Ashes of Vile

20

CHAPTER TWENTY
Surviving With The Weak

Lace shrieked. Devin looked around frantically begging for any kind of help. The scene was a whiplash of unexpected turn of events. Like everything was filtered out for Cassidy; After everything she had heard from Lace, noise started kicking in her eardrums as she heard the only words she was willing to hear. "She's not dead!" Lace dropped to the ground beside Lilac, and in unison, Devin dropped down on his knees, released out of his misery. Cassidy was back in her fearful mind and it all started coming together like she had lost a piece of her memory and herself. She was not in control, her emotions were.

She looked at Lilac who was still struggling to fight for her life, but as fatal and crucial the arrows were, she was still alive. Her eyes were opened, and Cassidy could just count every breath Lilac took. The blues were slowly disappearing but it slightly glowed underneath the sun as it released Lilac from its aggressive grasp. Something so mesmerizing would seem to be gentle with its movement, but her source clearly had no mind on its own. Cassidy was who withheld it, and she was the one to control the amount of power it binds.

And as she fought with grief and vexation, the source followed. Blindly associating him with evil, Cassidy felt that there was no place in Devin's heart to find some sincerity and genuineness; But it wasn't all that she cared about. What mattered was Cassidy on Devin's back as she sprinted inside the manor and put her on the bed as Lace ran out to fetch Zakeen.

Zakeen, pulled out of his cancelled plans, immediately got to his work and patched up her wounds and carefully mend all the broken parts of Lilac. He muttered a few tired non directed insults then and there, obvious to the fact that no one really cared much about the vulnerability of being human. They so heavily relied on Nadir to get straight into stitching and cleaning without second thought. But there wasn't much he could do to get them to stop. They liked to hurt others. And when you surround yourself with people who like to inflict pain, there was no avoiding times where the hurt ones would be themselves.

While Zakeen focused on keeping Lilac from dying, Cassidy was ready to sprawl at Devin for a second time. But she hadn't got the confidence to do so. She knew it had something to do with her source. The source gave her trust in herself, it was something to fall back onto. And Lace, extremely intelligent, fazed Cassidy as she seemed to read exactly what was on her mind. "You know you'll have to learn, no matter what it takes."

Cassidy ignored her the first time. "At this stage the source is protecting you. It is pushing you to do things. But soon you'll have to protect it. Carrying such power just means you're up for grabs for power hungry people."

"Like you?" Cassidy retaliated.

Lace stayed quiet. But someone else seemed to respond. "Like me," August appeared out of nowhere. Cassidy defensively looked at her piercing eyes with silence yet not the kind that backed down. August walked past them as she made clear she wasn't there out of interest for what had just previously happened. But something told Cassidy that she knew.

"If I was in your position, I would be fighting chaos with your ability. What a shame the world had picked you, its weakest soldier, to withhold it." August said when she had stopped nearly at the end of the hall.

"You think so highly of yourself but you are the one here for blood power and possessions not justice." Cassidy said, not wanting to accept defeat. But a part of her felt small and inadequate for saying such thing especially considering the gravity of her current situation. Lilac was all she had to think about. But now August and her words were clouding her mind. "How could I be fighting for justice when I myself perform and sponsor injustice? I would fight chaos, Idgen, and become it, not rid of it from this universe."