Land of Light and Shadows

Chapter 32

Chapter 32

"Veres?" Lyv questioned, watching as Cleo got up from her seat.

She nodded as she started riffling through Ollyn's saddlebags, pulling out a map of Laria. Unfolding it before she even sat back down, Cleo sprawled it out in front of them, pointing to a blurred-out section in one of the mountain ranges near the left edge. "Veres. It's in the mountain range northwest of here, close to the other portal that connects to your world. It's even older than Arloerin."

"And no one goes there?"

"Never. It's not just because of the wraiths."

Lyv gulped. "Wraiths?"

"Ghosts, specters, whatever you want to call them. The ones there now...well, they're the ghosts of the males my mother killed whenever the darkness overtook her. There has always been some guarding the entrance, though. With every soul taken there, they're trapped in this world to guard it. They're hard to get rid of. You have to have a sword forged from silver and iron. Even still, they still manage to find their way back. After all, you can't really kill a ghost, can you?"

Lyv shivered at the thought. "You're serious."

"Of course, I am. If Adeena were here, though..."

She trailed off, making Lyv raise a brow in question.

"Adeena...her dark magic...well, like I said before, it was the lethal kind. Her magic in general was unique. She knew how to combine both light and dark, not only to kill someone, but to also bring them back to life. Most of the time, though, she ended up just reanimating the corpse." This time, it was Cleo who shivered. "Gods, I remember when we went out exploring with our grandfather one time just a few weeks before they were killed. We came across the carcass of a rabbit. Evander told us to just continue on, but Adeena couldn't stop looking at it. Before we knew it, it started twitching, pushing itself up on nothing but exposed bones and tendons as maggots fell from the rotting flesh. It was gruesome and it traumatized me like nothing else ever had before. But to Adeena...it was nothing."

Lyv's stomach turned at the image that appeared in her head of the scene. She thought of something else, the reanimations she herself had done using dark magic, in creating the oskurreia.

"It sounds like she had the same aspect of dark magic as Corliss and I do," Lyv began. "There's this...this spell. It reanimates the corpses of people we killed, turning them into black shells of what they once were, mindless and obedient. They're called oskurreia. That's what roams all of Escarral now that Corliss and Guinevere control the land."

Cleo kept a careful watch on Lyv then. "So...you've killed before, created these oskurreia things?"

She didn't want to admit it, didn't even want to think about all the lives she'd taken when the darkness controlled her, so she nodded in silence.

Cleo didn't even say anything, just took her hand and held it tight.

"There's something else I wanted to tell you about," Lyv said quietly, wanting to switch the subject in a different direction. "Something about Adeena."

Dropping her hand as if it were sheathed in flames, Cleo stared at her with both emerald and onyx eyes. Carefully, she folded the map back up, setting it off to the side. "What?"

How would she be able to start this? You know your dead sister? Well, I saw her, which is the reason I froze when first meeting you.

Well, that was good...kind of.