CHAPTER

28

Liam walked the halls of Heavenstone, wishing they felt as comfortable to him now as they had been over the last five years. Other knights milled about, an alarming amount of them sporting fresh cuts and casts for broken bones earned in the battle the day before. Liam shook his head. The combined might of the minor islands had been terrifying to witness, and they’d held on by a razor’s edge. If Weshern had also joined in …

If Weshern had joined in, then Center would have fallen, her people slaughtered, the Speaker executed. Liam tried to push away the thought of what that world would be, and how it would feel to no longer have the Speaker to command his life. Blasphemous thoughts. Weak desires for escape and ease over the righteous path. They didn’t represent his heart. His heart was pure. He was the blade of the angels. He was the flesh on their bones, the blood on their feathers.

“Are you all right?” a servant asked Liam, stirring him from his thoughts. He started to rebuke the young man for disturbing him, then stopped. Liam hadn’t realized that he’d stopped walking. Instead, he stood unmoving before a bare wall. His left hand was balled into a fist, and his forehead rested against the cold stone.

“Yes, I’m fine,” he said, stepping away from the wall. “Just needed a moment to think.”

The servant didn’t look convinced, and that worried look pushed Liam even faster through the halls and up the stairs. His nerves were shot. His doubt was growing. Liam didn’t want to reveal this weakness to the Speaker, but there was someone else who might be able to answer his questions. Someone who might have a better answer than the deflection Marius gave him when asked.

The third and highest floor of Heavenstone was also the quietest and most luxurious. Liam’s heavy footsteps were muted by the thick red carpet. The stone walls were hidden behind long curtains colored violet, with gaps left for a multitude of paintings. Their beauty was incredible, little glimpses of a long-vanished world of deep forests, sprawling mountains, and moon-frosted lakes. There was no crawling darkness in that world, no midnight fire. Just peace.

The door Liam halted before lacked any obvious markings, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any. Liam pulled back one of the curtains, revealing a name lightly carved into the stone: Er’el Jaina Cenborn. He knocked twice, then released the curtain. Straightened his uniform. Waited.

“Yes?” Jaina asked, her door cracking open and her head peeking out. “Oh. Hello, Liam. Is there something the matter?”

Liam worked up every nerve in his body, needing the strength. He was already on tenuous ground, having been reprimanded multiple times for his lack of faith, but he felt he must challenge his past and demand the answers they’d avoided giving him for years.

“My daughter wields flame within her blood,” Liam said. “And my son sprouted heavenly wings to save himself when falling to his death. I want to know how, and why. The Speaker insists these powerful gifts are from the deceiver, but at risk of committing blasphemy, I refuse to accept that as an answer.”

Despite the empty hallway, Jaina glanced in each direction and then sighed.

“Very well,” she said. “It seems pointless to keep hiding it. Come in, Liam. We must discuss this in private.”

She opened the door wider and stepped aside. Liam entered a posh room flooded with fanciful little decorations. He couldn’t help but notice a particularly violent bent to the many paintings on the walls. Like most that hung throughout Center, they were images of the world prior to Ascension, detailing ice-capped mountains, forests spanning hundreds of miles, and deep red rock carved with canyons. Most, however, also contained scenes of battle, be it with swords, spears, or bows and arrows. A few even showed lines of men slaughtering one another with primitive firearms. Others depicted graveyards, disease, or towns aflame. The largest painting was of a dark-skinned man with a noose around his neck hanging from a tree, a crowd of furious people holding torches and rifles above their heads as they hollered silent, permanent rage.

“That’s a cheery one,” Liam said, nodding toward it.

“Given Center’s heavy nostalgia for the pre-Ascension world, I like to remind myself humanity has always been cruel and sinful. It was true then, and it is true now.”

“Then why did the angels pull us into the heavens instead of letting us die like we deserved?”

“I don’t know,” Jaina said. “Perhaps even the angels have a nostalgic heart.”

She settled into her leather chair beside a large bookshelf filled with faded tomes predating the Ascension.

