“That’s a good idea,” Andros said. “Lea may need a few days to recover from using such a strong burst of magic like this.”
“I’ll gather some of the others to help me clear out this cave and bring these books and items to the village so we can study them,” Ourelia said.
Andros stared down at the brittle bones of the dead hunter. “They can be killed. Portals and hunters can both be defeated. Just knowing it and seeing it with our own eyes gives us all new hope. This is a big day for The Resistance.”
I left them there to clear out the cave while I carried an exhausted Lea back to the village. She slept most of the way, leaving me to focus on the memory we’d seen. There was something about it that kept nagging at me, but I couldn’t quite figure it out.
It wasn’t until long after I’d settled Lea into her bed that it finally hit me.
Even though we hadn’t been able to hear what the two witches in the memory were saying to each other, some part of my brain had registered this one fact.
The young woman in the memory had said the older woman’s name several times.
She’d called her Priestess Winter.
This Passage
The year that followed was one of the most productive and important in the building of the demon resistance against the Order of Shadows.
The books we’d found in the cave were in fact spellbooks belonging to young witches training to become a part of the Order. It took some time to learn to read the human language, but after a few months, many of us had a working knowledge of the basics.
One of the most important books we found was the hunter’s own personal journal. Through it, we confirmed what we’d already suspected. The hunter used to be human. All hunters had been human witches in the Order at some point.
Her name had been Julia when she was human. She had been an initiate of the Order of Shadows just like her mother before her. She became a full member at the age of eighteen in a ritual ceremony, but unfortunately, she didn’t describe what that ceremony entailed.
Did it have something to do with the portal ceremonies we had witnessed? The terrified girls that always seemed to be a part of the ceremony could very well have been eighteen. We had no way of gaging human age, but they all seemed to be very young.
When she was in her twenties, she tried to talk her younger cousin out of joining the Order of Shadows. The exact details weren’t clear, but she had broken an important rule of the Order by exposing some of their darker secrets to the younger recruits. One of the girls betrayed her confidence and she was thrown into some kind of prison in the basement of the priestess who ruled over all of the blue demon gates.
Priestess Winter.
She rules over all the blue gates. She knows where my brother is.
As punishment, Priestess Winter used a special stone to strip away all of the young witch’s normal powers. We guessed this was the memory we had witnessed when Lea touched the blue stone in the hunter’s den.
After her powers were taken from her, they were then replaced with darker magic. Something that allowed the hunter to live here in the demon world much longer than a normal human lifespan. Their bodies decayed but they continued to live on as ghosts of a sort.
As a hunter, she was given a new name. She seemed to retain a lot of her memories, but she had no real will of her own anymore. No ability to deny the Order what they asked, and no way to redeem herself. The passages in the journal were often tinged with madness, so the information was not always easy to understand or interpret, but we were at least able to understand that all of the hunters used to be human witches who had broken the rules or angered the priestess. The hunters were banished to the shadow world and doomed to a life of solitude and madness, their only job to locate demons who were powerful enough to be used in the human world.
Unfortunately the journals still didn’t help us understand just how the demons were being used by the humans. All we were able to understand was that somehow the demons were being used to provide greater power to the witches over there.
During that year of intense study, while I looked for answers that might help me find my brother, Lea practiced her ability to see the memories of the past. We spent more and more of our time apart and I think she had begun to see that there was no room in my heart—or my life—for love.
All I knew was revenge.
Andros and Ourelia continued their work with the black roses. Now that they had some of the Order’s spell books, they were able to understand some of the magic behind the roses’ ability to bind a demon to a specific spot. They began to experiment with the different components of the portal rituals, adding soul stones to the center of the roses. It was dangerous work—one wrong word or step could leave a demon’s powers or energy trapped inside the stone forever—but what they learned was invaluable to the cause.
On this particular day, just over a year since we had discovered the abandoned portal in the cave, they both came running up to the village, their faces filled with excitement.
“You will not believe what we’ve discovered,” Ourelia said.
“It’s incredible,” Andros said. “Something that will change everything.”
“A portal?” I asked, my heart racing.
“Better,” Andros said, smiling. “Get the others.”
It took us some time to round everyone up. Especially Lea. She’d been growing more and more distant lately. When I finally found her, she was sitting alone looking out over the sea. There were storms in the distance, causing the waves to rise and fall violently. Not a calm day today.
“Andros wants to show us something important,” I said. I noticed the sadness etched on her face. “Are you okay?”
She turned and gave me a strange, sad smile. “I’m okay,” she said.
“Have you been out here alone all morning?” I asked.
“Let’s see what Andros has to show us,” she said, standing. She didn’t answer my question.
Her sadness frightened me. Had she seen something in the memories of the past?
She joined me in the village. Ourelia and Andros had already gathered the rest of the group together in the village center. By this time, there were nearly two hundred of us.
