Conscripted, p.15
Conscripted, page 15
That is if the Dantian was as solid as a diamond.
But Ria did not know this yet. All she knew was that she was feeling good for the first time since the odd feelings began to well up within her just over a year ago.
Feelings that let her know about things she shouldn’t have known, things which regularly gave her a sense of dread…
Her eyes fluttered open. She pushed her scattered thoughts to the back of her mind as she quickly realized that she was not alone.
“Good,” Jarrold said, his voice quiet and calm. “Rest easy and move gently. We don’t have long, but you may take a moment to get your bearings. It will take some time to adapt to your new strength.”
Ria inhaled deeply, then let out a long, heavy sigh. She closed her eyes as she came to a sobering realization.
This is exactly as it happened in my dreams. I didn’t realize what they were, or where they were until the moment they became reality. It’s all coming to pass regardless of what I wanted.
Gingerly, she reached up with a small hand and made sure that her silky raven hair was in place, covering her face, her eyes, and most importantly, her ears.
She then shifted her gaze to Jarrold, who briefly wore an odd smirk on his face before quickly schooling his features. He was a little blurry through the curtain of black hair shielding her features, but she was used to viewing the world this way.
She didn’t like to be noticed by anyone, not anymore. Not since the other kids realized that she was different. Unless you counted...
No, don’t think of him.
“I will leave you for a moment and go find the Lord. He will want to know you are awake so he can come to see you.”
She gave him a small head-bob in response; she had perfected it over the past year to keep from talking to people who didn’t matter to her. Normally, she tried to keep her speaking to a minimum. She still couldn’t believe she had called for help last night like she did.
It must have been because I knew he...
She drove the thought away as soon as it appeared. As she watched Jarrold exit through the tent flap, she quickly scanned the area to ensure it was vacant. The tent was plain, with cots identical to her own stationed haphazardly about the room.
Maybe I should run for it before he comes, and it’s too late to stop myself.
She went back and forth for several minutes, a battle raging within her as the two halves of her will clashed against one another for the thousandth time. It wasn’t a simple war between the desires of her mind and her soul. Rather, it was as though she had been split in two, and each side had its own heart, its own mind. Each passionately and desperately arguing with the other over the best course of action, to finally put an end to the conflict that made her second guess every choice she made and every path she took.
She had never wanted to meet him. Never wanted to get close enough to the crystals for this other power to awaken within her and affect her judgment.
To be trapped in a life that would take me far away from what should be my one and only focus.
But fate had conspired against her.
Every time she tried to flee from what she felt… no, what she knew had to be done, she had been thwarted. Repeatedly. She thought she was strong, that she was wholly and completely dedicated to finding the thing that had been missing from her life since she was but a small child.
However, as soon as she saw him show up on that street last night, she surrendered all of her willpower to flee from what her dreams had told her would occur. When he came to her rescue like a knight out of the worn and faded pages of a romantic fairy tale, her heart melted. What had once been an impenetrable fortress of ice and snow had become a quiet, serene garden, granting her a sense of peace she had never experienced before.
She didn’t want to admit it. Especially to herself. But she knew it was true.
The moment she saw him, she knew who he was. Who he was to her.
His face was intimately familiar, like the birdsong that roused her from sleep at the convent she grew up in or the patchwork quilt of stars that kept her company every night…
Though she had never seen it before that moment.
Every freckle on his olive tan skin, the elusive golden flecks that made themselves known under the light of the sun in his otherwise green eyes, she knew them all. Even the scars that he had yet to earn.
Naturally, she wasn’t aware of the specifics. She didn’t know the how or the why of what would come. Only that they would, and that she would know them intimately when they came.
Somehow.
It was in that moment that she made another startling realization, one that caused the roar in her ears from the battle raging in her subconscious to come to a deafening crescendo… then silence.
They had barely spoken over thirty words to one another on their short walk to the Aloham palace, but...
She knew. Knew in the deepest, most carefully guarded parts of her soul that she already loved him. Just as sure as the night has a dawn, Ria loved the man who had come to her rescue in her hour of need. Who stood by her side as she faced down her fate at the Aloham palace. Who would stand by her day after day, season after season, year after year. She knew.
That, and the fact that she would have to share him with others if he was to become what he was meant to be. What the world needed him to be.
She had fought against this knowledge tirelessly. Over the past year, she had tried to run, to look away and ignore the signs, but in the end, it had all happened precisely as she knew it would. Well, as she knew it would in hindsight; it took the events coming to pass for that knowledge to become clear in her mind’s eye.
Maybe that’s what guided her down the alley last night. What made her choose to walk through the slums instead of the more affluent areas to get to the docks.
Had she already betrayed her goal without even realizing it?
Have I already betrayed my mother?
Tears began to streak down her pale cheeks, and she let them fall freely. The room grew dim, a hazy blur of muted colors darkened by her shield of silky black hair. The world faded away as her head filled with the sound of her own rapid breathing, everything else falling into the background as she allowed herself a brief moment of respite. She could taste the salt as her tears reached her lips and tongue, her clenched fists trembling with the weight of her sadness, as her heart pulsated with a suffocating mixture of pain and longing.
