Soulwoven: Exile

Chapter 38

~38~

During the destruction of Nutharion City

A moment later, all was still.

Dil stood at the heart of a well of darkness. Her heart ached and thundered, but the fire was gone, as if something else had drowned it. Litnig's arm pressed against her, and one of her hands was still twined in the leather of his jacket. Her other hand held tight to Cole. Their feet were smushed together.

Litnig's arm relaxed. So did Dil's grip. She listened to the brothers breathe.

In the darkness, it was hard to tell one from the other.

White light flared in front of her and swam around Litnig's hand. His eyes were glowing again. He let go of her and Cole and took a few steps forward.

The space around them looked completely alien. It was wide and dark and open. Shelves stretched as far as the light went in every direction. Large casks sat between them, barely lit by Litnig's hand. A ragged hole gaped in the ceiling. A pile of rubble at Dil's feet led up to it like a ramp.

We fell, she realized. We fell and the tower fell on top of us. Litnig protected us, like he did from the fire, from the lightning. She rubbed her chest, touched her mouth, her tongue. She'd broken a tooth, and it was bleeding. But everything else seemed normal.

"Are you all right?" Cole asked. He was looking closely at her, still holding tight.

Slowly, Dil nodded.

She was, she thought, though the tooth hurt like hell and her chest felt loose and warm, as if something had been opened in her heart—a crack, maybe, though not a physical one.

But how did you explain that? How did you know if it was even real?

"Yenor's eye, you scared me," Cole said. He squeezed her.

She squeezed back. Almost said she was sorry, but she wasn't.

"I couldn't let it hurt you," she said instead.

Cole just hugged her harder.

#

"Where are we?" Litnig asked. A few moments had passed.

Cole broke away from Dil. "The Cityhall storehouse, I think." His eyes gleamed in the darkness, darting from left to right like a rat's.

Immediately, Dil missed the warmth of Cole's body. The temperature had dropped. Her breath formed clouds in the damp air, and she shivered in the dress that the women who helped her had wrapped her in.

Tyaeva, she thought. And Reista, and Ymel, and Willem. What happened to them? Where are they now?

Cole's arm snaked back around her. His eyes continued to comb the darkness.

Litnig seemed fixated on the rubble above them.

"We need to find Pyell," Litnig said.

Cole twitched. "When did you learn to soulweave?" he asked.

Litnig's eyes turned back to him. He lowered his glowing hand and looked at it, wiggled his fingers, let the light go out.

"Does it scare you?" he asked.

"No," Cole mumbled.

Dil's eyes drifted to Litnig's sword. In the dark it was all but invisible. There were only occasional hints of purple, swirling in its depths like lightning-streaked patches of cloud in a thunderstorm.