CHAPTER THREE
ALYSSUM
For the second time in one morning, I found myself balancing on and grasping at tree limbs to gain a better vantage point.
My last attempt had undoubtedly taken years off my life, yet there I was again—just brilliant.
I had no choice but to ignore my palpitating heart, the discomfort a potential distraction from the tasks at hand: observe the crosser, and don’t get caught.
When the cloaked figure stumbled out of the fog, confusion knitted my brow together.
I wasn’t quite sure what I’d expected to see, but a perfectly calm man who merely seemed to have lost his way hadn’t made the list. I squinted through the searing light, hoping to catch a glimpse beneath his hood, but even my spyglass couldn’t bring his shadowed features into focus.
He weaved between the ironbark trees, brown boots that matched his cloak noisily crunching fallen leaves, seemingly aimless.
Was this the same man the Sentinels had been searching for?
He looked plain enough. Why would they desire his return so deeply that they were willing to scour the forest for half a month in search of him?
Prissy had even said they would lug his corpse back to Lunamor if his remains were all they located.
It made no sense. Not only was there nothing extraordinary about the man, but there was no soul-crushing fear evident in his gait, or visible wounds to suggest some unfathomable fate had befallen him.
At most, he seemed a bit sluggish. What if the Threshold was harmless, and he was simply reorienting his senses from navigating that seemingly endless gloom?
At the very least, that might explain why he appeared so unsure of his path forward.
My fear of the fog continued to dwindle, even in the face of its sprawling magnificence. Its mysticism had haunted my nightmares, but what if it had been nothing more than mysticism all along? The possibility ignited a series of thoughts and questions within me, each more consuming than the last.
Sorcery was dangerous for Lunamorians—we all knew that. There was not one Lunamorian who’d succeeded in building a life beyond the wall. But the Threshold was clearly more than a mere weather anomaly. So how did this man seem perfectly fine? Perhaps I could question him…
If I kept my veil lowered, it might not be too reckless of an idea.
But just as I began contemplating how I could pull off that degree of idiocy without endangering myself further, I spotted Prissy and Blondie doubling back, deep in an animated conversation.
I bit my tongue to dissuade the curse that hovered there; I wanted to damn both men to the depths for being so persistently annoying, but I heaved a laboring sigh instead.
Crunch.
My attention snapped to the crosser, whose stealth and grace were seemingly nonexistent. The man wasn’t near the Sentinels, or even in their path, and if he could cease the ruckus, they might pass him by without noticing.
Crunch—snap—“Oof!”
Or not.
Blondie’s gaze assessed the thick forest at his side for the briefest of moments, but his incessant chatter must have drowned out most of the cloaked man’s stumble, for he continued on.
Prissy, however, stopped in his tracks, his black metals shifting audibly as his chest heaved.
If I was sweating this profusely in majority cloth, I couldn’t imagine the torture one might endure beneath plates of onyxium and straps of leather.
I prayed the heat would dull Prissy’s senses; if they found him before I did, I might never learn the truth.
As Prissy studied the thicket, dark eyes compressed into slits, the questions I’d spent my life suppressing bubbled to the surface.
Why would anyone risk crossing of their own accord?
Even if you were a non-believer, surely it wouldn’t be worth the slightest possibility that you’d come back forever fractured and memoryless?
Yet, to my knowledge, there were many believers—so what might compel someone to knowingly relinquish their memories?
What could possibly be worth losing yourself for, especially when you’d have no recollection of the exchange in the first place?
Something about the Threshold’s mythos didn’t hold together, and my hope for answers was dwindling.
I had taken great care to keep my curiosities locked away, ever present but never strong enough to compel me to defy Father, but these armored Sentinels and their crosser had ruined me.
The perpetual itch for knowledge that had plagued my existence was growing wilder, and I needed answers.
Didn’t I deserve the truth? If only this once?
I’d already been astonishingly lucky to witness any of this at all, so I just needed a bit more of that luck. The brownness of the man’s clothing camouflaged him well enough, I thought. If he stopped making so much noise, maybe they wouldn’t even—
“You there!” Prissy’s attention locked on the crosser just as he inelegantly heaved himself over a log.
My stomach plummeted through the branch beneath me, and it was all I could do to suppress a groan.
Blondie, whose powers of observation left something to be desired, was several paces ahead of Prissy by that point. He scoured the nearby brush, scanning to and fro before his attention landed on the muddy man straddling a log, who appeared utterly oblivious to the fact that he’d been spotted.
“You think it’s Vicar?” Blondie leaned towards Prissy, his metals grinding under the movement.
“Of course that’s him. Who else would it be?” Prissy grunted, his tone very near chastising. I couldn’t see his face from this angle, but I imagined it was just as irritated-looking as mine. “Thank the stars we can stop coming all the way out here.”
Blondie cupped his mouth as he shouted, “Identify yourself!” But Vicar—if that’s indeed who he was—sat struggling with the log. It seemed his pants had caught, and his concentration appeared singularly occupied with freeing himself.
“Well, go on then,” Prissy prompted, motioning towards the forest, too near the Threshold for comfort. His nonchalant demeanor, marred only by the slight uptick in his tone.
The sigh that Blondie emitted was exasperated at best, and insubordinate at worst. “Why do I have to retrieve him?” The hesitation in his voice was palpable, but he must have received a rather fearsome look, for not a moment passed before I heard, “I’m going, I’m going,” followed by the unceremonious clunking of Blondie’s metals as he half-jogged into the thicket.
Prissy found himself a sunless patch against a sprawling tree.
The scraping of his metals was obnoxiously loud, and I imagined him relishing the rest and shade, completely unaware that I was in his line of sight if only he cast his attention starward.
