June DWC Day 7
I could see his face as I pushed down upon the handle, releasing the catch. Roiling brine spilled out from the cracks in the door, black as squid ink and raging from my touch.
Corwin Bloodrose was smiling.
Hester awoke to a deafeningly quiet house.
Recent mornings were filled with the roar of saw blades or the clang of steel on steel, with brief pauses while the engineer sipped black coffee--
-- but not this morning. This morning, the manor was quiet, save for a low, constant drone in Hester's ear.
It didn’t feel like awakening.
The desperate gulp of air and thunder in her heart felt more like a resurrection.
Her head throbbed in time with her quickened pulse. The sterile guestroom ballooned in her blurry vision as a white fog. It wasn’t until she looked down that color entered the world in a jarring streak of dark crimson down the front of her dress.
The implications lingering in the manor’s silence were damning indeed.
“No, I couldn’t have–” she murmured with quivering assurance as she threw back the covers to reveal the full extent of the stain; a bloody waterfall down the front of her ruched bodice and matted in her gilded hair… but not under her fingernails.
So then it was Jerra who–
“No, no–”
Her elder sister would have brought her home to the ranch, away from both Corwin and Zelion.
Her knees floated with each unsteady step to the vanity as she stripped herself of the robin’s egg gown.
The ruined dress was exchanged for a shapeless sweater that fell to her knees. She washed her face haphazardly in the basin; more for the cold water to revive her than to remove her bleeding mascara. The endless tangle of her mane was swept back in a messy collection of pins to keep it from her eyes.
Her reflection hardly improved.
Neither had the silence.
“He mustn’t be dead if I was brought back here…”
Surely not for lack of trying. She didn’t need to read minds to see the intent blazing in Jerralynn’s eyes last night–presuming it was last night? Time was as perplexing a fact as everything else that happened after an officer placed the cloth over her mouth with an apologetically murmured ‘--don’t resist, Lady Mournvalor.’
Her sister instructed him to. She was wise to as well; it was Hesterlynn’s civic duty to stop her that night, whether she wanted to or no.
If what Jerra said was true, Corwin Bloodrose needed to be brought to justice in court, not in a backroom.
Even so…
She crept from her room into the hallway devoid of echoing saws and hammers. Just when she had gotten used to making her morning tea to the sound…
The faintest of words took shape in the ceaseless drone. At first, it sounded like the conversations of people in another room-- but as she grew closer, there could be no doubt they were talking to her.
It was as she emerged into the chilly hallway that she heard a single rushed word emerge from the mist, hoarse and breathless: "... help..."
To her right was the library, and to the left, the door in which Cory told her to never enter.
"... hear me..." someone whispered.
Her slender arms erupted in goose pimples at the plea. Had this quaking voice been hidden beneath the industrial noise all along?
If so, she had been careless in Corwin’s company.
She should run.
The master of the house was nowhere to be seen, she only had to reach the front door. She wasn’t a prisoner (yet); she could run past the illusory boulders and then follow the Light’s guidance to the nearest Argent camp.
Then arm herself and return, knights in tow.
“Please… help me, Hester…!”
The only thing clear in the soft, white noise of the world was the pained call of her elder sister.
“Jerra?!”
The words came from the other side of that damn door.
Her stomach sank as she lifted her hand towards the handle. Duty puppeted her and residual, concentrated aether dulled all reason.
As soon as she touched the door handle, the cries of her sister ceased, the cacophony of unintelligible whispers whisked away on a phantom wind-- all but one.
The voice burrowed in the back of her mind like a slithering worm.
"Little thing," rasped a voice deeper and darker than the ocean's unknown depths. "You bear the mark of an inquisitor, yet it is you who has so much to confess."
Spindly black tendrils sprouted from underneath the door handle, crawling over her fingertips-- up her hand, then her wrist, holding her in place, even when she tried to pull away.
The other voices returned, whispering amongst themselves. They were talking about her-- some of them excitedly, some of them aghast, but all of them without intelligible words. All she could hear was inflection, loud and clear-- like the gallery of a courtroom, they were eager to pass judgment.
“By Belore–!” Hester hissed through her teeth. She splayed her spindly fingers from the handle only to have her palm forced against the brass.
It was profane. The black touch curdled her blood, leaving her cold.
"Do you hear me, little thing?" the voice demanded in the back of her mind. "Turn the handle. Step inside. Tell us all."
The confessor’s moon eyes flashed with golden defiance even as her fingers coiled back around the handle.
My conscience is clean, Hester steeled herself, so certain that all the harm she had ever done was for a greater cause: her family, her people, her god.
Heresy would receive nothing from her but its own end.
