Lucy started to stir after hours of being unconscious. But trying to open her eyes split a migraine across her brain and forced them tightly shut.
"So the rumors have spread to the rest of the world." Stated a deep croaky voice that was unknown to Lucy, but somehow familiar.
"I thought it had stayed on this continent," Jared replied, biting down on his fingernail. "I thought if she just stayed away from here she would be safe. And now all of her belongings are in the possession of people that have already tried to kill her once."
Memories of the night coursed back to Lucy, but they were hazy, clouded by her still-battered mind.
"Unfortunate. How long was everything in her possession for?" The man asked, collecting tools from dusted shelves.
"Six months," Jared said as he cursed himself for not being more prudent. "At most."
"So, they'll have six months to track her before her essence leaves the objects." The man's voice was feeble and grainy as if he lived a lifetime of smokers habits. "Knowing that, isn't there only one place she could be where no one would dare attack her?"
Jared bit so hard his nail split. "She wouldn't be safe there."
The man grabbed an old set of leather straps from an even older apothecary drawer. "She would. For the moment at least, while they decide her fate."
"Until they decide to kill her."
Lucy was hearing everything through a static funnel but surely she heard her brother correctly. But what? Kill who?
"Or don't," The man replied, sad but resigned to the ways of things, as age had made him. "But your only other option is to send her back into the world where your enemies can now easily find her. And with only you there to protect her, how quickly then will she be killed?"
Jared ran a hand through his already disheveled hair and tugged on it so tightly the man worried he might pull it out. He knew he was right, but accepting that meant he'd be accepting what he'd been trying to avoid at all costs for the last decade.
"Attwood may not have the morals of the last good king anymore, but the doubt in the prophecy still remains." The man said. "And they wouldn't act on something so drastic as this without good reason."
"Even if the nobles did spare her, how am I to trust that boy will?" Jared asked.
That boy echoed in Lucy's mind just as harshly as her brother had emphasized it.
The man paused. "I don't know. But we both knew who his father was and if he has an ounce of professor Blackwood in him, there is hope."
"From what I've heard he doesn't," Jared said, "And is as power-hungry and self-serving as the rest of those nobles."
"They aren't all so evil. And as I recall, isn't there one who you trust with your life?" Ervan gathered the last of his tools, a thick leather mouth guard found in the bottom drawer of his most unfrequented armoire.
Jared thought about his oldest friend, Solace. They had met back in their days of Attwood and he remained Jared's only confidant over the years. He was now a teacher at the school and probably the only kind-hearted soul left there. "Are you willing to trust him with your sister's life now?"
"Can you think of any other choice, professor?" Jared asked as he followed his old teacher across the room to stand over Lucy. She laid flat on a long operating table raised chest level off the ground.
"I'm not a professor." Ervan instantly shot down. "Not anymore." He analyzed Lucy and what he had become. A mind sower. Practicing one of the most debased and looked down upon forms of magic possible. It was only ten years ago he had been one of the most exalted people in the world, a professor of Attwood. But he had left because if he had stayed, he might have become something even lower than what he was now. "And there isn't."
Jared looked down at his sister with eyes full of regret. "With just me, she's easy prey. But no one would dare hurt her there." He knew this for certain because attacking Attwood, or any of its students, was waging war against Emora, the strongest country in the world that no sane person would dare provoke.
"Except those in it." The man said, strapping Lucy's wrists to the table.
Lucy felt a tightening sensation around her hands, and when she tried to move them, she couldn't. "Even a farmer protects his cattle from the wolves, to kill it when it suits him."
"I'll just have to pray they don't draw their butcher knives for six months," Jared said defeated. "Or until I can find what I need to and prove the prophecy wrong."
The retired professor continued with his shameful setup. "Some things are better left buried."
"Not this," Jared insisted. "If I can find the last good king's diary I can prove to the world that no one can rise to become a vessel anymore."
The man looked over Jared, uncertain of it all, but it wasn't his decision to make and why would he diminish what little hope the boy already had of saving his sister's life?
"If that's your decision, are you sure you want to send her there without her full memories?" The man asked, securing the rest of the latches across Lucy's body.
Jared shook his head, though it tore his heart apart to steal from her like this. "If there was another way I would." He thought back to how Lucy was right when they started their adventure together. When she was a child suffering endlessly from bouts of crippling anxiety where she would scream bloody murder while pointing to imaginary demons all around her. She couldn't even keep down any food her mind was so riddled by the traumas she went through. The only thing that had saved her was the mind sower stitching away years of trauma, allowing her to start again, without her past destroying her as much as her future threatened to. "If those memories resurface, she'll die in a different way."
What is he talking about? Lucy thought as her mind started to clear, but the clarity came along with bone-breaking pain. Screams ripped from her dried-out lungs, as the pain was so great she couldn't comprehend anything but mind bending agony.
"The stitches have come undone!" Ervan panicked. "Something has triggered her memories."
Lucy had never experienced pain like it before, and through the pain, she was seeing flashes of images that seemed like dreams but felt too real. People and places, all came to her vividly, but she had never been there or seen them before. Or had she? And soon she was seeing nightmares. A little girl left in the corner of the room, cold and hungry, men stealing that child in the middle of the night, being tied up and thrown in the back of a wagon gagged and blindfolded, a tall blood-soaked man with a razor-sharp scythe reaching out his hands to her with black eyes as he stood before a crowd of dead bodies. And worse of all in the crystal-clear voice of a woman, that was recreated in Lucy's mind by her most repressed and significant memory, came the words, who are you?
"Resow them now!" Jared yelled, holding Lucy down as her whole body writhed.
"Hold her tight!"
Lucy could barely force her eyes open enough to see silvery-brown hair before a blinding flash of light threw her back into unconsciousness. And as she plunged into the darkness, the only thing her mind could grasp onto were the soft echoes of a faraway voice, who are you?