Chapter 7
I woke up to someone shaking my shoulders. Fingers, small and desperate, digging, digging—
“Get up, Esmer!” Elliot screamed, eyes wild and face contorted with anguish. Tears slid down his cheeks, running into his mouth. “Please get up, please!”
For a moment, I was unable to comprehend. Refused to comprehend. Then the shouts—the shrieks—rose in a hellish chorus, giving me no other option but to face reality straight in its horrible face.
“They’re trying to kill us. We need to hide,” Elliot insisted, grabbing me by the arm and pulling me up.
As my feet found the floor, I faintly registered a numbness shifting over my limbs.
I wanted to hide. I wanted to do nothing but hide.
But it was too late for that. Whether Eden heard me or not, I’d made a promise to her: to protect Elliot with all I had left.
To keep him safe no matter the cost—even if I’d just dreamed of the Shadow Bringer himself.
“Elliot, who is trying to kill us? The Light Legion?”
“No, the village,” he wailed. “The entire village.”
The tendons in my knees felt liquid, weak, but I moved toward the windowsill, anyway.
The sun was hours from lifting over the horizon, but it was not darkness that met my eyes.
Torchlight, dancing fiendishly across our property, stabbed at the night air.
The Visstill was alive with glints of metal and crazed, hate-filled eyes.
Dozens of eyes, hollow and feral. And they were moving in a frenzied mob toward our home.
They were gathering in front of our home.
“I saw—I saw—” Elliot shuddered, his small shoulders curling inward. “I think Mother and Father are dead. When you didn’t wake up, I thought you might be dead, too.”
“Elliot—”
“I think they’re dead,” he howled again. “And I don’t want you to die, too!”
Elliot’s beautiful, innocent face made my stomach roil.
Thick lashes clumped together with tears.
Eyes a soft, warm brown, now somber with grief.
Dark hair curling over his ears and neck, now knotted with tangles.
I reached out to hold him, to put my arms around him and will the world away, when a crash resonated from below.
A masked legionnaire stumbled up the stairs into our room, clamoring on his hands and knees as something grabbed at his foot from behind. He glanced wildly at Elliot and me as he struggled, kicking again and again—but whatever it was at the foot of our stairs began to pull, dragging him down.
“A little help would be nice!” the legionnaire yelled, throwing another violent kick at a Corrupt that resembled a local farmer.
The young man’s golden armor was streaked with blood, and his cape, now trailing along our floor, left behind darker marks of red.
“A knife, a hammer”—he paused to take another kick, groaning with effort—“a chair, a vase—something!”
Elliot and I ran frantically around the room, seizing the first objects we saw.
Elliot threw a quilt, which tangled around the Corrupt’s body, and I flung a landscape that Eden had painted, which ricocheted through the air before it slammed against the monster’s sneering face.
The Corrupt fell back, howling, and landed in a heap of unnatural angles at the bottom of the stairs.
The legionnaire jumped to his feet, immediately wincing. “Ah, that stings,” he hissed, clutching a wound in his side. “Though I do have my legs back, thanks to your valiant”—he glanced at the lifeless heap at the bottom of the stairs—“blanket and art throwing. Interesting technique.”
“Th-thank you, sir,” Elliot mumbled.
“On a more serious note, do you have any family or friends in the next village?” He pulled off his mask, wiping the sweat from his brow with a swipe of his forearm, his brown skin glistening in the dim light.
He was young—and handsome. Wounded and smeared with blood and dirt, but hardly a few years older than me.
He didn’t put the mask back on. Instead, he clipped it to a holster at his side.
“Half of Norhavellis has succumbed to Corruption. It’s too dangerous for you to remain here any longer. ”
“Silas, where are you?” called a frantic voice.
“Silas—oh.” A masked young woman, clad in Light Legion armor, appeared at the bottom of the stairs, nearly tripping over the Corrupt’s body.
“I thought this one had you for certain. How fortunate you aren’t dead.
” She glanced between Elliot and me, pulling off her mask and placing it at her side to take a better look.
Her kohl-ringed eyes, framed by waves of dark red hair, were curious and slightly judgmental.
“Ah, the two Havenfall siblings. Are these your rescuers?”
“It’s great to see you, too, Mila,” Silas responded. “And yes, they are.”
I drew myself up to my full height, sending the woman the most imposing gaze I could muster—not unlike the one the Shadow Bringer had given me. “We saved your comrade’s life, so you will take us with you to Istralla.”
“Now, what would the Light Bringer think about that?” Mila asked, clearly perplexed.
“You’ll need weapons first. Knives? An axe, perhaps.
” She hopped over the Corrupt and bounded up the stairs.
Once in our room, she looked around, frowning at what she saw.
