Reaching For Stars

⚠⫿🗻Star Still Shining

This scene is taken from the fourth book in Drao's series (unnamed). Marked mature for gore (wounds) and implications of abuse.

Footsteps bounce around me, sharp and multiplied by the thick, leering, stone walls, despite my attempts to soften them. The air, stale and filled with dust, weighs heavily in my lungs as if it was made out of pelts, tinged with the scent of musk, sweat, and blood. It unsettles the balance of my innards, causing them to shrink back and shiver.

I do not like it here, in the Ravan tunnels. They press at me, compressing the light to a small aura before and behind me with thick, dense blankets of darkness, hiding the steps below my feet and the far too narrow twists and turns. Here, darkness reigns. Here, countless Ravans, Leaders, and First Shadows have worn grooves into the stone, guiding the next one's feet in an inevitable march towards the room. The room where the ghosts of screams linger in the corners like cobwebs: the Ravan's room.

A tremor slithers down my arms and back, slowing my steps and adding an undercurrent of unease to the whispers of deep, twisted memories born from within the room's walls. The jigglosackt—resting on top of the basket I cradle in my arms—brightens as my movements jiggle it, stretching its pale, white light a little farther ahead and illuminating a door. It is wooden, made from some tree that had died decades ago, and is deeply grooved from violent encounters and desperate fingers clawing for a way out. A metal bar stretches over it, locking it against the wall and keeping all who are behind it trapped.

Here is the threshold of the room. Here is the entrance to a place of fear and blood and suffering. Here is where one chooses to enter or to flee, and I am not one who can make the choice. There is no question to whether I will open this door and tend to the wounded Weft confined to the room until he heals enough to be broken again; the Leader has given me an order, and I must obey.

And yet, I hesitate. How could I not? Behind this door is where my voice was ripped from my throat and my words stripped of their melodies. Behind this door invisible shackles were snapped over my wrists and my freedom snuffed out like a candle. Behind this door was where my heritage was crushed into dust and the Leader's brand pressed into my skin, condemning me to be the First Shadow. To serve the Leader until I die. To keep the secrets of the tunnels behind the walls, and the Leader's greatest strength.

I straighten my shoulders and tighten my fingers around the basket of bandages, rags, a jar of water, and salves of the highest grade, drawing stability from the familiarity of the rough, woven strands of green zvet sprigs. I have an order. The Leader has spoken. I must fulfil his will.

Forcing my muscles to loosen, I reach out, heave the bar aside and shove the door open. The stench of dried blood, sweat, and tarnished metal slaps my face, reaching slimy fingers into the crevices of my airways. Phantoms of pain ages past waver in my throat, a pitiful representation of the agony I went through.

In the blackness beyond the reaches of the jigglosakt's light, one omire-blue slit gleams like a star made from the depths of the ocean. It widens as I peel the squishy beetle off the basket, slap it onto the wall, and approach the ledge carved into the other side of the room.

The ledge is long—taking up half of the wall—with a high ceiling, and is just deep enough to comfortably hold the Weft's body. On the head and foot of the ledge, two holes poke diagonally through the stone so that the chains clasping around the Weft's wrists and ankles pull his arms above his head and his feet flat against the ledge's floor.

At first, his eye remains dulled and unseeing, only tracking my movement out of instinct. But as I draw closer, the film over it clears and I am seized by the frigid, unfathomably intelligent eye of the Weft.