Page 39 of Bright Soul

He placed a shrouded body on the ground and dropped to his knees. “My Sudair,” he said in a broken voice.

Ravai and I exchanged wide-eyed looks. I recognized the general shape of the body and its delicate, curved horns.

“I-it happened in the night—”

“Stop. Use some sense,” Phaeron hissed. “There are children.”

The head of security looked up, noticed Ravai and me for the first time, and lowered himself further. Phaeron beckoned to us, and we went to him, dinner laying forgotten on the table. His broad palm and shadowy magic covered my sight. We walked out of the room, and he closed the door behind us with his tail.

Ravai was already keening, making high sounds of grief in her throat while her eyes shimmered with the onset of grief. I was a trembling animal next to her, my leathery wings makingshivery sounds. I waited for Phaeron to tell us it wasn’t the Sudaira…that Mom wasn’t dead.

Grief heavy in his voice, Phaeron said, “Ravita, Brazita, go back to your room. I will handle this.”

Still keening, Ravai took me by the hand and tugged my stunned self away. We waited together until our room’s lamp flickered with the end spurts of its oil reservoir. Phaeron let himself in. The meager light reflected the grief in his eyes.

He told us as gently as he could. Mom had died in the night, her body unmarked but her skin cold and her heart stopped. There was nothing anyone could’ve done for her. We stayed huddled on the floor together for the rest of the night, grieving together.

The head of security continued working for Phaeron at the Royal Shadowborn School. Gossip spread amongst the staff and students about Mom’s sudden death and led me to take a peek under her eyelids before she was buried to see if the rumors were true. They were. Her pupils were gone, leaving her eyes flat circles darkened to maroon. I didn’t tell Phaeron I’d seen them, but the sight haunted me for years.

Soon after the funeral, he took me aside and offered me a flower with gleaming blue petals. In a world of darkness, it was one of the only pieces of flora that dared to shine bright. I keened low in my throat as I took the bloom, knowing it was Mom’s favorite.

“I know we don’t know each other well yet,” Phaeron said carefully. “But your mother’s love for you came through clearly in every letter she wrote to me. It is my duty to care for everything she loved.”

He’d come to kneel before me so I wasn’t craning my head. I felt a familiar glimmer of hope. Dread threaded through it at the possibility he was going to crush my dreams of remaining here as Ravai’s sister.

“Without her, I cannot ‘properly’ adopt you, but I would like to all the same. You and Ravai deserve to grow up together.” He put his hand over the one I used to hold the flower’s stem.

“I would like that,” I said in a small voice. I hugged him fiercely when he scooped me up, our foreheads touching briefly in affectionate acknowledgment of one another. He was my father from then on.

Dad treated Ravai and me the same as time passed. He loved us in his own way, as the one to personally tutor us with blade and shadows alike. The other instructors thought we were child prodigies, but it was really endless drills and a ruthless regime of early wakeups and long dinner conversations about values and strategy.

As we grew into our adult bodies, Ravai and I had our petty little rivalries, but we were still the definition of inseparable. We were the star pupils of the Royal Shadowborn Academy. Other students would gather to watch our rooftop duels, the same as when Dad and Endaeron would get a wild hair and show off their skills with battles of blades and black and white shadows. Those days, my sister and I always wore shadowborn black.

I had a quiet dislike for the garish white shade of Myuna and her followers even before the Age of Decay. But the day it started, it became the color of death and betrayal. The teachers and students had paired off in the school’s courtyard for practice duels. It was a completely mundane morning…until it wasn’t.

Myuna’s soul feast was marked by a palpable shift in the air. I’d felt it like a creep of dread across my scalp, stepping away from Dad mid-practice duel to gaze at the sky and then acrosscourtyard, where the other students were backing away from a flash of bone white.

Endaeron writhed on the ground, his claws sunk into his head and his wings tangled around him. Ravai had placed her sword aside and turned him over in a misplaced effort to help him as corrupted magic started to twist and rend his skin and bone apart.

“Ravai! Get away from him!” Dad screamed.

Even then, he’d been suspicious of Myuna, but he couldn’t have predicted that she’d empower and corrupt my uncle’s soul the way she had. He became the Hungering Darkness as a flash of white mist, abandoning his ruined body to jump into Ravai’s. And then he hopped into several more bystanders, leaving behind soulless corpses and further spreading panic.

Dad personally killed the last student Endaeron jumped into, panting with shock and horror as the kid slumped to the ground. Not knowing the true evil Endaeron had become yet, we both thought we’d lost him and Ravai in the same breath. I saw her eyes, chilled by the pupil-less maroon circles staring across the grass at nothing.

“Her eyes…like Mom,” I stammered out, giving away the secret I’d held within all that time.

“Myuna,” Dad growled, hatred turning his face into a snarling mask.

Myuna had killed Mom. We still didn’t know why, and we never would; everything happened so fast after the Age of Decay kicked off.

We received word from the growing stream of survivors fleeing to the school. Myuna had killed and consumed countless others, first reaping the capital city and moving outward from there. Her ghostly torchbearers brought her feast to her. Killed and twisted by her magic, just like my uncle, they were immuneto common weapons yet were cut down easily by shadowborn claws.

Thanks to this, we hosted a refuge for survivors, and amongst them the Hungering Darkness lurked unseen, biding its time. No one was untouched by the insane grief of that time. Most faces were unmarked of colored dust and paint, wiped clean a final time after the deaths of mates and loved ones. Chief amongst them was my father, who dressed for war each day and cleared paths to the school for survivors, cutting down unnaturals with ruthless fury.

I went with him every day I could, afraid he’d get himself killed with the single-minded anger that’d consumed him. The two of us made for an unstoppable team. With my help, he returned to the Royal Shadowborn Academy every day, usually with a new group of survivors in tow.

Though I was still just a teen, I was a witness to history by my father’s side. When it became obvious killing monsters would never be enough to stop Myuna’s single-minded consumption of our people, he sought the insight of others.

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