by Tom Hansen
Synol nodded, blinking back tears. “I know, I just wasn’t expecting this. This…this is horrible.”
Ynya nodded. “Yes, but we can’t sit on the side and cry about it, we need to act like soldiers and go somewhere.”
In the distance, from one of the south-side white buildings, a door clanged open and two soldiers exited carrying a man’s naked body. He was covered in blood and appeared lifeless.
All the idle chit-chat among the soldiers ceased as everyone turned to the man.
Ynya shivered. “Let’s find them and get them safe.”
Chapter Seven
Since the bloodied man had been taken toward the west, they decided to go the opposite direction. Despite how large the structure had looked from the outside, all the towers, multiple walls, and sharpened rocks had reduced the size of the inner compound by about half. The road around the huge milling area in the center appeared to be about a quarter-mile square.
It was just small enough to comfortably see from one side to the other when you stood in the center, but large enough that it still seemed incredibly massive.
As they walked down the road, nodding to soldiers who eyed them, Ynya tried to decipher all the various signs on the buildings.
“First Enlightenment? What does that mean?”
Synol shrugged. “I’ve been trying to figure that out for myself, too. You see that building over there?”
She pointed, and Ynya could just read the sign. “Prisoner Processing. If anyone would know where Finny or Meki or, it would be them.”
Synol nodded. “I just hope we’re not too late. It’s been weeks since they were taken.”
Ynya looked back through the massive yard in the center, at the huddled prisoners inside. “At least it’s only been weeks. It could have been months or even years. How long has Reyoarfjell been around? I only ever remember Mama and Papa talk about it once when I was younger. That must have been six years ago.”
Synol breathed out. “It’s been open for longer than that.” She stopped and turned toward Ynya. “I just realized something.”
“What?”
Synol’s already pale face seemed to drain of even more color.
This, in turn, raised the alarm levels of Ynya. “What is it?”
“I think Mama has been here.”
The statement bored into Ynya’s head, and heat rose inside her as a rush of emotion rocked her so much that she had to take a step back. “She…what?”
“I remember her talking to Papa about the Enlightenments. At the time, I never knew what they were talking about, I only knew it was related to Reyoarfjell. But I’d never heard that word uttered anywhere else until now.”
Synol pointed at another sign.
Ynya’s blood froze. “Third Enlightenment Processing?”
Synol visibly shivered and grabbed her arms with her hands. “Come on, I don’t want to be here any longer than we need.”
They came upon a building labeled Hall of Records. A half-dozen windows adorned the front, covered with shutters. In front of each shuttered window was a bench and a small table.
One guard stood by the doorway.
Ynya didn’t know if soldiers needed to explain their reasons for entering buildings, but decided that marching up and making it look like she knew what she was doing would be the better choice.
She walked up to the guard, nodded perfunctorily, then grabbed the door handle and opened. Synol followed her lead.
He nodded at them, then looked back into the distance.
I can’t believe that worked!
It was much warmer inside than outside. Ynya had to take down her hood lest she overheat. Synol followed suit.
The first room was empty. The entire interior looked to be carved from one piece of stone, but Ynya figured it was just built this way using earth mages’ abilities. She took in the timber ceiling that was so tall she wouldn’t be able to touch it even if she jumped from Synol’s shoulders. A heavy wooden door adorned each wall.
“Left, right, or center?”
Ynya shrugged. “I think the center would be more likely?”
Synol nodded. “Works for me. We might need to use our magic in there, so be ready.” Synol knocked on the door.
A loud cursing sound came from the other side. A woman opened the door. “What do you want?”
Synol pursed her lips. “Hello, we’re looking for information on a couple prisoners that were processed here a couple weeks ago.”
The woman, whose short brown hair looked like it hadn’t been washed in weeks, sighed. “Do you have their ordinals?”
Synol looked at Ynya, who shrugged. “Ordinals?”
The woman’s eyes opened slightly and her nostrils flared.
Inside Ynya’s chest, panic rose. Something’s wrong. Why would she be asking for ordinals rather than names?
The woman pursed her lips. Her eyebrows furrowed as she studied each of their faces. “I need to log your ordinals too, please provide them.” Her eyes flicked to Ynya’s right arm as she said ‘ordinal.’
A memory of silvery tattoos on the two previous Skarmyord percolated in Ynya’s mind. She realized the woman had silver tattoos on her right forearm as well.
Ynya jumped forward. She grabbed the woman’s head and poured heat through her hands.
The woman released a scream, but it quickly faded as the heat overwhelmed her. She crumpled to the floor and Ynya grabbed her and pulled her into the room.
“Why’d you do that?”
“Ordinals. Did you have any idea what that meant?”
“No, but I was going to ask her to explain.”
“You think she would have explained something to us that we should have known already? Did you notice her eyes? She knew we weren’t who we said we were.”
Synol’s eyes went wide. “What does that mean?”
“It means we should hurry.”
