23. The Turret
THE TURRET
Seraphina
The Mess Hall is too loud tonight.
Metal trays scrape against tables and laughter ricochets off the walls, both sharp enough to make my temples hurt.
The smell of roasted meat turns my stomach, and the dull, constant ache where my freshly opened scars are wrapped tight beneath the bandages around my torso throbs.
Pretending to eat, I push my food around the plate, but of course, Khali notices.
“You’re not eating,” she says, her brows pinching together.
“Feeling sick,” I admit.
“Probably the blood loss.”
I shrug, and immediately regret it, feeling like I’ve traveled back in time to a decade ago, where every movement, no matter how small, came with an instant reminder I’d been damaged in an irreparable way.
Diana’s mouth opens, her concern about to spill out.
“I’m going to stretch my legs,” I say quickly, pushing my tray aside before they can protest. “Maybe get some air. All the sitting around today hasn’t helped, either.”
“Yeah. Must suck to be banned from the training hall and sparring yard,” Reiva says.
“Just add it to the list of things I have to thank, I mean hate, Lilliana for.”
Khali, Az and Reiva nod their agreement. It’s not like me to be hateful, but where that particular demoness is concerned, there is no other word strong enough to describe how I feel about her.
“Want company?” Diana asks, putting her cutlery down neatly.
“No, thank you. You stay and eat.”
Khali studies me for a long moment, then nods. “Go back to the infirmary if you are still feeling shit later. See if there is anything else they can do or give you to make movement more… comfortable.”
“She’s right,” Az says. “I don’t want to be that guy, but… we have a game tomorrow, and they were pretty adamant that you can’t skip it.”
A nod is the only answer I give them. I’m already standing, already moving, and very conscious that the sun is setting fast.
I have to get to the foyer by nightfall. The real reason I’m feeling so sick tonight, and have been all day.
I have a date with an insufferable Overlord.
My ribs protest beneath the linen and leather with every step along the corridor, and my muscles feel tight and heavy from lack of use today.
Instead of training or sparring, I spent the day in the records room.
Nothing but silence and shelves packed with the histories of Vulcaris and the Iron Isle, of the Sisters and their army, the Iron Choir.
Of those who have fought, and fallen, and vanished into margins and footnotes no one reads.
I should have been enjoying every moment as I searched for stories about the Sisters, but I’d wished I could be doing one of Silver’s torturous kata’s or facing down Lilliana for a rematch in the sparring yard instead.
With that option being firmly off the table according to the overbearing Overlord, I’d been looking specifically for something, anything about the Sisters’ wings. For tales of them being taken. For proof they could be returned.
I barely came up for breath, yet still only made it through about a measly five percent of the scrolls dedicated to the seven females.
Sure, I found records containing information that I’d have killed for when I was bored in my turret in the Citadel.
Stories that, if true, flip everything I’ve ever been taught about those women, and almost everyone else with demon blood, on its head.
And yet… nothing about wings, or losing them, or regrowing them, or whatever Silver seems to think he helped someone to do once.
Maybe it wasn’t one of the Sisters?
The thought has occurred to me more than once today. Silver hadn’t actually said, or even hinted that it was one of them, but my gut had driven me to those scrolls today and usually my gut instincts don’t lead me far wrong.
I did find the scroll Silver had been writing the night I walked in on him though, after he’d been gone for six days.
It turns out, everything he’d said was true. Well, according to the official record.
The sister he had gone after, Tiriel of Indolence, the Dream-Watcher, she’d truly been on a mission to save souls. She’d sneaked into Scelus’s capital with the help of a hellgate and gone up against some of the most evil of her own kind… to do the right thing.
She’d risked her own life to save the souls of people she didn’t even know.
And it seems that’s true for all of the Sisters.
Each scroll I read was bursting with heroism across Trutina. Like they are some kind of vigilantes who are neither on the side of Virtus nor of Scelus but doing their own thing altogether.
Another thing my gut is screaming to be true is what Silver let slip yesterday in the infirmary, after his episode where he’d thrown everyone out and scared the patients and nurses half to death.
That I can’t pass the final game without wings.
Silver hadn’t meant to say it. Still, I heard it and that was enough. You can’t unhear something like that.
It’s been haunting me all day.
Because it’s impossible for me to fly again.
Right?
Which means my life has a guaranteed expiry date now.
I didn’t think I was afraid of death or dying. At times in my life, I’ve almost looked forward to it. To reuniting with my mom.
