Chapter 9
NINE
Unsent correspondence, translated to English, and addressed only to My Truth:
I see you everywhere. In the corridors. In my dreams. He could try to erase you a million times over and never succeed.
MALACH
The first thing I notice when I wake is the absence of pressure on my wrists.
Dead. I must be dead. Except . . . if I’m in the eternal beyond, why do I still hurt?
“Take it easy.” Lyklan. Is he dead, too?
“Neither of us are dead. Yet.”
I cough violently. It’s like breathing fire. “Water,” I gasp.
He brings a cup to my lips, and I swallow greedily, the cool liquid carving a soothing path down my scratchy throat.
I force my eyes to open. The blinding white of my cell is gone, as are the chains. I’m in a small, clean room, laid out on a narrow bed. There are no windows, but it’s a lot better than S’lach’s dungeon. Did Lyklan break me out? There are gaps in my memory.
“Where are we?” I ask, frustration replacing my fatigue when my voice comes out thready and weak.
“Staff quarters. S’lach’s estate.”
Lyklan sounds wary.
He should be.
This wasn’t what I wanted, and he knows it. My memory rushes back in, pain-streaked fragments of my time chained to the ceiling. Spasming fingers—involuntary, and certainly not a sign of surrender by anyone’s definition.
“Take me back to the cell,” I demand.
Lyklan covers my mouth with his hand. “If you know what’s good for either of us, you’ll shut up,” he snaps. “There’s no room for your rigid sense of morality right now, Malach.”
I’m tempted to bite him.
If I had even a fraction of my usual strength, I’d be out of this bed, slapping his hand away from my mouth, wrapping my own around his throat, and repaying his betrayal.
“You’re angry.” He drops his hand. “That’s good; you should be, but you must use that anger wisely.”
“Don’t tell me what to do.” I sound petulant, even to my own ears.
Lyklan shakes his head. His eyes are bloodshot and clouded, but I don’t have sympathy for him. “Hear me out,” he says. “And if you still want to get us both killed afterward, gods help me, I’ll let you.”
I stare at him for a long moment before nodding. It’s not as if I have a choice. Lyklan thinks I have a death wish. I don’t have a prayer of convincing him otherwise if I refuse to hear his plan.
He clears his throat, and when he speaks again, it’s in my family’s dialect.
I grind my teeth. I know what he’s doing, trying to appeal to our history.
He knows the language because his family has worked as my family’s guardians for generations. I used to consider this dialect as much his as mine, but hearing him speak it now . . . He might as well pour salt in my wounds.
“S’lach will ask you to judge his enemies, but you don’t have to tell him the truth, Malach. Any adversary of his is a potential ally for you, and you’ll be in a unique position to identify them safely and keep S’lach’s attention off them.”
Lyklan rubs his hand over his face. “I know lying is detestable to you, but truth is not your radiant word. It’s hers. We’re in dire need of some judgment, wouldn’t you say, Brother?”
I frown as I consider the picture he’s painting. Me, a spy—by choice this time—undermining S’lach while gathering allies. It’s not a terrible plan, but do I have what it takes to live a lie?
Celine’s face replaces Lyklan’s, dredged up from my worst memory. Her horror as she learned of the depths of my betrayal, tears spilling from her eyes as the portal whisked her away from me.
“I’ll do it,” I mutter. Even if it stains my soul. Even if I don’t recognize myself after it’s all said and done. It will be worth it if I get my hands on S’lach. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll also get a chance to make things right with Celine.
S’lach waits three days to summon me: a power trip as transparent as the smug curl of his lips as he watches me approach. My injuries are healing, but I’m still in pain. Pain I refuse to show him. He’s already going to make me bend the knee.
I won’t be able to stomach anything more.
“I knew you would come around.” S’lach strokes his red beard. His wings are tucked; the stained symbol of his radiant corruption hidden even in his inner sanctum. Sore spot or denial? For all I know, he’s proud of the outward sign of his inner moral decay.
I dip my chin. An acknowledgment, but not a graceful one.
I loathe him. He knows that, and pretending I don’t won’t do anything but make him suspicious. It’s a small mercy, really.
He smiles, and I look away, examining the room instead of his cold brown eyes.
The study has changed since the last time I was here.
White lights line the intersections of the walls, ceiling, and floor.
The glow is clinical. Thorough. It hides nothing, banishing any and all shadows before they can form.
There’s a hollowness to the room, the absence of art or books noticeable. Flat lines, endless white . . . if I screamed, would the sound repeat forever or be devoured before it had a chance to be heard?
Besides S’lach’s red hair, which stands out against the endless sea of white like a warning, the only interesting feature is the lines. They protrude from the walls in various shades of white, adding texture to the endless, flat expanse.
At first, I think they’re abstract, then a chill rakes down my spine. Runes. They’re runes. Oversized and discordant, once I’ve seen them, there’s no going back. They spell the same thing over and over: silence.
