Chapter 40 #2
He lifts a hand like he will touch my cheek, but stops an inch away.
“I’m getting worse, I’ll admit. But it’s not a cliff. It’s a slope. I can slow it. I’ve been doing it for months.”
He wants me to believe it’s under control. That he’s stronger than the thing that’s been devouring him since he was pulled out of the eel tank and thrown behind the bone door. But the black threads under his skin tell another story.
“Tell me about your hunt for the drakes these past weeks, then,” I say, cutting across his stubborn composure. “Where you went. What happened to make you come back worse off than when you left?”
He stares at a spot over my left shoulder. “I didn’t hunt them. Not in the end.”
“What do you mean?”
Falcen glances at me, then away. “Drakes hate our kind. You remember.”
I think of Mara, the nether drake that reluctantly saved our lives, and the feel of her mind brushing against mine, all cold mist and pessimistic wisdom.
“Hard to forget, actually,” I admit.
Falcen responds with a humming sound in his throat. “They smell us and bite a path in the other direction or swallow us whole. What we managed to do with the mare we rode was nothing short of a miracle.”
Or my ability to directly communicate with it. I bite my tongue, reluctant even now to tell him the truth.
“And you?” I ask. “If the Master Keeper sent you on a hunt, why didn’t you kill one?”
I try to sound nonchalant even as the thought of a drake like Mara dying at Falcen’s hand makes me ill.
Has the Master Keeper ever considered the intelligence of these creatures?
Of their unique ability to exist both in our realm and the Void?
They stay away from the academy, uninterested in Vehloria’s political empire. Why does he want them dead?
Then I remember the academy’s underground experiments. What Malakai could try to do with drake blood injections into students…
I shudder. Falcen mistakes it for revulsion over his lack of a drake body count.
“I needed answers, not corpses,” he clips out.
“I’m glad,” I say, letting the sheet slip a little as I move back to perch on the edge of his bed.
“I don’t like the thought of a drake hunt.
One helped us when she really didn’t have to.
It’s not right to kill them when they go out of their way not to attack Soulren by living as far from us as they can.
What do you think the Master Keeper wants with their corpses?
What would he do to them in the academy’s underground? ”
“The Master is well aware that to attempt to cage a nether drake is the equivalent of the collapse of all the academy’s buildings.
But like you say, they’re a mystery, one with curious abilities and long lives despite their decay.
There are many things he could try to do with their blood, scales, fangs.
” Falcen sighs. “I tracked a nest to the eastern ridge. There were four of them. Nestlings, I think. They were—” His voice breaks.
“They followed me for three days. Sometimes they’d get close enough that I could smell the Void on their scales. But they never struck.”
“What did you do?” I ask, half afraid of the answer.
Falcen’s jaw works. “I tried to force a confrontation. I thought maybe if I could draw just one into a fight, the rest would scatter. But every time I tried, they just … stared. There was this”—his gloved hands clench, as if grasping at the right words—“this intelligence. Like they were trying to tell me something, but I was too stupid to understand.”
I want to reach for him, but I’ve learned not to touch unless he signals it’s safe. So I lean forward, my hands bunched close to my heart.
“I couldn’t kill them,” he says finally. “Not when they looked at me like that. Like I was the abomination.”
“I don’t think you’re an abomination, Falcen.”
He laughs, but it’s splintered. “That makes one of us.”
I don’t know how to reply to that, so I lace my fingers together and try not to fidget, remembering Mara’s description of Hollows trailing behind Falcen with chains. Now that I think of it, was it for Falcen or the drakes?
“What did you report to the Master?” I ask.
“I lied.”
He shrugs, a gesture so nonchalant and un-Falcen it startles me. Lying to the Master Keeper is a death wish. Or at the very least, an invitation to a new and improved agony.
“I said the nest was empty and that I torched it,” he explains. “The Master Keeper doesn’t care about the truth, only the result.”
That gets my attention. “Then why send you at all? Did you ever think they wanted you to bond with the drakes? That’s why they keep sending you on these missions?
