Land of Light and Shadows

Chapter 6

Chapter 6

The chairs surrounded the council room table once more, the maps of Escarral forgotten. All eyes were on Lyv, who had to take a moment to focus on breathing in an out to calm her nerves. Finally, she found herself starting from the beginning.

Telling everything to human family the most difficult. Even Camilla and Soren, who had seen firsthand what Corliss and Guinevere's dark magic was continuously doing to Escarral, were seemingly devastated by the volley of information she told them all over the next hour.

"Are you all right?" Evelien asked, tightly holding onto a now awake Imrie.

"Truly?" Ada went on.

"I am," Lyv promised, reaching over to tightly grasp her eldest sister's hand. "And in the next few weeks, we're going to start looking into a way to get rid of it. With everything going on over this last month...well, there's an obvious reason why we've held off digging more into the past."

"So, you're obviously going to ask Allel, Mik, and Kalla to tell you everything that happened," Camilla said then, crossing her arms and leaning back in her chair. "Finally. I've told Jai multiple times that should have happened a long time ago. Hell, even I've tried to get Kalla to talk over these last two weeks we've been gone."

"I know," she nodded in agreement. "The thing is, I wanted to give them some...adjustment time. Myself included. With Allel and Mik, they've been under Corliss's control for over a century. Kalla's different, though. She'd been on her own, though she was still held by Corliss in some way. I think she still is, no matter what she says."

Lyv had been thinking about that fact more and more lately, especially after they saved Mik. It went all the way back to when she first met Kalla on Blackloch, which seemed so long ago. Even though the pirate queen claimed she was removing herself from under Corliss's control, there was still the matter of magic that bound them, just as it had previously bound her, Allel, and Mik. It was a different kind, but magic, nonetheless.

Knowing she didn't have much more to tell them and having the conversation already weighing all of them down, a quiet overtook the room. It wasn't tense, though. Rather, reflective and united in that they would all do anything they could to rid Lyv of the darkness and finally from their world all together. Of course, like Lyv already knew, they couldn't do that completely. There always had to be a little darkness in the world, just as Dark Lyv had been telling her.

With evening plans already set for everyone to meet at Merek and Evelien's home for family dinner, everyone went their separate ways until then. While her sisters and brothers-in-law went to round up the kids along with Merek, Evelien left to head home since Imrie was getting fussy. Camilla and Soren both hugged Lyv before heading home themselves, claiming they were both going to pass out in bed until later that night.

As for Kalla, though, she had disappeared. Allel and Mik weren't anywhere to be found either, so Lyv had hopes they were able to calm her down, tell her everything Lyv had told them. Surely, she couldn't be mad at Lyv, especially when she had absolutely no control over what happened with the stone. She wasn't even mad herself. She had time to come to grips with it, even before it happened, which was the reason she was so calm now. A calm that would only last for so long, though.

Lyv found herself just walking through the palace, lost in thought and hardly seeing those she passed. It wasn't negative thoughts her mind turned her, but rather just random ones. Like how she loved some of the paintings hanging along the walls, or how she would have to ask Emmeric about a suit of armor displayed near his office, or if Elys and Eamon knew about the secret passageway behind a hidden wall panel just a little further down from it.