“Know that everything I tell you here is not to be repeated,” she said. “Not even to other knights or theotechs.”

“Understood,” Liam said.

Jaina rocked back in her chair, fingers tapping.

“We were hoping to save ourselves,” she said, staring at him. “You need to understand that. All we did, right or wrong, we did with the best of intentions. Perhaps that won’t save us when we kneel before the creator, but I’d like to believe it so.”

Liam crossed his arms and stood before her, impatiently waiting.

“Go on.”

Jaina smiled bitterly.

“Er’el Tesdon championed the idea for much of his life, and sadly we only acquiesced in his final days. He swore that our reliance on demons for elements would be our eventual undoing, and that by keeping them enslaved we were repeating the failures of the past that led to the Ascension. Plenty disagreed with him, but we all knew our system wasn’t perfect. Worse, every demon that died attempting to escape was forever one less to bleed for prisms. Underneath the dome, we had no means of procuring more demons, and the demons themselves did not procreate. Something had to be done, for no matter how many centuries it took, our supply would eventually run out.”

Jaina slumped further into her chair, her slender fingers rubbing her lips in thought.

“Tesdon’s idea was simple: could humanity harness in their blood the same power of the demons?”

Shivers spiked Liam’s spine.

“Blasphemy,” he said in shock.

“Perhaps,” Jaina said. “But there was a bit of groundwork already established. Men and women, seemingly at random, were born with varying degrees of affinity toward specific elements. That affinity allowed manipulation of the elemental prisms, albeit with mechanical aid. Tesdon insisted the next step in our own evolution was going beyond affinity into actual manipulation with human blood, removing the need for the demons. Once Marius gave approval we began selecting candidates from the populace for our implantation experiments.”

Pieces started tumbling into place, not all of them, but enough to paint a picture that terrified Liam.

“The Ghost Plague,” he said. “That wasn’t a real illness, was it? Our people were being taken for your experiments.”

Jaina nodded.

“We invented symptoms, declared us the only ones able to detect the disease early, and then moved in quickly before anyone knew what was going on. It’s easier than you might think, Liam. First you start with the poor and the homeless, the ones who are likely already ill or isolated. Once we took them, everyone feared catching our fraudulent plague. We weren’t proud of this, mind you, but the implantation process was frighteningly lethal, and due to the nature of our quest, and the need to keep the source of the prisms quiet, we had to explain the disappearances to the populace somehow. We tried inserting prisms of various sizes into subjects’ bloodstreams, grinding them into powder, sewing them into flesh within body parts, anything we could think of. It never mattered. The fever inevitably came to snuff out the subjects’ lives.”

Ferrymen had taken dozens of Liam’s friends and neighbors across the sky to Center, fearful and seeking a desperate cure for the disease the theotechs claimed they’d contracted. But they hadn’t been cured, for there was nothing to cure. They’d been executed. Liam’s head swam, and he asked his next question while certain of the answer.

“You experimented upon me as well, didn’t you?”

“We did,” she said. “Does that bother you?”

“I don’t know.”

Jaina spun in her chair and opened a drawer. Among some papers and books was a broken piece of a fire elemental prism. She took it out and set it on the table before her.

“This was half of the prism we shattered and inserted into your blood,” she said. “We’d reached the end of our trials. Nothing appeared to work. The best we’d concluded was that those with an affinity toward an element survived longer if implanted with that same element. You, among others, had a stronger affinity for your element than the rest of the populace.”

“And so I survived,” Liam said. “Did that prove your theory?”

Jaina smirked.

“You were an outlier, Liam. Among the thirty we tested with incredibly strong affinity, two managed to survive the coming fever, and only then by us submerging them in ice water and forcing liquid into their veins when they could not eat or drink.”

Two survivors. Liam knew the other. They’d discussed it before. A miracle, they’d called it. Their own little miracle, showing how God desired them to meet one another.

“Cassandra was the other,” Liam said. “You experimented on her as well.”

