Seven
I wake in a place that is not my room, though the shape of it feels familiar: the flat ceiling, the stone walls, the wooden bed. For a moment I think I’m back in the dorms, and for a moment that’s worse than waking up in the Embrace. The ghosts here have names.
I feel the rough wool of a blanket, bleached coarse.
It scratches the skin of my inner thighs—bruised and mottled, dark beneath my skin.
I shrug the blanket up to my chin, shivering, but I cannot move my legs.
I try, but I feel only numbness, a tingling in my hips that tells me I’ve been lying still for much too long.
There is no noise, but a pressure rings in my ears, and then the sound of footsteps begins.
Heavy and methodical. Pacing with precision.
A door I cannot see slams open and the room shakes so hard it feels as though the walls may buckle.
Suddenly, hands are everywhere—black and gold, the reinforced knuckles of the Guardian uniform.
They seize the blanket and tear it from my body.
My clothes are next, stripping me bear, leaving me exposed and shivering.
I writhe in terror, instinctively trying to worm out of their hold but the hands only clamp down harder.
I smell blood and liquor and the filthy tang of old sweat.
I know this nightmare. I’ve had it often, but the fear still rises in my throat, a trapped rodent desperate to chew its way out.
The difference this time is the face. I do not recognise it.
It registers as a blur of all the men I’ve tried to avoid and the one that I no longer have to.
The one I ended. The red nose and dark freckles of an old Night Warden, the gold teeth of a man that would wait in the stairwell at lights-out.
The cold eyes of the dead Guardian. Their faces flicker in and out of one another like lightning behind closed eyes.
The hands don’t stop at my wrists and legs.
They hold me fast, spreading my legs while another pair of hands forces my jaw open.
A third set—no, not hands but something softer, like the heavy hem of velvet curtains—drags along my thigh.
The softness is worse than the pain of their nails digging into my wrists.
It makes my skin turn ice-cold. The world slips sideways, and I try to scream, to lash out, but the hands only grip me tighter as velvet forces its way into my mouth, choking the sound before it leaves my throat.
My eyes fill with water and it’s all I can do to cry.
The room warps and the bed buckles. The walls crumble and I’m left naked and alone on the cold stone floor.
Gilded men rise through the floor. They have no faces at all—just resplendent gold sunbursts, shining in a light that brings no warmth.
Their hands dig into my flesh once again, their rough palms sure and determined.
They take hold of my ankles and force them apart.
I thrash and snap and bite, but my limbs betray me, turning to soft, pliant dough.
The sensation that comes next is always heat.
It arrives as though channelled: a column of searing flame between my legs, splitting me and burning me.
But there isn’t pain this time, not like in my memories.
It’s worse: there is pleasure. It prickles up my spine, and I am mortified to feel myself hardening under their touch.
I will my body to still, to be dead, but my every nerve is alive and my body reacts anyway, hot and humiliating beneath their touch.
The hands grip around the shaft, squeezing it in tormenting agony, and for one terrible moment the face above me becomes Kael’s, before it shifts to a face I do not know.
The face is immense, eyes endlessly bright that they blind me.
It takes on a woman’s form and bends over me, her skin crackling with the impossible light and at first I think it is the Mother Shard come to save me.
But her mouth opens and the voice that spills out is that of every man who ever tainted me:
“Such a pretty thing. So soft. You asked for this.”
I twist away, screaming, but her hands multiply like roots sprouting from a tree. The arms of my tormentors, coil around me, crushing me. I feel myself splitting, my skin breaking in great white fissures.
“You want this,” she whispers, but it is the voice of the dead Guardian, poisonous with drink and hatred, “You’ve always wanted this, little Lightborn. So soft, so eager to please.”
“No,” I try to say, but no sound comes out, my mouth cannot form the word. I can barely breathe.
The woman’s face looms over me, enormous, as her features shatter, the pink light behind her skin bleeding through. “You are not like the others,” she says, and her face becomes Lyssandra’s, the beautiful, gentle Waterborn girl. “You are worse. You are a broken thing. Useless.”
The words echo in the air. Worse. Broken. Useless.
The room flickers to nothing. I’m somewhere else now, bent over the railing in the rain on that bridge above the river.
The Guardian’s breath is hot against my ear, his hand closed around my neck, his hips grinding into me with a slow, inescapable rhythm.
