The girl gently traced her fingers over the pictures and symbols lining the fake wall. She wondered if any of the stories and predictions entombed here showed the downfall of her people.
Did a descendant of Solace see this future? Did they try to stop it?The girl shook her head to rid herself of those thoughts. It never did any good to dwell on things that she couldn’t change; doing so was a quick way to insanity—another lesson from her great-grandmother.
The sounds of angry voices and pounding feet came from the direction of the main entrance to the Room of Knowledge, across from where the girl was currently standing. Her pulse spiked again, her heart beating in her throat. A sweat broke out across her body—she forgot one of the commandments from her great-grandmother in Solace. She stopped moving.
Her breaths came in short, shallow gasps as she heard the bodies moving closer. She could make out the sounds of at least five soldiers, if not more, and the muffled voices of her mother and great-grandmother. Her heart sank from her throat to her stomach. There would be no good to come from the soldiers holding her family captive. She had seen firsthand what these soldiers did to their people, the brutality they offered. The girl was torn between running to the alcove that contained the hidden Seeing Room that only the blood of a Keeper of Memories could access, and simply handing herself over to the soldiers. At least she would die with her family.
The girl took a deep, fortifying breath and closed her eyes. Time seemed to slow as she reached for Solace. It came faster than it had even earlier this morning. The girl didn’t have time to dwell on why this was the case, but inherently she knew it was because her grandmother had died—the responsibilities and advantages that came with being a Keeper of Memories were already slowly passing to the girl. Instead of fully immersing herself in Solace, she reached for the bonds of her mother and great-grandmother within the space. She found her mother first, and sent a series of images, showing her mother where she was and her ultimate destination.
All of this happened within the span of a heartbeat, and the girl waited with bated breath to see if her mother had received her message. When there was no response, the girl closed the connection to Solace and folded her hands in front of her. She shut her eyes and listened to the sounds of the approaching group, making peace with her inevitable fate.
She counted the steps of the group as they got indeterminably closer to her position in the Room of Knowledge. Suddenly, instead of the sound of footsteps, the girl heard the muffled sounds of shouts.
“Youbitch!You bit me!” a soldier, the girl assumed,exclaimed.
“You deserve far more than a bite, and I only regret that I cannot be the one to give it to you,” her mother spit with so much vitriol even the girl cringed at her words. Her mother was always soft-spoken, with kind eyes and gentle words of encouragement and love. To hear this from her mother was such a contrast it shocked the girl into opening her eyes.
The group paused and she could just see the outline of their shadows against the curve of the wall. Three more steps and the soldiers would see her.
Move!Her mother’s voice screamed through her mind, forcing the girl into action. The girl needed no more sign or encouragement, and she scampered from her position to the alcove set into the wall not fifteen feet from where her mother and the soldiers stood. The girl heard her mother and the soldier trade a few more barbs, but the girl tuned out their conversation, their voices muffled in her effort to concentrate.
The girl removed the small knife she had strapped to her belt and quickly sliced her palm. She winced at the sting—in her effort to move quickly, she had sliced her hand deeper and longer than she meant. Biting her lip to contain a whimper of pain, she squeezed her hand into a fist, allowing the blood from the cut to coat the entirety of her palm.
She quickly sought out the proper stones that framed the alcove and pressed her bloody palm to each in quick succession. An all-seeing eye for visions of the past and future, an arrow drawn in a continuous circle for the passage of time, and a rune that her great-grandmother told her symbolized the line of Keepers. The stones glowed white for a moment before another nondescript stone popped open, revealing yet another lever. The girl quickly grasped and pulled it from its position until she heard aclunk, indicating that the mechanism to open the door had engaged. She quickly pushed the stone lever back into its place, effectively opening the door to the Seeing chamber while also concealing the lock.
The girl pushed the door open, intending to hide herself within, but a scream of pain stopped her in her tracks.Mother. She whipped her head toward the sound, and instantly wished she had not done so.
There, not twenty feet from her, was her mother, on her knees in front of the soldier she had bitten. His hand glistened with blood from where her mother had not just punctured his skin, she ripped through tendons and muscle until the glistening white of bone shone in the low torchlight.
The soldier’s back was turned toward the girl and the alcove, his attention focused on her mother. His one good hand wrapped in her hair, wrenching her head back at a painful angle, and her mother’s hands had shot up to grip the soldier’s own, trying desperately to loosen his grasp. His other hand, slick with blood, clutched a dagger, the pommel angled toward her face. In one brutally strong motion, he brought the handle of the dagger down and into her mouth.
The girl heard the clank of the metal hilt and handle as it hit her mother’s teeth, and her mother’s accompanying scream was muffled by both the dagger’s pommel and her now broken teeth. The girl sucked in a sharp breath. The soldier removed the hilt and brought it down again a second and third time, breaking her nose and cheekbones with an audiblecrack. Each time her mother gasped in pain, tears tracked down her soot and blood covered face.
