Chapter 17
Seventeen
Falcen leads me through the archway and into a small antechamber. The room is bare save for chains dangling from the ceiling and clinking together in a nonexistent breeze.
My stomach turns, and I stop short.
“This is where your training begins.” Falcen’s voice is emotionless as he gestures to the manacles at the end of the chains. “Give me your wrists.”
I shake my head.
He sighs as if I’m a petulant child refusing to eat my vegetables. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”
“I didn’t realize there was an easy way when it comes to you.”
In a flash, he’s behind me, one hand fisting in my hair, the other like a vise around my throat.
“Is this what you want?” His voice is a low growl.
Before I can answer, he drags me to the center of the room. My cuffed, bare feet scrape against the stone floor, desperately seeking purchase. His grip tightens, the pressure against my windpipe making stars dance across my vision.
“Let me make this abundantly clear,” Falcen hisses. “Your comfort means nothing here. Your preferences are worthless. Your only value is in what you can do. What I can teach you to do.”
I claw at his forearm, my nails leaving red crescents in his skin. He doesn’t flinch.
Falcen grabs my manacled wrists and hooks them onto the dangling chain in the middle of the room, a renewed deep freeze biting through my skin.
“Let me go!” I thrash against the chains, ignoring the chill.
Falcen doesn’t relent. “Be thankful I’m not raising the chains until you’re dangling like bait. Learn obedience, Verily. The sooner you accept your fate, the easier this will be for you.”
“Fuck you,” I spit, still struggling. “I’ll never submit to you or this gods-forsaken place.”
A dark chuckle rises out of his chest as he moves closer, undeterred by my swinging arms. “We’ll see about that.”
He traces a finger along my collarbone, his touch light. Soul-magick crackles in its wake, the usual gorgeous blue polluted with weeds of black.
I recoil. “My gods, it’s still in you. The Voidspawn, the ones I siphoned from in the Veil tear—they’re all still in you.”
He lifts his finger off my skin, closing his hand into a fist and bringing it to his side.
Falcen gives me a half smile, though it doesn’t contain any humor. “It’s sweet that you’re worried. A few dozen Voidspawn souls could never kill me. I’ve consumed hundreds, thousands even. Their essence is part of me now, as much a part of my being as my own soul.”
I stare at him.
“How?” I ask, my voice hoarse. “How can you possibly contain so many? The toll it must take on you, your sanity...”
To hold that much darkness, that much corruption, and remain functional? It should be impossible. Yet here he stands before me, a living testament to what my grandmother and mother always told me was the true depravity of the Soulren, the so-called heroes of Vehloria.
Falcen leans in close. “You have no idea what I’m capable of. This?” He taps his chest. “This is nothing. A mere fraction of the poison I’ve taken into myself.”
I turn my face away, squeezing my eyes shut as if I can block him out. “I’ll never be like you.”
“We’ll see.”
A brush of wind on my face hints that he’s backed off, but I’m not so naive as to think he’s left me in peace.
A scraping sound draws my attention to the right. Falcen leans against the wall, dragging his nails along grooves carved into the stone. They flare to life, flickering with an ominous blue-black light. The temperature in the room plummets, and my breath fogs the air.
Disembodied whispers fill the air, a terrible chorus of laments and pleas, raising the hair along my arms. The polluted energy congeals around me, coalescing into spectral figures.
Their forms flicker and warp. A young man in tattered robes takes shape first, then a woman with bottomless eyes.
Next, a child with a tear-streaked face.
“Nox’s damnation,” I gasp as they crowd around me. I struggle futilely against my bonds, my chains joining the susurration of torment and despair. “What—get away! Please!”
“These are trapped Echoes,” Falcen explains from the safety of his corner. “Fragments of souls contained within these walls. Another punishment the academy likes to inflict on the disobedient.”
I stare incredulously at Falcen through their transparent forms as he points at the young man.
“A failed Soulren, not strong enough to survive the trials.” The woman.
“A Veil Keeper who tried to hide her young, Soulren son from the Resonance Academy’s all-seeing eye.
” The child. “The son she killed along with herself to escape the only way she knew how.”
“This is awful. You’re awful.”
“I’m the reason you and the rest of Vehloria’s population can function in a realm full of Veil tears and Void corruption.
