He could still not yet comprehend the bizarre nature of the library, especially its tunnel network, but he pushed onward, suppressing the unease swirling in the pit of his stomach. He endured it. For Briar, he persevered. His denial had brought him in here. Now his acceptance would bring him out.
When he arrived at the catacombs, Roy held the torch aloft. Firelight flickered across the rounded walls, dappling the coffins of the Protectorate with a rosy glow.
A peculiar sense of confidence came over Roy. He was unsure whether it was the sight of the sarcophagi and the bodies of his idols within them or the reminder of what existed under the Orphic Basilica, but he felt like he belonged here. Had this been a test, engineered by the elemental entity that had been shadowing him over the past week or so? He didn’t know, but what had risen him from bed, and out of his grief, recurred to him now. And instantly, he felt restored.
“Hear me!” Roy called out. He raised the torch, his heart pounding against his ribs. “Hear me, I said! Hear me! I will the dead to hear my summons!”
Cold air and mist swished about his feet. The crypt remained silent but for the dwindling echoes of his voice.
Again, Roy screamed, “I will the dead to hear my summons!” He thrust the torch out, and the flame swayed back, then hovered upright. “Come forth! Come to the light!”
Whispers sounded from afar; they were formless, unintelligible voices, hissing like the sigh of wind through bare branches. They seemed to come from a place deeper than the crypt. Roy thought of a severed bond, the link between the library and the supernatural world from which the ghosts had come. Perhaps if he put them under pressure and brought them to the surface ofthisworld, he could give them shape, but there was only one spirit with whom he wished to commune.
“Hear me, for I will not break this vow!” Roy exclaimed. “I promise to take your pain! I will bear your agony! I just ask of you... May I see her?”
As if in confusion, the voices quieted, then disappeared.
Roy choked on a sob, tears obscuring his vision, but the breeze brushed them away, bestowing upon him a newfound sense of clarity.
Unseen spectral heads seemed to lift in recognition of his torment. Roy could feel their unrest, like a sailor reading patterns in the sky: a black storm of agony, trepidation, terror, and fragmented empathy.
“You know this pain!” Roy screamed. “You know it! You’ve carried it for years or centuries or longer, how long I do not know, but I cannotstandit!” His hand shook, and the torch in his grasp flung crooked shadows across the coffins. “I don’t know how to live, how to move on!”
Voices rose from beneath him, ascending in pitch and volume, until he was surrounded by a whirling pillar of the dead. A din of shrieks, howls, and wails spoke of their misery, of their thousands of lives eradicated by tragedy and heartache. They pulled and tugged at Roy’s heartstrings, pouring their anguish into his own.
“Please!” Roy shouted. “How do I move on?Whyshould I move on? There is no point to this life if the end is just silence—”
Something shifted behind him, disturbing the stale air at his back. Sweat beaded on his palms, prickling his skin. He turned on his heel, his breathing rapid and coarse, and then pushed the torch out before him, squinting to discern the newcomer.
A ghost lingered at the yawning mouth of the tunnel, its blazing ruby eyes contrasting sharply with the orange torchlight. By this dual illumination, Roy discerned the slightest of features, the barest indication of its humanoid structure: the crook of an armpit, the line of a jaw.
It was Walestone.
I may not be whom you seek,Walestone said,though I offer you my condolences for your loss.His sibilant voice meandered around the chamber and rebounded off the stone walls and the wooden coffins.
“Bring her back,” Roy demanded, his voice dry and cracking. “Bring her back to me, not as an Old One, not Blighted, but as the sister I know. I will the dead to heed my directives.”
Walestone shook his head, slowly and with great solemnity.Even if I could exercise such powers, that sort of sorcery has been forbidden for thousands of years and was only recently discovered to be impossible. The repercussions are... troubling.
“Resurrection. It was once accessible, then. It was once used to breathe life back into the dead, to restore not just the animus”—he was thinking of the Blighted as he queried this—“but the actual humanity within them?”
You misheard me. You think without regard for consequences. Given the state you are in, I do not condemn you for this lack of judgment, and so I warn you again: These powers have, over time, been rendered inoperable.
“Would you return if you could?” Roy asked. “To the world of the living?”
Walestone drifted around the sarcophagi of the Elder Scribes, his amorphous, fuzzy hands clasped delicately over his middle, then answered contemplatively,How many years or eons I have walked among the dead, I know not. My soul is immersed so deeply in the world I now inhabit that if I were to march through the gates of reality, I would not even vaguely resemble who I had once been.
Roy contemplated this. “You’re saying the soul of a person undergoes some... somechangein the interim between death and whatever comes after?”
In many ways, yes, Walestone confirmed.Humans are brimming with contradictions. Your kind dread the end and what it comprises, but you also long to be rid of the anxiety, the anticipation, to bear witness to the other side of the horizon. Similarly, when a soul passes into the afterlife, there is resistance. Some cling to reality tighter than others, to linger, to say one last farewell, but all, in the end, come to a state of acceptance. A place of weightlessness. A period of blessed absence.
“And that is where her soul resides?” Roy asked, hope rising inside him. “A neutral zone? A sanctuary?”
Walestone recoiled.Your . . . your sister.
Roy swallowed at Walestone’s unexpected reaction. “I tried to summon her, but you came to my aid instead. Could you not find her? Was she not in this purgatory that you’ve mentioned?”
Walestone held up a hand.You do not quite understand.