The records room turned out to be a lot smaller than they expected. A large wooden desk stood in the center, with a dozen cabinets along the back and side walls. Each one contained three drawers with metal pulls.
On the front of each cabinet drawer was a small placard with words on them.
Ynya scanned the room.
“These four have First, Second, Third, and Fourth Enlightenments.”
Synol replied. “Here is one for Discarded. Should we look here first?”
Ynya shuddered, but shook her head. “Let’s follow the path they normally would have. Is there one for new prisoners or something?”
“Here.” Synol pointed at the draw in the corner. “Arrivals.”
“That should work.”
Opening the first drawer, they found it contained a number of ledgers. Each one had date ranges stamped into the outside leather. The one in the front was for the last two months.
“There.”
Synol grabbed it out and took it to the desk. Ynya began to close the drawer, then stopped. She scanned over the ledgers.
“These go back years.”
Ynya’s chest tightened.
She opened up the drawer underneath it. “These go back even further. This is before I was born.”
Panic rose higher in her tight chest.
She moved to the final drawer in the stack, and stopped. “These are much, much older, Synol.” Her heart pounded as she scanned the dates.
“How far?”
Ynya held back a shiver while the hairs stood on her arm.
“They go back a hundred years.”
Chapter Eight
Synol opened the ledger. “We need to find the girls.”
Ynya nodded, closing the drawer. “Yes.”
But her mind couldn’t stop thinking about what was in that drawer. How has this prison been going on for so long, yet I’ve only heard about it recently? Is it something the Frost Queen started, or is this something that has been going on longer than her reign?
The notion of those hundreds of ledgers terrified her. She turned and looked through th
e room with a newfound horror. Each of these cabinets list thousands of names over at least a hundred years. How many people have come through here?
“Ynya, I found them!”
That snapped her back to reality. “You what?”
Ynya stepped over to Synol, who had her finger planted on two rows about midway through the ledger. Each page listed four rows, for four people.
“Age twelve, gender female, hair red. Name Finny Oblique. This is her. She and Meki. They were processed three weeks ago. There are a few numbers here, but I’m not sure what they mean.”
Synol pointed to the column headers.
“E-one?”
“Enlightenment?”
“Maybe, but how do we tell where they were taken?”
The door burst open with a loud crack.
In a blur, half a dozen soldiers clad in blue attire flooded through the door and surrounding both girls.
Ynya flared her heat, routing it to her hands. Before she could do anything with it, a flash of silver filled her vision and she was stabbed three times. Thigh, middle, shoulder.
Each time the blade pierced her skin, she relived memories from long ago. Even though she knew the attack only took a half second, it seemed like an age. Ynya watched each blade strike true, and with each hit she wished she knew how to defend against their attacks.
She thought back to the lesson she had learned from Miss-Miss. You only get one chance to attack them, because after that, they own you.
That was the only way Ynya had managed to take out the woman in white. Even then, it was an incredibly close battle, and one she had only won because the woman was hobbled and overextended for the final strike.
Ynya crumpled to the ground in a heap as she felt her magic dissipate into a mist of nothingness.
Beside her, Synol did the same. Her head hit the table with a thump as she fell forward. She lay motionless across the ledger.
“So, who do we have here?”
A man clad all in red leather strolled through the doorway. He was tall and muscular, with a broad chest and a short well-trimmed beard. His hair was shaved off, leaving his head shiny in the lantern light.
He wove his fingers together and cracked his knuckles.
“Sorry we weren’t here to see you all personally, but we had already flagged you as suspicious when you entered the compound. Not knowing the proper hand signals made you stand out.”
Hand signals?
“But I am curious to meet someone with the audacity to infiltrate a place such as this. Normally everyone wants to escape, so why would anyone want to come in? I told my soldiers to let you in and we kept our distance to watch where you went.”
He stepped closer and loomed over Ynya. His bright red outfit and pale skin made him almost look like he was on fire.
“So how about we see what all the fuss is about, shall we?”
He grabbed Synol by the arm and yanked her from the desk. She crumpled to the floor.
Two soldiers who had been standing over the sisters with silver daggers sheathed them and stepped out of the way.
He looked up at the other soldiers in the room. “You can go, we have this. We’ll need to send them for processing, though, so notify the Inscriber that we have two unscheduled entries.”
“Of course, Sir.”
All but two of the soldiers left, leaving the door open.
The man in red picked up the ledger and looked it over. “Oh. Oh my, you ladies must be the two I’ve been hearing so much about. The Oblique sisters, I assume?”
He folded up the ledger and handed it to one of the soldiers, then squatted down to get closer. “Let’s get a better look at you both.”
The other soldier grabbed Synol and wrenched her to a sitting position. The first soldier set the ledger down and did the same to Ynya.
They weren’t gentle.
The soldiers forced Ynya into the row of cabinets behind her, cracking her head on the dense wood. The pain was intense and made her feel nauseous as heat bloomed through her head and into her torso.