Every movement makes the world shudder as tears well in my eyes.
I focus on my hands and on the churning water below, wishing I could fall into its embrace.
A drop of blood splatters on the back of my hand. Then another. Then more, until my vision is awash in red, and I can’t see anything but shining, dark crimson, pulsing its horrid light.
The Guardian's face suddenly looms before me, splitting in two as the voice of High Blessed Sera Vayne spills forth: “I do not deal in anomalies. I extinguish them.”
Marissa’s voice chimes in, a macabre echo, giggling, “Extinguish him. Extinguish him.”
Lyssandra’s voice echoes from behind me, whispering in my ear, “Painfully. Painfully.”
The word echoes until it loses meaning.
I’m back in the bed, but the stone walls now crawl with cracked pink veins that pulsate with a golden light.
The bed is a living thing, the blanket scratching at my skin, crawling its way into my mouth, my nose, my eyes.
I try to claw at it, but my fingers have no bones. They flail—limp and useless.
The forms of men lean over me, faceless and uniformed, gold and black igniting the memory of every rancid touch and every moment of helplessness I’ve ever felt.
Their hands move everywhere at once—gripping, stroking, restraining—until I cannot tell where pain stops and humiliation begins.
I arch, bucking wildly, desperate for freedom but unwillingly participating.
Lyssandra’s voice returns, colder than before: “So hungry to please. So desperate to be understood. But what are you?”
I sob, but the sound is a maniacal cackle of laughter.
“What are you?” The voice cackles back.
My body betrays me, finally convulsing against my will as ribbons of golden light burst from me. The hands restrain me as Lyssandra’s form absorbs the golden ribbons, drinking up the light, feeding from me. Her enormous eyes widen, smiling as she delights in my shame.
“Special. Special. Special,” she murmurs. Her voice is soft, almost trustworthy, but her smirk betrays her. “Just a broken thing for me to use.”
The air rushes all around me, and time seems to collapse as I find myself in the Dome.
I’m on my knees, and the sound of Kael’s laughter rolls around me.
I look up, and he stands above me, his boot pressing against my chest, his black eyes boring into my soul.
He brings his face inches from mine, whispering, “What are you?”
I cannot speak. I can only watch as Kael pulls a blade from behind his back and places it against my throat, holding me in place.
The ancient voice of the Mother Shard erupts from Kael’s mouth: “You want to survive? Show me your devotion. Show me your strength. Give yourself to me.”
I feel myself splitting, the light inside me forcing its way out of the prison that is my body. I scream, but the sound distorts and is absorbed into the walls, echoing back at me as broken, cackling laughter.
“What are you?” the voice roars.
“Nothing,” I whisper. “I am nothing.”
The world collapses and the last thing I feel is hundreds of hands dragging me down. Down through the earth, into the hungry darkness, while those enormous glowing eyes gaze at me from above with adoration and cruelty.
Her words follow me down like a lullaby, like a curse:
“This one. Yes. This one.”
I surface from the dark like a drowning man, gasping for air. It takes me a minute to remember where I am—the Embrace, in my assigned room. I’m soaked, every inch of me is covered in sweat. The sheets are glued to my skin, cold and suffocating. My pulse stutters against my ribs.
I haul the sheets from my body, scanning the room for intruders, but the lock is still in place.
My breathing won’t settle, and for a long moment I cannot move.
My arms and legs feel numb. It takes me another minute to shake myself loose, to remind myself that I am alone.
That I am safe. Well—as safe as I can be given my situation.
I drag myself upright and sit on the edge of the bed. The ache from the dream lingers, real as any injury. My throat burns and I swallow back tears. My wrists itch, phantom hands irritating my skin.
I take deep breaths, choking down air, trying to settle the pounding of my heart. The tremors in my hands don’t want to stop.
That’s when I see it: a crack in the ceiling.
It runs above my bed, in a twisted, jagged vein of gold cutting through the grey stone. It would be almost beautiful, if it didn't threaten my very existence.
Panic floods me. Did I do that?
My Mana has never escaped me in sleep before. Never.
The nightmare still clings to me like smoke, pressure lodged beneath my skin. I check my hands, half expecting to see golden lines burned into the flesh. But they’re just hands—shaking and ordinary, calloused from years of swinging a sword.