“--by the Light’s grace I am made one with all that is sacred,” she swore and twisted the handle.
When it opened, it was thrown, revealing all of its secrets in a mighty whoosh.
She took a single step inside.
The door behind her vanished. The dusty red smell of the landlocked Plaguelands disappeared, replaced by salt on the breeze.
She walked upon a platform made from smooth, glossy marble. A short walk led to a wide, rounded platform, containing a podium upon which rested a single open tome.
All around the platform was the sea. Vast, dark and deep, waves broke upon the platform as gentle as a lover's kiss. She stared out and saw only the same-- nothing but sea, and above it, sky.
All around her, color was drained from the world. Everything presented was in muted shades of gray, as though reality itself had been reduced to static.
The sky was a chandelier of stars-- a smoky haze bruised by pitch black night-- the constellations, dizzying, indistinguishable speckles in the sky. Auroras danced, but held their breath-- quiet, far off blurs of white in the distance.
Hesterlynn’s eyes paled to a meager starlight in a world devoid of the sun.
“The Light…”
Her prayer faltered on her lips as she became acutely aware of her size; tiny and insignificant.
“...guide… my steps…”
It wasn’t the Light that moved her forward, nor was it truly curiosity. It was something deeper, primal; that which drives a moth to singe its wings by the fire.
It was only as she took another uncertain step that she heard his voice again-- and no one else. No whispers, no voices, no other minds.
"You've finally returned to us, Little One." He spoke warmly-- affectionately, with the same tenderness of her doting father, coaxing her ever closer to the waiting tome. ‘Little One’: what Papa called her when he tucked her in at night, when he ruffled her hair and called her to supper. "You're almost home.”
Her stride halted even as the breeze continued to push against her back, blowing her blood-stained tresses ahead of her, tendrils reaching towards the far away pages. A thick swallow worked past her dry tongue as she shakily stood her ground.
“This is not the home I know…”
A distance ahead, the thick yellow parchment of the open book was blank, until a black stain appeared, bleeding out between the pages. What began as a trickle turned into a gush, rolling small rivers down the page, so thick and heavy it dripped off the book's spine and splattered on the floor.
The altar was a decorated thing. Warding spells were carved into the jet black wood, and glowed faintly, awoken by a pulse of void magic in the air. Each rune was drawn in Cory's hand.
“But it knows you, intimately,” the words slithered across her brain. “How you ask for so little, but desire so much…”
“Respect without fear…”
A citizenry that saw a woman who took pride in her work and not a monster who stripped secrets from unwilling flesh. It was for their own protection! Their safety was her concern!
She swallowed hard.
“Quiet intimacy…”
A vision of Corwin’s study, the vibrant magelight’s dimmed so that they might play a murder mystery game by only the ghostly flickers from candles and the crackling hearth.
She shook her head and grit her teeth.
“True love…”
She looked down to her wedding ring. The gold band winked at her in mockery. Hesterlynn drew a sharp breath, pushing down the greedy ache in her heart.
No wonder Cory closed his mind. She wished she could too.
The fluid, devoid of color, poured like blood from a wound and pooled on the marble floor-- a big, dark stain, thick and viscous.
"Your mother brought you to us when you were but a babe," the voice spoke in her head. The echoing seemed to have a point of origin now-- it was somewhere on the platform, between her and the depths of the ocean. "She begged us for a kiss upon your brow, so that we might leave our blessing in your mind."
A blessing!
Yes, that is what mother called it when a young Hesterlynn spoke of all the voices she heard, but not one that required giving praise to Belore. Hester never questioned her mother on the matter. Of course not, one simply did not question Mother.
The longer the voice spoke, the more directed it was. It coalesced in front of her, climbing like wild vines up the side of a house from the ooze. Lightly hunched, he held a cane in his right hand and a faint smile upon his lips.
"And we obliged," the voice continued. "All it cost was one trifling thing. She paid the price gladly, for she knew you were destined for great things."
Her father's mouth did not move when he spoke, but it was his voice she heard in her mind, as though he spoke only a few feet away from her.
His eyes were pitch black like two ink-filled marbles.
"Don't be afraid, Little One."
Hester’s left foot slid behind her. She proceeded to back pedal until the waves lapped at her ankles upon the platform’s edge. Her heart thudded so hard it reverberated in her ears. There was nowhere to run but the endless expanse of the sea or her “father’s” arms.
A trembling hand shot skyward, but the heavens would not split for her. The blade of Light she drew from the aether was a meager thing. It did not burn with the sun’s fury but flickered like a dying candle. She extended it outward in threat, though its point wavered from her uncontrollable shaking.
What has Cory done?
@daily-writing-challenge
To be continued in August~! <3
