Page 112 of A Liar's Twisted Tongue

And I’m probably gonna need more glamour soon.

When the wound disappears I slide the spatha sword into the sheath strapped to my back. Not that I want to train or learn to swing a sword to wound my opponent or do anything but find out how to get to the not-so-mythical universe we call the void. But I don’t know how to talk to Lucian anymore, who is my only lead. I’m just waiting for him to come to me; after my mom and his sister, it doesn’t feel like I can ask him for anything.

“I’ll be back soon,” I say to Aralia, but she doesn’t respond.

The school is quiet tonight. While I walk the empty halls, I close my eyes, trying to pretend it’s the early morning, before sunrise, and that I’m in the woods with Damien. Mom’s in the dwelling, getting ready to head to the factory, and I’m waiting for an austec to fall so I can throw a dagger in its throat.

The weight of the sword on my back feels nothing like the little dagger in my hand. The stagnant indoor air replaces the crisp morning breeze. And I’m all alone. Pretending to have company only serves to remind me that I have nothing here.

Leiholan is waiting in the training room. I don’t greet him, and he doesn’t greet me. I only unsheathe my sword and he raises his. I’m not in the mood for banter or blame, or for much of anything, actually. Every swing of mine is filled with anger.

After I’ve lost our fight, he says, “Good!” He points his sword at me, flicking it up and down in assessment. “You’re improving.”

“Yeah, I tend to be at peak performance when I’m pissed.”

We go back and forth before he inevitably presses his blade to my throat. I’ve gotten used to the steel on my skin.

I’ve gotten used to defeat.

The next time, it only takes two measly swings and a nick across my shoulder and collarbone for the sword to fall from my hands.

I drop to the floor to pick it up and pull my shirt up higher to cover the wound. The same thing happens one, two, three more times.

It isn’t until we’ve finished that he says, “I think I like you better this way.”

“Pissed?” I sneer.

“Quiet.” He smiles.

I swing at his sword with all my force while he isn’t paying attention, finally knocking it from his hand.

I go back to the suite and slip into the room, lying in bed and pulling the covers over my head just as Aralia’s been doing. I do nothing but try to breathe, keeping my eyes open, because every time I close them I see my mom covered in bruises and blood and dirt.

This is how I spend my night. Taking shallow breaths when I want to be taking deep ones and forbidding myself from closing my eyes for too long.

The next morning goes the same as yesterday. Aralia won’t get out of bed, and I’m realizing how much more dreary this place is when my roommate is acting dreary. I pull on my clothes and try to go through the motions normally.

I start going to the library every day, looking for any book that can tell me something, anything, without searching alarm words like “Arcanes” or “the void.” Arcanian War is the first thing I look up, even though that’s risky too. For as much text as they have on the subject, there’s really not much information.

The population of orphia on Iris went extinct—they never say what the orphic population was. So anyone with half a brain knows it’s the Arcanes. Which I do have, I just never had access to any of these books.

Their entire world burned and so did the Irisan Archives, turning all of the universe’s hundreds of thousands of years of history to ash. Over seventy percent of Elysia’s population was wiped out, with Soma keeping over ninety percent of their population—the only world that managed to do that.

Blah, blah, blah. The universe needed repair. Soma opened Visnatus on the free land so they could bring up the next round of leaders and keep the universe from dying.

Not a thing about the Arcanes, other than their homeland burning. Nothing about the void; what it is, how it was created, why they were sent there or how to get there.

Defeat has never tasted this bitter. Like the dirt and blood on my mom.

I decide I have to find the illegal tomes. I remember when the Arcanes became forbidden to speak of—I was six. It was just before the war, when the keepers were getting more and more violent. They killed everyone who even said the word, and the ghost stories became less and less popular.

Lucian is the only person who would have any access to what I need. But I haven’t seen him since I saw my mom. How that one got so screwed up, I don’t know.

A week passes before Ms. Abrams pulls me out of class halfway through a lesson on weaponizing our powers for defense. Air Folk work on taking the air out of a location, effectively killing any living, breathing thing in what could be a thirty-mile radius once they’re able to fully harness their powers. For now, they only suffocate a table’s worth of students and any plants in the area. Light Folk create barriers—like the one that electrocuted me on the first day here—effectively trapping anything in its vicinity. When they’re able to fully harness their powers, they can up the voltage so that any creature that touches their barrier dies on impact.

I didn’t even know the Folk could do any of these things. I keep my confusion, concern, and astonishment from my face at all costs.

There’s nothing for the Fire Folk, I guess because our magic is already so easily weaponized. It’s why my “dad” was such a force in the second brief war against the Nepenthe. He could kill anything for miles just by setting off a fire with his finger. He was just never able to stop it.

---