“I know there has been some concern lately about our growing numbers,” Andros began, addressing the crowd now that we had arrived. “We need as many demons to join our cause as possible, but since we know the king will not approve of what we are doing, we have to be careful not to draw too much attention.”
“For now, we’ve managed to avoid his concern. All we’ve done is help rebuild the villages and other harmless actions,” Ourelia added. “But the more we learn about the Order, the more we feel that battle is close. When that moment comes, we are going to need a safe place to hide, away from the eyes of both the king and the Order.”
She glanced at Lea, who did not drop her gaze or act in any way.
“Recently, we lucked upon a very happy gift,” Andros said, a smile bigger than any I’d ever seen on his face before. “A few weeks ago, while looking for a new, larger home for our camp, Ourelia and I stumbled upon the entrance to a cave.”
“A very large cave,” Ourelia said. They were both giggling like children. “We spent several days exploring the area to make sure it was safe and uninhabited. You are not going to believe this place.”
“You’ll have to see for yourself to understand the magnitude of this discovery,” Andros said. “But I think we’ve found a new home for The Resistance.”
They led us through the Obsidian Forest and across a small stream to a clearing in the woods. In the center of the clearing was a ring of black roses. Confused, I turned to Andros.
“I thought you said you found a cave. This looks like one of the Order’s portals,” I said.
Andros smiled. “That’s the other big surprise,” he said. “Through my experiments with the roses, I was able to develop a security system of sorts. Ourelia and I spent the last week covering the original
entrance to the caves with this new door.”
“How does it work?” Lea asked.
“When the black roses and the soul stones are used together, they can pull a demon into a circle and hold them there,” he said. “This is how the order uses the magic. But I learned that if I put roses on both sides, I could actually turn this into more of a doorway. A passage, allowing a demon to enter one side and come out the other. It’s like a portal of sorts, but since we control the magic, we can also control who can enter.”
“And it’s safe?” Azira asked, wringing her hands together.
“Completely,” Andros said. “I’ll prove it.”
He stepped into the circle of roses and his body disappeared. The crowd around us gasped.
I looked to Ourelia. “Where did he go?”
“He’s inside the cave below us now,” she said. “Trust us.”
She motioned for me to enter the circle, but I was afraid. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Andros. It was just more of a fear of the unknown. I had no idea how Andros had figured out the way the roses worked, but what if he was wrong?
Lea stepped forward and took my hand in hers. It had been months since we’d touched and the feel of her skin on mine surprised me.
“We’ll go together,” she said.
I nodded and squeezed her hand. Together, we walked into the center of the roses.
She put her arms tight around my waist and drew in a surprised gasp as the roses pulled us through, our forms turning to smoke and tumbling around as we were pulled through the solid earth.
It was a feeling of separating from myself. Not quite like turning to my shadow form. Even in shadows, I am whole. I cannot turn invisible and walk through walls.
This was more like being taken apart and put back together again.
When we pushed through to the darkness of the cave below, I took a deep breath and held Lea to my body. Her breath came fast and her chest rose and fell against my own. She looked up at me with such a mix of adoration and longing that it broke my heart into pieces.
She deserved to be loved. She deserved so much more than this. Tears filled my eyes and I wanted so badly to tell her the truth. That someone did love her. That it was all my fault he was gone.
Even after all these years, I could not forgive myself for his disappearance.
And I could not love her the way he’d asked me to.
It suddenly felt as if this brief journey—this passage through the earth and into the darkness of the cave below—was a sign of times to come. This embrace was the beginning of the end somehow, although at the time I couldn’t explain how or why I knew it. But I sensed it with all that I was. We were on the edge of great change.
And I think she knew it too.
I looked away and released my hold on her. Lea’s shoulders fell and her eyes darkened. The moment of tenderness between us passed as quickly as it had come. Never to come again.
The Underground
Words cannot describe the awe we all felt as the small corridor emptied out into a large hall. I had never seen an underground cave with such extensive carvings and gemstones.
The hall itself was dirty and needed a lot of work to bring it back to its former glory, but it was breath-taking even in its run-down state. The ceilings in the Grand Hall were as high as the sky. It reached out so far it was difficult to even see the back of the hallway from the stairs here at the entrance.
Smooth white marble, unlike anything I’d ever seen before, adorned the floors. Tall circular columns rose up from the ground, reaching all the way to the ceiling, adorned with intricate patterns of gold. Grand staircases curved down either side of the entrance, leading down to the floor of the Grand Hall.
Six smaller staircases on each side of the Grand Hall each led up to their own separate corridors. Just how big was this place? And who did it belong to?
“What is this place?” I whispered.
Andros stepped toward me as I stared out over the main balcony, my eyes drinking in the enormity of the hall. “This is the palace of the Troll King.”
I laughed, not believing him at first. But when I turned to look at him, I realized he wasn’t kidding.
