But I’ve never known the loss of losing a husband, a companion, the person you’d sworn to spend the rest of your years with.
As she lowers her dark eyes, I see her in a new light now: the wife of a Crusader, a woman who married a man whom she knew would die young and ghastly. Perhaps they lived in Ashenvale before, or maybe they relocated there once he’d been stationed on the Shadowthorn border, but I can see her now, painting the necro-ink onto his skin every morning before a mission into the Shadowthorn, and wondering for days at a time if he was coming home.
“Before you ask,” she says, as quiet as a petal falling onto a bed of flowers. “Yes, he died as most Crusaders do, tucked far away in the Shadowthorn. We never saw him again.”
I jerk my eyes to meet hers. She said we. Her eyes widen when she realizes her accidental reveal. Her lips part, as if she could inhale and take it all back, but what’s said has been said.
She wasn’t just a wife, I realize. She was also a mother.
Silver clears her throat and takes my chin back into her hand. “That was a few years ago now.” She angles my face upward. “Are you ready for the last symbol?”
It takes me a moment to recover and realize what she’s talking about, but she holds the necro-ink brush up and I grimace. Dryly, she raises an eyebrow at me, and I shake away all signs of my disgust. At least it’s out of my system now, as long as I can focus on anything but what is about to be placed on my lip.
I tilt my head up, press my teeth against my bottom lip to smooth out the hump as best as I can for her, and inhale. “Do it. I’m ready.”
I hold my breath when she presses the slick brush to my lip. I continue holding my mouth steady as she drags the brush lower, the cold, slick blood leaving me sticky. If I think hard enough, I can imagine it’s just the honey I used to sneak from our harvest. My mother would find me with dribbles of it down my chin on a daily basis during the harvest. She’d always laugh, a warm, chittering sound, and say to me, “Well, it’s a good thing you’re not in charge yet.”
Only, no matter how I try focusing on the memory, it’s not good enough to convince me otherwise. There is a sweet scent to the necro-ink, like there was with my mother’s honey, but something putrid lingers just beneath it, and no matter how much I refrain from inhaling, the odor still drifts up my nostrils.
With my help, Silver finishes the final line on my chin and closes her vial. I’m silent as I apply her symbols, half distracted by the sudden surge of familial memories flooding my thoughts, while also trying to focus on the precision of my brushstrokes.
The cross I draw on her forehead seems too tall, and it sits in the center of her forehead instead of near her nose like the Spirit Keep’s. No matter how many times I go over the marks under her eyes, they’re always uneven, one of them drooping lower than the other, and the second more curved than the first.
Finally, I have to admit to myself that this is precisely why we’re practicing. I’m not the only recruit who is struggling with this. Despite the steady hands that most of the other recruits have when wielding their weapons, their hands quake with the weight of the necro-ink and the life it once contained.
Since there’s no point in trying to make the markings perfect, I move onto the final line. Using my thumb, I pull her lip to the side to make it taut.
But just when I press the black ink to her lip, someone comes bumbling down the stairs. They take them two—three—at a time, panting and heaving, calling out for the general. The man crashes to his knees when he reaches the bottom of the landing, his black leathers glistening. I hadn’t heard any rain, but I guess this far down, we wouldn’t.
An acrid smell swarms the room after him, and I realize that’s not rain on his shoulders. It’s demon blood.
Panting, bent over with his hands on his knees, he utters, “Demons.”
A Horrific Stand
Catacombs, Castle of Nigh, Arcathain
Alphonse leaps over the crumpled man, bounding for the stairway, black cape rippling behind him. He stops on the first step, twists around, and points at us. “Defend the necro-ink! Go!”
While most of us are left dumbfounded and frightened, the sounds of screams carry down from the carnage above and Alphonse bounds up the stairs after them. If there is a tug on my heart for him, it is too faint for me to tell. Right now, I’m more worried about the rest of us. With the massacre happening right above us, we are trapped down here with no way of escape. Our only hope is that the Crusaders above will rise victorious. Or, if not, that the demons won’t bother coming down here.
But then something that Scholar Amon said during one of his lessons on demons whispers in my thoughts. “They feast on human flesh. They especially love the flesh of the dead.”
What better place to find the dead than in the catacombs?
The Spirit Keep gathers her robes off the cold stone floor and skitters down the corridor. “This way, initiates.”
I stare at the abandoned bucket of necro-ink, wondering if perhaps she didn’t hear Alphonse’s last command.
Fox finds her way over to me and shrugs, apparently noticing the same thing, but it’s not like either of us are going to call after her, or lug the bucket of sloshing putrescence with us. As the Spirit Keep disappears around the bend, the other recruits hot on her heels, we have no choice but to follow. Perhaps the Spirit Keep knows of a place where we will be safe. Perhaps she’s leading us there, necro-ink be damned.
But with every twist and turn down a new corridor, I can’t help but think the path she takes us through is vaguely familiar. As familiar as anything can be down here, I suppose, when you’re walking past shelf after shelf of yellowed bones and chipped skulls. With layers of earth between us and the sun, it’s difficult to keep my bearings, harder still to tell in the darkness if the alcove of skeletons we passed was one of the ones I saw on my tour earlier.
I shove the thought aside and focus on keeping up with the others. Safety, that is the only place she can be taking us, the only place where recruits should be.
But as the acrid stench of blood thickens in the air, my dread builds. I know that smell.
The Spirit Keep turns a final corner and we find ourselves back in the morgue. The young woman’s lifeless body still hangs limp from the slab, as does the man’s.
I realize now that Alphonse wasn’t asking us to protect the two buckets of necro-ink, but the entire harvest waiting back here.
I can tell by the way Silver assesses the room that she draws the same conclusion.
“We are useless without our shadowsteel,” she says, her beauty severe in the face of death. “He can’t mean for us to protect them when we can’t even protect ourselves right now.”
It’s true. Because we had planned to spend the morning in the catacombs instead of training, we left out shadowsteel weapons back in the dorm. Lugging around the long halberds and heavy maces seemed excessive at the time. Now I’m sure I’m not the only who wishes they had kept their blade ready.
Shadows flicker over the stained-glass window. The pane is deeply colored, and tightly designed, so that it’s impossible to see anything happening on the hill just outside. But steel rings in the air, a sharp, whining sound that is only pierced by the guttural cries of the fallen and the hungry snarls of the demons.