“We did,” she said. “And while you two survived, you were two of hundreds, a pitiful survival rate with no chance of replication among the general populace. Er’el Tesdon’s blood modification program was deemed a failure. Not long after, he himself passed away.”

Liam tried to take it all in, to understand what this meant. Him and Cassandra, the only two survivors … and set up to meet on a blind date by friends.

“You put us together,” he said, trying to keep control of his growing rage. “Why?”

Jaina shrugged.

“I took over what was left of Tesdon’s experiments after his passing. Even if the process couldn’t be replicated, I wondered at the meaning of yours and Cassandra’s survival. Perhaps your blood might be used in further transfusions instead of more prisms? And what of your survival? Did it mean you had inherited the powers we were hoping for? We tested this, of course, draining over a hundred vials of blood from each of you. Every experiment, a failure. No affinity. No elemental manipulation. Nothing.”

Liam remembered being drained of blood. They’d told him they were seeking a cure for the Ghost Plague should it ever reemerge. But they weren’t seeking a cure. They were seeking a weapon, and they’d killed hundreds injecting demon blood into their bodies to achieve it.

“And me and Cassandra?”

“I was curious how further generations of children might be affected by your implantation, and I didn’t want to risk diluting the blood, hence your pairing. A mere final act of the experiment before we sealed away all results completely.”

So clinical. So heartless. As if the time they’d spent together, the love they’d felt between them, meant nothing at all. After Cassandra died in battle, they’d taken Liam to Center and anointed him a new knight in service of the Speaker. It had been a great honor, one that would require great sacrifice. His body bore the tattoos, each one chasing away the sin in his mind. His heart bore the greater scars, the separation from his two young children. Now Liam saw that separation, not as an honor, but just one more part of a damn cruel experiment.

“My children,” he said. “They finally showed the promise you were looking for.”

“At first it appeared nothing more than a slightly stronger affinity to an element,” Jaina said. “Kael’s was with light, but we pushed him into Weshern’s Seraphim Academy instead of becoming a ferryman. I thought his abilities would be better put to the test there. I kept an eye on their training status, not thinking much on them, to be honest. They showed peculiarities but little beyond that. Your daughter even lagged behind other members of her class when it came to elemental manipulation, a quirk that left me puzzled and disappointed. Just another dead end, like everything else involved with the implantation experiments. At least, until your daughter wielded fire on her swords in her battle against Galen.”

Liam remembered that day. No one had told him directly, but too much conversation was filled with talk of the unusual skill shown by the Weshern Seraph. His heart had been filled with pride, and he’d asked Marius for a chance to meet with his children. The Speaker had chastised his weakness and warned that even then his children might be succumbing to the words of the heretic, Johan.

“We attempted to take them in quietly,” Jaina continued, as if oblivious to the fury growing in Liam’s breast. “Sadly our attempt failed, and it was only after Galen’s fall that we apprehended one of them for renewed experimentation.” She sighed. “Such a shame Breanna escaped. Her blood was everything we had ever hoped for. If only the process were not so fatal, but even if it weren’t, I have a feeling the rest of the Erelim would not allow it to continue. The rebellion of the so-called Phoenix of Weshern is a vibrant warning as to what may happen when power is given freely to civilians of the minor islands instead of being tightly controlled.”

Jaina stood from her chair and brushed off her robes.

“I understand this is a lot to take in,” she said. “Remember—we had the best of intentions for our experiments. Our whole race, freed from reliance on demon blood. Some suffered and died due to those experiments, true, but they died for a noble cause.”

Liam touched his shaved head with his fingers, tracing the lines of tattoos he knew by heart. Er’el Iseph had repeated words of repentance and salvation during the tattooing process. Cleansing his soul from the sins he’d developed on Weshern, he’d claimed. Elevating his mind to become more than a lowly Seraph and a father, but instead a true knight of Center. A blade for the angels. Teaching him to revere the Speaker above all, to put his wisdom above family, friends, and country. You were chosen, Iseph had claimed. Your name whispered by the angels themselves to join the holy ranks.

