14. The Records Room
THE RECORDS ROOM
Seraphina
Slipping out of the dorms, heading for the records room, I’m overwhelmed by how much I need to research and learn, with so little time.
All week, unable to continue our alliance’s private session, I’ve had to spend R&R with the rest of Ferrum watching and interrogating me.
Khali’s been convinced we needed to be studying the virtues to counterbalance the sins, and Morogan had suggested that with a name like ‘The Feast of Endless Need,’ generosity and temperance were the best places to learn how to fight greed and gluttony.
So, we’ve spent every R&R session with half of Ferrum’s cadets asking Diana and I questions about how Virtishan’s feel and think when it comes to greed and gluttony. With Khali leading and asking more than most.
I don’t for a moment think it will help, and I’ve told them as much, but the more questions I answered for Khali, the more she opened up about what she knows, too.
Like how the games don’t take place on the island but in Hell itself.
A terrifying thought that after having days of trying to wrap my head around it and mentally prepare, I don’t think I will ever be ready for.
She also said that if Silver isn’t here to open the hellgate, someone else will. Not Zaheer or Yuvi though, who I already assumed didn’t share the gift of opening such gates, but it was good to have it clarified anyway.
It has to be the Sisters who can.
Perhaps they taught Silver how? Plus, it would explain how they manage to commit their sins and atrocities unnoticed by any witnesses, keeping their existence to a rumor outside of their secret island and army.
Before meeting Lorelei in that alley a week ago, I was starting to believe they were exactly that… a rumor.
Diana believes our angelic blood will have some kind of reaction to entering Hell that will make our skin turn inside out, or worse.
The cambion in our alliance swear it won’t happen.
I’m not convinced either way, all I know for sure is that I’m not about to take a demon's word for anything.
After all, it was Khali herself who told me that a nephilim has never made it through the first game before. What if we can’t get far enough to attempt it because we die the moment we enter the birthplace of all that is evil?
I need to prepare for the worst, and make sure my death isn't for nothing should Diana be right about children of the angels not being able to enter the underworld.
Tonight could well be my last, and therefore the only chance to tell my father as much as I know after a week of living among them, breathing the same air and listening to their conversations.
If I die, at least he’ll know enough to do something about the academy, the island and whatever else I find tonight.
That’s why I’m not at The Rec with the other cadets right now.
That’s why I’m pushing open the heavy door to the records room, hoping to find some information. Anything that might help Virtishans to prepare for whatever the Sisters are building and planning for.
The door creaks as it opens.
The room is dimly lit by orblight, and I slip inside, shutting the door softly behind me until it clicks.
I let out a breath, my heart hammering, back flush to the door. I can’t believe I made it without a surprise run in with Makina.
Then I look up.
And freeze.
Gray-gold eyes meet mine from across the large table which takes up the entire center of the room.
He sits alone, an orblight drifting over him like it’s afraid to get too close. His body is angled over a long scroll and the quill in his hand doesn’t stop when he speaks.
“Scarvo.”
A chill runs down my spine, but I force my voice steady. “You’re back.”
“Obviously.”
My jaw tightens. “You were gone.”
Silver sets the quill down slowly, deliberately, and lifts his gaze. “You noticed?”
“Of course I noticed. You were gone for six days.”
I hadn’t realized I resent him for it so much until this moment and the words spill out.
He smirks, raising a dark eyebrow. “You counted?”
Heat prickles under my skin. Irritating heat. “I keep track of my instructors,” I say, a bit too defensively. “That’s all.”
He hums low in his throat, like he doesn’t believe me for a heartbeat.
“Where were you?”
He eyes me. “Working.”
“You leave your unit with someone completely unqualified and unsuited to help us prepare for a deadly game for six days and that’s your answer?”
He holds up a finger. “First, do not talk about Makina like that in front of me again. Zaheer is itching for an excuse to tie you to a sink in the basement. Don’t make me give him one.
” My face flushes as heat fills my cheeks.
Zaheer said that? “Second,” he goes on, another finger joining the first, this one with a fresh cut on it.
“Tell me truthfully, would you have believed me if I told you I was helping someone to save souls?”
He arches a brow and lets his hand drop.
“Your face is screaming no.”
He leans back, hands clasped behind his head, and I hear the shuffle of his legs under the table like he’s resting one boot over the other.
