Page 16 of On Burning Paths

6

Nyx

With how much Fenric has been feeding us today, the food sits heavy in my stomach, and my throat is tight with emotion I can't swallow down. I don't realize I'm crying until I feel the tracks of it on my face, cool against my skin.

Thorian notices first. He doesn't say anything. He just pulls me in, one arm coming around my shoulders, solid and certain, and I press my face briefly against his chest and let myself have one moment of it before I try to pull back.

Then Fenric wraps his arms around both of us.

Thorian goes still. I feel it, the slight tension that moves through him, the beat of resistance. Then he lets out a slow breath through his nose and doesn't move away. The three of us stand there at the edge of that terrible place while the other teams murmur around us in the low, stunned way of people who have just watched something they can't unsee.

When we finally separate, I drag the back of my hand across my face and straighten.

The groups around us have turned to each other, and Thorian pulls us in to do the same, maneuvering me gently so I'm beside him rather than tucked against him, though he keeps one hand light at my hip, as if he's not quite ready to let go entirely.

Dragging his other hand through his hair, he lets out a breath and says, "I have no idea how we're going to make it through this trial."

I look to Fenric, but his face is a startling mix of pale and blank, his mind stalled somewhere back among the gravestones. I wipe my face once more and lift my chin.

"Okay. Okay. We have to think," I say. When I return my gaze to Thorian's, he's watching me intently. "What do you know about the Ashen?"

A beat passes, during which the eerie silence settles over us like a sodden blanket, then Thorian breaks through it with, “They don’t touch you. Can’t even make physical contact. But they attack in much worse ways when you lay your eyes upon them. Perhaps it’s making eye contact with them, or it’s getting too close to them, I don’t know the specifics. But I do know that if they’re looking at you while you’re looking at them, there’s a problem.”

The fog grows thicker, and it’s hard for me to even remember where Ulric was standing out in the field, before he fell. Surrounded as he was, he didn’t have a choice but to look at the ghosts, at the figures.

Is that what will happen to me? To us? Will they surround us? And then.. ugh.

"They dig into your brain and examine your darkest sins," Thorian goes on, speaking low and quick. "Every time you've hurt someone. Every lie that cost another person something. Every moment you chose yourself when you shouldn't have, every betrayal, every cruelty you told yourself was justified at the time. From there, it goes darker, to the things men have done simply because they could. Thievery. Assault. Murder. Everyone has something, whether they admit it or not. And the Ashen dig it all up out of you and fashion it into a weapon."

He pauses, gaze sliding to the cemetery, before he continues, “They force you to face the things you’ve done until you become judge, jury, and executioner. It’s said that the actual dying is the least painful part of facing the Ashen.”

“Fucking fuck,” Fenric mutters, burying his hands in his hair and rocking forward, then back. He speaks more to himself than to us, starting to pace again. “I keep trying to think of a way around this, but if the warlock couldn’t do it⁠—”

But I’m not listening to him. I’m trying to gather my own thoughts.

“So, they, what—make you think about what you’ve done?” I ask, thinking of the punishments my parents used to put Lyra and I through. Hugging one another when we fought, or writing essays on why our actions were wrong.

“Something like that,” Thorian sighs. “If you’ve killed a man, you’ll feel that fear and anguish, the trickling of life, the sudden dampening of light into death. You feel it all as if it was you. Even the strongest of men will do anything to make it stop.”

“Forced empathy,” Fenric mutters, shaking his head.

“So what if we walked through with our eyes shut?” I ask, demonstrating by closing my eyes. To my surprise, it draws a brief, low chuckle from Thorian, but by the time I open my eyes, any trace of mirth in his expression is gone, and I think I might have imagined it.

“It would be too easy to mess up, to stumble, to fall,” he says, “to open your eyes out of reflex."

“What about blindfolds?” I ask.

Thorian shakes his head. “A blindfolded team, wandering their way through? The others will pick us off before we get half as far as Ulric did. The warlocks have a range attack and would have no issue taking us out from the edge of the grave.”

I fall silent, out of ideas. Together, we stand and pace for another ten minutes. Fenric walks up and down the perimeter, looking out into the cemetery as if it might tell him a solution. Thorian sits down on a stump, abandons his staff there, pulls out his dagger, and begins whittling down a branch into a pointed tip.

And I stand with my arms wrapped around myself, trying not to think about Ulric. Trying not to think about the screams of pain and the blood.

What could he possibly have done that was bad enough to warrant a response like that? He kept screaming out his apologies, his voice breaking like the guilt was going to take him over whole. None of the warlocks seemed like the sort of men who carried guilt with them to me, but maybe that doesn’t matter. It was enough that they did terrible things, even if they pretended not to.

Taking a deep breath, I try to think of anything I've done that could make me feel like that. Thorian says everyone has a darkness simmering within them, their worst sins waiting beneath the surface.

My life flashes through my mind, piece by piece. Growing up with Lyra. My mother denying Valtor, then her and my father dying of the godfever soon after. I remember dabbing at my mother’s forehead with a cool cloth, bringing my father soup from the kitchens.