Chapter 2
ARIANA
Icouldn’t sleep all night.
Visions of the Lysian sitting in our dungeon floated around my mind like a dark hovering cloud, never to be blown away. No matter what I did, I could not get him out of my head. Every time my eyes would close, he came to me.
His body being behind bars was not a comfort.
I was extraordinarily aware of his lethal presence during our brief encounter.
The Lysian are told to be predators, and he was content being caged.
The only inkling of discomfort that he ever showed was when I practically told him that I believed he allowed himself to be captured.
His lean muscles flexed with every precise step he made, and his keen dark eyes tracked every movement while I stood before him.
His ears heard sounds I only could dream of and when he walked it was completely silent.
And his teeth . . . a shiver ran through me.
His dark hair was unkempt due to fingers running through it as if in frustration, but he did not appear to want to be released.
He was a creature that belonged to the free night, yet he sat in a prison I was not sure could even hold him if he wanted out. The Lysian made absolutely no sense.
I scoured my mind all night for ideas of what his presence meant. If he was captured on purpose, then to what end? Did he simply have a death wish? Certainly, there were more comfortable or exciting ways to go. Death at the hands of the Bavadrin leader would not be a pleasant one.
None of it made any sense. He made no sense.
A day ago, the Lysian was found flirting with the border of our lands, a border which he overstepped.
This act allowed us to do with him as we pleased.
Unless he was bringing a message from his King or the Bavadrin leader invited him to cross into our territory.
The Lysian had not spoken of delivering a message.
He also certainly was not invited. This left him with nothing to hide behind, no protections from the ancient treaty.
It was perplexing. The worst part of the situation was that our brilliant Bavadrin leader was going to act before even attempting to understand what exactly was going on.
The night dragged on as my mind overflowed with thoughts of the intruder. At sunrise, the perplexity bled into the day. I sat on my bed in silence, attempting to put together a puzzle with missing pieces.
Since getting up, I changed into my clothing and washed some of the sleepless night from my face. All of my actions were done so with little thought, for the questions burning within consumed me, leaving little room for anything else. I existed in a haze of uncertainty.
“Ariana.” A woman’s scratchy voice pulled me from my thoughts. “Your father requests your presence in the great room.”
Edda stood in the doorway. Her dark eyes appraised me while she itched her elbow absentmindedly.
Her extraordinarily long gray hair wrapped around her head.
Wrinkles covered her face for as long as I had known her, though they never grew deeper or multiply in number.
They were simply permanent fixtures of what made her who she was.
I frowned at her use of the word father. She knew I no longer acknowledged him as such, yet it was no use arguing with her. Edda always did as she pleased. Arguing with her never ended in my favor, anyway.
Her silver brows furrowed. She nearly looked worried.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, rising and going to her.
Edda stood a full head shorter than me. Though small in size, her bite was certainly worse than her bark. For a long time, I imagined that her appearance was just an illusion so that others unwittingly underestimated her, only to be sorely mistaken.
Edda was probably one of the most powerful Bavadrins to ever have existed.
Her gifts spanned beyond the mystics, for she was blessed within the soul of her being.
While the rest of the world was tormented by their choices, she was not.
Every decision she made was done so with absolute certainty.
Edda had not hesitated in all the years I had known her.
She never questioned a single decision she made.
It was a skill that I could not learn, at least not fully.
I still very much questioned my choices.
As a Seer, Edda could foretell things to come.
However, the future was never clear-cut; it always harbored twists and turns.
Following its trails could lead someone to wander dangerously close to a cliff’s edge, possibly falling over, never to return.
Edda’s tellings needed to be taken with caution.
I no longer asked her what she saw, for it was often difficult to make sense of.
Instead, I waited for everything to be filtered through her, trusting her to give me what she thought necessary.
“There is a fog around everything here. The future has lost its clarity,” she grumbled.
“The future has never been clear,” I said to her, nearly rolling my eyes.
Waving my comment off with a single sway of her hand, she nudged me into the hall. “Come, we must go to your father before his head rolls.”
“If only it were that easy,” I mumbled, starting down the vast stone corridor. The Bavadrin Leader Superior was neither calm nor kind. He was someone who thrived in anger.
Edda hissed, glancing over her shoulder to make sure no one was within earshot. “You must be strong.” Her onyx eyes peered at me as we made our way to the great room. “Have you eaten today?”
“No,” I mumbled, squaring my shoulders and straightened my spine in preparation to face whatever reason the Leader Superior decided to summon me.
“Good, nothing in your belly to lose then,” she muttered.
I glanced at her, but she kept her eyes focused on the hall before her.
I wondered what she meant by that but kept from asking.
More often than not, when she was already being cryptic, she answered questions in a confusing fortune-telling manner.
I didn’t think I had the patience for such a thing, not when my attention was torn between my present situation and the mysterious Lysian sitting in the dungeon below.
The sounds of our footsteps echoed through the hall as we made our way to where Fraser waited for me.
When we entered the great room, eyes turned to us, including those of the Bavadrin Superior.
The room was terribly bare, made of gray stone and nothing else.
It was cold and unwelcoming. There was a dais at the other end with a few seats; otherwise, there was nothing but standing room.
Large windows to the west provided natural light.
Despite the warmth of the sun, the windows only made the room feel colder, as if they somehow kept the sun further out of reach.
A cluster of people stood in the center of the space, one of whom with skin too pale to belong to a Bavadrin.
I halted at the sight. The moment I found the Lysian’s dark blue gaze, his nostrils flared in recognition.
His hands were in chains and strung up on a large wooden frame that had not been there the day before.
The Lysian’s heels couldn’t touch the ground.
His shirt had been removed, placing his body on display for everyone, skin white enough to show the veins running beneath.
Lean muscle covered his bones. He looked surreal, like a marble sculpture that had never been weathered by the elements.
A knot twisted in my stomach at that realization.
All the stories described Lysians as scarred.
They were told to be an animalistic race, wild even.
The tales always highlighted their terrible strength, the acute senses, and the scarred bodies of the permanently violent beasts.
The Lysian before me had no healed wounds. None. His skin was too pristine.
“Finally,” the Bavadrin leader spoke, voice echoing through the room. “Ariana, come,” he barked, summoning me like a master calling his dog.
I winced.
Fraser, his given name, sat in his large chair as if it were a throne and looked down over everyone in the room.
His hair hung past his shoulders, gray with a few strands of black sprinkled in.
One side of his head was braided with jewels and stones, marking him as the Superior.
Bloodstone was always his favorite and the most prominent stone in his collection, the green of the forest splattered with blood-red patches.
Brown eyes, as hard and cold as the room we were in, viewed me.
Pulling my attention from the Lysian, I did not look at Fraser’s advisors nor the others present as I walked to the Superior, stopping before the seat intended for me. I couldn’t keep my gaze from drifting back to the Lysian. His jaw flexed when I observed him once more.
“Sit.” Fraser gave the command without even looking at me. Instead, he watched the Lysian with a dark hunger, and my stomach twisted. I once believed people were not born evil. The man who sired me proved me wrong.
Again, I looked at the stranger strung up in the center of the room.
His cold eyes remained fixed on me, something almost daring stirring within them.
My attention drifted over his body once more before snapping back to his stare.
Despite the position he was in, power still clung to him. I felt it in the air between us.
The guard beside him stood with a whip in his hand. My stomach twisted yet again, for the guard was Willis. The Bavadrin Superior no doubt hand-picked him to act out the orders. Fraser intended to not just torment the Lysian that day.
There were many ways one could torture someone. That was Fraser’s favorite lesson. It was one I learned a very long time ago—and one he’d never let me forget.