Chapter 65 Calluna
CALLUNA
C alluna walked the streets of Racliffe, and despite the things that walked around her, she had never felt so alone.
They peered at her with squirming gold eyes, and though they bowed and showed reverence, she dared not say a word.
It wasn’t just them she feared, either. The city itself felt alive.
Too often, she saw its eyes and felt the exhalation of its mouths.
There you are , she thought, stopping before the broken door of a home.
Aylah rested within, her eyes closed, her wounded body safely curled into the embrace of an enormous lion.
Its human face bared its teeth but quickly ceased upon seeing Calluna and sensing her aura.
These creatures, these monsters, they obeyed the radiance within her.
What that meant, she dared not think on.
“Hello, sister,” Calluna said. She tried to project her greeting as excited and loving, but instead the words came out like a whimper.
Aylah looked up, blinking as if returning from slumber. The swollen leeches were padded pillows to her body. Along both her arms, several more leeches crawled, nibbling and biting and leaving clean, healing skin in their wake.
“Calluna,” Aylah said. Her voice was as cold as the ocean. “What are you doing here?”
“I… I was hiding in the city when it happened,” she said, trying to think of an answer that wasn’t so pathetic.
“It struck me, and it was awful, it was terrible, I cried so much, Aylah. I cried, and I wished I was somewhere with you, with any of you, and not alone. I don’t want to be alone. Not now. Not ever.”
Her sister sat up, causing the lion to stir. A soft growl escaped its throat.
“You hid,” Aylah said. “As Faron sacrificed himself, and Sariel destroyed everything, you hid?”
Calluna stood tall and struggled not to cry against the strange and sudden hate flowing off her sister in waves.
“Faron?” she asked. “What happened to Faron?”
Aylah shook her head, refusing to answer.
“You,” she said. “You showed Eder where the key was. That’s what he said. You showed him what he needed to activate the Tower Majestic. This is all your doing.”
“Me?” Calluna took a step back, her eyes widening. “But you… you’re the one who captured Isabelle.”
“And I wouldn’t have if I had known,” Aylah said, standing. “I knew only what Eder told me, but he was wrong, wasn’t he?” She stepped closer. “Did you know, Calluna? Did you know the purpose of the tower? You scoured its secrets. You learned more about it than any of us. Did you know?”
“Please, Aylah…”
“Did you know?”
Calluna struggled to keep her words firm despite the tears swelling in her eyes.
“I knew the Etemen had activated the tower once,” she said. “Only once. I thought it saved them. I thought it took them to a better place.”
Aylah drew her sword and pointed its sharp edge toward the door.
“Get out,” she said.
“Aylah, no, I can’t, don’t do this.”
“I said get out! Go to the Tower Majestic. Look on all you’ve done with your meddling.”
Calluna fled, sobbing and screaming and furious. She ran through wild, untamed streets, hating the way the monstrous beings bowed their heads as if she were a princess. As if they couldn’t see how broken she was.
“I didn’t know!” she screamed, not caring who heard. “I didn’t know, how could I have known? And Eder, he should have refused. He should have stopped. I didn’t start this war. I didn’t start any of this!”
Her flight took her east, toward Bridgetop.
More of the creatures congregated there, and they quickly formed a path to allow her to pass.
Calluna sniffled and wiped her tears, better composing herself now that she had put some distance between her and her sister.
She observed the things as she walked, appreciating them as a distraction from her own misery.
There was an order to them, a guidance among the chaos that had enveloped the people when the crackling radiance had washed over them from the hole in the sky.
Calluna sorted them into various races in her mind, for though they seemed random, that randomness was repeated throughout the city.
The harpies with their equestrian heads.
The leaf and thorn people. Animals with two heads and six limbs.
Those lions with their human faces and their bodies pulsing with fat, recently fed leeches the color of marble.
Among them, most pitiable, were the mere humans split asunder by their past lives. Rarely did they live long, if at all.
At last, she stood before the Tower Majestic. Calluna craned her neck to peer up at it, Aylah’s chilling words striking her heart.
… Faron sacrificed himself…
Stair by enormous stair, Calluna climbed the tower. It took so long, and she was sweating by the end, but the exertion did her good. It helped her collect her thoughts. It helped brace her for what she feared she would find.
… Sariel destroyed everything…
At last, she arrived at the rafters, and the little lift up to the Final Ascent. There was no one to operate it, and so she hopped, grabbing ropes and climbing until she curled up around the edge and onto the rune-strewn floor.
The first thing she saw was Eder’s body. The second was his head, lying beside it.
“You sweet fool,” Calluna said, approaching both.
She dropped to her knees beside the body and cradled Eder’s head in her lap, her slender fingers gently stroking his lovely face.
It was frozen in death, but it would not be for long.
Once she buried his body, head in its proper place, he would soon return, in a few years.
But what world would he awaken within, with the sky ruptured and waves of radiance steadily spreading throughout Kaus?
She turned to the key, the damned sacrificial bowl she herself had given Eder, and felt her insides freeze.
“Faron?” she asked. Slowly, she stood, Eder’s head cradled to her chest. Her every footstep was smaller than her last as she approached, until she was tiptoeing toward the charred corpse. Her lips trembled. Her grip on Eder’s head tightened.
“No,” she said. “No. No, you didn’t, Faron, you didn’t, you didn’t…”
The final sacrifice. The true death. It was him. Not Isabelle. Not anyone else. Her wonderful, softhearted oaf of a muscle-bound brother had given everything. There was nothing left. No life. No soul. No returning. Cold flesh tightening into rigor mortis.
Calluna collapsed beside the burned ruins of his body. She tried to lift what remained, to cradle him against her, but he was too heavy, and she too small. She bent over, weeping as her hair fell across what had once been his face.
“Why?” she asked. “Who could be worth this? Or were you sick of it all? Was this your one last pyre?”
She lifted his head and slid her legs underneath him so that it settled onto her lap.
There she cradled it, Faron’s head in one arm, Eder’s in the other.
She wept. She screamed. She fought against the voice of guilt that seethed within her mind, so heartless, so cruel, to disregard the actions of others and insist that, yes, this was all her fault, her fault and no one else’s.
She wept until she heard the sound of ringing.
Calluna looked up, enduring the dizziness she always felt when staring into that swirling, burning black hole in the sky.
There, in its very center, she saw the thinnest beam of white light.
It was like a crack in the darkness, splintering, growing.
The tower shook underneath her, as if all the world groaned from the effort.
Calluna stared, eyes wide, tears burning away, as the white light grew. Her mouth dropped. Her hair whipped about in a sudden wild wind. Hope and fear pulsed in her heart.
“Faron?”