Page 90 of A Liar's Twisted Tongue

“Why wouldn’t you fight back?” I ask, genuinely shocked that she hadn’t. It doesn’t seem like Aralia.

“It’s a long story,” Aralia says, and I get her point: don’t push me.

I don’t say another word about it.

I’ve been going back to the coast every day to make sure the Lucent doesn’t resurface. Some things don’t add up, like how he had another blade on his person but didn’t stab me a second time, even when I had the knife and stabbed him in the neck. He didn’t even fight me. I’m not at all sure that he was even trying to kill me, and that scares me more than anything.

He wanted something else from me.

On a particularly emotional day, I went to Lucian. Well, first I went to his suite, then the Nepenthe in the blue beanie—Azaire—told me to look in the art room. I didn’t know Lucian was an artist, not until I stumbled in and found him in front of a canvas, paintbrush in hand.

I closed the door. “You don’t think we should’ve buried him, do you?”

He looked at me for a long moment, his eyebrows falling over his eyes while he took me in. It was like he saw the emotional weight of it all. I didn’t feel this bad after the Folk, I guess because I didn’t let myself. But now I’m feeling them both, and on top of them, there’s the dream. It’s more like I’ve killed two people in the last week, not just one.

Lucian said nothing when he walked across the room and wrapped his arms around my shoulders, his hands weaving up and through my hair. I didn’t have it in me to not grab onto him either. It felt good and it felt bad, good to be held and bad to be held by the one person who knows too much. The one person I don’t want to know anything.

When he finally finds out where I’m from, he won’t go out of his way to protect me anymore.

I’ll take care of it, he said, but he didn’t realize that those words are a contingency; they don’t mean anything to our future selves.

Whatever he feels about me is bound to change. So whatever I feel about him has to stay bound.

At the time in his arms, I didn’t know which was more worrisome to me—that the Lucent’s body would resurface, if what Lucian said was true, or that I killed a man and didn’t give him the proper burial. But the Lucents don’t bury their fallen like the Folk, they send them into water. Before I remembered that I realized I was more scared of being caught, which just made me feel worse in the end.

I killed someone and am worried about myself. I didn’t even think about his family until today.

I’m sitting at the coast, looking into the sea like his body is going to float to the surface. I killed someone’s best friend, or brother, or maybe father. And all I’m worried about is what’s gonna happen to me.

My conscience is stained red.

My notebook sits in front of me, opened to a new page, but I don’t think I have anything new to write. A girl named Nova started showing up in my dreams, blonde hair and a laugh like a gods, and I’ve already written about her. She’s the first person I’ve dreamt of who I didn’t know.

I wonder when I’ll kill her too. That’s what happens with the dreams, right? I just keep killing these people.

My thoughts spin in circles, all the way back to the blade on the man’s hip. He aimed for my shoulder and didn’t aim again. He wasn’t going to kill me. That becomes more and more obvious with each day.

The whispering comes again. It’s been coming every time I come to the coast, as steadily as the wind. I’ve almost gotten used to it, like the dreams. But this time it’s different; it’s loud and debilitating, infiltrating my mind and subsequently the only place I have left to be honest. So, let me be honest, I am losing my mind.

Aren’t I?

The whispering goes and I’m left hunched over myself, regaining my sanity. That was the worst attack by far, and if the dreams are any consolation, it’s only going to get worse. It will get worse, and I will get used to it.

When I catch movement from the corner of my eye, I turn my head as quickly as I can. If someone sees me here and then the body resurfaces…

There’s no one there.

But when I turn my head back in front of me, that’s when I see it. A corenth, with gray fur and a blue glow coming from beneath it. Several pairs of furry antlers poke out around its head, and its eyes are the color of snow. Not that I’ve seen snow before, I just know that it is pure white thanks to my mom.

I reach for the dagger at my waist, but the corenth makes no move to harm me, and I don’t think I’d be able to take down one this big with something as measly as a six-inch bedazzled blade.

The corenth looks at me while I look at it. I swear there is pain in its eyes, which doesn’t make sense. Corenths don’t feel emotions like orphias, they’re lesser creatures that don’t even have their own souls. And yet, its eyes look like any of our own.

Causer… act… us…

For a brief second, the whispering wind becomes audible. But it doesn’t stop me from bringing my hand to the hilt of my dagger.

Act… Never…

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