Chapter 16
Sixteen
“You should count yourself fortunate, Reaves. Not everyone gets a second chance at the academy after turning their back on it.”
A baritone voice I don’t recognize slinks into my ear, making me float out of unconsciousness and crack my eyes open. I blink against the bright light of a wall sconce. Nausea crests in my throat, and I retch.
When I try to move, I find my wrists and ankles shackled.
The glyphs carved into them radiate the same cobalt color as Falcen’s throat and arm tattoos.
I quickly learn that when they light up, a cold needle of ice slides up my limbs and through my ribs, finding the ember that I keep hidden even from myself and smothering it under runic frost. It shrinks inside me, hissing like a kicked cat.
The unfamiliar voice continues, slithering down the corridor and through the bars barricading me in this squalid, bare cell, “Or did the Void leave you too sated to refuse? How long until it calls to you again?”
I drag my head up, fighting the vertigo that threatens to pull me under again.
My tunic and breeches are torn and filthy, my arms and lower legs bared and covered in bruises.
My wrists and ankles blister under the weight of the shackles, their magickal cold intensifying.
I try to breathe through the panic, but the air is thick, sour, and hot, like the fermentation room behind the vineyard during the summer months.
I have no memory of how I got here. The last thing I remember is … pudding?
The thought is so absurd I almost laugh, but my cracked lips can barely twitch.
I’m torn out of my confusion when a voice that’s starting to become as familiar to me as my own finally replies, “You’ve made your point. What do you want me to do?”
Falcen.
My heart kicks in my chest so hard I feel it in my wrists despite the shackles’ numbing chill. Falcen’s nearby. Whatever’s happened, whatever prison I’ve been taken to, he’ll get me out.
“Break her,” the other voice answers.
“I understand my duty,” Falcen replies, but his tone contains a new quality, tight and overworked.
I force myself upright, bracing my back against the rough brick wall. Cautious of my sensitive stomach, I lean toward the thick iron bars facing the torch-lit corridor where the voices are coming from.
“Do you?” The other man’s tone drips with derision as he addresses Falcen. “The girl was potent enough to feed you, then drag you back from the brink of the Darkening. And she is but a babe. Have you grown that weak since you swore off dark souls?”
The wall sconces in the hallway sputter, the only sign that figures move just out of sight, their shadows surging and receding across the bricks like a black tide.
There’s a long moment of silence. Falcen is the first to break it, his voice soft with restrained anger. “I am not weak. The girl’s magick caught me off guard and nothing more. It will not happen again.”
“See that it doesn’t,” the other man says coolly. “The academy has invested too much in you to lose you to the Void’s call now. Though perhaps we let you advance too quickly, if one little novice is all it takes to unravel decades of conditioning.”
I hear a single, heavy footstep, then Falcen’s voice. “Choose your next words very carefully, Keeper. You forget what the academy made me into.”
“Ah yes, the great Falcen Reaves, pride of the Soulren legions,” the Keeper sneers.
“Tell me, do you remember the exact number of Void-tainted souls we had to pour down your throat before you stopped screaming and started begging for more? How your pupils swirled like ink until you could no longer tell your own thoughts from the moans of the damned?”
Falcen’s resultant silence is so charged that I feel the hairs on my arms stand at attention. “That was a long time ago. I am no longer that boy.”
“Are you sure?” The man laughs, a cruel, mocking sound. “Isn’t that why you tried to leave us? I’m surprised you’re not writhing in withdrawal as we speak. Once a soul-devourer, always a soul-devourer, isn’t that right?”
“I will mold her into a weapon for the academy,” Falcen snaps, so sharp it could cleave rock.
“No, you will do as commanded and bridle the girl’s spirit until her magick bends to our will. Her resonance with the Void is too strong to be left unchecked. She must be tamed or put down.”
I bite down on a whimper.
Put down, like a Void creature.
“That won’t be necessary,” Falcen replies in a tone that makes me think he’s gritting his teeth.
“Then prove it. Crush the girl and deliver her to me once she is brought to heel, as is your duty. Or shall I report to the Master Keeper that our star pupil has lost his stomach for killing? Perhaps he will decide you need a refresher in the curriculum.”
My brows come down, and I pull my lips in as I parse through their conversation, stealing nuggets and hiding them away at the back of my mind to turn over later.
Also, where in Nox’s hell am I?