The man in red grabbed Synol’s chin, moving her side to side and looking at her face. “You must be Synol, the older one. I thought you were coming here in a carriage. You should have just stuck with the plan, because you are now going to experience things the hard way.”
He pulled his hand away and grabbed Ynya’s chin.
Revulsion replaced the pain in an instant, as soon as he touched her. She wanted to bite, but she couldn’t move.
“And you must be the fire one I’ve heard so much about. You have caused a lot of grief for the soldiers in Hyndalskyr district, I have to say. Many of the soldiers here have friends who died by your hand, so enjoy how they treat you for that.”
He stood. “Shackle them first, then take them to the yard and into processing.”
“Yes, Sir.”
One of the soldiers reached into a pouch and pulled out a strange-looking apparatus with a handle and a clamp on one side. The handle had some kind of a trigger mechanism.
She put the object to Synol’s ear, and pulled the trigger.
Synol grunted.
When the soldier pulled the apparatus away, Synol’s ear bled. A small silver earring was locked in her ear.
The soldier loaded another round into the ear piercer and punctured Ynya’s ear, too.
Her connection to magic disappeared.
It was like being stabbed with the silver daggers, but worse. With the daggers, the magic was still present, but too far away to be felt or touched. This one removed the magic entirely.
Ynya felt empty inside as the heat she’d enjoyed her entire life disappeared. The cold right next to her heart, the one she’d received from her mother and still hadn’t figured out how to activate, disappeared as well.
Gone.
She remembered how foreign her mother’s magic felt to her when she first received it. But now that it was gone, too, she realized just how much she had come to enjoy the constant reminder of her mother’s presence right beside her heart. Even though she hadn’t figured out how to use it yet, it had been with her long enough that it was now a part of her. It no longer felt foreign to her.
Ynya liked carrying that piece of her mother with her.
Now it was gone, along with all her abilities.
She tried desperately to pull the earrings out, but it was no use. Stronger magic than hers held them in place.
The ever-present rage flared but quickly subsided, her magic unable to fuel it any longer.
“Oh, and in case you were wondering where your sisters were,” the man in red spoke from the doorway, “one is currently being processed here, but another was removed from the program almost immediately. Seems she didn’t have what it takes for her Majesty’s Army, so we disposed of her.”
Chapter Nine
Prisoner 1267062201 watched from the chair as a man came into the lab.
She had been strapped to this chair for the last three hours, and instructed to wait.
She had complied.
She always complied.
It was how things were done here at the compound. You complied, or there were consequences.
But the voice continued to tell her not to comply. The small voice she constantly pushed away told her to stand up. It told her to break the shackles around her wrists and ankles and leave this place. It told her to find her sisters, and her Mama.
She told the voice no. She was going to follow instructions this time.
It was the least painful way.
“2201, I see you are awake.”
The man approached. He wore brown leather clothes and a long apron that might have been white at some point. His boots were finely stitched and covered in dark red stains.
Everything he wore was covered in dark red stains.
He carried a number of books and papers and placed those on the desk in the corner of the room.
After shuffling around for a bit, he pulled a stool from behind the desk and placed i
t in front of her.
He sat down, groaning with each movement.
“I am the Translator, at least that’s what everyone calls me around here. You have been expedited, and I am most excited to try some things on you.”
He grabbed her right wrist and turned it, to read the ordinals etched on her inner arm. As he read, his eyes widened. “Oh my, you have quite the number of amazing gifts, and those have already been enhanced. I say, we are going to have so much fun.”
He pulled back her sleeve. “Gods Above.”
He pulled back the top of her shirt to expose her shoulder, where the fresh numbers had just been etched the day before. The skin around them was still raw and painful.
The voice told her to bite him, but she pushed it away.
“And Gods Below. All the way to the middle of your chest. We don’t have many of you, unfortunately. We have to make do with what we have, and who we can round up. But every so often a fine specimen such as yourself comes into my office and I get to fine-tune my methods.”
He released her shirt and stood.
The man in the apron turned a wooden crank on the side of her chair.
Her chair elongated and flattened, straightening her from a sitting position to standing. With a creak, the board fell back and latched into something.
Now she lay on a table.
She’d been on a lot of tables in the recent past. She spent most of her time on tables, being Enlightened.
He grabbed her right wrist and turned her hand, slapping the inside of her elbow. “Of all the places you’ve been, I have to tell you that this one is the most exciting. The treatment that I deliver here is unlike any that you have experienced in the other centers. This one is the pinnacle of our modern science engineering. The best of the best!”
He cackled, which devolved into a cough. “The point is, this is the end goal. This is why we are here. This is why I’ve been here for so long, extending my life one generation at a time in order to complete my work for Her Majesty. This is my place, and she had all this built just for me. Many have come through here over the years, sadly not many have survived, but each time I get closer and closer.”