“But you’re not fighters at all, are you?
Especially you, little boy,” she said, gesturing absently at Elliot, who made a face back at her.
“What should we do with them, Silas? Can’t have them running around with wooden spoons. ”
The Corrupt at the bottom of the stairs shuddered and groaned.
Silas and Mila shared a pointed look.
“Mila,” Silas urged, a hard edge to his voice, and they descended the stairs once again.
Mila pulled a line of cording from around her hip, artfully tying knots around the Corrupt’s wrists and ankles. “There, there. Help me move him so he can be purified later.”
Silas grunted in agreement.
I shuddered and turned to Elliot, who looked just as aghast as I felt.
We didn’t say what we were both thinking: that Mother and Father would be sharing the fate of this Corrupt.
Their souls would be spared by the Light Bringer, but the demons inside them would be destroyed. Along with their mortal bodies.
If they weren’t already dead.
A loud crash resonated from below. If more Corrupt were breaking into our home, we had nothing to defend ourselves with and nowhere to go.
“Elliot, come on!” I urged, shoving our window open and clambering to the roof.
Outside, the clanging of metal on metal muffled what little sound we made, so we carefully moved to a quieter, darker side of our house.
Silas and Mila chased after us, capes catching in the jagged texture of the wooden shingles.
They crouched forward, balancing against the uneven surface, just as three Corrupt grabbed the edge of the roof, reaching for our feet.
Elliot screamed, yanking me back by the hand.
The Corrupt pulled themselves up until their elbows were pinned to the roof, feet kicking against the side of the house for leverage. They grinned at us—the three of them—and let out a chorus of gleeful snarls.
“Esmer, Elliot! How wonderful that you’re still alive,” one rasped.
It was Norhavellis’s baker. Edgar. His dripping mustache leaked a dark substance, and his eyes no longer reflected the kind, warm man who’d always made magic with sparse ingredients, bringing light into Norhavellis where there was scarce any to begin with.
I recoiled, horrified, as I recognized the faces of the others: Muriel, Edgar’s wife, and Anna, their child. Their brawn and the unnatural resonance to their voices must have come from the demons within them. The demons that now were them.
“Yes, better for us that they’re not already dead!
” Anna bellowed, clambering over the edge before the rest. She was a slim girl near Elliot’s age.
If Norhavellis had the luxury of a schoolhouse, they’d be in the same year.
Tears wet her cheeks, reflecting in the torchlight, and she headed straight for us, eyes aflame. “You ruined us.”
“That’s not true,” Elliot insisted. “We always tried to help.”
“Traitor!” Anna screamed, lunging with a snarl and throwing herself at Elliot before I could react.
Mila sprang from behind, flipping the girl to the roof with a practiced sweep of her boot.
Anna leapt back up—far too quickly—and rolled under Mila’s foot, diving for Elliot again.
But Mila was quick, too. She knotted a fist in the girl’s cloak and flung her away in one fluid, forceful movement, leaving her sprawled on her spine and sliding backward down the roof.
Edgar and Muriel grabbed for Anna’s flailing limbs, still struggling to worm their own bodies over the edge.
“Let go a’ me! Let go!” Anna shrieked.
But the more they grabbed, the more Anna lurched backward. She slid off the edge, dragging Edgar and Muriel with her. After they hit the ground, they did not move.
“Th-they sounded almost—almost themselves,” Elliot sobbed.
“We need to get to the Light Bringer,” Mila said, grasping us by the elbows and ushering us back to our open window. “We’re not safe up here.”
Reluctantly, I let her guide me. There was nothing else we could do.
Elliot and I didn’t have a chance, not against the red rage of the Corrupt or the cold precision of the Light Legion.
We moved quickly through our home, pausing only to step over the fallen Corrupt at the foot of our stairs, and followed Silas and Mila as they took us outside again.
The Light Bringer, along with a few of his more ornamented followers, stood apart from the fray.
He held a large scepter in his armored hand, and he wove it through the air, chanting as smoke billowed from its crevices.
Undulating smoke coiled against my tired skin, freely drifting, rippling, encircling.
The purification ritual.
It was the scent of fertile earth, of mud soft from a rainstorm. It was dried, sweet leaves on a warm forest floor. It was security and comfort and dreams. The feel of limitless promise and ancient secrets.
Music thrummed out with the smoke as it spread, led by the Light Bringer and the people around him.
Voices blended with the low hum of accompanying flutes, and the melody rose in strength with the smoke, growing stronger and more brilliant with every passing moment.
Corrupt began to fall, dropping their weapons and going silent.
The smoke and the music seeped through cracks in my skin, and I exhaled, scarcely conscious.
Then I collapsed backward into the mist-drenched grass.