The quiet that hung in the sepulcher answered first, and then the actual voice followed. “Yes. She said that it is a wonder you are related at all, that you are not the same, that you are disloyal, weak-willed, stupid, unskilled, clumsy—”
“—all that, huh—”
“—and perhaps worst of all, you arenice.”
Celeste’s gaze fell to the floor, veins flooding with the unpleasant heat of humiliation. It was shameful how she had turned out, she already knew that, but to be callednicewas worse than a curse on Delphine’s tongue.
“Is she correct?” the voice asked, snapping her out of the hollow and confusing place she often went when there was nowhere left to hide.
“I wasn’t here to help her, and she died,” she said, voice cracking. “I don’t even know if I would have been powerful enough to save her.”
“Perhaps she did not deserve your help,” the voice suggested, echoing a thought Celeste had been far too afraid to have. “And perhaps your power lies elsewhere.”
Celeste shook her head, dark hair swaying as she studied the shadows on the floor. That was a thought she never had—she didn’t deserve what she could do, and she certainly hoped there was nothing new she would ever discover.
“Well, then perhaps she was right about it all, that you are too weak to truly defy her. Too weak to undo her wrongs.”
Celeste blinked back up at the urn. “Undo her wrongs…”
Before she could think too long about what she might do, Celeste plucked the urn from its spot. She hadn’t expected the heft since it was so small, and it nearly slipped from her fingers, but she pulled it to her chest and held on tightly. The magic around its lid prodded at her, and an arcane barrier pushed against her palm as if to will her away. Delphine sure had trapped the thing tightly, and with an unrecognizable magic, but then Celeste’s emotions were often too overwhelming to properly identify arcana anyway.
“You would free me?” it asked, the voice echoing into her chest, desperation on its unseen tongue.
“Yes,” she grunted, digging fingers into the barrier her sister had created, an odd sparking there as the arcana crackled, warm like the rising sun. “I’m not like her. I don’t hurt people. Now,open,” she pleaded, fighting what kept it closed. There was a jolt against her chest as her locket unfastened on its own, noxscura enveloping her limbs and assisting unbidden.
With a pop and a sizzle, the lid came free, and magic burst forth from the jar as a smoky haze filled the sepulcher. Celeste inhaled sharply at the strength it had taken, arms trembling as she watched the chamber fill with an entity that had been too-long restrained.
It was everywhere, deafening and blinding, but there was something like a hand that softly grazed her cheek. No one had ever touched her like that and meant it, and she tripped backward into the slab, but then that voice was in her ear. “Thank you, Celeste,” it said, and her skin yearned to be touched again, everywhere. “Your sister was right.”
All at once, the arcane entity swept out of the chamber, and she was suddenly left alone.
Heart beating hard, a flicker of noxscura slithered up to hover at Celeste’s shoulder. It twisted slightly as if to say it understood about as much as she did when it came to what had just happened. She cast her gaze once more on the journal that had been Delphine’s and frowned.
Perhaps it did not matter, sisterhood. Perhaps the only importance of the role had been its ability to make her comply.
Celeste abandoned the empty urn on a shelf and willed the noxscura back into her locket. That was enough of that, and so she returned upstairs as the ghostly touch faded from her skin, intent on undoing at least a few more wrongs.
CHAPTER 2
AN ANALYSIS OF PAST AND PRESENT DANGER
Thinking about what came next was much easier when Celeste had something to do, and there was much to be done at the temple. She wasted no time digging in, literally, because the first tasks involved a significant amount of excavation.
One service Valcord’s followers offered was burying the dead which meant there was already a small graveyard behind the temple. She counted the stones, but no new ones had been added, so it was up to Celeste to break the hallowed ground for the first time in over four years. Even if she wasn’t one of Valcord’s disciples, she didn’t object to the work—everyone deserved to be cared for and tucked in one last time.
Noxscura was good with necrotic things which meant it could make quick work of the corpses. Celeste didn’t really mind that which others deemed too odd to touch, but she wasn’t particularly strong, and some of the bones were much too heavy, so she did what she could, aided by her oft clumsy magic.
When the hole she’d dug with both a shovel and arcana was big enough to fit the fallen man who had slain Tempest, she used noxscura to place him inside piece by piece as gently as she could, only dropping a few of his fingers and toes in the tall grasses. When they couldn’t be found, she decided they would make for good fertilizer. With some difficulty, she stuck the sword into the nameless knight’s plot in place of a stone, and she lay a small bundle of flowers beside it. Maybe he had killed her sister, maybe not, but ragwort wasn’t all that nice, and the yellow blooms would wither in a few days anyway.
Noxscura also aided in cleaning the last of the hide from Tempest’s bones, but she had to leave them piled out front, too big for her to bury. Delphine had cultivated a roost of miniature wyverns in the temple’s rafters, purchased off a breeder from across the Maroon Sea, but they had apparently also met a violent end. Celeste gathered up most of their noxscura-cleaned bones in a box, but set the acorn-sized skulls all along the tops of the bookcases in the library. Their empty sockets stared down into the octagonal chamber, the room a little less lonely that way. The library had been Celeste’s favorite, and perhaps worse than finding it littered with dead wyverns had been the damage done to the books, but there were more pressing things to attend to than rebinding at the moment.
Pressing things like all the blood that stained the stone floors. She tried very hard to not dwell on to whom it may have belonged as she scrubbed on hands and knees, but it couldn’t have all been her sister’s. Thankfully, she got the arcane faucets in the temple to run with clean water, and she only blew up one bathing chamber in the process, so at least she could wash up after.
Then there was that divot and all those other bones. Another Valcordian service was taking in the orphaned, though there hadn’t been any children at the Briarwyke temple when Delphine took it over. Celeste found unsettled graves in the yard, so assumed the littlest corpses belonged there. The tedium of deciphering a femur from a humerus negated the somber thoughts of how small they all were, and those graves got flowers too, nicer ones as she ventured into the forest to find some powder blue chicory that have braved the cold to bloom.
A week went by in a sweaty, exhausting blur, but the temple was secluded and had no visitors, so she could take short breaks whenever the urge to have a small cry became overwhelming. Though the place was still an utter mess, and Celeste still hadn’t come to any real conclusions, the temple at least had fewer bodies strewn about it. Except Delphine’s.
Digging another plot and transporting the body was simple. It was just more work, another thing to be done, but when Celeste was deciding what she might choose for a marker, she finally broke down into an ugly fit of tears. It was an odd sobbing, full on and painful and a relief all at once.