“The truth is, I was working. One of the Sisters didn’t return when she was supposed to.”
I almost choke, completely blindsided that he’d so casually mention them.
I strike while the iron is hot. “Which one?”
“Tiriel.”
My pulse kicks up at the name. “So, you went after her?”
“I went to find her,” he corrects, like there’s a difference.
“Because she was running a bit late?”
He crosses his arms. “Yes.”
I frown. “That sounds excessive.”
“Does it? To me, it sounds like loyalty.”
The quiet conviction in his voice makes something inside me coil painfully tight.
Silver taps the edge of his scroll. His handwriting is dense and angled, impossible to read upside down and from across the room.
“You saved her?” I ask, my hands resting on the back of a chair as I lean closer.
He scoffs, then looks around the room as though checking no one else is around. “Careful Scarvo. I wouldn’t let her hear you say that. Tiriel is not the type of woman who needs saving. She’s castrated men for suggesting less.”
He leans forward again, elbows propped either side of the scroll, fingers steepled.
“The Sisters are the best at what they do. They plan, then they execute said plan with meticulous efficiency. So when she had not returned by the morning she was supposed to, I opened a hellgate to where she’d been heading in Superbia and started looking.”
“Just like that?”
Open a hellgate, step through, face whatever sin-warped horrors lie on the other side in Superbia, the capital kingdom of Scelus.
Like using a door.
“Yes. She’s smart, she left a trail that led me right to her.”
“You make it sound easy.”
“It wasn’t.”
“You went alone?”
“Yes.”
Any moment now he’s going to grow tired of the interrogation, but this is the best information I’ve ever had on the women who have tormented my thoughts for years.
“Why?”
Surely they’d send lower ranking soldiers with him.
“Because when someone important to you doesn’t come back when they are supposed to, you don’t waste time or wait for their body to wash up on your coastline. You go find them.”
Something in my chest stutters.
That… That is not what I’ve been imagining my father or siblings to be doing while I’ve been here, in the dark and unable to reach them all week.
Not once have I thought they might be worrying over my well-being and desperate to know I’m okay.
The little sleep I’ve managed to get recently has been plagued with a recurring nightmare where my father thinks I’ve betrayed them, and my siblings show up in Tidecrest to hunt me down, only to find the host of nephilim thieves I was supposed to have killed but sent there instead.
I swallow, then shake the nightmare away. I haven’t betrayed them and they have no reason to think I ever would.
What Diana has told me about the academy is so bad, of course it’s cast doubt in my mind over how on earth my father could possibly not know what’s been happening behind those white doors while under his command.
“So, Tiriel,” I clear my throat. “She was hurt?”
He visibly shudders, like he’s picturing how he’d found her too clearly in his mind.
“Her wings had been broken in so many places, she couldn’t fly, and she was too exhausted to open a hellgate.”
Phantom pains so sharp it feels like they rupture my spine shoot up and down my back and across my shoulder blades. I don’t think I could even wish something like that on an enemy such as a Sister.
But, unlike me, her bones could be reset and would heal with time. She will fly again because he saved her.
Silver’s eyes narrow as he watches me watching him. I quickly school my expression back to as close to emotionless as I can muster, not full of pity or pain and look away, pretending to scan the shelves of scrolls.
I don’t like the way he’s looking at me.
Like he’s trying to work something out. But when he speaks, he doesn’t mention it.
“Look, we both have shit we need to be getting on with. The main thing is, she’s back on the island where she belongs now, she will heal and the souls she recovered will be returned to those they were stolen from soon. ”
“Souls?”
“Ahh, perhaps you might believe me after all. But that’s a long story for another day,” he picks up the quill and dips it into the inkpot.
“Or you can save us both the conversation and read it for yourself when I’m done adding it to the records.
This room is full of similar stories, but I guess it’s not every day an illegal soul stealing organization is shut down. ”
He says it so casually, like evil demon organizations going after one another is nothing. Only, if I’m hearing him correctly, what Tiriel almost died doing was… for good. Not evil. Nor was it for her own gain, but to help people who had been wronged and likely couldn’t help themselves.
And if I am to believe the Overlord opposite me, this could change… everything.
The entire world as I know it.
Trutina as I’ve been raised and taught to believe it is.
The scales and balance.
The clear line between good and evil.