The contact eased the excitement of the curse now running through her veins, relaxed the oily feeling she couldn’t quite banish from her mind.
She listened as the tempest lashed and reformed her quiet, dead world, as it built and then died, and as time continued to pass around her, she listened until it disappeared altogether. Night had come and gone, and it wasn’t until hours after the storm had gone that she rose from where she lay.
Calavia looked down at herself, now naked, completely healed of all her wounds...all except one. She gently touched the scar over her stomach. She glanced at the room, at the passageway beyond, and finally settled her eyes on Astegur’s slumbering form.
There was no more blood. Hers, her mother’s, Astegur’s, or those that had died here. It was as if it had never been there to begin with. Even the copper, pungent scent of it was gone.
The mist had eaten it all.
Her pure blood was gone as well.
My humanity.It was the price she had paid, the price the mist had demanded of her—it was the price for stealing her mother’s power. Calavia shivered, afraid what the cost of such a thing would ultimately mean. What it would do to her.
She knelt at Astegur’s side and checked his wounds. They no longer bled but were raw and deep. His breathing was labored. She leaned down and placed a soft kiss on his mouth, but he did not wake, so she left his side and sought out what remained of her stores of herbs and medicine. She returned to him and cleaned his hurts, plugging them with a paste that did not include her wax. As she went to clean and dress his left arm, her brow furrowed, and her lips pursed. The gash was deeper, messier than the rest, and her fingers shook as she touched it to get a closer look.
His skin was opened up straight down through the thick, corded muscles of his arms, all the way down to the bone. Calavia leapt up and darted back to her stores, searching out the right materials she needed to sew the wound closed. And with the hours that followed, she carefully mended his upper arm.
When she was done, she sat by his side until his breaths evened out. She found him a threadbare blanket, covered him up, and watched him sleep.
Later that day, when the darkness began to return, she went to the back of her altar room, where the vilevines were at their thickest, and carefully untangled them, reaching behind the mass to pull out one of her precious vials. She didn’t know if she needed it, or if she was now susceptible to thralldom, but she gulped it down anyway.
As the mixture settled in her belly, she turned to the passageway and looked down it. On the other end was a pile of corpses she could not muster the courage to approach. After all that had happened, she feared that if she addressed them, all the nightmares would come crashing back down on her and the peaceful quiet would vanish. That this was all a cruel trick.
Calavia swallowed weakly and returned to Astegur, lowering herself back down at his side. She lifted the edge of the blanket and shuffled under it, careful not to disturb his rest. His heat soothed her heart, and she quickly found sleep beside him.
Another day came and went as she remained by his side, only venturing out of the room to make broth, clean and dress herself, and bring what small comforts she could. Each time she woke, she checked his wounds, touched his flesh, and held him against her, whispering her thoughts in the mist around them. It thickened the air even more each time she rose, further reminding her that her humanity was gone.
By the third day, as she bathed Astegur with a rag and a bowl of tepid water, his eyes shot open to meet her own.
Her hand faltered mid-stroke. Calavia bit down on her tongue and tried to find the words to tell him all that had happened, that his arm would never fully heal, but the words refused to come out. Instead, her eyes flooded with tears.
He raised his right hand slowly and touched her chin with the backs of his fingers.
And without a sound to break the quiet of Prayer, she mounted his body and chose to forget.
* * *
The following day,she trailed behind Astegur down the central passageway, over the corpses that had begun to smell, and stepped out into the settlement for the first time since the centaurs had surrounded it.
“Look,” he ordered when she remained hidden behind him.
She clutched onto the leather strap of his belt and slowly moved forward, forcing her eyes upward to take in the devastation.
First her gaze was caught by the blanket of fog that shrouded everything. Nothing disturbed it but for the natural critters that lived in the swamp. Her skin grew cold just by acknowledging it. The broken houses and huts that lined the main pathway into Prayer were gone, even the supports that had resisted time and rot had been wiped away. The only indication that something had ever been there was the gray foundations of stone directly below clear water.
Nearly everything was beneath the swamp water now—even the raised land. The steps of her temple were submerged, leaving the central temple as the last structure above the waterline. The wood stakes that had been placed popped out here and there like slivers. In and among them were the dead, floating pale and bloated.
She looked for her mother among them but could not find anything resembling her body. She took a step forward. “Are you certain she is gone?” She had asked him the same question several times since he awoke, and his answer was always the same.
He pointed to the space directly before them, several feet out. “She saved my life. They tore her off their general and removed her from this world.” He grunted as if the words he said made him uncomfortable. “There will not be anything left, not after this.” He waved his right arm.
Calavia looked over the ground he indicated but saw nothing but a few dead centaurs. She didn’t want to believe that her mother was gone. That she had failed, had failed in restoring her life, had failed in protecting her. She rested her hand against her scared stomach, but did not feel betrayal, only unease. Calavia took another step forward to get a closer look when Astegur’s hand settled on her shoulder.
“No. It is unsafe,” he said. “There are many dangerous things in the water, fallen weapons only being one of them.”
“Do you think they are all dead?”
“I do not know now, but I will by tonight.”
