Page 82 of Thief of Souls
Keep your enemies closeindeed.
Now how the fuck am I going to get this cursed thing open?
16
“Soraya?” I whisper through the stone.
I’ve tried everything I could to shift the lid. The sheer weight of it is impossible to move, and the distraction across the grotto will only last so long. Which means the only way I’m getting through it is by using my magic.
I pace around the sarcophagus.
Falion Sifted beyond sight.
But how? How did he do it?
Pressing my hand against the sarcophagus, I try to reach through it the way I reach through shadows. Nothing. Nothing but cold stone against my touch.
I can’t help thinking about the first time I ever Sifted.
My two foster brothers hurled me over the lip of a well, and I woke up in a nearby forest.
Nearly a mile away.
I did it once.
But how?
I was four. I can’t even remember what I was thinking that day. It’s my first formative memory, but it’s as shadowy around the edges as the gloom that fills this room.
The well. Strong hands levering me over the edge.
“We’re done feeding you, you little bitch,” my eldest brother said.
I can’t even remember his name.
But Riori? I remember him. I remember that you never dared allow yourself to be alone in a room with him, and as he held me over the edge of the well, he leaned close enough to whisper, “I hear you sniveling at night. You’re scared of the dark, aren’t you? Well, this ends in darkness, you little bastard. And the only people who will hear you scream are the two of us. The well monster’s going to feed well tonight.”
And then he lets me go as he laughed.
That day filled my nightmares for years. Sometimes I wonder if my recollections of it are even real, or whether they’ve become some twisted amalgamation of my dreams.
I fell for what seemed forever.
And then the icy shock of cold water swallowed me whole.
I couldn’t swim.
It was so dark down there I could barely breathe.
I thrashed, and I screamed, and I looked for them, but all I could make out was a thin circle of light above me, with two dark heads peering over the lip of it before I went under again.
And then something touched my foot.
Something cold and slimy curled around my ankle, like a bony hand that was half-rotted.
“You’re not the first brat we’ve fed to the well,” Riori said as he dragged me out of the hut. “You’re finally going to go meet the rest of our brothers and sisters.”
I screamed and screamed and screamed.
