by Sarah Chorn
“No.” This time the word was hissed between clenched teeth. Lightning flared, striking the center of the barn with a flash so bright it blinded her. Thunder roared, shaking the structure around them. Seraphina’s ears were ringing. She shrieked and heard Neryan shout out a curse, his body slammed into hers and pushed her to the ground, his solid weight protecting her. Vadden closed his eyes, breathed deep.
“I’m fine,” she said, pushing Neryan off her. “I’m fine. He just startled me. I’m not hurt. Gods, Neryan, you weigh a ton.” She grunted as he pulled himself off her and then sat beside her.
Vadden had lost control. They were all so close to losing control.
“I’m sorry,” Vadden said after he’d calmed down. “Once we are in the palace, we will have to act fast. He’ll read our minds, he’ll know what we are planning, so we’ll have to move quickly, before he can react. As soon as we see him, we strike. We end him.”
“Will you be able to kill him, if it comes to it?” Neryan asked. His words were cold as winter. Edged in frost.
For a long time, Vadden didn’t reply.
“We should get some sleep,” he finally said. “We’ve got a long day ahead of us.”
“Vadden, I am not okay with this,” Neryan grumbled. “I am not okay with any of this. I trusted you and now…”
“You can still trust me, Neryan. I swear it. My past is complicated, but I know what needs to be done.” Vadden clasped a hand over his heart. “I will not betray you. I swear it on my blood and bone, on everything I am, everything I ever have been, and everything I will be.”
Neryan rolled onto his side, turning his back to both of them.
Seraphina didn’t miss Vadden’s non-answer. She watched as he arranged himself, using his pack as a pillow. He grunted, and rolled onto his side. “Eyad stole all of my yesterdays,” she said into the darkness. “I will steal all of my tomorrows back from him, one by one. I don’t care what you were to each other. I will set myself free.”
Silence answered her.
She listened as Vadden’s breathing grew deeper, and evened out. Neryan was next, and then it was just her, staring through the hole in the barn roof at the stars in the sky twinkling so far above. She was full of a restless energy. She couldn’t see over the horizon, but she felt something out there, lurking. Waiting like a promise. She couldn’t decide if she wanted to run toward it or from it. She felt like she was living in a dream. She’d spent so many years of her life imagining a day she’d be able to stand, unchained, under a naked sky with nothing but horizons all around her, waiting to be explored.
She kept thinking she’d wake up any moment now, in her tiny cell with Eyad standing over her, leash in hand, saying, “Good morning, pet. We have a lot to do today.”
She closed her eyes, and somehow, she slept.
When she woke, the eastern horizon was blushing and the stars were disappearing. She heard Vadden and Neryan creep into the surrounding fields to make water, and took the moment of privacy to stretch her body, ease her aching limbs, and rub her throbbing leg and back. She hated how much she hurt, this constant ache never seemed to go away; and while she enjoyed the freedom of motion she had now, it came with a steep price. She was afraid she’d lurch her way into Lord’s Reach, and be so overcome by exhaustion and pain she’d sleep for a week and miss everything she’d gone there for.
She grabbed the cane Vadden had made her and heaved herself up, reaching her feet by the time Neryan appeared again. He’d gone a bit further than usual. Her fire was humming inside of her, anxious and ready to break free. He rested a hand on her arm, the contact beating it back. “How are you?” He asked.
“Fine.” She wanted to ask him if he was okay. If he was ready to be back in that city, ready to face the Premier. She knew he didn’t want to, but would he actually do it, or would he pull back at the last moment? Could she trust him to stay with her? Could she really ask him to do this for her, knowing that he had a daughter out there in the world? Was she cold enough to require this ultimate sacrifice from him?
Trepidation filled her.
But then Vadden appeared, quieting all her questions before she could ask them. “Ready for today?” he asked, throwing his pack over his shoulder.
“As ready as I will ever be, I suppose,” she said.