“I’ll cut out your tongue next time, whore,” the soldier said as he roughly shook her mother’s head by the grip he had on her hair. He forcibly threw her to the ground, her mother’s hands not reaching in time to catch her fall, and her face hit the packed earth with a sickeningcrunch.Her nails dug into the earth as her body writhed in pain. The soldier viciously kicked her in the ribs, causing her mother’s head to lift off the ground momentarily as her body desperately tried to protect itself from the new danger, only for the soldier to aim a second swift kick at her face. The toe of his boot caught her nose with a wetcrunch, and her mother flopped to the ground, unmoving.
The girl didn’t realize she was crying until she felt wet splashes on the neck of her kaftan. She sniffled quietly, but her noises blessedly went unnoticed. The soldier picked up his dagger and wiped the pommel on her mother’s kaftan, staining the usually white garment a macabre shade of red.
“Get up. Lord d’Refan will be here soon and, unfortunately for me, he needs you alive,” the soldier said as he roughly picked the girl’s mother up, her head lolling to the side, blood running freely from both her mouth and nose. “But don’t worry, I’ll have my fun with you before the day is done.”
Her mother opened her eyes at that moment, and her gaze connected with the girl’s. She gave her one sad smile before inching her chin up, barely indicating that the girl needed to hide. The girl gazed at her mother one lasttime. With tears falling freely down her face, she entered the alcove, closing the door securely behind her.
Chapter 4
The Girl
The stone door closed with athunkbehind the girl, sealing her in the Seeing Room and effectively cutting off all sound. The silence was so oppressive that there was almost a sound to it. The room was small—when the girl sat in the middle of the space, she could touch the walls on either side of her—and circular, with stone walls and a ceiling that seemed to stretch up into oblivion. Altogether it seemed too small and yet too vast for the girl. She took a few tentative steps until her feet reached the small sitting rug that dominated the floor space. It was pitch black with thousands of runes stitched in a haphazard pattern around the perimeter. The girl could identify a few of the runes, but not many. There was one for foresight, one for memory, one for projection, one for protection. Beyond that, the strokes and dots that created the ancient script were lost on the girl. While every Mage was taught the basics of Blood Magic, its intricacies belonged to the Bondsmith, who, along with the deepest knowledge of runes, was lost in the Sundering.
The rug, like the room, was generational and sacred. Each Keeper, once they accessed Solace from this particular room, added their own runes to the rug based on what was shown to them in Solace. There was a small stone bowl built into one of the circular walls which contained a needle and thread. Before stitching her own runes, however, the girl would need tobathe the thread in her blood. Her blood was simultaneously an offering to the goddess for her visions and wisdom, and acted as a bonding agent for the potent magic that was conjured just by creating a rune. The girl gazed at the rug, noting that some of the runes were darker than others, indicating that they were bathed in the blood of her far ancestors, whereas a few runes stood out in a lighter red hue, indicating that her mother or grandmother had added those to the Seeing rug.
The girl sank to her knees on top of the rug and let her fingers trace over the runes. Each time she touched a rune she felt a tingle in her fingers and a small flash in her mind’s eye—sometimes she saw the face of an ancestor when they had come here, sometimes she saw the meaning of the rune. It was a heady feeling, this connection with her ancestors. The more she touched, the heavier the air around her felt. The air was thick, almost as if the souls of her ancestors existed in this specific place and were coming to greet her as she took her place amongst them as a Keeper, a Matriarch. The veil between Solace and the waking world was much thinner here, making it not only easier to access Solace, but also easier to see both into the past and the future.
Once the girl’s hands had touched all the runes in the circle, she brought them back to rest lightly in her lap. She was surprised to see that the skin on her fingers was unchanged, even though they still tingled as if magic was constantly running through them. The girl took deep calming breaths, attempting to find her center after the chaos of the day.
Was it really just this morning that she had found her great-grandmother in Solace?
The thought seemed preposterous to the girl. The day simultaneously felt like it had lasted a lifetime and an hour. She continued to center herself, attempting to forget the horrors that awaited her when she inevitably left the safety of the Seeing Room. Gradually, the girl’s eyes closed and her breathing evened.
All at once, she felt her mind catapult her into Solace. But this time, instead of walking through the long white hallway, the girl was unceremoniously deposited outside of a door. Gone was the serenity that existed when she accessed Solace earlier this morning. In its place was a deep foreboding feeling that seemed to permeate and vibrate the very air. It was like the world was on the brink of something and Solace couldfeelit happening.The doors around the girl rattled with an unseen force and the ground beneath her rumbled.