” I realize too late how that sounds. “I mean, maybe get closer to the Void, to see what happens to someone who’s already been … changed.”
It’s a theory, but as soon as it’s out in the air, it feels right. Like a puzzle piece clicking into place. The Master Keeper isn’t afraid of Falcen becoming something monstrous. He’s curious. Scientific. Maybe even excited. And if that’s true, then the only person who stands to lose is Falcen.
He turns on me then, the full force of his ruined eyes boring holes into my skull. “They’ve yet to discover a way to control us once we’re fully transformed. That’s what pisses the Master Keeper off the most, I think.”
Something in the way he says “us” makes my skin crawl. Not Soulren. Not even halflings. Us, as in things that have gone all the way. Things for which there is no reversal.
He paces the width of the dorm, his cloak billowing out behind him like a storm cloud.
“They don’t want a cure,” he says, voice gone gravelly. “They want a trigger. A way to spark it on command, then shut it down when they want.”
Falcen leans his forehead against the cold glass. His breath fogs the window, then the moisture is gone. “The first time I got sent out there, I thought it was punishment. But it’s more than that. He’s not punishing me, he’s studying me. Making notes every time I come back less human.”
I reach for words and find only a fistful of anger.
“I think you’re more human than anyone here,” I mutter, but my voice cracks.
I try to imagine Falcen’s mind, with its twisty corridors and locked doors and all the shadows moving behind the walls. He’s been fighting this so long, alone, and I’ve been oblivious, wrapped up in my own survival while he’s been slowly losing himself.
“Don’t.” He holds up a gloved hand. “I don’t want your pity. I want you to understand why I can’t let you pour your soul into me like water into a cracked vessel. Whatever I’m becoming, it’s not worth your life.”
He mutters a string of syllables after, the sounds slithering around his jaw and vanishing into the cold air.
“What did you just say?” I ask carefully.
He blinks. “What?”
“You were speaking. Just now. In that tongue.”
Falcen’s face goes blank. Then something like horror flickers across his features before he shuts it down. “I don’t remember saying anything.”
The steady dread tickling the back of my throat finally makes itself known. “Did the drakes … speak to you?”
Falcen pauses. “Speak to me?”
I add quickly, “I just mean, did they make sounds? Anything that could be interpreted as communication?”
He cocks his head as he stares at me. “They made no sound at all. That’s what was wrong. Drakes screech, roar, growl. These ones were silent as stone.”
I swallow hard, debating how much to reveal.
“You’re hiding something.” He steps closer, looming over me where I sit on the edge of his bed. “Your left eye twitches when you lie.”
“It does not!” My hand flies to my face. “Does it?”
A ghost of a smile touches his lips. “No. But now I’m certain you’re hiding something.”
My mouth goes dry. I want to tell him everything, about the eels, about Mara, about Davrin’s strange dinner with Malakai. The confession lurches up my throat … and dies there. Ember slams against my ribs, a wall of heat and warning, and my tongue twists until silence feels safer than speech.
I tell myself it’s because I don’t know what Falcen would do with the truth.
Whether he’d see me or see a monster who can talk to Void creatures as easily as she chats with her grandmother.
But the real truth is simpler, sharper, and full of agony.
I can’t bear the look in his eyes if he knew my strange connection to the Void.
He’s disgusted enough with his own hidden rot.
I huff, covering my hurt with a smile and dropping my hand. I think of the next best thing to tell him. “The whole reason I went into the underground was to find Davrin, because he was taken there by Keeper Malakai after our test with the Void eels.”
Falcen’s eyes widen before his voice drops to a growl and he grabs my upper arm. “Malakai took you to the eels? You went into a water trial?”
I nod.
“You can’t swim.”
His concern warms me. “You’re right. Water and I aren’t friends. I barely survived. Actually, it was Davrin who did something in that tank—”
“I don’t care about Davrin!” Falcen roars, and I jerk in his hold. “I care about you being thrown into trials you’re not prepared for.”
I reply cautiously, “I’m still here, aren’t I? I made it through.”
