Page 25 of Angel in Absentia
“I’m daring to say that forties isn’t old anymore. We all need to be ready to live longer. Quit complaining.”
He grumbled again before sinking into the water. He didn’t quite have to go under yet, but Clea sighed as she knelt beside the pool, sitting on a divot that made it easy for her to lower her hands into the water for an extended period of time. Next to the divot was a bell she could ring to bring in aid if needed, and beyond it a carpeted path that led to a series of beds under a skylight.
The beds were arranged under a rotating ceiling so that they would absorb the light of the sun and the moon based on their full rotations across the sky. Clea also wasn’t sure if those practices helped, but was open to the theory that light could improve a patient’s recovery.
If all went well, they’d transfer him to one of the beds until he was ready to walk.
Clea prepared herself for the act, nervous but still focused as she closed her eyes and centered herself in the room. Soon, she leaned forward and placed her hands in the silky, warm water. Ansra stirred with her intentions and spilled into the water until the pool itself glowed brilliantly like liquid sunlight.
She felt the shape of his illness, much worse than during her last attempts. Small strains, muscle tightness, and other minute ailments burned away through his body until all that remained was the curse like a massive black scar that shaped his organs.
This was the barrier she’d felt in the past. It was impenetrable blackness, resisting any tugging, prodding, or visions she had of a whole state. No matter how hard she tried to clear the path for her father’s recovery, the illness stayed.
She did not relent, buckling in for a long and tenuous healing as she felt her heart start to race with the steady exertion of the energy. Minutes passed in such a state, her ansra restoring her father’s lungs and relieving any need to breathe. She felt her father shift in discomfort, knowing that by intensifying the healed nature of the rest of the body, he felt the curse more profoundly inside him.
She remembered how the curse had felt to her, like a separate entity, consuming her, a parasite. She remembered, as Ryson had pulled the darkness from her and broken it down, how it had howled and screamed.
The warlords in the Wraithlands are at it again, he’d said. In the memory, his words changed and shifted, made more explicitas he delivered the message.Someone put their soul into this curse.
Clea resisted the urge to open her eyes, the light lessening slightly with her focus before she reoriented the nature of her healing. She stopped focusing the light on the illness as if it were an ailment. Instead, she healed the curse as if it were a separate person trapped within her father’s body, her energy shifting and intensifying with her focus.
Instead of willing it to leave, she imagined uncoiling it, and after another moment, she felt it quiver slightly. Her father’s body jerked in response.
She followed the most powerful tool of her intuition, speaking through feeling as she opened herself to the presence within the curse.I am not afraid of you. You do not disgust or appall me. I see you.She repeated the words, not sure how much she believed them, but willing herself to believe them.Open. Unravel.She continued to prompt the curse with warmth,Be free. That’s why you’re killing him. To be free from his body. I’m inviting you to be free now. I am giving you another way. I see you.
The curse cracked open at her words, and she reached deep into it like a chasm beneath the sea. She extended herself far, stretching her mind, heart, and soul beyond her body. Her mind searched its mind; her soul searched its soul. Her body remained grounded while her other pieces opened like fingers in a grasping hand to envelop this dark force.
She felt the blackness reach back through her hands, into her soul, and grab her, using her like a tether to pull itself free.She felt the curse crack loose, the withering soul released into freedom, allowed at last to die peacefully.
She prepared to withdraw back into herself, feeling the vulnerability of how she’d extended herself, but something chased the path of the soul, reaching inside her and seizing her.
She gasped into another room, staring as she searched a place surrounded by darkness and ice and a tremendous hunger. She couldn’t breathe, searching the empty air beneath her.
She knew without recognizing any specifics that she was back where Ryson had transported them when he’d removed her curse, at the source of the darkness.
She inspected her body, or the faint outline of it, shaped in light. She wandered forward across a black, icy surface, and ripples of warm light extended out in rings with her movement, crackling like fire against the cien that filled the world around her. Her heart raced, no longer in her chest but in her ears.
These were the Ashanas.
She looked around and saw vines of the illness, connected to souls all across this vast cavern of darkness. The vines pulsed, pumping the illness through the extended corpses to vast roads across the sky.
She realized then that she was standing in two worlds. Standing as her own soul, she balanced precariously on a plane where the soul and body met.
She saw the network of illness, strewn infinitely across the sky, reaching into other victims, not just her father. He was free, butthis web spoke of a hundred other victims, dying slowly in the way that she too had been dying.
A graveling, dark voice groaned, startling her, and she turned. This place reeked of desolation and sickness. The illness that had once rotted her body, and rotted her father’s, covered this world in alternating layers of decay and ice. Frost-coated bodies, frozen in cannibalistic postures as if seized with an unbearable hunger, covered the world like statues. She saw it now much clearer than she had before. This place was no longer just darkness but a vast and terrible wasteland where Venennin ate one another alive, their acts preserved in the ice.
A dark, swollen figure limped for her from the darkness, eyes alight with an electric blue sheen. A swollen, rotten claw reached for her, a wretched deep roar breaking across the dark, icy wasteland.
I see you, it said hungrily into her soul as if repeating her own statements in her healing. A physical claw, perhaps once a Venennin’s but now wrought with illness, continued to grab for her, and she was convinced that one touch of its fingertips would distort the essence of her soul beyond all comprehension. In a power that dripped with death, she felt its name whisper through her:Javelin de Gal.
Fear clenched her heart tightly. So much fear.
Not enough.The words pulsed, filling her body with light that radiated with a sudden flash. The broken creature that had reached for her backed into the dark again and swelled into smoke. The smoke grew around the monster just as her body swelled with light in contrast.
Not—
“Enough,” she said, and the word did not come through her voice but her soul, vanquishing her building fears. It came translated into flashes of light through this world of devastation.