They started out early, walking with quiet determination east, toward the Reach. They decided to stay away from the road for as long as possible, keeping to the nearby forest and fields, Vadden forging ahead since the terrain was more familiar to him. After a few hours of walking, Seraphina grabbed Neryan’s arm. “He has secrets, my brother. Do you trust him?”
Neryan stopped, studied her. “He’s helped me for five years now, Seraphina. He has been beside me since the day I escaped Lord’s Reach, and has done nothing but shelter me and keep me safe in that time. Yes, he has secrets, and I am not…” he looked to where Vadden had stopped on a small rise, waiting for them. “I’m not happy with the nature of what he’s hidden from us, but we all have secrets. I worry about how his will impact us, but what choice do we have? You picked the path we are walking on. It’s too late to turn back now. I told you I’d support you, and I am.”
She let him go, and pulled herself after him, to the top of that hill where Vadden was speaking in low, important tones with Neryan. “Up there,” Neryan said as soon as she reached them. “Look.”
And there it was.
Lord’s Reach crouched on the horizon like an affliction, a battered silhouette stretching across the point where the sky rested its weary head against the pillow of the earth. It crept up on her like a migraine, a low throb teasing the edges of her vision until she could see through the shimmering mirage that spread over the land like a blanket to the city itself. Brown buildings and walls against a browner world, with a backdrop of the lapis lazuli heavens as the only splash of color. It loomed before them like a chalice full of poisoned wine, ready to be swallowed by the desperate and foolish.
She didn’t want to go there. She didn’t want to go back into that place, to walk through those gates, past that wall, and enter that city where Eyad’s grip was so secure it almost strangled her.
Yet, she also wanted to go there so desperately it almost hurt. Was there some part of her that wanted to run back to Eyad? Back to that familiar life where, if she wasn’t free, at least she understood the world she was living in? Neryan had thrown that at her during their argument, but in her darker, quieter moments, she wondered if maybe he was right.
No. Impossible.
Wasn’t it?
She was so lost and now, staring at the city arrayed before her, she worried that maybe she would never have the time to find herself.
“We should hit the road now,” Vadden said. “Meet up with refugees, if we can.” They made it to the road almost as soon as he had finished speaking.
She stopped, frozen on the long thoroughfare that bisected what used to be verdant farmland—now dried and dead, ruined. Once this highway had been wide and well kept, but now it was pitted and scarred; covered in dust kicked up by a steady stream of refugees. Lined in bodies rotting in the hot sun, flies buzzing in the air, mouths open, eyes seeing nothing. The stench was incredible, defying description. Seraphina pulled the wrap she’d stolen from a farmhouse over her head and used it to cover her nose and mouth. They would walk a road lined by corpses and ghosts. It was fitting.
The refugees they saw were bedraggled, starved people dragging themselves toward the city. Each of them smelling like death, wearing desperation, gaunt and wasted. All hollow eyes and puckered skin. The three of them stuck out among the travelers, with their relative health and their eyes that were haunted, but not by starvation.
They picked a family, another communal one, a handful of husbands and a few wives with a gaggle of children trudging slowly toward the city, waiting for it to swallow them whole. None of the travelers complained, or even spoke when the three of them joined their group, and they were already moving so sl
owly, Seraphina could easily keep up. Neryan covered himself with a hat. They kept their heads down, and shuffled along with everyone else.
Getting into the city was a nonevent, almost disappointing in how easy it was. The guards didn’t stop their chattering, didn’t so much as look at them as they passed. They were just one more group of starved, wasted people looking for hope in a hopeless place. Harmless.
She felt Vadden tug on her arm, and they broke off from the family they’d been walking with. He led them down a wide, dusty road that was lined with beggars, the dying, and the almost dead. A few hopeful talented folk trying to sell their abilities, or their bodies, for some food.
As they walked down that street, she noticed small groups of guards kicking people here, checking them there. A cart following behind each group piled high with bodies like so much firewood. Occasionally a guard would stop, shout something over his shoulder, and the man hauling the cart would pick up another body, and throw it on the pile.
