“As for the Culled: Go forth as beacons of light into the darkness without fear, for fate awaits you on the other side.”
Words of the Prophet Adad-Nirari of House Chasina, 673 Age of Sanctum
Darius and I sat across from one another on our faded blue couches in silence. I still wore the black skirt and tights from the night before, my white button up untucked and hanging loose, my heels nowhere to be found. I blinked as I stared at the grains of wood in the coffee table, hardly daring to breathe. Darius leaned back on the couch and stared at the broken lamp as the silence stretched on. He wore one of his standard t-shirts with a pair of gray sweatpants but the normality brought little comfort today.
“It has to be a mistake,” I croaked through my dry throat. “There has to be someone we can go to. Maybe if we found some of the priests—”
“The brand is never given mistakenly, Adrian,” Darius replied, his voice low.
I stood and paced, biting the inside of my cheek as thoughts raced through my hungover brain, each worse than the last. I ran my shaking hands through my tangled hair. The Culling had never happened like this. It wasn’tsupposedto happen like this. Head throbbing, I cycled through these flawed notions, turning them into a frantic mantra.
A deep sigh snapped me back to reality.
Darius.
He perched on the edge of the couch now, eyes glazed over and hands folded in front of him as his jaw ticked a steady rhythm. Serious and still, he waited as I came to terms with the gravity of the situation.
I stopped pacing and turned to face him.
“What do we do?” I internally cursed at the smallness of my voice. Like crashing waves lapping at the shore, my fear threatened to overwhelm me. Frustration burned in my eyes, tears pooling but held back only by my fierce determination, or perhaps denial.
“There’s nothing we can do,” he answered, his dejection weighing heavily on the air in the room. “No one has ever escaped the Culling. The price has always been paid.”
“You’ve always been certain we would be the first in a thousand years to complete the Trials,” I deflected. “So who’s to say you couldn’t be the first to avoid the Culling, too?”
Darius had the grace to chuckle, a weak smile tugging at the corner of his lips. A fleeting reward for my efforts before resignation took over his face again.
“This is different,” he whispered.
In my heart, I knew he was right, but I stubbornly clung to hope. Sanctuary was cruel, a devastatingly brutal home for those of us living under the weight of the upper rings. But what was happening to Darius directly conflicted with all the rules we’d always been taught.
Before twenty-one, we were untouchable, even to the Geist. Or at least, we were supposed to be.
At twenty-one, we had the opportunity to participate in the Trials and had four years to get as far as we could. Then, at twenty-five, that red bar tattooed in the center of our foreheads disappeared, barring us from admission to any more Trials. And between the ages of twenty-five and twenty-eight, we could be culled. We didn’t know why, but no one had ever been culled before twenty-five or after twenty-eight.
Until now.
The rules had apparently changed.
“Where do you think they go?” Darius asked quietly, as if he were afraid to voice the question aloud but needed to ask as desperately as he needed his next breath. “The Culled, I mean.”
I frowned. No one knew. Once culled, you disappeared forever. There was the ceremony, of course, the ritual that some dusty old book in one of the major house’s libraries claimed helped to ‘ease the crossing’, whatever that meant. But other than that, no one knew. And no one who’d been culled was ever seen again to ask.
I’d always assumed it was some sort of ritualistic sacrifice and that once they were culled, they simply…ceased to exist. But looking at Darius, at the boy I’d been friends with since I was too young to remember having met him, I couldn’t believe that. I simply couldn’t accept a world that he wasn’t in, a world where he didn’t exist.
Darius sighed and turned away from me to the window beside him. He silently stared down at the eerily empty streets below. When he eventually spoke again, his tone had changed. There wasn’t a trace of the fear or the sorrow that had interwoven it before. In fact, there wasn’t a trace of any emotion at all. “Take care of Dahlia. I know she doesn’t think she needs it, but—”
“Darius—”
“Let me finish, Adrian. Please.”
I clenched my fists at my sides. I didn’t want to hear this, didn’t want to listen to his last requests, his final instructions before he left me forever. But I would. Because I had to. I owed him that much. For the years between us, for the loyalty he’d always shown me, for the love I bore him. I would hear him, and I would do anything I could, promise anything I had to, if it meant he might feel a shred of peace in his final hours. I fought to keep the tears at bay just a little longer.
“Take care of her,” he repeated. His voice was composed, restrained, but there was a tension behind his tone as well, like a man standing in the eye of a storm, waiting for the splitting winds and drowning rains to take him. “She’s strong, the strongest woman I’ve ever known, present company excluded, but she worries more than she’ll ever admit. And my mom. It’ll kill her when she finds out.”
“You should tell her.”
“I don’t want them to know. Not like this.”
