Chapter Four
Avelina
Blood. That’s all she saw. All she knew. All she tasted as she woke up on the floor of a train car. Only after she swiped her grimy hands over her face did she smell the smoke.
“What happened?” she murmured through sticky lips.
The second she did, she regretted it. Something toppled off her head and she wrenched backward.
Blood. She sat in a pool of it. The whole train car was coated in it.
Crimson from the ceiling to the floor. Puddles of it everywhere with clumps of flesh scattered.
Avelina slowly sat up, shifting onto her knees, searching the horrifying scene for answers.
Her fingers brushed a spine and she screamed.
Scrambling backward, she toppled over a body that sent her splashing across the floor.
Avelina shoved herself up against a wall, her boots slipping through the sinew.
“What. Happened. Here?” She panted for air as it dawned on her steadily…the train wasn’t moving. Avelina sat in a puddle of blood, her sticky back to a wall, trying to regulate her heart in the midst of a nightmare. “Why am I alive?”
“Because I saved you…” a soft voice tickled her ear.
Avelina watched from down the hall, a pair of gray feet, delicate but boney, stepped through all the gore toward her.
They pushed aside chunks of dead flesh as their lace shroud dragged through all the death.
Inch by inch, Avelina memorized the form of Catalysta.
She knew her name, not because of her father’s incessant lessons on the heretical gods or her own studies.
No, she knew who the woman with a crown of bones atop a head on long, silver hair was because Catalysta told her.
In her mind, when they joined hands, she was known to Avelina.
And as the Goddess of Madness knelt in front of the blood-coated girl on a dead train, Avelina recalled exactly what happened.
The power surged through her, and she ripped the first ruffian to shreds.
She tore through him like wet paper and stepped out into the hall.
Blast after blast, she turned the train robbers into sinew and roasted meat.
Clumps of them fell around her as she stared through bleeding eyes.
Catalysta’s power raced through her veins, and she almost let Avelina rest until another man charged her from the back of the train.
Warlock. They cursed her. Spat at her feet. Pushed and shoved her, screaming at her till she made it all…stop.
“I crashed the train,” she breathed. Avelina Dalethorn tore apart the train like a monster. Her belly quivered as she assessed the damage. Not a single person was left alive. I’m a murderer. I’m a monster.
“You must leave. They’re coming for you. They’ll kill you if they find you.”
Avelina crawled up the wall with her nails, leaving tracks in her wake as she climbed to her feet. Catalysta bowed her head to her slightly. The words came out in a rushed croak, “Why are you helping me?”
But the goddess did not deign to answer her.
Instead, she disappeared in a swirl of floating ash as the door to the train car burst open, filling the space with thick smog.
Right, crashed the train. Avelina bolted across the floor.
Stumbling around all the bodies, their personal effects spilling out of cabins like their innards, she did her best not to trip.
Every inch of her was doused in her crimes.
Avelina managed to get to the back door of the train car before she heard the thunderous boots of Paladins descending upon the train.
If she were a better liar, she could try to play it off as a victim.
If she were a better daughter, maybe she’d cry for her father, and the Paladins would buy it.
If…if…if. There was no time to change her mind.
Avelina climbed down out of the crunched car and slid out onto the tracks.
Her boots crunched gravel, but otherwise it was a silent escape.
She crept alongside the other train cars, using the embrace of night to hide her disappearance.
Only, a beam of light stopped her and sizzled her skin. Avelina cried out in pain, throwing herself into the tall grass away from the beam.
“There it goes! Did you see it?”
“Grab them!”
Avelina tore through the grass, getting a few feet away when two large hands grabbed her arms. Shrieking, she thrashed left and right, slick as an oiled pig, she freed herself from their gloves.
Avelina spun to face her doom. Heart in her throat, hands up, she sobbed as the two Paladins painted in her crimes stared at her bewildered.
One of them held a lantern over her. Crimes illuminated, there was little she could say.
“The train was robbed. They killed him so fast! I didn’t mean to—” her pathetic whine cracked in her throat. Trembling the whole time, she desperately hoped they believed her.
Run.