“What are they doing with them?” Seraphina asked, almost afraid of the answer. So much death. So much suffering. It was everywhere, smelling up the air, filling her lungs. There was no getting away from it. It was becoming part of her.
“Probably taking them to the pits outside the city,” Vadden grumbled.
“I can cool you off,” a woman with a wind talent mark on her cheek said, pressing herself against Neryan. “For a slice of bread.” She was dirty, and smelled incredible. Wind tugged on her hair and seemed to lift up Neryan’s shirt with invisible fingers.
“Get off me,” her brother hissed, stepping out of her grasp.
Vadden wrapped an arm around his shoulders and led them away. “Come on, we’re almost there.”
He pulled them along, walking off the main streets for quite a while, until they couldn’t hear the city anymore, putting distance between them and it, until there was nothing but crumbling buildings and alleyways so tight an adult would have to turn sideways to fit through them. Until all they could hear was…
Nothing.
One empty street, and equally empty alleyways, as far as the eye could see. No sound, and no life. In a city full of people, of the dead and dying, the sudden emptiness, the haunted feel to the area they’d walked into, jarred her to her core. She saw that Neryan had lost all color, his eyes taking in the scene before them. Vadden was shaking, lightning flaring down his arms, a storm in his eyes, jaw clenched as though he was holding back an anguished cry.
It had been long enough that the red had turned brown and black, but there was no doubt what it was. It was everywhere. On the walls, on the street, on windows, between cobblestones, caked into cracks. Flies buzzing everywhere, feeding on the traces of carnage left behind. This quarter was covered in such a stain, it would never be scrubbed clean. Such brutality, so many lives painting the city.
All that blood.
“Damn him!” Vadden shouted suddenly. “Damn him!”
“Vadden, calm down,” Neryan said.
So much blood. It was everywhere, stinking up the air with the tinge of iron and old life. If she concentrated, she thought she could hear the shouts of the dying. She’d lived a sheltered life. She knew violence existed, and death happened, but she’d never seen it like this, never seen it pushed past the boundaries of an idea, and enter into the territory of reality. All of this blood, though… She reached out, ran her fingers over a dry, rusted stain, wondered who had put it there and what stories it had fed into the stones of the building it decorated.
She wondered if the world could scream.
“He did this!” Vadden was shouting. “These were people. They were innocent people and he killed them all. If I’d stayed maybe I could have stopped it. This entire city is full of the dying, those who don’t need to be dying. How many are deceased because I was a coward? Because I left instead of reigning him in?” Vadden was pacing now, firing lightning bolts from his fingertips, singeing the cobblestones around him. Ranting and raving, words tumbling over themselves like they couldn’t wait to hit the air.
Vadden’s energy was intoxicating, bumping up against her fire like a living creature, feeding it until she lost herself. She was an inferno. A forest fire encased in flesh. A soul, blazing. She was a cosmic event. She was a shooting star scattering a trail of diamond dust in her wake. Her luminosity rent the midnight sky, leaving a scar that would mark the heavens with the violence of her passing. Her brilliance served as a reminder that the darkness might be fearsome, but it’s the light that wounds.
Suddenly, in the middle of all this, she heard a voice calling her name, loud and desperate, from right under the city itself. It sang to her, begged her to come, to find him, to make him whole again. He needed her. He needed her more than he’d ever needed anything and she had to go and get him. Had to—
She heard shouting, felt Neryan’s hands gripping hers, painfully tight. His water was no match for her fire, not really. Not right now. It would be so easy to give in, to just let herself go and Become…
“Seraphina!” Neryan was shouting at her. “Seraphina!”
Slowly, slowly she pulled herself together, became aware of the tight, hot feeling of her skin, the closed in nature of her soul, the warm blood pooling in her limbs and the red, burning haze covering her vision. She became part of the world again, felt the city seep into her, mark her with its musty odor and its oppressive history. She was Seraphina again, not a star, nor a burning soul; just a woman, staring at a world that was too overwhelming for her to understand.