“I suggest you work quickly. And Reaves? Do try to resist sampling the goods any further. We’d hate to lose our first remnant in decades because you couldn’t control your appetite.”
The Keeper’s footsteps recede, his shape boiling away into the dark, and for a few baleful seconds, there is only the hiss of the torches and the distant drip of water echoing from somewhere deep in this hellhole’s guts.
My heart won’t slow down. I want to believe Falcen is playing a part, that he’s on my side, and this is all a show.
But then I remember what he looked like back in the Blightwood, his face spattered in blood and Void ichor, eyes black and gold and starving.
I remember the way he shook as he fought whatever was eating him up inside.
I hold myself utterly still, hardly daring to breathe as Falcen’s silhouette falls across the bars of my cell. When he steps into view on the other side, torchlight carves cruel fire into his cheekbones. He doesn’t look at me yet. He studies my shackles as if they’ve bitten him, too.
“Falcen.” His name is hoarse on my tongue. “What is this place. What’s happening?”
He works his jaw, then looks over my head, stating, “This is the Resonance Academy. You’ve been brought to the catacombs.”
I struggle to sit up straighter, ignoring the way the room spins. “The what? Why am I a prisoner?”
“You are not a prisoner. You are an initiate.” He shifts his weight almost imperceptibly and still won’t meet my eye. “Your training begins at dawn. I suggest you rest while you can.”
Training? I want to laugh at the absurdity of it, but unease itches the back of my throat. “This is madness. Our entire trek here was a training exercise. Why am I not given a bed? Or robes? Or a full explanation?”
“You still don’t understand, do you? This is not some quaint mage school where you make quirky friends and learn disappearing spells. The academy forges weapons, not scholars. Your power is crude and untamed. It must be broken like a wild horse before it can be rebuilt.”
I stare at him. “But you said...”
“I know what I said.” He finally meets my gaze, his eyes chipped as raw sapphires. “Forget it. Forget everything except what I tell you now. In this place, I am not your friend. I am your handler. Your instructor. And you will address me as ‘Resonant’ or not at all. Is that clear?”
Anger flares through my chest, hot and bright. “And if I refuse? If I tell you and this thrice-damned academy to shove your training up your sanctimonious asses?”
His lips flatten. “Then you will die.”
Hurt slashes through my ribs at his matter-of-fact tone. “You’re lying.”
“Am I?” He cocks his head, his lips curving into that twitchy, almost smile I was just beginning to like.
“What do you think happens to initiates who lack the strength to master their power? The ones who fight the curriculum? They go mad. Their minds unravel as the Void seeps in through the cracks in their psyche. They become abominations. Dangers to themselves and others. And remembered as nothing but a carving at the gates.”
“And you’re to be my teacher in this? My jailer?” A cold sweat breaks out across my brow. “But you hate teaching.”
He steps closer to the bars, his tall frame blotting out the firelight. “I am to be your commander. It’s very different from a tutor. You’ll understand that soon enough.”
Falcen pushes off the bars and spins on his heel, stalking off with a dismissive flare of his elitist cloak.
“And you’re the one to do it, huh?” I goad through the bars. “The great Falcen Reaves, commander of one chained girl?”
Falcen stops short, and I immediately realize my mistake.
“I warned you,” he murmurs.
Falcen gives me his profile and flings out a hand, a flare of crackling blue-black lightning careening into me and throwing me into the opposite wall. A sob rips from my throat, and my soul-glyphed chains tighten, driving their magick into my convulsing form.
“It is Resonant, or nothing at all.”
Falcen resumes his stroll out of the catacombs, his voice fading as he adds, “Thank you for the boost in energy, by the way.”
I can’t even watch him leave. Instead, I curl into my side against the wall and wait for the icy agony in my limbs to recede, my face crumpling.
And for the first time since being forced to say goodbye to Noxie, I lower my head into my knees and sob.
The same torchlight that greeted me when I floated into consciousness is the same light I see when I shake myself out of a restless, unplanned sleep.
There are no windows in my prison, none of Lux’s light to soothe me.
I’m cold, hungry, and my face is stiff and swollen from dirt and crying myself to sleep.
I have no idea how much time has passed.
A loud clang jolts me out of my fetal position. Through bleary vision, I notice Falcen standing outside my cell again, this time clad in fitted black combat leathers. He’s holding a tray of beige gruel in his hands and slides it through a slot at the bottom of the bars.
“You have five minutes.”