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He walks down the hall to the door at the end, then stops, as if waiting to bolster his courage.
I hurry to his side. “Keita, you don’t have to—”
Eyes bright with flames turn to me. “I do,” he says, and then he slides the door open, revealing a chamber frozen in a scene of violence.
The covers on the massive bed are scattered, the embroidered pillows tossed in varying directions. There’s a catastrophic hole in the brightly painted glass doors leading to the balcony, a heavy wooden table lying smashed to its side, as if it had been used as a desperate yet futile barricade. But that’s not what commands my attention.
The people lying in the center of the room do.
There, spread out just in front of me, is a scene worse than any I imagined. Six people—two adults and four teenaged boys—lie on the floor, their opulent robes shimmering around them like silken rivers. The blood that stains their bodies is still bright red, and it dots their ears and noses, and drips like jewels from the claw marks on the belly of the father, who fell holding his sword. I gasp when I catch sight of it. And then I notice what I didn’t before.
The corpses all look peaceful. Given the violence I’ve seen surrounding them, their eyes should be open, their faces frozen in a rictus of terror. But a feeling of peace pervades the room. As if these people have been held somehow, preserved lovingly, just like the rest of the mansion.
Keita sinks to his knees, his breaths ragged. Tears are falling down his cheeks now, the tears he’s been holding back for so very long. Little flames follow their path, almost as if his anger is leaking out. “They should be screaming,” he gasps out, tears choking his words. “When they died, they were screaming. Why don’t their faces look like that anymore?”
There’s a bewildered expression in his eyes as he asks this, and it’s perfectly understandable. Everything else in this house has been preserved as it was the moment Keita left it. Everything but his family.
Why has their pain been erased—replaced, it seems, with peace? I don’t understand how any of it is possible. Then that thrumming runs through me, more powerful than I’ve ever felt it.
I’ve been consumed with Keita’s pain. That’s the only reason I can offer for why I didn’t notice it before: the power that runs through the house, it’s strongest in this room. And it’s coming from a tiny box. Everything in me stills as I see it, the small jewelry box that sits innocently at the corner of the room, on the only table that remains upright in this masterpiece of preserved chaos.
It’s small and so plain, it’s easy to overlook. There are no carvings on it, no gold. It’s just an obsidian box, black stone that gleams dully in the evening light.
And yet energy pulses from it, a song that echoes the one coming from deep inside my soul.
That box once contained my kelai. Hopefully, it still does. I stagger toward it, my heart pounding in my chest. Hopefully, what I’m feeling is the source of my power and not the memory of it, like everything else on this estate.
“Deka?” I barely hear Keita’s bewildered question as I continue onward, my body barely able to hold itself up any longer.
Every step I take is heavy with apprehension. So much rests on this moment, on what I find when I open the box. It could be nothing, an echo from moments past. Or it could be everything: the key to saving Otera, to saving everyone I love.
My head is spinning now, sweat dripping down my face and neck. The nearer I get to the box, the greater the energy that thrums over me, a feeling so familiar and so welcoming, it almost feels identical to the Greater Divinity. Only this is my own divinity—or at least the key to it. The key I’ve been searching for.
If it’s still there.
I glance around, searching for Mother’s body. She said it should be somewhere nearby, except no matter how hard I look, it’s nowhere to be seen. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t here somewhere, hidden in a corner I haven’t yet noticed. I sink to my knees in front of the box, hands trembling as I reach out. But the moment I open the box, I sag, disappointment flooding me.
My kelai isn’t there. I don’t have to look down at those gleaming black stone corners to see what I already feel. It’s been taken. Was likely taken mere hours ago—spirited away while my friends and I rushed through the caverns—the same way Mother’s body was.
The knowledge flows into me so smoothly, I know it comes from whatever remnants of my kelai still pulse around this estate, preserving it the same way tree sap does the unfortunate insects that get trapped inside it.
A wail chokes my throat. A cry of anguish.
All this time, I’ve been frightened of my kelai. Reluctant to find it. But now that I’ve experienced it, I realize my mistake. It’s a part of me, as integral as any organ. It’s mine, and now it’s been stolen yet again by gods who want to use it to destroy me.
They have it and I have nothing. Nothing but these remnants that swirl around me, teasing me with the possibility of what might have been.
It’s some moments before I rise. Once I do, I turn back to Keita, who’s still kneeling there beside his parents, sobbing as if his heart could break. Outside of that first moment when I began walking over to the box, he hasn’t noticed my journey, has no inkling of the immensity of what I just discovered. But that’s what grief does. It blinds you to everything but the devastation in your own heart. And this, what Keita is experiencing, is pure and true grief.
I put aside my anger, my frustration, as I concentrate on his despair. And on the incongruity of the scene around him. I suspected it before, but now I truly understand why his family looks the way they do, why they’re so peaceful, unlike everything else in this room.
It’s because my kelai is a part of me. Has always been a part of me.
Even when I didn’t know it, it knew me, knew how I felt about Keita. That’s why it has preserved this estate the way it has—or, rather, why it rolled back the decay that had fallen over it.
This estate wasn’t always this way.
If I had to hazard a guess, it was no doubt moldering away for years, a forgotten, hateful tomb for Keita’s parents. But then I fell in love with him, started to regard him above everyone else.