Except, now a part of me isn’t so sure that we will be in for the same afterlife experience anymore. Mine will most likely involve a lot more fire, torture and endless suffering.
An even bigger part of me doesn’t want to die right now.
Recently, I’ve been lying awake at night wondering how I might be able to make this suicide mission of mine less… suicidal.
I shake my head. I don’t usually let myself hope, but dare I just a little bit when it comes to the possibility of being able to fly once more?
Raphaella knows I’ll do anything to have my wings again.
To feel the wind in my feathers.
Anything.
But hope is a liability.
Hope gets you carved open and left bleeding in the sparring yard ash.
Or on the lush front lawn of the Citadel.
The foyer is bathed in deep red when I arrive, the last of the crimson sun spilling through the towering windows and staining the stone floor like fresh blood.
I sit on the built-in bench beneath the largest pane, twisting carefully to look out as the bandages pull tight around my wounds.
I watch the sun sink lower and lower, until it disappears completely.
“You’re here.” My pulse jumps at his deep voice sneaking up on me.
“I was ordered to be.”
He wears his normal training leathers, only now he’s in a simple long sleeve black shirt rather than his tunic.
“Come on.” He turns and heads toward a narrow door set into the far wall. The stone above it reads:
Staff Quarters
Silver stops with his hand resting over the handle and looks me over, expression unreadable as he waits for me to catch up.
“How bad’s the pain today?”
“I’ve had worse.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
I don’t answer but my heart pounds harder than it should as his gaze tracks every movement, every breath.
Each step toward him, toward the door, feels like crossing a line that I won’t be able to uncross somehow.
“Did Khali or Angelo catch you up on today?” he asks, pushing the handle down and holding the door open.
“They did.” They’d explained how because there wasn’t a Triad yesterday after the incident with Lilliana and I, today Silver put Lilliana back in the warm-up ring. Against Khali this time.
Lilliana wound up with one less tooth in that rotten mouth of hers.
I don’t admit it to Silver, but the story made my day slightly less depressing.
The door shuts behind us with a soft click, and the air cools. The sounds of Vulcaris fade away as he leads us to a spiral staircase, which winds upward, tight and steep, carved directly into the heart of the tower.
I trail behind him, palm against the wall for balance, the bandages around my torso pulling with each breath. But the similarity to my own home, to my turret, is welcome, calming even.
Silver slows without looking back, adjusting his pace to mine so seamlessly it irritates me. And that brief respite of calm vanishes.
What feels like a thousand steps later, at the top is a solitary door of solid wood and decorative iron.
He opens it wide and walks in like he owns the place.
I hesitate on the threshold.
These aren’t any staff quarters.
They are his quarters.
The space itself is unmistakably his.
Not lavish, not sparse. Dark wood furniture, a round table near the hearth littered with maps and rolled parchments, weighted down by daggers instead of stones.
Weapons are mounted around the curved turret walls, each one sharp and polished and placed with precise spacing. Not for display but for readiness.
There’s no clutter, no indulgence, aside from maybe the bed.
Which is massive.
Carved from thick wood with iron embellishments, its linens are dark and rumpled.
He actually sleeps in them.
I don’t know why the obvious thought is so stressful, almost overwhelming.
Silver watches me take it all in, saying nothing.
Finally, there’s a single chair pulled close to the floor to ceiling window, positioned exactly where the light would hit at dawn.
I walk up to the window which curves around the back wall of the room, and wish it wasn’t so dark out. I miss the view from my turret every day.
“You live in a turret?” I eventually ask.
“The turret,” he corrects. “Are you afraid of heights?” he asks, quietly stepping in behind me.
The question induces a short, surprising laugh out of me. “That would make sense, wouldn’t it?”
His mouth curves faintly, reflected in the glass.
“No, I’m not.”
“I didn’t think so.”
Everything smells like him.
Cedar and iron and smoke.
The scent wraps around me, sinking under my skin, tightening something low in my stomach that has no business reacting.
He shifts closer, ever so slightly. “I could do what Yuvi and Z do, live down in the village, near the harbor, in a tent in the woods or a cabin in the mountains,” he says, gaze fixed on the darkening night sky. “Easier access. Fewer stairs. Less cadets.”
“But you don’t.”
“No.” A pause. “This is the best view in the Iron Isle.”
Something aches at that.
“I used to have the best view in Industria,” I say before I can stop myself.