Relocating wasn’t an option, and so I sat, unmoving, only my eyes flitting between the Sentinels and the crosser.
Blondie’s trek into the thicket extended each time he paused to scrutinize his surroundings; this was probably the closest he’d ever been to the Threshold, and I could feel my nerves lighting up on his behalf.
After finally reaching his target, he steadied himself on the same log, plated chest heaving with each breath.
He reached out and pulled the man’s hood back, though the man curiously seemed unconcerned with anything other than his pants.
“Vicar Umfrey,” Blondie groaned. “What in the depths are you doing out here? Were you lost?”
Even while straining, I could barely make out the words.
Vicar looked up at the Sentinel, his orange, bushy eyebrows indented. I couldn’t risk pulling out my spyglass, but if I wasn’t mistaken, the look on his face was devoid of recognition.
“Pardon,” he said politely, swiping at his bulbous nose. “But what’s a Vicar?”
“Ah, you dumb bastard.” Blondie clasped him on the back, shaking his head. When he turned to regard Prissy, I was already struggling to breathe through the sudden tightness in my chest. “It’s him,” he called back. “But he’s Vacant.”
“I can see that. Cover him up and make your way back,” Prissy ordered.
Fire weaved itself through my extremities, and blood roared in my ears. I tried fruitlessly to steady myself against the sudden wave of terror. It was only the second time I’d heard the word used that way, and the childhood memory overtook me without warning.
A dark corridor. Sparse candlelight. A steady drip, drip, drip. An enormous iron door with too many locks.
Why would a door have locks on the outside?
A kitten clutched to my chest, nibbling at my collar. A man’s scream so thick with terror, the likes of which I’d never heard, and I jumped back, arms prickling with gooseflesh.
The locks screeched against themselves, and I scurried behind a heavy curtain blocking boarded-up shutters.
“It’s a fate worse than death.”
I buried my face in the fur of the silvery-blue kitten I’d followed into the dungeons, praying to remain hidden.
“He knew what could happen. Even the villagers have heard the legends.”
Keys jangled, slicing through the damp silence of the corridor.
“There’s a difference between knowing and knowing.”
“Can you imagine?”
“I’d rather not.”
Sandals scraped against the stone floor. Too close.
“I’ll go tell Bjorn we’ve got another Vacant.”
“Is that what he’s calling them?”
“Got a better idea, have you?”
The sturdy branch I clutched came into focus as Blondie and Vicar made their way back to the dirt road. I heard the shuffling of their boots and I focused on the noise it made, afraid that if I didn’t, the sound of my heartbeat—or worse yet, another memory—would drown out their voices.
“I just had a funny thought,” Blondie said, his tone humored and weighted simultaneously.
“What’s that?” Prissy asked.
“He’s Vicar the Vacant, ain’t he?”
I watched, unmoving, as Vicar studied their metals with half-hearted curiosity, seemingly aware of little more than what was directly in front of his face. I couldn’t make out his eyes, but I imagined they were large, empty saucers, absent of whatever spark must have lived in them before.
It had been true after all. The horrors of the Threshold were real, and there I sat, suddenly very aware of how near I was to the fog.
My breath no longer reached the recesses of my lungs.
I couldn’t risk moving, so I clutched the branch I rested on until my hands ached.
The pain centered me just enough that I could remain still.
“Vicar the Vacant,” Blondie whistled out. “Has a bit of a ring to it. More than Vicar the baker, anyway.”
“You’re a cunt,” Prissy said as he gripped Vicar’s shoulder and began steering him towards Lunamor. “Come. We’ll have to wait until dark to get him to the dungeons—can’t risk anyone spotting him.”
“Where are we going?” Vicar asked, flicking some mud off the front of his cloak.
“Back to Lunamor, Vic.”
“Where’s that?”
I never heard their reply, and only relaxed my posture once the plumes of dust in their wake puffed beyond the bend.
My legs were heavy as I looked towards the Threshold, studying the foggy furls as they lapped against the air surrounding it.
Even as I bore my gaze into the gloom, I was met only with silence.
No voices, no whispering. No one calling my name.
I struggled to catch my breath, but rationalizations were already casting the memory away.
I wiped the dampness from my brow with my forearm, desperate to be on the ground and out of the scorching heat of the sun.
The heat that, when mixed with a heightened emotional state, had surely dulled and played tricks on my senses.
I gripped the ironbark trunk that supported my weight, intentionally pressing raw fingertips into the rough bark.
After three steadied exhales, my heartbeat ceased its race, normalizing to a steady thump.
It was time to return home. Away from the Threshold.
Away from memoryless men and onyxium and the lifelong fear that I had stupidly thought would cease if I confronted what had frightened me.
Instead, it had only grown more poignant in the face of unseeing eyes.
Vacant.
The very word started my heart once more, an audible beat in my ears that I could not escape.
I needed to leave. Now.
I descended the tree more quickly this time, my mind’s preoccupation an asset as I capably made my way to the forest floor, landing amidst the brush with a grateful sigh. If I could avoid heights for the foreseeable future, my heart would thank me for it, I was certain.
After a quick self-assessment to ensure my hair was secure beneath my coif, I raised the veil on my hood and lowered the high collar of my tunic, reveling in the sensation of hot wind brushing against my mouth and neck.
And then something else was on my mouth.
A gloved hand, clasping the lower half of my face with unbridled strength, silencing the scream that ripped through my throat.
I felt the blade before I saw it—a thin sliver of steel pressed to my jugular, begging me to make a move.
I could sense their lips against my ear, warm breath causing my heart to seize.
But it was the words they spoke that truly stole the air from my lungs.
“Looks like I’ve got myself a princess.”