She gazed at the couch and Plum perched on its back, the small stack of tomes, the flickering candle on a side table, and, most invitingly, the thick linen blanket. What would it hurt, just a little bit of extra research?
They returned to the sofa, and Reeve flipped through the pages of the journal he’d been reading. It was an exceptionally old one, preserved with the slightest bit of arcana in its binding. She had found it hiding behind other books lined up on the library’s shelves. “This is the one you were reading this morning, isn’t it? The one that made you think to go underground?”
She nodded, though she didn’t say it was more than just the books that had inspired her.
Reeve’s brows knit while he ran a finger along the cover’s edge. “There are some troubling things in here, but some good things too. Father Charles held a record at the temple for most eggs eaten in one sitting, and he has a recipe for plum pie that sounds pretty good.”
At this, Plum croaked, and Reeve pet him with assurance he didn’t mean to bake up the wyvern. He rambled on a bit more about benign entries in the journal, and Celeste watched the way his lips formed the words, looking just as soft as they’d been against hers. The kiss felt like a lifetime ago, a shock it had happened at all, and then the experience was washed away as quickly as the two of them had been through the caverns. Maybe he wouldn’t bring it up again. Probably, he wanted to forget.
Finally, Reeve took a deep breath and flattened the Valcordian text to a specific page. “Murkiness,” he said as he pointed to the word, “means something specific to followers of Valcord. It is not just darkness but a muddying of the light, something good that’s been altered. I’ve read this passage about ten times, trying to understand it, or maybe trying tonotunderstand it. But I can’t stop thinking that when Father Charles writes about murkiness invading the temple, he means that they…let it in.”
Celeste knew the passage he spoke of. It was starkly different from the others, the tone heavy and odd, and the words much more ambiguous than when the author wrote about the best dates for planting new berry bushes or how to most easily dig a grave in the spring thaw.
“I didn’t want to believe it, but I think you were right. I think the priests found that rift in the planes two hundred years ago, and they experimented on a sieve with whatever was left behind after it was closed. I want to believe they had good intentions, that whatever they made was supposed to help the town. When they realized it was too dangerous and tried to vanquish the evil, they found they couldn’t—it could only be contained like in that…that well beneath the water. The well of silver.”
Celeste shivered and pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders. The noxscura swirled in her mind again, terrible and real. Plum saw and crawled down into her lap from the back of the sofa, careful this time with his talons on her skin.
“I’ve never seen noxscura like that,” said Reeve. “But you have, haven’t you?”
Celeste nodded, not looking right at him. “It kills almost everyone who touches it,” she heard herself saying. “Not always right away, but eventually.”
He angled himself toward her on the sofa and closed the book, listening.
“Delphine and I were lucky, they said, because we survived. I thought we were lucky because we used to live in a big manor and always had good food and warm clothes and anything we wanted, but then we were taken away by the Holy Knights of Osurehm. They said it was because our parents hired mages to do bad magic and to serve dark gods, and we weren’t allowed to go back home.”
Her gaze flicked up to his, worried he would hear that and assume the worst, but the sleepiness had been lost from Reeve’s warm eyes, and he only looked on her with a deep concern.
“Our mother and father were executed. A lot of people in Clarriseau were. Delphine and I went back many years later, but the manor was burnt to the ground, and no one would touch the land because they said it was cursed. They even said our name was cursed, and they made it obvious they didn’t want us around. At least we were able to leave there again—that was easier than leaving the temple.”
“Why weren’t you brought to one of Valcord’s temples after your parents were…ah, after they died?”
Celeste bit her lip. “Well, we weren’t…good, not after the noxscura, but we weren’t useless either.”
“When you say noxscura, you mean like what we found in the cavern, don’t you?”
“Yes. There was a place like that under the Osurehm temple, but it was much bigger.” Celeste let out a long, slow exhale, and she leaned fully into the sofa, hugging Plum to her chest. She’d told the story very few times before, once met with sympathy and once met with intrigue, though she left out many details because they were sordid. This time, however, even the worst parts came tumbling out as she told Reeve of the long walk deep into the earth surrounded by men in armor and carrying weapons, the screams of other children, the bodies left to rot, discarded, not even buried.
Why didn’t they at least bury them?
She hesitated before she finally told him it had hurt. Delphine always sniped that she had been too precious about the whole thing. She might have been six-years-old at the time, but for darkness’s sake she was an adult now, so there was no need to recall it so pathetically.
But Celeste could remember being thrown into the pool no other way, the deep, icy stabbing at her innards, the blood that had forced its way to the surface and spilled out of every cavity, the way her skin peeled off for days and how infection had set in. When she woke beside that silvery pit of noxscura, she’d been left for dead and languished for days, alone. But then, like magic, her ailments had suddenly cleared. And also like magic, she could do new and terrible things.
She almost got away then, but the holy knights found her and brought her back to the temple. Her only relief had been seeing that Delphine too had survived. But it was not a relief to survive, not really.
“I think they wanted us to be like you, in a way, to defend against infernal things. They summoned these little creatures from that plane, imps, and they made us hurt them. Well, they made us make them hurt themselves.” At the memory of the infernals shrieking in fear at lifting blades to their own throats and then gurgling on their spilled blood, she squeezed Plum a little tighter, and he nuzzled her neck. “They said the imps were evil, but they didn’t deserve what was done to them. Not the first time, and especially not every time they were brought back. Nothing deserved that.”
Reeve’s features had drawn down, no sign of his dimple, and she wondered if she’d revealed something too dark, too evil, but then he moved a few inches closer, and she knew she could go on.
“It was never going to work because they thought we were just as bad as the things they wanted us to guard against. If you want something to fight for you, you have to be able to trust it, but they never did after we became nox-touched. They hated us and kept us in these arcane cages that made you feel like you were constantly being squeezed and couldn’t take a whole breath, but I don’t know if that was the magic or I was just afraid of being alone.” She swallowed, eyes flicking down with embarrassment, and she went on quicker, “They forced us to use what we’d been given by the noxscura—cursed with, more like. Not everyone was good at it—me especially—but Delphine helped because if I didn’t prove worthwhile, they’d get rid of me back in that pit, and I really would be dead with all the others.”
It felt like a long time, explaining, because Reeve had many questions, but he asked them gently, voice low, and Celeste answered them all. There had been use once in keeping her secrets, but now as they spilled out of her, it felt just like when they had finally broken free of that temple years ago.
Delphine slipped away one day and returned to the pool of noxscura below the temple. She risked sacrificing herself, allowing the pure arcana to swallow her a second time, something no one had done and survived. Celeste had thought she’d lost her, she knew twice was too much in the noxscura, even for Delphine Delacroix. But then the girl had risen from the silvery pool again, and the arcana hadn’t even weakened her but made her a terrible, relentless thing.
There was death—murder, really—and a lot of it as they razed the Osurehm temple to the ground. That death followed them back to Clarriseau, north to the Infernal Mountains, through The Wilds, and eventually to Briarwyke. They never stayed in any one place for more than a few years, and Briarwyke wasn’t meant to be any different, but then Celeste had broken herself away because Delphine’s antics had finally become too much.
“It was my fault she died,” Celeste whispered. “And so here I am. And here you are too, come to fix the mess we made of this place.”