“By a stroke of luck,” he mutters, jaw working. “And there is but a sliver of it available in this place. The eels would have torn you apart while you thrashed. Drowning and being devoured at once.”
The vivid image makes me grimace. “A few initiates underwent that exact experience.”
He releases me and rakes a hand through his hair, softening at the grief in my tone. “Malakai knows what he’s doing. He’s testing your limits.”
“I swear there was genuine fear in Davrin’s eyes when the Hollows dragged him away,” I continue while watching Falcen pace back and forth in front of the bed.
“But when I found him, he wasn’t chained to a slab or twisted into one of those halflings.
” I pause, struggling to reconcile the image with what I’d expected.
“He was sitting at a dining table. Eating. Like we hadn’t just escaped being torn apart by Void eels. ”
Falcen freezes mid-pace, his gloved hand clenching into a fist. “Where?”
“In a chamber beyond the halflings. It was like walking into another realm after what I witnessed where they were being held. Polished furniture, candles, fine silver. Davrin sat across from Keeper Malakai, devouring a feast fit for a Render Lord, not an initiate who’d failed a trial.”
“And he was unharmed?” Falcen’s voice carries a dangerous edge.
“Completely. Not a scratch on him. If anything, he looked healthier than before the trials.”
Falcen’s eyes grow smaller, his throat working beneath the gorget. “Tell me exactly what happened to make Malakai single out Davrin.”
I wrap my arms around myself. “Davrin turned the water black. After that, Malakai took him, and during their dinner, explained that Davrin had resisted the transformation process. That most Elites can’t handle even an hour on whatever slab they were using, but Davrin, an initiate, lasted five without his veins darkening. ”
“Five hours,” Falcen murmurs, and his face drains of color. “Gods above and below.”
“Is that significant?”
“I lasted seven.” His voice drops to a whisper. “Seven hours, seventeen minutes before the first fissure cracked my skin.”
Cold skitters down my spine. “Malakai said Davrin’s resistance made him eligible for something. He made it sound incredibly rare.”
Falcen’s face drains of what little color it retained. He crosses to me in two swift strides and grabs my shoulders.
“Are you certain that’s what he said?”
“Yes.”
He looks at me as though I’ve slit open a vein in front of him before he smooths his expression, fast.
“You know what he means,” I surmise.
“A myth. That’s all.”
“You’re lying,” I say flatly. “Your right nostril flares when you lie.”
His mouth twitches despite himself. “It does not.”
“Now we’re even.” I rise from the bed. “Tell me, Falcen.”
Falcen sighs, running a hand down his face. “It’s a program. It’s so restricted that not even all Keepers are privy to it. No one speaks of it directly.”
“What is it?”
“Not what. Who.” Falcen moves to the window and scans the sky as if looking for enemies before continuing. “Elite Riders are supposed to be the academy’s answer to the Void incursions. Warriors who can enter the Void and return unaffected. Who can...” He hesitates.
“Can what?”
He looks at me then, only briefly, but his eyes are stark.
“Falcen—”
“Enough.” His tone is final, like he’s shutting a door between us. “You shouldn’t know any of this. Forget you ever heard it.”
“No.” I stand up straighter, letting the sheet slide off my body completely. “And I won’t pretend I don’t know what’s happening to you or those halflings chained in the dark.”
“I won’t let them hurt you.” Falcen turns for the door, his shoulders rigid beneath his armor and cape.
A slow sense of warmth creeps up my chest, and I realize that for all the ways Falcen is changing, the part of him that wants to protect me is still intact. Maybe even stronger than before.
“Is that what the academy does? Turn their best into monsters, then train others to control them?” I press.
Instead of reaching for the doorknob, Falcen rests his hand on the thick wood, his head bowing forward.
“What’s going to happen to Davrin?” I ask softly.
Falcen’s eyes shutter closed. When they open again, they’re ringed in gold fire. “He’ll be the second attempt.”
Before I can ask more questions, he turns and wrenches the door open. Frost spirals across the frame as he disappears into the corridor, leaving me staring after him, my skin prickling with the terrible weight of what I’ve just learned.
And what he wouldn’t say.