A strange feeling stirred inside her chest. A feeling of having been here before making her slowly survey the rest of the cottage. Anelize looked to where there was a small seating area. A few chairs and the table she’d knocked into were coated in a thick layer of dust and snow, cracked ceramic cups and dishes forgotten to time. And to her very right was a bed nestled in the corner, a small wooden cradle beside the opened window, the tattered curtain hanging off the rod shifting in a faint breeze.
Across the room, she noticed a door had been left ajar which led into another room. Slowly, she approached the door and pushed it wide open, peering inside. It was empty, save for a knife having been left behind on the ground and a wall full of strange carvings. Every crack and corner. Runes of some sort.
Anelize wandered inside the room, feeling a strange pulse ofothernessaround her. Her power stirring awake, as if it sensed a heartbeat nearby. Only there was none to be found.
She did not know what the symbols meant but as she approached them, she had the strangest sense that she recognized them. They called to her, as if urging her to learn their language. Explore them.
Anelize placed her palm along one of the carving’s and winced when a sharp edge suddenly sliced intoher finger. A drop of her blood fell and dripped over one of the strange patterns—a red smear, like paint filling the hewn curves.
Then, she felt it. A pulse of power, so sudden it felt as though a wave emanated from the bloodied rune, stealing the breath from her as she felt it again, and again. Filling the room with light that rose and fell as all of the runes seemed to shimmer with light. Wisps of blue and red shifting over the walls around her.
Through it, she heard the distant sound of her name. A familiar voice, though she knew not who it belonged to. An echo of a shadow that barely held the silhouette of its owner. Obscured by the distant darkness surrounding that voice.
Anelize, Anelize, Anelize…
The power seemed to wrap around her, the voice growing so loud she feared her head might crack in two. The wisps wrapped around her like the hands of phantoms, pulling her away from the wall and spinning her around. Anelize froze as she found herself standing in the same room, only now there was a woman a few paces away from her sitting upon a wooden bench. Before a loom. Her long fingers pulled and spun the pale threads before her as she hummed her song, a familiar sound Anelize had heard before in her dreams.
“So, you’ve come,” the woman rasped when she finished her song. “Is it power you seek or truth?”
“Truth?” Anelize murmured, her voice echoing around her. Uncertain if the woman was speaking to her, she glanced around the room, only to find that there was nothing but darkness awaiting her. The door she’d walked through no longer there. Only the markings on the walls, and the woman seated before her creaking loom.
“It will come at a cost. As all power does, but be warned itwill always be lost. Sooner rather than later. Nothing more but a taste. Truth is power, only you cannot choose when to accept it. You cannot cower from it, though you may wish to do so.”
Anelize stepped closer as the wood of the loom creaked, the woman never slowing in her weaving until the ivory threads began to slowly turn red. As if she’d started to dye them. It was only when she grew nearer that Anelize realized it was not dye, but blood coming from the woman’s sliced fingertips. The skin sloughing with every pass she made. It was unsightly, though the woman showed no sign of pain.
The crimson red appearing to glow in the dark cavern of the room.
The woman looked up at her, still running her fingers over the threads as though in a trance. Anelize gasped at the sallow skin along her face and bright burning eyes watching her.
Her lips parted, revealing blackened teeth the same as the Moroi’s as she hissed, “Long have I waited for you. Yet you are far from ready for the truth I have to offer, Anelize Yarrow. Alas, too weak to hold the true power I must share.”
“I do not want power…” she said.
“So it would seem.” The woman tilted her head curiously at her, black ink shifting amongst those shimmering eyes of hers. “Then why have you come? What is it you seek now?”
Anelize swallowed nervously. “I want…to find my sister. I want her returned to me. I want to put an end to all of this.”
“This…the king and his men? The war of blood and ghosts that haunt the streets of Elvir. The history of mad men and their makers. The saints turned into demons.” the woman murmured.
“Yes.” Anelize swallowed nervously, her entire body feelingas though it were a fraying thread. The power around her making her feel uneasy with every wave that swept over her.
“Everything comes at a cost.”
“What is the cost?”
The threads stopped spinning once the last of them were a deep red. Blood dripping onto the floorboards, creating a slow viscous pool gathering near the woman’s bare feet. The woman slowly rose from her bench, practically looming over Anelize. She took a staggering step back as the woman slowly turned to face her, hands streaked with her own blood as she reached for Anelize. The same as she’d done in her dreams.
Anelize froze, could not move as the woman looked at her intently. Trailed her fingers over her face, to her eyes.
“Everything,”she said, her lips parting as the threads of the loom snapped. Swirling and stretched around them as they unspooled from the loom, as though they had a life of their own the threads surged and began wrapping around them into a cocoon of power that burned Anelize as they grazed her skin, down to her veins. Whispered with voices, sharing their secrets with her in a language of old and new. Power unlike anything she’d ever felt before. Calling to her. Urging her to hurry. The woman said, “Though you already know that. It is why you have come to me once more.”
Tears ran down Anelize’s cheeks as she stared up at the woman as she was wrapped into a sea of red, her eyes the last to go.
Anelize screamed as the threads tightened around her, crushing her very soul as it grew to be too much with a power that seemed to fill and drain her completely. Reducing her into a mindless puppet, slowly killing her?—
“Anya!” a deep voice yelled as a hand gripped her arm in avice, yanking her away from the threads and into the light. A bright, warm light that filled the room.
She hardly realized she was screaming as she tried to push away the hands that gripped her, shook her hard enough that her teeth rattled.
