Page 88 of Angel in Absentia
Clea remembered a glimpse of this feeling from King Kartheen’s castle. The energy was familiar; it was a presence on the edge of control, and Ryson was still now, his face tilted up, his eyes closed. His weapons hung loosely by his side and then slid from his fingers.
They fell onto the frozen earth with a dull clink. For the first time, the silver dissolved from Ryson’s hands and he lifted blackened fingers, pushing them over his face and through his hair as if he were taking off a mask.
The vibration Clea had felt intensified and Prince answered the question that she’d forgotten she’d even asked. Just as he answered, she saw the smile on Ryson’s face, and knew the being she watched in warfare was an entirely different creature than who she’d spoken with an hour before.
It’s power.Prince replied.
A ripple moved through the smoke beyond Ryson, and a shadow as large as the city walls loomed against the red and black haze. Ryson looked so small in comparison, just a man, overshadowed by a beast of legend.
Prince’s words continued as Clea balked in horror at the stature of the beast.
Veilin so often speak of the suffering of Venennin, but they never speak of the pleasure of power that tempts Venennin into such suffering.Prince continued.
The darkness swirled and peeled around them, violent strikes of power manifesting and burning through the air. A figure lifted and loomed above them all, Ryson and Alina standing side by side again as this massive, rotten beast rose high into the sky, a shadow in the smog.
Clea knew it was Javelin de Gal, arriving in the battle at last. He was larger now, no longer a mirage in her dream, but the beast in all its presence.
Oliver Padren perhaps suffered the worst fate of them all. Ryson kept his heart from cien. Alina kept her mind. Oliver kept his body from cien–an unfortunate choice, since cien then claimed his heart and mind, condemning him to the fate of the beast he is now.
Javelin broke through the smoke with a sweeping claw. Alina was struck down, transforming just as the long nails sliced through her and cast her form back into the nearest city wall. The wall exploded with the force and Alina’s form vanished inside it.
Ryson laughed, a laugh tinged with pleasure and madness, and she sensed something in her heart darken–in his heart, as if it knew what would come next. Ryson’s human shape suddenly seemed fragile, like glass, aching to break.
The end is here. We should retreat. We are too close.
“No. Wait,” Clea whispered back, not understanding Prince’s warning when it seemed the battle had just begun. The smog began to clear with Javelin’s movement and for the first time, Clea saw Javelin clearly.
He was a lumbering monster, boiling with rows and mountains of muscle, interlaced with rotting sickness and ice. Two gargantuan horns, one broken, gave shape to his head and formed rows down his hulking back. Fangs like pillars opened in a mouth that exposed rows of teeth spilling down a tongueless throat. His thick lips dripped with carnage, three eyes wide with reddened veins and icy blue pupils glowing like spotlights in the darkness, searching in all directions. Long, snaking tails thrashed behind him, breaking buildings in a chorus that forced Clea to cover her ears against splintering wood. She felt, even then, Prince shielded her from the worst of it.
And there was Ryson, a sole, dark pillar, armed with little but a smile.
Javelin lifted another claw, high into the air like a tower.
Clea wanted to race forward and shout. Ryson wasn’t moving. Why wasn’t he moving?
Stay away.Prince warned.Stay away.
She wanted to argue, wanted to scream. The claw slammed down. Ryson transformed. A blast of freezing air swept through the clearing with such violence that vibrations shivered across nearby stones. Loose structures crumbled. The massive, rotten claw was intercepted by another, the collision so intense that it blasted the fog away as two beasts locked together in an exchange of power.
A wave of potent cien crashed through the environment, and that vibration of power Clea had sensed before intensified into a high too potent to resist. Her ears rang. She felt her consciousness swim as her vision blurred.
Prince!She urged, resisting the feeling as darkness swelled around her and her mind was overwhelmed with it. She felt as if she were being cast inside an ocean, struggling for the shore as it threatened to pull her under. Surrounded by darkness of such a great caliber, she was no longer aware of any battle around her. She withdrew inside her body with the singular goal of ensuring her own light survived within it.
She faded out of the present and was soon standing on the shore of a red and black ocean, the waters boiling up toward her feet.
Give me your soul.The tides pushed and then withdrew again as they said,Let me have your pain.
Another wave crashed against her legs.Give me your sorrow,the waves said,Let me have your life.
A million voices chanted the words. She looked out into the ocean of cien, certain that for a moment she would be lost inside it, before she saw faded footprints of light over the water.
She inspected her glowing body, realizing that she was once again on that vulnerable plane where cien and ansra resided. She was in the shape of her own soul, navigating this plane through that form.
Tenida had spoken of The Eating Ocean–the heart of cien, and as Clea looked forward, she began to follow the lit footprints of residual ansra that guided her over the water.
She knew, without being told, that this was the path the ancient healer had taken when he’d been overcome with cien and lost in the ocean of it. He’d somehow found a way out. He’d found an answer to rescuing himself and the other heroes who were drowning with him.
Clea followed the footsteps across the water, careful not to step beyond them until they led her to the horizon where a handprint of light exposed a door that would have otherwise been invisible. It was cut from the very appearance of the sky.