Neryan had his arms around her, pulling her in a fierce hug. “I thought I’d lost you there for a minute,” he said. “Are you back now?” He was covered in sweat; his body was shaking.
“I never left,” she answered. She was engulfed in a tidal wave of his water.
“Seraphina, you weren’t a woman anymore, just fire shaped like a person and I was boiling.” She studied herself. Her clothes seemed fine. Nothing on her was singed. Then she studied her brother and saw the terror filling his eyes. Fear, very real fear.
He was afraid of her. Neryan was afraid of her.
“Neryan, I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened.”
She wavered on her feet, suddenly exhausted. Neryan was studying her, eyes wide. He hesitated before wrapping a tentative arm around her shoulders to steady her.
“Here,” Vadden said, pointing down an alleyway. His eyes had lost all color, nothing but whites, lightning flashing down his arms. He was menace barely kept in check. If he’d noticed her lose control, he made no mention of it. “There’s an apartment down there. It’s not…” he bit his bottom lip and cursed low under his breath. “It’s not stained like the rest of this fucking place. Stay there. I’m going to go look around the city, see what I can find out.” He looked around himself again, took in the carnage, the blood, and the singed spots where he’d fired off his lightning. “I’ll come back with some food,” he said, then he turned his back on them and disappeared.
“I’m not sure I want to sleep here,” Neryan admitted, pushing open the door to the tiny one-room apartment Vadden had directed them to. There was no blood in this space. At least none that she could see, but it had obviously been ransacked. Blankets, clothes, bowls and other odds and ends lay everywhere, strewn about, smashed and discarded. She wondered who had lived here, who had used these belongings, and whether they were still alive, or if they were part of what was staining the city right now. Neryan reached down and erected a table that had been thrown on its side.
She was so tired. Too tired. She ached. Every part of her hurt, and the fire that was smoldering inside of her seemed stronger.
More than that, though, was the voice. It had been close, so incredibly close. Right under her feet. In that instant, when she’d been nothing but fire, all of her humanity gone, she’d wanted nothing more than to burn a path through the center of the world until she found whoever was on the other side of that call. She’d find home when she was with them. Somehow, she just knew that
for the truth it was and she craved it.
A dark, unpredictable part of her had just woken up, and she wasn’t sure how she felt about that.
Night was crawling across the sky. Had they really spent a day traveling? Her stomach growled, but she doubted Vadden would find food for them. “Was that your stomach?” Neryan asked. He was pacing the small space, picking up items here, discarding them there. “It sounded like a bear growling.”
“And when have you heard a bear growl?” Seraphina asked, mustering a smile. He was trying to lighten the mood. She would go with it. They both needed it.
“I think I just did,” he replied, his eyes filling with relief.
“I spent my childhood sharing a bed with you,” she said. “You snore like a bear.”
“I do not,” he argued, but he was smiling now—a broad, beautiful smile. She regretted that she hadn’t seen it sooner.
“Please. If Eyad was smart, he’d just stand in the countryside at night and listen. Your snores would lead him right to you.”
“Oh, come on,” he argued.
“No wonder you haven’t found a wife yet. She’d have to be an incredible woman to tolerate all that noise. You’d lift the roof off the cabin, my brother.”
“Seraphina—”
“No really, you’re doing her a favor by not finding her. Imagine all that hard work you’re saving her from by snoring under the stars rather than in her cabin.”
“I forgot how annoying you were,” he said, elbowing her in the ribs until she burst out laughing, the sound flying past her lips and filling up their small hideout.
Her laughter surprised even her.
Premier Eyad
He was in another meeting, propped up inconspicuously so as not to look like he was propped up at all. Yet another commissar was reporting on how none of the newly tested children had been found to have any talent. Magic appeared to have dried up, along with the weather, almost a year ago, and no new talent-users had been found since.
