One
Trapped
I woke with the echoes of battle pounding through me, but when I cracked my eyelids, a cry on my lips, the wounds I clutched were imaginary. My skin was smooth, unbroken and unmarked, the colour of honey dripping in the sun. I was swathed in wispy white silk. It fell about the bed beneath me in sections, parting around my legs like water. I passed my fingers from the silk to my skin, feeling no difference in texture. I cocked my knee to the side, letting the material fall away until my entire left leg was visible. The tiny white scar high along the inside of my thigh was still there. It had grown smaller since I last thought to look at it. But still … it persisted.
While all my other wounds had healed—wounds far more grievous than the patch of skin stolen from my left thigh—I couldn’t help but think that this was the worst of them all, simply because of the memory attached to it. I had been cut before. I had been beaten, burned, abused and attacked. I had broken my body more times than I could count … but none of it compared to that day.
That memory belonged to my shadow—the dark, powerful place swirling inside my heart. It was tainted by death, sorrow, and guilt. I pressed my thumb to the mark, watching it disappear for a moment as I lifted my touch away, until the blood rushed back beneath my skin.
I wondered what my mother would think of me now.
Would it matter that I had been punished for my greatest mistake?
Would it matter that recompense had been taken from every inch of my body?
Would it matter that I was one of the fated Fjorn? The last to stand against the end of the world?
Could it matter, if she was no longer a part of this world?
I turned my hands over, expecting to see the work-roughened palms of a steward. My palms. But instead, I saw the soft, privileged skin of a sectorian. The healed skin of a Vold. These hands belonged to the Tempest now.
Would my mother even recognise me?
I swung my legs to the side of the bed, setting my feet against the rough stone floor. It was stormstone. Dark and glittery. It was a solid colour, unlike polished stormstone, which turned almost translucent when turned to the light. I swallowed against the roughness in my throat, peeking around the room. A single bed stood against the wall: comfortable and draped in luxurious silks and furs, though it was narrow. There was room for a small adult or a child, and no more. The tattered rug was at odds with the lush bedding, the furnishings sparse.
One of the walls was hollowed into a long shelf, several items spaced out with even, almost obsessive precision. A polished steel mirror was propped against the back wall of a small washroom attached to the bedroom. It also housed a polished silver tub, clawed feet digging into the stone beneath; a matching basin with polished silver taps and a latrine beside it; and another shelf cut into the wall, with folded piles of clothing. I sorted through them, recognising the dresses and Vold outfits the King had given me, as well as a familiar cloak and boots, woollen socks and several of the silk bodysuits worn as underwear by the sectorian women.
I left the room, my heart thumping nervously in my throat as I returned to the bedroom. There was only one building that I knew of in the Fyrian empire made entirely of stormstone.
The Obelisk.
The last place I had expected to wake up.
A silver ladder was notched into the stone grooves, leading up to a trap door of polished stone. I could almost see the sky above as light hit the stone, turning it translucent, filtering through the veins to cast a rippling glow into the room below.
I climbed the ladder and threw back the heavy door, crawling onto the floor above as a strong, wailing draught almost knocked me over. All around me, the wind screamed, slipping between the gaps of pillars ringing the platform like dozens of sentries to trap me inside. I struggled to my feet, approaching the pillars, the stone smooth beneath my soles, polished to a slippery, dangerous sheen. Over my shoulder, I could see the imposing rock of the Wailing Crag, and before me, the misty expanse of the Vilwood, doused in spray from the waterfalls that plummeted from the basin below, where the streams of the mountain gathered.
I was at the top of the Obelisk, where Andel—the Scholar—made his home. Where the secretive Sinn sectr hid away their most powerful minds to work in peace, separated from the rest of society.
I touched the middle finger on my left hand, where I wore the ring I used to travel from one place—or person—to another.
My finger was bare.
I should have noticed earlier, but I was too busy marvelling over my changed skin and lack of wounds. I tore my eyes from the Vilwood, rushing to the trap door. I slipped down the ladder rather than climbed. I stopped before the shelf of objects, scanning them frantically.
A collar. A bell. A bracelet. A worn-down, wrapped bar of kalovka soap. A comb. A toothbrush. A worn old book with a faded maroon cover.
My ring was nowhere to be seen.
A growl built up in the back of my throat and I fell to the bed, ripping away the silks and furs until they littered the floor and the bare mattress stared back at me.
No ring.
I was trapped.
I piled everything back onto the bed and returned to the shelf, snatching up the bracelet. It glowed pearly white, a delicate light swirling from within the rainstone beads. I tied it to my wrist and a small whisper of calm settled over me, the cool of the beads tempering my emotions. I played with them, sitting on the edge of the bed as I stared at the other items. Someone had collected all my possessions, lining them up in a grim summary of my life so far.
The collar that had imprisoned my body.
The bell that had robbed me of my voice.
The soap that I had stolen from my dead mother.
The bracelet that housed my innocence, a piece of me stolen in the darkest hour of my life.
The book. The Battle for Ledenaether. Each page illustrating hundreds of years of the evil force that we had all been blind to. Hundreds of battles against the Darkness that we had lost. It showed how our world had been slipping inch by inch, so slowly that we didn’t notice … until it had fallen to the sickness completely.
We were in the clutches of the Darkness now.
I turned my eyes back up to the ceiling, wondering at the clear sky.
“Ah, you’re awake.”
I startled, jolting up from the bed and turning to the Scholar, who stood in the doorway of my washroom as though he had been there all along. He wore his usual dark clothing, a travelling cloak secured along the front of his chest with black straps. His arms were crossed, one broad shoulder notched against the wall. His eyes were a pale, ghostly violet, narrowed as they usually were. The Scholar was famous for his temper, and there was always a tinge of violence in his eyes, no matter the situation. It weighed his gaze down, tightening the edges of his mouth. It whispered to me from the etchings on the bare sides of his head. He wasn’t bald—his hair was actually thick and lustrous, wound tightly into a braid that ran down the centre of his scalp and dropped over his shoulder, thin black chains snaking through the strands. The hair either side of his braid had simply been shaved off, leaving those frightening carvings on show. They were all symbols that remained unfamiliar to me, small scars layered onto each other.
His eyes narrowed further as I stared at him, and I felt my own temper rising, my throat raw and scratchy as I spoke.
“I won my battle.”
“I’m aware,” he returned dryly.