Prelude (Underworld Lucian Fanfiction)

63 - Chapter LXIII: The Fires of Absolution

Sixteen hours earlier.

With the house gone quiet save for the creak of a distant stair, Rena opened her eyes and listened from her hiding place. The silence told her that she was alone now, that she did not have to face anyone. Her hands filled with emptiness, and her mind foundering on the face of a child, red and dripping with blood. Still warm in her arms. Dead like her sons, unable to speak or scream or weep.

For a time, she remembered how she had fled. She remembered the weight of her shame, the nightmare that had stripped her of honour. No longer a soldier. No longer a guard. Only flames. Screaming horses. Death. Unable to make a sound as she wandered through heat and smoke...

...following them.

Weak.

A ghost.

Barely a whisper on the outer wall, aimless and drifting until they reached the western wing: Kolya driving his people forward with the finger-less vampire behind, carrying Sabine on his back and filling the passageways with poison. She ought to have called for someone. The thought forming like breath, starting to creep from her lungs. But the sound kept dying in her throat.

So she stayed silent.

Waiting until they passed, folded in the cracks of her memories until long after they'd gone. Even then, seated in the shadows of an open window, unable to muster the strength or courage when neither had helped her sons. Each memory carrying her forward—not through the house of Alexander Kerr, but through the smoke of a burning field in the aftermath of a losing battle. She was carrying a basket, holding the bleeding fibres close to her chest, the silhouette of a half-moon making shadows on her face. She heard a slice of metal and in a daze, she stepped from the field of her memories onto a wooden floor.

Crossing the room until she stood before a fireplace, vacantly staring until the rain began. The thunder making her drift away from people...questions...sounds, trying to escape, trying to mimic what she had seen when they disappeared. Running her hands over the mantlepiece, pressing the stone leaves until a latch gave way and she was rewarded by the creak of wood, the sound of a panel opening to her right. A hole leading into darkness, making her thankful as she drew the passageway shut and let herself sink to the floor.

Guarding herself from the things she had seen. Cobwebs and dust lining her throat. Hearing a voice bellow her name in the distance. No longer a nudge of melancholy, but a grating howl of loss.Glass breaking, teeth clashing. So close he could smell her. But she had fallen through the cracks and until someone pulled her from her hole, she would remain where she was. Unable to make the whispers that could call for help. The fireplace holding her close, keeping her safe like a secret behind the walls.

A forgotten creature whose carcass would become an effigy of failure. Lost in a waking dream, wandering the corridors of a world where mothers died before their children. A world where she could fight her fears and snatch their hands, once so small, back from the jaws of war.

But she had not moved in hours.

She could not.

So she allowed herself to drift. Lifeless in her hiding place. Listening in the hours that came after and dreaming of her children. Arms wrapped around her shoulders, wishing she could remember the scent of their hair. The soft noises they made while they slept. The memories sinking like stones in a lake of turmoil. Reminding her not of the sons whose severed heads she carried for days, but of a child. Desperate and shivering. The fading scent of Sabine, more fragile than her children, telling her to rise up and follow.

The journey taking all of her strength...her breath...her pain. Past the spy-slits of a corridor. Down an old staircase and through a locked door, stalled for the time it took her to break through rotting wood. Wandering through a catacomb she had never seen before. Crawling in fits and starts until the scent led her to an industrial sector. Heat and sweat drawing her to places where they had lingered and left, leaving her to crouch on the floor, sniffing rope and sawdust.