King of Dust

Chapter 08

The icy draft from upstairs made Astrid shudder and I gripped her hand tightly as I looked upon the carving on the wall. The image itself was horrifying, the faces of the little people twisted into fear. I was reminded in that moment that the image I beheld was what people thought of me. Terrifying, a swarm of bats in the night with no other intention than to suck them dry.

For a while, I had been that. In the beginning, as the rage from losing one of the only people that I loved boiled in my blood, I had decimated the townsfolk searching for an explanation, trying to justify what had happened to me... what had happened to Clara. After a while, that anger died down and I remembered that I didn't want to be anything like my warmongering brother. I left those violent tendencies behind and became a coward. The people of Starkovia understood nothing.

Astrid whispered in the darkness, "Urien, is it okay if I provide light? I can't see a thing."

"Yes," Urien muttered from behind me.

With a click of flint, Astrid lit a torch that she had pulled from her backpack. The warm, yellow light illuminated the dark room. There were no windows on the walls, but light leaked from underneath the two doors to the left and the right of us.

"Stay here for a moment," I whispered. "I'm going to go and check the room on the left."

I stepped into mist to move quickly across the room and barely cracked the door to peek at what was inside once I had solidified. I huffed with disappointment as I found absolutely nothing of interest. Beams of sunlight streaked across the floor, and I used the door to awkwardly block myself. I remembered the days when Starkovia was all doom and gloom and clouds and rain. What a rip off. The room held a few nice pieces of furniture, a harpsichord, and a harp. Big deal. I became more and more suspicious by the second. The children outside had made it seem like some travesty had happened here, but nothing was out of the ordinary.

"This house is boring," I called across the hall.

"I assume nothing?" Urien asked.

"We could start a band, maybe."

"I don't even know how to play any instruments. We're going this way."

Urien opened the door opposite to me and checked it, trying as best as he could to silence the creaking door. He slipped into the room like a ghost, and Yra sighed loudly out of boredom. Within moments he, too, had entered the room. Before I could fully step through the door, Astrid placed a gentle hand on my arm.

"Hey, Darius," she whispered. "Are you okay?"

"What?" I asked. Great. I had always been easy to read, like a book. She could probably see distress all over my face.

"Are you doing okay? You looked really upset in the wagon and I just wanted to make sure you were all right."

"I'm... managing, but I don't think it's the right time to talk about it, my dear. I appreciate your concern."

By the time I entered the room, dodging little bits of sunlight on the floor blocked by the heavy, red curtains covering the window, Urien was already snooping through drawers looking for something. He pulled a key from the mahogany desk that sat in the center of the room. Yra browsed through books on the tall bookshelves that lined the library, not finding anything of interest based on the drooping look in his eye. Astrid wandered about the room, like a lost dandelion seed, flitting from place to place trying to be helpful. A book on the shelf caught her eye and she tore through it, finding some value there. She slipped it into her backpack, hoping none of us saw with a look of guilt on her face. Urien continued to poke about the room when I noticed something odd.

I had moved into the corner of the room to avoid the morning sunlight and rested my arm on the bookshelf casually, waiting for the rest of the group to finish. When my eyes wandered to the shelves, I noticed a book with an entirely blank spine. In my personal experience, those kinds of books tend to be diaries or journals and often contain juicy secrets! Not... not like I have any diaries lying around that contain any juicy secrets, or – or bad poetry. Definitely not bad poetry. Being the Nosey Natasha that I am, I pulled the book off the shelf, and, to my surprise, a door swung open.

Only moments after the door opened, Urien moved in, his eyes picking apart every facet of the room. He loved secrets nearly as much as I. Urien's fingers ran down the spines of books as he looked at their titles in dim light, and his face fell in abject horror.

"Holy shit."

"What is it?" I asked and blocked the secret door with a chair to prevent it from closing.

"This looks like a necromancy cult."

"That's... awkward, ya?"

Urien flipped violently through one of the books, taking in a few pages, and scoffed, "Fortunately for us these spell books are worthless. They're completely bogus."

"Find anything cool?" Yra called from the other room.

"Creepy necromancy books!" I replied.

"Cool."

"Not cool," Urien spat. "These ideas are incredibly dangerous. The balance between life and death is—"

"Blah blah blah, vampirism and necromancy are bad, okay. Thanks, Dad. Anything else in here?" Yra quipped as he sat on the desk, peeking into the secret room.

I turned in the room while Urien scoured through more books, hoping something else would catch my eye. What I had hoped for was some cool wizard robes or other ridiculous paraphernalia, but, unfortunately, I found a corpse. A dead man, body decaying and skin falling from bones, slumped on the ground with three thick darts in his head. The skull had been fractured where the darts had hit. As I squinted to figure out what the hell a dead body was doing in the room, I followed a trip wire from the top of the chest the sorry sap slumped against, across the ceiling, and to a crossbow that had been triggered. Apparently, someone didn't want thieves looking through their stuff.

"Urien, we have a dead one here," I muttered.

He stepped to my side and looked the corpse over. Yra disappeared into a puff of mist and reappeared at my side, his greedy eyes looking through the chest.

"Is everything okay in there?" Astrid called.

"Keep watch," Urien instructed.

"Ooh, I found a will," Yra muttered as he pulled papers from the chest, shoving the dead body aside. "Kenton and Emberly Hopson. Upon their death they leave the house to... Rosemarie and Viggo Hopson."

"The children we met outside."

"Mm hm."

"What's this?" Urien pried something from the corpse's hand. The joints creaked and moaned as he pulled on them, and eventually he worked loose an old piece of paper. "A letter, I think."

"Who's it from?" I asked as Urien looked over the paper.

With a sharp breath, he looked up at me, accusation in his eyes. "You."

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