If it weren’t for the Soulren, this world would be obsolete.
The Void would have taken over. While unfortunate, these people were sacrificed for the greater good. Now consume them.”
The Echoes press in, their spectral hands clawing at my limbs, my face, my hair.
Cold, intangible fingers pierce through skin, past bone, grasping not at my body but at my resonance itself.
I choke, thrashing against the chains as despair floods me with memories that aren’t mine.
Burning villages. Screaming children. The last breath before death claims them.
“Stop fighting them, Verily,” Falcen commands. “Open yourself to their energy. Draw it inside you.”
“I can’t,” I gasp, screwing my eyes shut. “They’re suffering.”
“That’s why you let them in,” he bites out. “The Echoes aren’t alive. They’re resonance left behind. You absorb it, you free them.”
I shake my head, tears blurring their pale light. “You mean I kill what’s left.”
Falcen slams his hand against the wall, the sound cracking through the chamber and forcing my eyes open. The Echoes recoil, flickering in and out of existence.
“You think mercy is clean? You think it doesn’t take? You’re only prolonging their agony with your selfish refusal,” he snarls. “They’ve been trapped here for decades, unable to move on. You have the power to grant them peace. Or would you rather leave them to an eternity of this?”
He gestures to the woman and child huddled together, their forms squirming as if in the throes of physical torture.
I want to run, to close myself off. But my ember stirs in answer, flowing under my skin. The Echoes’ reach for that glow like moths to flame.
“He’s lying.”
A small voice draws my head up, and I lock on to a very young girl holding a straw-stuffed toy rabbit against her chest. She would be adorable, beautiful even, if it weren’t for the incredible gash bisecting her face.
“The Elite doesn’t tell you the truth. You will not be sending us into Lux’s arms. You’ll be damning us. They don’t free us. They use us. Over and over.”
Cold knifes through my chest. I blink hard, my breath fogging. “What does that mean?”
Falcen lunges forward, his hand slicing through her form. She bursts apart, the sickly green smoke curling and sinking back into the stone like it’s been swallowed.
“Don’t listen to her,” Falcen warns. “She’s corrupted. Void-touched before death. Their words rot everything they touch.”
He’s not wrong. Her voice lingers inside my head, eating away at any calm that might remain. They use us.
“I won’t do it, Resonant,” I snap at Falcen. “I will not condemn these poor souls.”
Eat.
I jolt at the intrusion inside my head, my ember at last fighting through the soul-glyphed shackles and returning to life, but at the worst possible time.
No, I respond, keeping my face expressionless. These are innocents. We must not harm them.
Hungry.
I glare at Falcen, the betrayal and hatred I feel toward him blackening my heart more than being trapped in the Void ever could. “I swore I would not become like you. This doesn’t change anything.”
Falcen’s eyes flash, twin pools of molten gold through the gloom. “Do you think they’re innocent? Look again, Verily. See them for what they truly are.”
Against my will, my gaze is drawn back to the remaining Echoes.
The young man’s robes are stained with blood, his hands twisted into claws.
The woman’s empty eyes gleam with malice, her mouth stretched into a grotesque grin.
And the child... oh gods, the child. Black swirls around his small form, brightening with an unholy energy as his skin peels off his face.
“They are the damned,” Falcen murmurs, yet I can hear him as if he were beside me. “Souls too tainted, too corrupt to ever come across Lux’s light. This is a mercy.”
“No!” I cry. “You’re doing this. You’re creating an illusion!”
“You still don’t understand, do you? There are no heroes here. No shining, great kingdom to save the realm from our rot. In this world, it’s consume or be consumed. And I’ll be damned if I let you throw away everything I’ve done to keep you alive.”
Eat eat eat.
Don’t you dare side with him, I warn the ember. But it spreads, warming my veins, boiling my blood…
“Must I make this worse for you?” Falcen asks, mostly to himself.
I watch with mounting horror as Falcen approaches me, his expression a blank mask. The Echoes’ wails crescendo, their spectral forms thrashing and splitting in two, then three.
He stops beside me and places a hand on my forehead, his touch searing against my clammy skin.
“You leave me no choice.”
His voice is laced with a grim finality.
