Chapter Twenty
There’s no doubt that the Sea of Storms lives up to its name.
It’s the dead of night, and The Leviathan is rocking violently, waves battering all sides of the hull like distant thunder. I lie awake in the cabin, staring at the inky ceiling. The tiny window beside the bed shows only blackness, with occasional bursts of foamy spray.
No matter how many times I’ve tossed and turned, the anticipation is too much, waiting for the gong to signal the next trial.
I’m not sure how long it’s been since we flicked off the lamp, but it feels like minutes and hours all at once. It’s the storm. The lurching vessel. The smell of salt and damp wood in the air mingled with something darker. Fear.
It swirls overhead, thick and oppressive, like a gathering storm.
Taron’s inner demons are more demanding tonight. I’m not surprised. That first trial took a lot out of him, so his subconscious would be struggling to suppress them.
Four of his inner demons hover near the ceiling, one more than yesterday. Their shapes are blurred at the edges, and they drift like hazy, half-formed silhouettes. Their razor-sharp teeth clatter as their tongues lash at the air.
I try to ignore them, but they’re too potent. They must also be able to sense my struggle, because every time I close my eyes, they lurch from the corners of the cabin, forked tongues darting at my face and charcoal eyes burning into my skull.
I must’ve drifted off at one point, because I almost scream when I open my eyes again to find one of the demons breathing its sour, almost spicy breath on to my face. Its sharp, malformed fingers are stroking my cheek.
“That’s enough,” I sneer, grabbing at the demon, only to have it disperse between my fingers and retreat to the corner of the cabin.
Inner demons are tricky to deal with. Much more slippery pests than Soul Wraiths, if that’s even possible. To cleanse a person’s inner demon, you have to pull its roots from the source.
I roll over, facing Taron’s bed across the narrow cabin. His body is still, chest peacefully rising and falling. But I can see beyond the shell of his exterior.
Inner demons only materialize like this when their host is at capacity, unable to contain all the torment consuming them from the inside. I wonder if he feels them now, clawing at his mind as he sleeps. I wonder if he wakes up in the morning feeling hollow.
My thoughts drift back to the street urchin in Rava. It surprised me how Taron had shown him mercy. I remember the look on his face, something resembling sympathy, but also more…
It was understanding. Empathy.
I study his sleeping form. Who are you, Taron? I wonder. What was it that drove you into Madame Vera’s clutches?
Curiosity gnaws at me. It’s an itch I can’t ignore. My body moves before my mind has the chance to protest.
I slide silently out of bed. Another wave crashes against the ship.
It throws me forward. Taron doesn’t stir.
His back remains turned to me. I hesitate.
If I do this, I’ll invade his privacy. Technically, I’d be committing a crime.
Reaching into someone’s mind without consent is against the law across the Triumstellar Accord.
But so is murder, and the tournament is already ripe with it. Besides, this would be for his own good. By reaching into Taron’s mind and taking some of his pain upon myself, I’ll only make him a better competitor.
I tiptoe over to his bed. My heart is hammering behind my ears and I’m cautious, but the closer I seem to get to Taron, the more his energy seems to pull me forward.
My knees land softly on the floorboards as I kneel beside him, my hands hovering over his bare upper body. Unlike Cyrus, whose skin radiates warmth like sunlight captured beneath the surface, Taron’s is cool, like the first breath of air on a crisp evening.
The air around him seems to steam, as if delicate threads of dark energy are evaporating from his pores.
I shuffle a little closer until I’m pressed up against the edge of his bed. Then I close my eyes and reach out – at first with my hands, lightly grazing his chest, then with my mind.
The energy swirls around me, cold and potent. It coils around my fingers like black ribbons, pulling me another inch closer before looping around my wrists and tightening.
Images flash behind my eyelids. Taron, as a child.
He’s dirty and emaciated, scrounging for food in the bustling streets of Rava.
His face is smeared with soot, his eyes wide with desperation.
Hunger. He weaves easily through the market, with such small hands darting out for scraps – bits of bread, bruised fruit, anything to fill the gnawing void in his stomach.
Behind the grime, I catch glimpses of an earlier life, a simpler one. A stall laden with goods, two figures smiling, working side by side during a storm. His parents.
I see them struggling beneath the weight of a broken canopy as the wind howls, the collapse of everything they built crashing down in a single stroke. A violent storm.
It left them with nothing, left him with nothing.
Taron, too young to grasp what happened, watches as their hands slip away, leaving him alone to wander the streets.
Forgotten. And there, glinting in his tiny hands, is a pocket watch – a delicate thing, his father’s, engraved with three moons.
He clutches it tightly, the only remnant of his old life.
Tears well in my eyes. They abandoned him?
