𝐁𝐄𝐂𝐀𝐔𝐒𝐄 𝐈 𝐂𝐎𝐔𝐋𝐃 𝐍𝐎𝐓 𝐒𝐓𝐎𝐏 𝐅𝐎𝐑 𝐃𝐄𝐀𝐓𝐇 | "The Carriage held but just Ourselves - And Immortality."
In which Eden Mercer learns there is more to the Problem, and herself, than meets the eye.
𝐋𝐨𝐜𝐤𝐰𝐨𝐨𝐝 & 𝐂𝐨.
𝐀𝐧𝐭𝐡...
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𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐆𝐀𝐋𝐋𝐄𝐑𝐘𝐀𝐓𝐂𝐎𝐌𝐁𝐄 Carey Hall was loud.
Not to the un-Talented ear, however. For Eden, though, the sounds were nearly deafening. Sitting on the stone floor of the room, pencil in hand hovering over a sketchbook, she closed her eyes and zeroed in. She found that, when she focused on her Talents, the humming in her ears would cease. It was then that she could hear the entire room. At first it was joyous—piano music, conversation, and laughter. But then came the screams. Every single one pierced her very being, along with the rush of glass shattering and the stampeding of footsteps to try and avoid whatever horrors had occurred here.
Pulling away from the Talent-induced hysteria that she was being forced to listen to, she found George slowly walking about the room, a thermometer in hand. It was dark now, the last shreds of daylight falling from the sky. Looking down at her sketch, she found that she had drawn exactly what she had heard. Happy, smiling faces had been scrawled over madly with horrid, terrified grimaces. Some laughing mouths turned to ones holding screams of anguish. Broken glass and cracked dinnerware littered in sketch at the bottom of the page.
"This whole place is freezing up," George informed Eden as she stood on wobbly legs, clutching her drawing. His head was still bent over the thermometer, reading it as he went. "And it's hard to map a Source because the rooms don't fit together properly. I think there's something old that's hidden away." A rush of sound enveloped Eden's inner ears. Humming, tapping, creaking—all at once and yet, she could distinctly hear all three. "It feels like we're going in blind." George stopped to look at her, dark eyes wide with uncertainty behind his glasses. "Are we sure we wanna do this?"
Eden glanced from George, to her sketch, and back to George. "I knew we shouldn't have come," she muttered. That sick feeling in her stomach hadn't gone away, either—it was still there. She had just become used to it. She didn't want to be, though, and she couldn't help but feel like they all needed to get the hell out of there. "Lockwood?"
Turning around, Eden found Anthony tampering with something in the adjacent hall. "Lockwood, what are you doing?" George called out next.
A few moments passed with some more tampering sounds and then Anthony was making his way toward them again. "Just a spot of fishing," he replied casually. "Hopefully, this will relax you both a bit. I came here yesterday after Satchell's to do a bit of recon and stashed this outside." In his hands was a paper-wrapped bomb flare. "It was obvious, Fairfax being who he is, he was gonna search our bags. And me being me, I was gonna smuggle flares in. We don't have our usual kit, but we do have this bomb flare." He pulled the brown paper off of it and showed them the weapon. Truly, it did nothing to ease Eden's nerves—she just felt that they shouldn't be there. "Industrial strength. Better be. Cost enough."
