✵ ✵ ✵
Luna left, following him out, her words echoing "Wrap this up. And get out of here."
The other man got up, his eyes glossy with rage. "You killed him," he stated.
"I did," said Nia, nodding slightly. "It's all the more good for you. With those cards," she said, gesturing to the cards askew on the table with a dagger, "you would've never won that round."
He advanced towards her, nostrils flaring, hands rising. And then he crumpled, like a shadow shown light. Nia walked to his heaving body on the floor, plucked out her dagger, wiped the blood off on his jacket, and stuck it back in her shoe.
She crouched next to him. "It's a shame. I could've taught you how to play."
His fingers snagged on her coat as she got up, the silence interrupted by a soft tumble of paper. She looked down to see a list tucked in his sleeve. Pulling it out, and flaking off some of the blood, Nia opened the note. It was a list of names of people she had never heard of before. Seven of them were crossed out with rickety, lines of rusted blood. A symbol hid behind the words. A circle with five lines intersecting it. Retrieving the list of names she'd found herself, in the dark room in the castle, she held the two papers side to side, her eyes drifting like currents between them.
Thunder crackled above. The names were different, but everything else was the same. The same coarseness of paper that only came from the pulp of trees of Guine, a small town west of Esterham. The same manipulation of ink in loopy curves and shaking lines.
"How many are there?" she muttered to herself. She looked up to ask the dying man, but he was already long gone. His eyes open, staring at the sky, black pupils expanded like pools of ink. She saw lightning of the sky above reflected in them, and felt the faint patter of rain.
It was about time. "Summer lasted long enough," she said, rising up to pull her cloak over her head, and dissolve in the dark of the corridor. "It's time for storms." Her voice echoed, chasing after its own tail, until it melted in with the thunder overhead.
✵ ✵ ✵
"I'll know where and when to hold up part of my deal. So don't scream when you see me again."
He stood with his arms closed, leaning against a wall. On anyone else, the posture may have seemed relaxed but he looked like a toppled statue. Cold and hard.
"What happened there?" she asked.
"She reminded me of people I want to forget," he said shortly.
Luna didn't know what had happened to the boy she knew. The boy who used to laugh and smile at everything, not to keep his demons at bay but because he was that happy. Even when his father called him into his office, and he came back out sometimes with a limp. Even when his brother would mess the braids and beads in his hair, she'd watched him work at for hours. She wanted to know where that boy had gone what had happened to him, but at the same time, she wanted it to remain a secret forever, so that she could cradle his memories and live in blissful ignorance.
Acelius's jaw was tightly set as his eyes bore into the dark corridor unfurling behind the open door, as if he were trying to set the black aflame. Maybe if he looked any longer, he would.
"Who is she?" she asked, in a subtle tone.
His face turned to his, and her stomach turned.
YOU ARE READING
unraveled
Fantasy"I've seen rats with better attention spans than you," she said onto his face. And then the boy was there pulling her onto her feet and off of him. "But have you seen them with such beautiful faces?" he asked, standing up, brushing off th...
