“Who are you?” I ask it.
Before our eyes, the raven shifts into a beautiful woman, with the same white hair as our mother. She stands before me, naked and graceful, and says, “I wondered when you’d ask.”
Magic Forgotten
Catacombs, Castle of Nigh, Arcathain
Dimitri shrugs off his leather tunic and shoves it toward my aunt. She takes her time slipping into it, as if she’s thoroughly unphased by her naked flesh.
“Who are you?” my sister asks, her tone less bewildered and warm than my own.
The woman turns to face her, her lips twitching. “You must be Kalli. I am Imryll, your aunt.”
I could’ve guessed as much. The woman is the spitting image of our mother. White hair. Hard set eyes. Sharp features.
“I didn’t know we had an aunt,” Kalli snaps.
“No, you wouldn’t. When the Blight came for Harwood and your mother left, she decided to leave everything about her druid life behind, including me.”
“Druid life?” I ask.
“Ah, my apologies. I forget how little you two know. Evelyne promised to tell you when you were of age, but I suppose she didn’t get the chance. The druids are a well-kept secret, but they are the dwellers of the Forgotten Forest of Eyve. Long ago, the humans knew of them, but they were mostly left to their own devices. It’s why it was so easy for the humans to shut us out and lock us away with the Primordial: they did not know us and so they did not care for us.”
“You weren’t…alive then, were you?”
My aunt laughs. “No, I’m afraid not. But the stories are passed down and I know them well. But this hardly seems like the time for me to educate my nieces on their upbringing. Shall we move?”
“We can’t,” I tell her. “The gates, they can’t be broken.”
Imryll tosses her hand in the air. “There is much for you two to learn.”
She closes her eyes and aims her hands at the ground. The floor begins to quake, the stones cracking and breaking apart. The floor hitches, the iron bars cracking apart from the stone ground.
Kalli and I step outside our cells, me with wide eyes, Kalli with skepticism.
“The druids are mages?” Kalli asks.
Imryll laughs again. “I’m afraid not, but we’ll talk more about that later. For now, we must run.”
“But where are we going?” I ask her.
“To the Eyve, of course. Now that you both know who you are, and since you’re being persecuted for it, where else would you go?”
I haven’t thought about him in a while, but suddenly I say, “We could find our Uncle Adrien? I ran into him, when I was in Ashenvale.”
“Of course. Adrien is already waiting for you in the Shadowthorn. He knows you summoned me, and he awaits us to find him.”
“Uncle Adrien’s alive?” Kalli asks.
“I-I can’t just let you leave.” Dimitri’s voice cuts the conversation off at its knees. “I don’t want you to die, Halira, but this…you can’t ask me to do this.”
Imryll raises her hand, an all-too-magical gust awakening in the room around us.
“Wait,” I tell her, racing toward Dimitri. “Please. Just this once, when it is most important, don’t think about the rules. My life depends on it. My sister’s life. You of all people know what it’s like to—”
“Don’t.” He jerks his hands away from me, but I reach for them again.
“I’m sorry, Dimitri. I know it hurts, and it seems like a low blow, but it’s the truth. If you prevent us from leaving, then you’re killing my sister. You’re killing me.”
A muscle ticks in his jaw and he hangs his head low.
“Please. Allow us to pass. We will leave and never return, but at least you’ll know that it wasn’t you who allowed us to die.”
Dimitri’s confliction only gnaws at him the more that I speak. His expression becomes as hard as stone as he watches me, considering our dwindling options. I know him well enough to know that his call to duty is too powerful, no matter how much he cares for me. Because the truth is, I’m no longer all that he has. I’d been wrong. After yesterday, he now has hundreds of brothers and sisters, an entire legion of Crusaders who would defend him and he would them. And regardless of what happens to me, he will need to live on, and the Shadow Crusade is his life now.
So when he takes my chin into his fingers, I flinch at the gentleness with which he raises my eyes to meet his.
“I will not let you die.”
Tears prick my eyes again, but they have no time to fall. I give him an appreciative nod before returning to the others.
“We should do as Silver and Güthric did, and head to the catacombs to gather some necro-ink. We might even be quick enough to meet them there and take them with us.”
No one argues my point. In fact, none of us utter another word as we sneak through the grounds. Fortunately, the courtyard is sparse of any Crusaders. After Alphonse’s orders to pack up, I imagine many of them are inside doing just that. It allows us to go undetected as we flank the west side of the castle and head north toward the catacombs.
Instead of going through the main entrance, we opt to go around the back to where we know we will find bodies, if not already drained necro-ink.
But from outside the recently repaired doors, the conversation occurring from inside reaches us.
“These are my catacombs and you’ll take no necro-ink from them!” the Spirit Keep shrieks, shrill and defiant. “The dead will haunt you if you so much as steal a drop!”
Kalli, Dimitri, and I duck near the door, listening to Silver and Güthric barter. But the Spirit Keep won’t give them any necro-ink, which means she likely won’t give us any either.
“What are we going to do?” I ask my sister.
But as I turn to her, Imryll steps out from around the ramp, her arms outstretched and wind gusting at her back. It blows the doors wide open and she strides into the morgue, drawing the attention of all three of the people inside. With a flick of her wrist, she calls to the vines of ivy climbing the stone walls, and they slither inside along the floor like snakes. They reach for the Spirit Keep, and she scrambles back, but they take hold of her ankles, hold her in place as they climb the rest of her to restrain her torso and arms, and then secure her to a wall.
“Sorry,” Imryll says. “We don’t have time to negotiate. We will only take what we need. The vines will release you once we’re gone. I hope you understand.”
We fill our vials in a fresh bucket of black ink, then grab one more vial each and fill another. Silver hands me my battle-axe as well as Tor’s dagger, and hands Kalli the shortsword that I think had belonged to Sai.
“Oh,” my aunt says, drawing my attention away from the dagger in my hand. She unbuttons Dimitri’s tunic with slender fingers and eyes the Spirit Keep. “I’ll be needing your garb as well.”
When the Spirit Keep doesn’t respond, Imryll has her vines remove the tattered thing from her themselves. The rest of us avert our eyes as both women are bared before us, and though I feel guilty leaving the older woman naked and restrained, we flee the catacombs not a moment after Imryll is clothed again and dash for the Shadowthorn, filling Silver and Güthric in about my strange aunt along the way.