It was difficult to rationalize the sharp tang of panic that tore through Sebastian when a handful of the Queen's guards separated him from Astrid. His final look of her as Melvin and four others closed ranks on him had been of her scowl; fierce eyes glazing, her hold on his abdomen somehow unrelenting even though her fingers were no longer there. Splashes of blood had decorated her face like silver-kissed freckles.
Because whatever she had killed hadn't been human. The blood had sprayed silver from her mutilated wounds, body lay limp, limbs bent at impossible angles, a ragged rip tearing her torso in two. And yet, being marched from the chaos and the princess responsible for the destruction had sent his every nerve on edge.
"Where's Astrid?"
The hallways of the fortress remained eerily empty as Melvin led him towards the rooms designated to him.
Melvin tightened his grip on Sebastian's elbow. It startled Sebastian's frayed nerves, and Melvin grimaced. "Sorry. Didn't mean to scare you," he said, loosening his fingers. "The threats have been dealt with, it seems."
Threats? "There was more than one?" Well that wasn't at all reassuring. Perhaps he should have stayed with the girl who had the sword. "Where's Astrid?" he asked again.
"The interrogation cells, I imagine."
Sebastian's toe caught on the lip of a rug. "But she was protecting herself! Protecting us."
Melvin's jaw ticked. "She isn't the one under questioning."
Oh.
Sometimes, he was a real idiot. "If she isn't being interrogated, then she must be the one interrogating someone, but the intruder is dead. Astrid killed her."
They reached the double doors to his room. Melvin held him back, motioning the other four guards to enter first. They spread out in practiced formation, and Sebastian imagined them examining windows, looking behind doors, under the bed. For monsters that shouldn't exist.
It wasn't until their accompanying guards dispersed into the room that Melvin whispered, "There was more than one. Captain Soiree caught it."
"It?" Sebastian's fear doubled the pounding behind his eyes. "What was it?"
Melvin glanced at him. The visor of his helmet had remained up throughout their journey through the fortress, and his light eyes were somber. "I-I'm not entirely sure."
Sebastian held his breath.
"But that woman—the intruder—she wasn't human," Melvin continued. "Her blood..." His hand that held Sebastian shook. "Whatever the two of you did that night unleashed horrors that should have stayed forgotten, memories that perhaps Rainier would have been fine without. And for those of us born after the Purge, we know nothing of such demons, and how do we fight what we don't understand?"
Sebastian clenched, grinding his teeth. His ma had told him stories of demons growing up. The Abyss. The land of the undead. A place where darkness reigned and the sun never touched. But they were stories, nothing more than tall tales to scare children into behaving.
But his ma had also spun tales of the elements, and Sebastian was learning those were very much real.
Sebastian flexed his fingers as the guards returned from his room.
One of them alerted Melvin with a stiff salute. "All clear."
Melvin released Sebastian's arm but pushed him into the now vacated room. "We'll remain out here but keep the windows locked and eyes open."
The snap of the shutting door caused Sebastian to flinch. It had been the same sound the intruder's shoulder had made when Astrid had kicked it. With a strangled sigh, Sebastian collapsed against the door as if that would keep everyone else out. He ran a hand through his unruly hair, dropping to his knees, but he didn't dare close his eyes. He knew what he'd see when he did.
Spilled blood that didn't run scarlet. Flames erupting in his palm. Astrid holding him around the middle. Gory sword. Her face twisted beneath her tight braids.
Demons from the Abyss.
His head hung between his knees, his breaths sawing through his nose and out of his mouth in painful gasps. He imagined Astrid outside a series of dark, dank cells, that ancient bloodied sword in her hands as she sneered at the captive behind the bars. The snaps its bone would make as she broke them...
Sebastian lurched to his feet.
Productivity, he thought. I need to be productive.
He tore off his dinner jacket, surprised it remained intact. One of the buttons broke in his haste, and he swore as something heavy flopped to the floor when he tossed the jacket across the room. A deranged snort escaped his throat as he knelt beside the fallen object. He heard Astrid's delighted laugh as she'd proclaimed, "Did you smuggle a book into a party?"
Shaking his head, he held the book to his chest and crossed the room to the nearly empty bookshelves—Sebastian stopped before them, staring. An array of tan scrolls occupied the previously empty shelves, neatly rolled up and stacked into pyramids. A few tomes with cracked leather binding sat scattered among them, titles written in the old Scribal language standing out to him.
