He covers the dead man’s mouth with his palm, and closes his eyes.
No words. No apology, no incantation. He doesn’t feel sorry, and he doesn’t need to beg. The power floods into him immediately, eager and desperate for the slightest invitation, and Shae welcomes it just as desperately. The darkness is a rushing river. His breath hitches. His eyes fly open but see nothing as the dark power surrounds and fills him.
It doesn’t hurt. Nothing hurts. Shae breathes in the shadows and calls to the other corpses. The last remnants of power inside them rush towards him too. Intoxicating. He should have done this years ago.
When the corpses are empty, Shae rises to his feet. He opens his mouth to thank them, then laughs. They’re dead. They don’t matter. They were only tools to feed his strength, and now they’re not even that.
He can’t feel anything. No pain, no fear, no sorrow. No warmth, but no cold. He can survive like this. But is it enough? The only thing he feels is a new, dark hunger crawling through his body. He needs to be strong to face Izen. Surely more power would be safer.
A memory surfaces. A little homestead, at the far eastern edge of the Lyralan Crater. The memory should hurt, but it doesn’t now. All that matters is the two graves behind the house. Perhaps he can take one last gift from them, as recompense for leaving him.
***
When Shae reaches his childhood home, the memories feel like they belong to someone else. He’s not the boy who lived in the single-story stone building. He’s not the boy whose mother patched the walls with magic, or whose father thatched the roof with his own two hands. He’s not the boy who drew water from the well out front, or threw pebbles down it to see how long they fell before they splashed.
His father held some other boy on his shoulders to pluck the fruit from the trees behind the house. His mother showed some other boy how to darn the holes in his socks.
Another boy ran as far south as he could, another man kept running and running, for fear of angering the dead, for fear of drowning in sorrow like a pebble sinking into water. Another. Not Shae, who feels nothing besides hunger.
The dreamlike haze carries him to the orchard behind the house. The trees are still black and twisted from his last visit home. Some of them have fallen, tangles of twisted branches without leaves or fruit, their roots exposed and dead. At the center of the dead grove rest two gray stones. There are no words on them.
Shae stands above his parents’ graves. “You left me,” he says quietly. “And you refused to come back when I needed you. So I’m not asking this time.”
Another thought briefly crosses his mind. Why does he need to banish Izen now? He’s not afraid of the power anymore. He feels so much better now that he’s given in. Maybe he should kill Izen instead, to make sure nobody else can ever banish him and rob Shae of his newfound strength. Or he could join with him, work together to become even more powerful, consume even more, and kill anyone who ever tries to stop them.
He laughs. Whichever path he decides, he needs this power.
He draws his knife. But before he can slice open his arm, the sound of hoofbeats thunders from the west.
?
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Arthur
Arthur sees three horses ahead just north of the border. He urges Duchess faster to intercept them. He recognizes two of them: Georgia Oakven’s flashy white steed, and the little dark bay gelding he helped Shae buy just the morning before.
None of the horses have riders. They whip past Arthur and Duchess, eyes wide and ears pinned back, racing for the safety of the Lanwatch gate. Arthur sees a streak of blood across the white horse’s flank as it passes.
Duchess shies under him, but quickly calms as Arthur nudges her into a canter. Arthur wishes he had her composure. It’s all he can do to keep his hands steady on the reins.
He’s never been north of the border before, and all he has to go on are vague memories of maps and the directions from Karis. Seven miles northeast of Lanwatch. But Vara’s Radiance hasn’t left him, even without a focus item. Whenever he turns the wrong direction, whether through confusion or a turn in the road, the warmth inside him fades. It surges like wildfire when he’s on the right path again.
As the trees thin out and the scope of the Lyralan Crater spreads around him, a needle-prick of darkness pierces his awareness. A whisper of evil in the same direction that Vara’s Radiance guides him. Arthur doesn’t know if it’s vaidkos or demon or walking corpse. He just knows he has to keep going.
He might have missed the tower remnants were it not for the ravens. The ruins are just north of his path. But the cawing cries and fluttering wings attract his attention. He rides closer in and sees the first broken body. A woman with her throat torn out, a raven pecking at her stomach, and a Riverswords-blue armband. The rest of the bodies spread out behind her.
Arthur dismounts, shoving away his nausea and fear, and checks for survivors. There are none, but something selfish and scared inside him eases when he finishes looking through them and hasn’t found Shae.
Wherever Shae is, it’s not on the bloody ground here.
The fallen deserve to rest in peace, buried or burned to return to the earth and sky. Arthur can’t give them that now. All he can do is touch his heart and murmur, “May Vara’s Radiance light your way.”
He mounts up again and rides east, pushed by Vara’s Radiance towards the whispering darkness.
His destination appears at the edge of the crater. A lone farmhouse, dilapidated but not completely ruined like the other buildings he’s seen so far in Lyrisenia. There are holes in the roof, and the windows are broken. A chicken coop sits empty in the front.
Vara’s Radiance flares inside him, then goes dark, and he knows he’s in the right place. Uneasy pressure fills his ears, like he’s climbed too high a mountain. His skin crawls, and the air is too cold in his lungs. There’s something evil behind the house. He gallops forward, Duchess’s gait never faltering beneath him. She only stops when he reins her in sharply at the sight ahead.
