“Fuck the gods,” I muttered.
He let out a quiet, bitter little laugh. “And once again, you remind me of her.” He went quiet for a moment. “Or who she was in the beginning, at least.”
It was obvious that something very painful was playing out behind his dark eyes—a specific memory of some kind.
I didn’t dwell on what it might have been. “How can you be sure of all of this?” I asked instead. “The Order’s involvement, I mean?”
“Because Aleks knew it all himself, deep in the back of his mind, even if he wasn’t consciously aware of it. And so I saw it, too, during that last possession. I had him much longer this time than I did when he was a child, and he knows much more of the Order’s schemes than he did back then. It was a very eye-opening few weeks. Not only because of his knowledge, but because I could feel the power that had gathered in him since our last encounter. I was fighting for control as much as he was, if I’m being honest. And after all of that, what choice did I have but to continue to dig, to find out the truth about the Order? And about myself, and the things I lost when I was cursed?”
“Find out the truth?” I shook my head. “By manipulating me into doing it for you, you mean.”
His mouth curved with a hint of a smirk. “And you performed magnificently, by the way.”
I scowled.
We sat in prickly silence for a moment before I said, “Aleks…he changed so quickly. So completely.”
Lorien considered my words while absently summoning a ball of light between his palms. “The events of these past months have shifted everything. Your powers awakening more fully, the battle we had over the Aetherstone…all things that also spurred the Order into movement again. It seems quick, but they’ve been biding their time for years now, waiting for opportunities to strike. And they infiltrated your palace, didn’t they? I suspect they’ve been there for months, if not longer. And once Aleks returned to that palace himself…” He trailed off, allowing me to fill in the rest.
The thought that they might have been creeping through my halls all this time made my skin crawl. I felt disgusted. Violated.
Worse, though, were the new, even more painful questions flooding my mind.
How much of Aleks was truly…Aleks?
How much of what he’d said and done these past weeks was merely him trying to get closer to me for the sake of completing the Order’s mission?
I swallowed hard. “I still don’t understand how they’re controlling him in the first place.”
Lorien cut his eyes toward me. “You’ve seen the markings on his body.”
“…His scars, you mean?”
“They aren’t normal scars. And wherever he told you he got them from…he almost certainly wasn’t telling the truth.”
“No. He wouldn’t have lied about that, he?—”
“Maybe not on purpose. I’m sure his tormentors did all they could to hide their true purpose from him.”
I hugged my arms tightly around myself, thinking of those scars. Of how precisely carved so many of them were. They’d always made me feel sick whenever I touched them, but I’d always associated them with his abusive past—so of course they’d felt wrong to me.
I never once thought they might have been the source of something far worse.
“Each one is a spell woven into his flesh.Runes, some call them. Corrupted magic. Nothing divine about it. Very few people in any of the realms would have recognized them for what they are; I doubt even most of the Order members fully understand what they’ve done to him. Only Severin and the other higher-ups, the ones capable of carving such enchantments, know the true power of such things.”
“But where did they even learn how to do that?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. But this world has had no shortage of beings that have tried to rival the gods we serve. We both know that the Vaeloran Cycle was birthed into a chaotic world, meant to be its saving grace. But darker things have a way of taking root in broken places.”
I fell quiet for a minute, summoning a shadow and watching it coil around my fingers. “How were we ever supposed to balance anything in such a world?”
He huffed out a laugh. “Still so concerned with trying to bring balance and peace?”
“We were made for that, weren’t we?”
“Yes. And look where it’s gotten us.”
I had no response to this.