"Where did you come from?"
Mind buzzing, Sebastian reached out at random, picked up one of the bound, aged books, and flipped it open. His frantic mind immediately settled into the familiar routine of translation.
...perhaps none as revered as the Elders of Galandreal, the most ancient and wise of the Elvish race. For it was the Queen of the Tree City, Branwyn of Holalethe, who bestowed upon her human beloved, Guinevere Verilibros, the first gift of Voixili. Thus began the genealogy of the Authors and their grimoires...
Shock sent Sebastian into motion. He flung the book from him, yanking his hand to his pounding temples. That word rattled around his brain—voixili, voixili, voixili. It was strange how words lost meaning the more they were spoken, but this was the word Astrid had first presented to him. It only grew in power. He stared at the bent, old book crumpled on the floor, eyes wide. And there the word was, lying innocently in-wait on that page.
But what was it?
Sebastian stumbled back to the book and snatched it to his heaving chest. Some of the pages were bent, but Sebastian flicked through them impatiently, looking for that page, a thrill coursing through him when he found it. His thumb ran over the crinkled words, stuttering to a halt where he'd left off.
However, unbeknownst to Queen Branwyn, bestowing such a gift would carry a consequence for the rest of eternity. Voixili allowed humans to steal the Earth's elements, entrapping its seven powers of magic into mere mortal ink. Into words. Thus, Goddess Elayn, the mother of Earth, was entitled to use those words to take back life that was Her own. Any living soul who defied Earth's magic with spoken, spiteful words would lose a living soul in return. For what is taken from Earth must be given back.
Sebastian had slumped to the floor. The book fell from its perch on his knees and into his lap with a resounding thump. His breaths came far too quickly and yet, somehow, not quickly enough. He glanced back at the book. It lay heavily across his thighs. Voixili. When he and Astrid had blown up that tower, it had been that word that had led him there. He remembered the drawl of the word, the power imbued in it that had pulled his feet forward, up those winding stairs, up to that sorcerous Monverta.
This claimed it had been a gift to humans so that mortal men and women could experience elemental magic, but it had also been a curse:
For what is taken from Earth must be given back.
Sebastian leaned his head against the wall behind him, pinching the bridge of his nose. Spiteful words, the book had said. Words that defied the power of Earth and her elemental siblings. His cheeks paled. He had defied the existence of magic. Had always argued against it to Imogene, to Abel, who had gotten sick with something Astrid had claimed to be a living force.
By the Scribes!
Had he truly murdered his parents?
And Abel...Gods, he would have killed her, too.
For the first time in too long, his mother's final words came back to him. He slipped a shaking hand into his pocket, as if the folded, worn bit of parchment would still be there, but he knew the words regardless:
Rest assured, that not matter what may have happened to us, we were always honored to raise you...Our souls hear the land's call, and it calls to you strongly...remember the story of Eilibir's Singers: just because the fish could not be seen, did not mean they were not there...
His ma had known.
A choked, broken sound tore through him that he quickly swallowed. He gasped on it instead to the point of near hyperventilation. Black stars erupted around his eyes, like a boat left untethered in the darkest of nights. He felt himself sway, his neck dropping between his knees—
The doors to his room swung open.
It jolted Sebastian into consciousness. Some deep rooted instinct of denial had him shutting the book with a divisive snap and stuffing it back onto the shelves, half-hidden behind a stack of bound scrolls. Something fluttered to the ground, and Sebastian grabbed it, turning his back to glance down at it as a set of voices drifted from the entryway.
Boy,
Maybe these books will stop you from pestering Lambert about such whimsical nonsense.
Norham
PS- Tell that stubborn arse of a girl my maps better be in mint condition. I still expect them to be returned.
A crazed snort escaped Sebastian's numb lips. Norham? But how—? The voices grew closer. Sebastian stuffed the letter into his pocket. He had just turned and straightened on his feet, surprisingly steady, when two figures rounded the corner of his antechamber.
It was disorientating when Sebastian realized the surly guard was as recognizable to him now as the alluring redhead.
"...ridiculous outfit. You could have changed," Captain Matthias said.
"It's called a nightgown, Captain. It's what one wears to sleep in, which, by the way, I never thanked you for dragging me from my bed—oof!"
