain things to Fel while I slipped out of the room. The gift from the Meliae still weighed heavily in my pocket, and I hadn’t even had a chance to unwrap it yet.

  I ducked back into my room and sat on the bed, holding the gift in my lap. Last time I’d done something like this, it teleported me across the map. I certainly couldn’t afford that right now. Holding my breath, I unwrapped the silk packaging.

  > You have found: Runeseeker Stone.

  > The stone glows orange and vibrates to warn the user of nearby manipulations. It can also be used to absorb or counteract Runic powers, but this destroys the stone.

  The Meliae never ceased to amaze. I stared at it, breathless. Counteract Runic powers...did that mean what I thought it meant? Perhaps I could use this to close a Tear, or even in the final confrontation with Crane. But there was the problem. It had only one use, and I needed to choose that use carefully.

  I grasped the stone in my hand, feeling its cool weight. A knock at the door startled me and I shoved the stone into my pocket.

  “Cael, are you in there?” Laurie’s voice came through the door, muffled.

  “Yeah, just a moment!” I said, straightening. With a breath, I opened the door to find her standing there, holding my cloak.

  “You forgot this,” she said softly, holding it out to me. The cloak dragged on the ground because it was much too long for her, but I was grateful all the same.

  “Thank you, Laurie,” I said, brushing the cloak off. “I’d been missing this.”

  “Can I come in?” Laurie whispered.

  I stepped back. “Um, sure.”

  She entered my room and closed the door. She had the same look as she always did at the Academy when she wanted something done: eyes narrowed, hands on hips. “What are we going to do, Cael?”