“Marius … the Speaker swore the angels spoke my name and spared my life,” he said. “None of what you say denies that. I survived. My wife survived. Two of thousands, and now our children … our children bear blood blessed by the elements.”

“I would hardly call it blessed,” Jaina said, frowning at him. “It is still demonic essence that empowers them.”

“You would deny the Speaker’s interpretation of events?”

The woman looked exasperated.

“I would state the mere facts, knight. I don’t need fanciful retellings to cloud my understanding of this world. Your son is not blessed from the heavens. No divine intervention spared his life. The flaming swords your daughter wields are mere tricks used by manipulating fire in a way other Seraphs never thought to attempt. Just like their parents, they’re nothing but statistical aberrations, freaks of nature that will never be replicated in our lifetimes. To be quite blunt, they’re lucky to even exist.”

Freaks of nature, thought Liam. Statistical aberrations.

Liam lunged, his left hand closing about Jaina’s neck and slamming her against the painting of the hanged man. His right gauntlet jammed into her stomach just below her rib cage, pinning her body to the wall. All his vision turned to red. All his emotions raged within his veins.

“I am not a freak,” he hissed into her ear. “My children are not aberrations. We’re not failed experiments. We’re human beings, you fucking monster.”

“Human mixed with demon,” Jaina said with great effort, her face turning pale. “Which side controls you now?”

The blade sprang from his golden gauntlet, piercing straight through to the heart.

“The father,” he told the dying woman.

She tried to scream. His fist tightened, choking out the last futile gasps. Blood dripped across his golden gauntlet. Tears trickled down his face. He pulled the blade free as her body stiffened and let her collapse to the floor. His rage washed away, replaced with a growing panic. He stared at the blood-soaked blade as if it were a traitor.

“What have I done?” he whispered.

Killing a member of the Erelim was one of the greatest sins possible against heaven’s design. Only slaying the Speaker was worse. At his feet lay the body. Her blood marked his clothes. There would be an exhaustive investigation; could he hide his guilt under such questioning?

No, he knew he could not. Liam had just ordered his own death sentence.

You gave in to your anger, a soft, mocking voice assured him in his mind. Accept it. Own it. Perhaps confession will grant you mercy when you hover above Hell’s fire.

Perhaps. Perhaps not. Liam could not concentrate on it now, not with the body collapsed before him. He had to get out. He had to think. Liam used Jaina’s robe to clean his sword and gauntlet, then hurried to the door and flung it open. He had to buy time. Had to get away for a moment.

No distance is great enough, that mocking voice insisted. You know that, Liam. Hiding only compounds your guilt.

Liam ran down the empty hall anyway, painfully aware of the blood that stained his pristine white uniform. He was halfway down the stairs when he heard the first of many horns.

Have they discovered her body already?

It was nonsense, panic speaking instead of logic. He knew what that signal meant. The angelic knights were being called into battle. Liam stepped onto the lower floor to see knights and servants rushing toward the armories. They paid him little attention despite his halfhearted attempts. Something was wrong. Even when the combined might of Elern, Candren, and Sothren had invaded, the people of Heavenstone had reacted calmly to the threat. What could possibly disturb so many so? He saw knights scrambling half-dressed, others shouting at theotechs for extra elemental prisms.

Determined to get an answer, Liam grabbed a half-dressed knight by the shoulder.

“Do the Seraphim attack again?” he asked.

“I wish,” the knight said. “It’s not the islands. It’s … it’s demons. They’re swarming all four minor islands.”

Liam’s dread grew. So this was it then? L’adim’s great invasion? They’d battled a taste of it when the fireborn fell, but now after all of Marius’s warnings, the true war had arrived.

“What is our task?” Liam asked. “Where shall we fight them?”

“Weshern’s the only one who sought peace when the others attacked, so it sounds like we’ll be going to Weshern’s aid first.”

The aid of my children, Liam thought, new purpose flooding into him. The salvation of their home.

“To battle then,” he said, saluting his fellow knight, hoping to inspire away his fear. “To a noble cause, and a nobler death.”