S’lach’s radiant word. The only thing he loves.
It gets worse. Each large rune of silence surrounds a smaller character. Deliberately broken, they’re made up of jagged lines and raised dots.
I read the timeline of his destruction, blood pounding in my head as a strange coldness sinks into my bones, digging in so deeply I fear I’ll never be able to shake it.
Reverie, ember, dawn, echo—gods, alive and dead—he’s collecting radiant words as trophies and stamping them on the wall.
Bragging, as if no one can stop him . . . because they can’t.
I believe in the old ways. In part, due to S’lach himself.
No accident could have gifted such a dangerous word to an evil angel.
The gods must be behind it, either for their own capricious amusement, or to teach the rest of us a lesson.
Celine wouldn’t agree. She’s uninterested in the concept of a higher power, especially one that meddles in her life.
Given how she grew up, I can’t blame her.
The door opens behind me. An angel enters, carrying a large silver box. His head is bowed, his wingtips nearly dragging against the floor. From the thin, narrow shape of the feathers, he belongs to nish eluun.
Laborers gifted with neither magic nor wings capable of flight, the eluun echelon is the backbone of the celestial realm.
Eluun angels were once celebrated for their contributions and gifted with the best place to live as a result.
In community-first villages clustered across the base of the realm, they’re the only ones with access to real dirt, plants, and natural water.
But that was before.
The eluun bows to S’lach, his fingers clasped tightly around the handle of the case.
S’lach grunts and pushes up from his seat. “There, in the open spot. Be quick about it.”
The eluun hurries to obey, zeroing in on a blank patch inside an oversized silence rune.
He places the silver box on the floor gingerly and pulls a device from it.
It’s shaped like a pen, but ten times bigger, with three connected glass bottles suspended beneath the handle.
The first bottle is filled with flame, the middle one contains dull metal cubes, and the final one is brimming with white paint.
The device itself is interesting—clearly something developed by the engineering tier. Nish orik get little credit for their inventions, but without them, the entire realm would cease to function.
With a quick, terrified glance at S’lach, the worker activates the device.
It emits the strangest collection of noises, a combination of rattle, hum, and splash.
Within seconds, the individual components of each bottle are no longer identifiable.
They’re being changed—no, combined. Sucked up into the machine and fused, they emerge from the tip and stick to the wall, drying in raised, white lines.
S’lach is adding a new rune.
And he wants me to watch.
“Have you forgotten her yet?” he demands. I meet his stare. There’s only one her he could be referring to, and by the cruel grin on his face, he knows I never will.
I give him no reaction, and the glee melts from his face, revealing something darker. “You’ve spent too much time around nish varek,” he says. “The guardians and their stoicism. It’s boring and outdated, Malach. That’s why my daughter could never love you.”
He pauses. His stare rolls over my face, searching for anything to feed his malice. I hold my hatred back with everything I have, even though I long to throw him through the white walls he’s using to desecrate our radiant words.
I lift one eyebrow, the one rebellion I allow myself, and wait.
“What?” S’lach’s hands curl.
“Nothing,” I say. “I suppose I’m simply surprised to hear you mention love when it’s clear you’ve never experienced it.”
His eyes bulge, and he bangs one fist on the desk, tossing his head back as he laughs. The eluun worker fumbles with the device, resuming his work with trembling fingers as S’lach’s laughter warps. It echoes off the walls until the grating sound blurs into a single droning note.
“Perhaps there’s some hope for you, after all, Malach.” He sharpens his gaze. “I see a sliver of your father hiding behind that dull, stoic expression you insist on wearing.”
My lips flatten into a thin line. “My father knows love.”
S’lach rolls his eyes. “You cannot trust a man who laughs as much as he does. Too much humor, it was hard to be around him, but he could be cruel with it sometimes, and I always appreciated that about him.”
His mockery of my father is another tactic to make me lose my temper.
The branded silence rune throbs against my hip, and I bank my burning rage.
It’s crackling inside me like the flame from the eluun’s bottle.
I’ll need it later, stoked to maximum strength, but if I attack now, every sacrifice that brought me here will have been for nothing.
S’lach sighs. “I’ll need your judgment this afternoon.
” He speaks of my radiant gift as if it’s a spoon or a hammer—another simple tool in his arsenal.
I suppose to him it is. “If you try to misuse this freedom . . .” Here it comes.
The threat against my life or my family.
“I’ll kill this eluun drone along with everyone he’s ever known. ”
Every muscle in my body locks. The worker makes a low, cornered sound deep in his throat, but he doesn’t drop his device, finishing the final line before turning the pen off with shaking fingers.
When I connect the broken lines he’s added to the wall, my rage reaches new heights. Judgment, etched in dingy white, and eclipsed by silence. The urge to paint this room red with S’lach’s blood grows harder to ignore with each beat of my heart.
I hold myself back. I’m still alive to make him pay. That’s all that matters. If I have to sacrifice my honor to end his life, I will.