The ember flares to life. Its appetite consumes me from the inside out. It wants—no, needs—to feed on the energy of the trapped souls. I grit my teeth, fighting against the urge, but it’s like trying to hold back a tidal wave with my bare hands.
A scream rips from my throat as one of the Echoes sinks phantasmal teeth into my shoulder. Agony lances through me, my body convulsing.
Yum, the ember urges, hunger gnawing at my insides. Consume. Grow stronger.
“No!” I sob, tasting blood on my tongue. “Get out of my head!”
Falcen seizes my jaw, forcing me to meet his merciless, dual-colored gaze.
“You’re weak,” he snarls. “Pathetic. How did I ever think you could be a Soulren? You don’t have the strength. You really are leftovers.”
Cramps arrow through my stomach, white-hot and scorching.
I’m drowning in the Echoes’ anguish, suffocating under the weight of their torment.
Falcen’s derision flays away another layer of my resolve.
I want to scream at him, to tell him he’s wrong, that I’m not weak.
But deep down, a traitorous part of me wonders if he’s right.
The Echoes’ assault intensifies, their spectral nails raking across my soul, shredding it piece by agonizing piece. I convulse in the chains, my cries bouncing off the stone walls.
“Give in, Initiate. Let go. Embrace your power.”
Falcen leans down, and that’s when I realize I’ve fallen to my knees, my arms stretched above me. His lips brush my ear.
I swear I hear him whisper, “Don’t make me keep doing this.”
But I can’t be sure.
The ember flares, ravenous and annoyed at being ignored. Against my will, magick seeps out of my strained fingers and latches onto the nearest Echo, the woman with too large eyes. It begins to pull.
“Stop!” I gasp. “Please, I don’t want to do this!”
“Prove you’re worthy of the resonance inside you,” Falcen continues. “Consume the Echoes, or I’ll leave you here to be driven insane by them instead.”
The young woman’s mouth opens in a silent scream as the ember draws her essence into me. I feel it sinking into my veins, a rush of icy ferment that leaves me seizing.
More Echoes press in, their nails sinking deeper, leeching the warmth from my bones.
Yes, yes, the ember chants. Let us feast!
“I can’t,” I whimper, even as my will crumbles. The pain is too much, the hunger too all-consuming. “Falcen, please...”
“Then feed,” Falcen commands, pressing down on my forehead. I must be starting to hallucinate, because there’s a single stroke of his thumb, a second of gentility, before Falcen hardens. “Let your true nature guide you. Embrace it.”
A keening wail builds in my throat as I stop fighting the ember’s pull. It surges forward, latching onto the Echoes with ravenous hunger. One by one, they dissolve into swirling tendrils of energy, flowing into me in a rush of agonizing cold.
I convulse, arching back as their essence floods my veins. It’s too much, the onslaught of foreign emotions and memories threatening to drown me. I’m fracturing, splintering apart as the boundaries between myself and the consumed souls blur.
Falcen’s hand stays on my brow, his touch a weighted brand against the glacial assault.
“Don’t fight it,” he growls. “Let it flow through you. Control it.”
“I c-can’t,” I grit out through chattering teeth, an oily taint coating my tongue. The child’s face flashes behind my eyes, her features twisted in terror as I rip her apart.
I hate him at that moment, hate him with every fiber of my being. But even more than that, I hate myself for the wicked thrill that flutters through me as the child’s soul shatters and sinks into my skin.
Falcen roars over the unearthly shrieks, “I am not going to watch you destroy yourself because you lack the spine to do what is necessary! You’re stronger than this!”
I want to believe Falcen, to draw strength from his belief in my endurance, but all I feel is disgust.
My inner ember takes the lead. It surges with reinvigorated strength, its ravenous delight a sickening counterpoint to my despair.
The Echoes’ wails reach a fever pitch before cutting off abruptly, leaving only the rasp of my labored breathing. I sag against my bonds, my skin crawling with the ghostly sensation of their final, futile struggles.
Falcen waits for my breathing to slow and my eyelids to lower before his hand slides from my forehead, and he steps back, his unreadable mask in place as he surveys his results.
“You passed,” he says through immobile lips before he spins on his heel. “Hollows! Take her back to her cell.”‘
Falcen storms out of the chamber so quickly that I blink once, and he’s gone.