And yet she stayed. Hands up to them like white flags, eyes wide in fear, she watched the two men clearly assess what garbled language she spoke at them.
“He’s dead!” Her death sentence echoed over the tall grass.
A Paladin bellowed out the window of her train cabin, the whole of Parandor’s forces turning to stare at the caught woman in the grass.
Another beam of light shot down and she shrieked, lurching backward.
“She murdered Knight Commander Dalethorn!”
“No!” she screamed as hands descended on her. “No! No I didn’t! They killed him! I’m sorry. I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”
They dragged her forward, panic stabbing her veins. Visions of swords brought down over her throat, of Tala reading about her death in the paper, of her name used as a curse, of her head on a spike on the wall of her father’s beloved Stronghold filled her head.
Run! Her goddess bade her to run, and knowing they would never trust a word she said, Avelina obeyed.
A gust of magic burst from her chest, throwing her out of the Paladins’ hands into the field of tall grass.
Avelina peeled off, boots stamping down the blades, she pumped her arms out at her sides.
And ran. She bolted away from the Paladins barking for her to stop.
Beams of light stabbed into the ground, a few grazing her.
With each skin slicing touch of the SunBringer’s vengeance, she learned to duck and weave.
The sun broke over the horizon, the world warming up under her love.
Yet Avelina felt only ice. Her bones were covered in jagged frost that carved into her muscles.
Everything inside her screamed in terror but she didn’t stop running.
If she even tripped, she’d be pinned by four or more Paladins.
It was the only thing that kept her vertical as she grew dizzy.
The tall grass whipped at her face, leaving her lips chapped.
Her cheeks blistered. Blood caked every crevasse of her body.
Relief came in the form of dense trees that broke the endless fields surrounding Parandor.
Avelina sobbed as the sunlight craned higher.
The Paladins were stronger under Her beams, and she couldn’t take them in a straight fight.
Once she broke through the first row of trees, a minty balm washed over her.
It was short lived as her boots sank into heavy mud. No. No! Nononononono! Her legs ached at the force required to pull her foot out of the muck. She stumbled forward over moss-covered mounds back into mud.
“There she is!”
“Grab her!”
“Help,” Avelina croaked. She spun to face her pursuers.
How do I fight them! You never told me how to control this!
Her goddess didn’t answer. It was obvious she was on her own.
Not only did she have no clue what the goddess got out of making Avelina a warlock, but she wasn’t exactly sure the terms of their agreement.
The only way to get those answers was to live long enough to ask them.
Thus, she put out her hands and demanded her body to do what it’d never done before—cast magic!
It wasn’t black in color, but more there was so much color swirling her arms that they bled together into a murky, dark ink.
Slithering up her arms like a snake, it coiled around her till it burst. The magic smacked into the Paladins with such force that it sent them flying out into the fields.
For a moment, she froze, watching it eat through their armor.
Down to the skin. Their screams of pain followed her into the swamp as she picked up her grimy skirts and booked it deeper into the trees.
I traded something for this power. I’m a warlock. I made an unholy contract with the Goddess of Delirium. Oh…if only Father could see me now. He would be so irate. He would be the one bringing the blade down over her throat…if he had lived.
There were a few classes of magic users.
Clerics and Paladins used their connection to their god to bestow blessings, cures, power, and more, but their magic was tied to their deity.
Bards were connected to the power of their own songs, or cooking, like the muse itself powered their spell craft but it took years of study.
Tinkerers used their innate magic to craft wares like guns and other powerful machines.
Spellslingers, generally, were feared, as they weren’t usually tied to a god or a moral compass.
They had an innate magical ability that allowed them to shoot fireballs across the desert or flood a town with a tidal wave when provoked.
Warlocks were detested…because like a cleric, a warlock’s true purpose was to fulfill their gods bidding.
Unlike them, however, it was by any means necessary.
Gods like the All Seer or SunBringer or The Dauntless Verity didn’t task their blessed ones with murdering whole towns or bringing about plagues.
Warlocks were said to be inexhaustible spellcasters who brought death everywhere they went. And now she was one.
Avelina didn’t even know how deep her contract to Catalysta went.