My smile faded, replaced with an open jaw and wide eyes. “You’re kidding me,” I said. “Trolls are real?”
He leaned against the railing. “Were,” he said. “As far as we can tell, they’re extinct now. Possibly for several thousand years.”
“How do you know it belonged to the trolls?” Lea asked.
Andros smiled. “Besides the incredible size of this place? There’s a library,” he said. “Come on, let me show you guys around.”
The ancient troll caves proved to be the perfect place for The Resistance. We called it the Underground, and it fit in every way.
With the amazing amount of space deep inside the caves, we had all the room we would ever need to not only train an army but also to protect those who would seek shelter inside our walls. Several of the corridors off the main hall held hundreds of rooms, which we each claimed for our own homes. There was a library like Andros had said, full of floor-to-ceiling bookcases made out of white marble. Most of the books inside were written in an ancient language none of us could speak, but we claimed this as the home of our research on the Order as well.
At the back of the Grand Hall, we found rooms that were perfect for training our army, including one that was large enough to hold over a hundred soldiers all running tactics at once.
Together, we fortified the spells and traps at the entrance to the Underground. There was no way the Order—or even the king—could come inside without one of us opening the door and inviting them inside. It was the safest place in the kingdom next to the throneroom itself.
Andros proved to be a great leader during those years. He appointed a council of members to lead. Ourelia was in charge of recruiting new soldiers and residents. Azira had taken on the task of organizing the library. Jericho was put in charge of security, building a team of trusted recruits to guard the entrance day and night.
Lea, Andros and I took turns teaching battle skills to the newer recruits.
Andros also took on the task of organizing the layout of the Underground. He assigned demons to their homes and turned the Grand Hall into a gathering place and a market.
The Underground—and The Resistance—thrived. It became home to more than a thousand demons in its first five years alone. Some of those thousand were trained as warriors, ready to fight against the Order if it came to that. Others were children and elders who became part of the community and who blossomed in the security and safety of the caves.
The demons of The Resistance began to speak of Lea and I as the future hope of the kingdom. They spoke of a time when the king would give his throne to his daughter and how we would restore the kingdom to its former glory. For them, we kept up the appearance of a couple who would someday be married, but we kept separate residences and rarely spoke of anything beyond the business of running the Underground city. Over the years, her sadness turned to cold determination.
It was a time of great change and great progress. The others were concentrating on building something powerful, but on the inside, I was falling apart. At night in the solitude of my room, I spent all my time reading through spellbooks, maps, and journals, retreating further into myself with each day that passed. I drew pictures of my visions and memorized every single detail of every ritual I’d observed.
I needed to know. I needed to understand what had happened. There had to be a clue in there somewhere. I had to be missing something. So I relived it. Not a moment went by that I wasn’t thinking of revenge or regret.
Forgive Me
It had been close to fifty years since Aerden had disappeared when the knock on my door came that would change everything.
I had been inside my small room in the Underground, drawing again. It was very late at night, but I hadn’t been sleeping much. So much time had passed since Aerden had been taken that I had
started to lose hope of ever seeing him alive again. All that held me to this hope was a single vision I ’dhad of him recently. He was standing in front of me, his form black and strange, his eyes distant. What did it mean?
And when would I see him again? How did I know this vision was real and not some random wish of an obsessed mind?
I had started to lose myself, thinking that if there was no hope of ever seeing my brother again, what was I living for at all?
Revenge? We’d been planning revenge for decades, but we never fought back. All this training was worth nothing if we weren’t prepared to fight.
Despite our growth in power and numbers, Andros still refused to begin the war against the Order.
He preached patience, saying that demons had been around a lot longer than humans. He said demons were immortal while humans were fragile. We had time, he would say.
But I wasn’t so sure. To me, he sounded like the King of the North with his assurances that because we were immortal, we were stronger than the humans.
Why couldn’t they see that while we were being patient, the Order was growing stronger? The longer we waited, the less chance we had of ever defeating them.
With each passing year, I felt Aerden slipping away from me. I felt my memories of him fading.
And it was tearing me apart. When I wasn’t training, I spent almost all of time alone in my room or wandering the outerlands, looking for portals. I hardly spoke to anyone, because I had nothing to talk about. All I thought about was Aerden and all I dreamed about was revenge.
Then, one night, a timid knock sounded on my door.
I’d been in the middle of an intricate drawing, immersed in my thoughts of killing Priestess Winter someday. The interruption was an annoyance. Who would be coming to visit me this late at night?
I yanked the door open, scowling and ready to tear into whoever had disturbed me so late.
But it was Lea. And the look on her face scared me.
She’d been crying, and these days, Lea simply didn’t cry. She hadn’t shown much emotion at all in years, come to think of it. Training the Resistance army and rising up as a leader of the Underground had hardened her.
A Demon's Wrath: Part II (Peachville High Demons) Page 7