The scene shifts, and I find myself in a different moment. Another stormy night, rain cascading from the heavens. A young Taron seeks refuge beneath a canopy of clothing scraps when Madame Vera appears. A striking figure with yellow-blonde hair and piercing eyes.
In the murky shadows of my mind, her promise echoes.
A vow to take care of Taron.
Then, another vision. Taron, older now, stands silently in the shadows, bearing witness to Madame Vera’s brutality. She kneels before a woman, an unsuspecting victim with tears streaking across her cheeks.
Madame Vera has the woman’s chin in her palm, and she pleads while the very essence of her soul, a luminous, ethereal glow, is absorbed by the Soulreaper, leaving only an empty shell in its wake.
The woman’s body drops on to the cold, hard floor, and my surroundings shift once again – to an even more grisly scene.
Taron is restraining a bloody man. The man tries to resist, his fingers working in a feeble attempt to spawn a light blade to defend himself with. But Taron keeps him pinned.
“Immobilize him,” Madame Vera commands from the shadows.
Taron drives his knee into the man’s back until I hear the crunch of bones. It’s ghastly, but something about him is different now. Taron’s body moves unnaturally, like he’s a puppet on strings. He kneels there, but it’s not him any more. I can’t put my finger on it.
Madame Vera lowers herself down by the man’s side. She has a wicked smile on her face as she drains his soul.
And then another scene. Madame Vera seizes Taron’s chin and gives him a peck on the forehead. “Thank you, my darling boy,” she says. “Good work today.”
Taron’s eyes fly open as he jerks awake. He launches out of bed and tackles me to the floor. His weight crashes down on top of me, and the breath is knocked from my lungs. My head is still reeling from the visions, words struggling to form.
He holds my hands above my head and drives his knee into my side. The movement is familiar – an echo of what I saw in the vision.
I gasp, “Stop! It’s me – it’s me!”
My heart pounds wildly as I struggle under him. I’m trapped, forced to breathe in the spicy scent of furious energy coming off him in plumes, dry and chalky, like I’m inhaling mouthfuls of dust.
For a moment, he doesn’t move. His chest heaves with ragged breaths, his blue eyes wild with fury. His lilac hair clumps around his face, hiding his full expression, but his anger is unmistakable. It’s his flaring nostrils. The flattening of his lips.
He loosens his grip, and his chin dips down as though he’s embarrassed. “What the hell are you doing?”
I’m still pinned, but I don’t push him away. It’s a confusing swirl of emotions – the way my body prickles at the coolness of his bare chest, and how my lips are drawn to his, mere inches away from mine.
“I-I thought you were having a nightmare,” I lie. “I just wanted to help.”
“Did you use your talents on me?”
“No. I didn’t.”
Taron hovers over me for a few more seconds, then he lets go of my wrists. I’m surprised when he doesn’t immediately back away.
“You’d better not be lying,” he says. “Because if you are…”
“What? You’ll kill me?” I bite my tongue, but I don’t regret challenging him.
I can’t help but be intrigued by Taron’s anger, even more so now I’ve seen the making of his hard exterior.
He’s a monster – I was right about that.
He has to be, from what I saw. Standing by as Madame Vera snuffed out innocent lives. Assisting her.
But not all monsters are of their own making, and I don’t think Taron is either.
There was something strange in the way he held that man down, like his movements weren’t his own.
Then there was Madame Vera’s command. Immobilize him.
Her voice rang with all the confidence of someone who knew Taron would follow through. No matter what.
I’d hoped a glimpse into Taron’s mind would give me answers, but I’ve only come away with more questions.
Madame Vera found him when he was a boy, hungry and alone on the streets.
She did something to that boy, twisted him and tore him apart, before putting him back together using only the most broken pieces. Why didn’t he run? Escape?
Taron’s expression hardens, and I’m worried he can read my mind. I swallow, exhaling a shaky breath. Then he stands, looking down at me on the floor for a long moment, his chest still rising and falling with the remnants of his adrenaline.
His gaze lingers on my wrists, where he held me down, but he says nothing. He only turns and climbs back into bed.
“Don’t ever do that again,” he warns, and I stay where I am for a few more minutes without moving.
I watch him in the dark, the shadows of his inner demons no longer dancing against the ceiling. The cabin continues to echo with the sound of waves crashing against the ship, but it’s the silence between us that’s louder.
When I finally, quietly, climb back into my bed, pulling the blanket up to my chin, it’s like I never moved.
I’m still staring at the ceiling, still unable to sleep.
My thoughts swirl, flashes of the visions playing before my eyes.
In spite of the glimpses I saw tonight, in spite of the moments we’ve already shared, the truth is I don’t know Taron at all.
He’s a stranger, and he’s wrapped in secrets darker than I could’ve ever imagined.