Sebastian interrupted Abel mid-breath, his madness for needing to feel her against him surprising them both as he collided into her. His arms wrapped around her, her face pressed against the exposed part of his neck. He could feel her quick, warm breaths brushing his skin. She embraced him in return, patting his back.
"Bash," she breathed, his name bleeding into his already constricted chest. "So, these are your rooms. A lot bigger than mine, which doesn't seem fair."
He half-laughed, but when she said his name again—Bash—with a lilt of a question after it, his heartbeat picked up, laden with guilt. He pushed away from her, backing up a few steps, hands held out in front of him like he was warding off an unknown evil. Her tawny eyes narrowed, two pieces of topaz searching him, head quirked to the side. Embarrassed, he lowered his shaking arms and glanced at Matthias, who wasn't looking at either of them but rather at the now nearly filled bookcase against the far wall.
Sebastian's stomach swooped. "You shouldn't be in here."
Abel blinked, still a bit dazed by his atypical touchiness, it seemed. Her lips turned down slightly as her gaze raked over him. Sebastian could hardly blame her for the confusion. He himself felt like a marionette, being jerked around by his spiraling emotions, being yanked in a thousand different directions that hardly made geographical sense.
"Where'd you steal these from, boy?" Matthias barked, a finger pointing accusingly along the spines of the books.
Sebastian exhaled, running a hand through his hair. "How would I know? I haven't been taken out of this fortress since I got here."
Abel blinked at him again, her eyebrows drawn in worry at his abrasive attitude. Sebastian tried to amend it. "I assumed Master Lambert brought them here. I was apprenticing with him, after all." He crossed his arms and slid between Matthias and the bookshelves. "What're you two doing here? Is everything okay?"
It seemed almost laughable to ask that because nothing was okay, nor did Sebastian suspect that anything would be quite okay anytime soon. Regardless he felt Abel join him, her shoulder against his arm, as the two of them stared down the royal captain.
"It's about the Elves, isn't it?" Abel asked.
Sebastian startled, clenching his fingers into fists to keep in his thoughts of Queen Branwyn of Galandreal, her human consort, voixili.
He shook his head in time to hear Abel continue, "I've heard all the stories about them—the silver blooded Elders. They've been alive for centuries, and now one lies dead in your courtyard. You caught another."
The guard hardly flinched under her questioning. To be fair, he'd probably been put through worse, no matter how intimidating Abel could be at times.
"I did not." Captain Matthias looked between them. "Catch another one, I mean." His jaw set. "The fortress is secure. I'm not here to discuss such matters. The first trial of the tournament has been pushed up."
"Moved up?" At that, Sebastian's raging thoughts froze. He had all but forgotten about the Saviour's Tournament. "To when?"
"Tomorrow morning."
Abel stiffened beside him. "What? That's far too soon! Sebastian hasn't even had time to practice—" She waved her arms around in the air like a performer attempting a magic trick. Any other time, Sebastian would have laughed. "Besides, your fortress was just attacked! It can't be safe to host such a public event!"
"That's exactly why it must be done," Matthias cut her off. "The Soleitian rebels will not have had time to regroup before tomorrow. We cannot afford to give them any more time than that. Tomorrow should be the safest time to host such an event."
"They weren't just rebels!" Abel argued. "They were Elves, Earth Wielders, and they shouldn't exist—!"
Matthias took a half-step closer to Abel. His polished boots squeaked against the floor. "What do you know of such things, little girl?"
Abel bristled, but it was Sebastian who said, "Why is Abel here?"
"Astrid ordered me to bring her to you." Matthias glanced at a still fuming Abel with a tight sneer. "She thought you may require...a certain motivation to prepare for tomorrow's task. It will be a trial of water."
Sebastian opened his mouth to retort, but Abel's fingers wrapped around his wrist loosely. He paused. Denial had cost him his family, had nearly destroyed Abel, and if that book were to be trusted—he wouldn't risk her again. He wouldn't risk anyone again. Not now that he knew. It felt like the mountain collapsed in on him, his vision spotting again, when he realized the only logical thing he could do was accept the illogical.
The elements were real. He had used them. He could control them. And if he spoke against them, someone could die. That was the power he held. His brain spun, but he pressed his nails into his palms to stop himself from reeling.
"Fine." His shoulders slumped but he pressed them back. "Okay," he muttered and turned to regard Abel. "Where should we begin?"
- - -
Well, it looks like our Bash has some practicing to do. Yikes!
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