It was one thing for him to join the Shadow Crusade knowing that his own life was on the line, but now I’m here too, one more person who he has to worry about, one more person who could be taken from him.
“I’m sorry,” I say quietly, uncrossing my arms. “I didn’t mean to…”
Even as I stare at the damp stone floor, I can see him shaking his head and I can all but hear him accusing me of making excuses again. Maybe he’s right. Maybe I do make too many excuses instead of just owning up to my mistakes.
“I am sorry. I know what you did for me, Dimitri. I know what my actions forced you to do and…I just wanted to find you to tell you that I appreciate what you did. I’m sorry you had to step in and challenge Alphonse’s orders in that way—I know how difficult that must’ve been for you—and although I’m really glad you did it, I promise, I won’t put you in that position again.”
The hard lines of his face soften. He seems thoughtful for a moment, hesitant to accept my apology, but with a begrudging roll of his eyes, a smile tugs at the corners of his lips. “You better not.”
With a smile of my own, I shove him away. He pushes me back, and I instantly suck in a breath between my teeth.
“Shit,” he says, lunging for me. One of his hands steadies my arm, his other grips my waist.
His proximity forces me to swallow, hard. I can barely even notice the pain when I do it. I’m not even sure my ribs are still hurting; all I can feel is the warmth of his hand on my hip, his fingers laced around my lower back.
I look up into his eyes, suddenly aware of our closeness. Not just in this moment, but in all that we share. Outside of my sister, Kalli, I’ve known no one longer than I’ve known Dimitri. We share our childhoods, our adolescence, and now our path into adulthood as well. We’ve been with each other through every hardship and loss, through every challenge and triumph. No one understands me quite like he does, the good and the bad, the irrational and the destructive. I was there for him when he lost his parents, and he is here for me now that I’ve lost mine.
When our eyes meet, Dimitri releases me, abruptly. He backs away, glancing over at one of the bone-filled shelves.
“I should probably get back to it,” he says quickly.
“Right, yeah, no.” Suddenly there is nothing more important than the stone floor, and my eyes narrow in on every crack. “I just wanted to thank you. Sorry you’re on catacomb duty on my behalf.”
I see him shrug out of the corner of my avoidant eyes. “It’s really not that bad. I mean, for me. It’s like I spent the past few years preparing for this chore. I can’t tell you how many dead deer and bears and boars I had to lug around before I could prepare their meat. I bet most of the recruits they send down here hurl their guts up the first few times. You,” he says on a breathy laugh, “you definitely will.”
If he were closer, I’d shove him again. “I love how you find me being squeamish around blood hilarious, and yet we never talk about how comfortable you are around it. Not sure I’m the weird one here.”
“I’m just saying, my lack of discomfort around blood has paid off. I imagine we’ll be seeing a lot more of it before this is over. You might try getting used to it.”
Biting my lip, I try to avert my attention to more pleasant thoughts, but my gaze falls to the skeletons surrounding us and I know there’s no hope of that while I remain down here.
“Well, I guess that’s my cue,” I tell him. “I’ll see you tomorrow then.”
Nodding, he waves and then heads back down the dark corridor. But as I watch him disappear around the corner, I can’t stop thinking about how strange it is that, despite being surrounded by death—quite literally, with the empty eyes of the dead watching us from the skulls on the shelves—that I’ve never found myself more drawn to him, more…enticed.
I can’t turn back toward the staircase until he’s completely out of sight, and even when I do, it’s like walking through the depths of the ocean trying to pull myself away from the boy I’ve known my whole life, and the captivating man he’s becoming.
Dusty Shelves
Castle of Nigh, Arcathain
With my head propped on my hand, and my elbow up on my desk, my eyes flutter as the elderly scholar Amon Cornelius drones on in the background. Fortunately, I’m not alone. Almost every single one of my classmates seems to be struggling to stay awake with me. Well, almost everyone. Maxwell is the only one among us who’s answered any of the scholar’s questions in over an hour. Dimitri is doing his best to stay focused, but even he has to strain to keep his eyes open every time they become heavy. There’s just something so hands-off and anticlimactic about listening to someone teach you about the Shadowthorn, rather than actually learning from going into it yourself.
If I’ve learned anything this past week at Nigh though, it’s that training as a Crusader has been exactly the opposite of what I expected. I always thought they were so desperate for bodies that they basically took recruits, armored them up, and shipped them out across the Shadowthorn border with little to no training. But this?
Night and day, our preparations never end. We spar in the morning as a unit before breakfast, then break for classes. Since Dimitri and I were declared the losers of our match with Güthric, we were placed in this Basics of the Shadowthorn class, along with Maxwell and Silver, who had been bested by Fox and Saimenimus. They keep us separated in cohorts for our more scholarly lessons before and after lunch—even though from what I can glean from Fox in the evenings, we’re covering very similar content—but then it’s back to sparring in the evening.
Scholar Amon waggles his ancient finger in the air. “Mmm, yes. Very good, Maxwell. The Blight is a well of toxicity. It mangles everything in its path—trees, flowers, grass.”
Maxwell beams awkwardly, a thin and proud smile that says this is likely the first time in his entire life that he’s ever been praised. Poor kid. I actually feel sorry for him.
“Some of you might be wondering,” the scholar continues. “Why humans are not marred in its presence, why the Shadow Crusade can send its soldiers into the vile land, day in and day out, and still they return untainted.”
Maxwell’s hand flies up, but it’s only there a moment before Scholar Amon points to him. “The Blight only affects the soil. Legends say that the Primordial Qaeus grew weary of hunting down the humans who’d condemned him to the Forgotten Forest of Eyve, so after years of roaming Arcathain, he decided he wanted the help of his friends, and he reached his hand down into the soil, released his shadows into the earth, and rebirthed the demons and fiends back into Arcathain.”
“Ah-ah,” the scholar says, his thin, wispy beard waggling in time with his finger. “Not just demons and fiends. There are other creatures, far more terrifying and ferocious than those.”
It’s at this point in the conversation that I finally perk up. I knew it. There had to be different kinds of shadowcreatures because otherwise there was no explanation for the thing I’d seen in my cottage.
“Before last week, most of you were simple commonfolk. You lived in the villages and towns that were on the edge of the Shadowthorn, but few of you have likely seen it from the inside.”