Because they had her, someone in the direction she had been going had taken her mother from her.
The mother she had only briefly known when she was a newborn. She had no memories of the woman who birthed her, her earliest memories coming from the convent for girls abandoned by the war against the Dark Shades that she grew up in.
She didn’t know where her mother went when they parted. Or where she was at this moment, exactly. Only a vague direction that had been leading her toward the sea.
She didn’t have the slightest clue as to what would be waiting for her out there. The only thing she cared about was following her intuition until she reached the place, the person her soul had been crying out to find.
Suddenly, the tent flap opened and in came the Hexinblade, interrupting her train of thought and ruining her chance at escape. She knew that this was the man whose woman had taken her into custody.
Lord Demos.
The name appeared in her mind as though carried by a gentle breeze.
“Jarrold told me you were awake,” he said kindly, not unlike a father to a daughter. “How do you feel?”
Head-bob.
“I knew you would not be one of many words, but her description of you did not do you justice,” he said, an amused chuckle escaping his lips. “I am Lord Demos Woodward, but you may already have some inkling of that already.”
She glared at him through her dark hair. His eyes had a sparkle to them as he leveled her with a knowing smile.
How did he find out about me? Know about… that? I... didn’t expect this part. It was a surprise even to whatever it is within me that’s been guiding me over the past year.
“We only have a few moments before Cal arrives,” he said gently. “I have already spoken to him. Now it is your turn, before we begin acting like you are just another batch of fresh conscripts.”
Her brow hardened, though she held her tongue. This was not the way she had expected this to go at all. He seemed to know about her. Usually, she felt things, never knowing the specifics in their entirety, that later turned into reality.
Not this time, though. This was a total surprise.
But how?
“Yes, I know who you are, child. Possibly a few things you’ve never known about yourself. For example, the surname given to you came from your father. I did some research; he was a mighty yet mundane warrior in Leland before the fall. Unfortunately, he passed when his small outpost in the Galadhor Range fell. There were no survivors.” He paused for a moment before speaking again. “I’m sorry for your loss, though you never knew him.”
This gave Ria pause. Demos had a gentle sadness to him, mixed with a kindness that she didn’t expect.
Can I trust him?
Her inner voice, or whatever it was, didn’t answer her.
“However, this is not the name that gave you your gift,” he continued. “I hope that with this knowledge, you will know I mean you no harm. You come from the Timewhisper clan of your people, a name both feared and respected in your mother’s society. Her given name was Evronia.”
Ria brought a hand to her face, covering her mouth as her breath hitched in her throat.
Evronia.
She didn’t have that knowledge, had never heard those words before now, but she knew them to be true the moment they left his lips. Her inner guide confirmed it for her.
Somehow.
“Your mother asked me to tell you a few things,” he kneeled down on one knee beside her cot so he was at eye level with her. Ria’s heart beat restlessly against her chest as she made eye contact with the Lord Hexinblade, threatening to explode from her chest as she waited for him to continue. “I can’t tell you everything. She was explicit in what I was to share and what to withhold. First, was that she loved you dearly, and hated leaving you all those years ago. But she wouldn’t have been accepted in our world with a half-human child... and taking you back? Well, doing so would have meant both of your deaths. By leaving, she knew your childhood would be far more difficult, but she also knew you would end up right here, years later.” He gestured to the ground beneath his feet with a pointed finger. “Relatively safe and whole of body, in a place that she believed would do the world some good. She saw no other way.”
He stopped for a moment, glancing down in a manner Ria thought might be sorrow.
“When she told me all of this, she was in tears. I suspect there were other reasons why she left, ones she didn’t tell me. She knew you wouldn’t forgive her, but she hoped that in time you would come to understand the why behind what she did, at the very least.”
Ria’s tears flowed freely and unabashedly now; she knew that everything this man had told her was true. She didn’t know how, for she didn’t truly understand the feelings that had been welling up within her, cluing her into things she should not know and sharpening her intuition to an almost inhuman point.
Feelings that were sometimes so powerful that, as soon as they appeared during Harvest of last year, she was convinced to journey far away from the convent she lived at near the Corberg Mountain in the Northern part of the Kingdom. A journey that forced her to live on the streets of small farming towns on her way to the capital, staying a few miles away for the coldest parts of Winter near Riverton until she knew the time was right to enter Aloham itself.
All she knew was that this internal guide was not the same power as that given to her by the blue crystal. It was older, and from a much different source. Other than that, she had no idea.
“As I am sure you have ascertained by now, you have the gift of foresight; this ability came from your mother,” he continued. “But since you only share one-half of her blood, your sight is different from her own. Not as clear, she said. You will not fully understand what it shows you. She said it would be more like feelings that come and go, like instinct or intuition telling you the path you should take, but not why. Later, when these events come to pass, she said that you would feel as though you’d seen it all before. Does this ring true?”
She gave him a small head-bob in response, followed by a sniffle as she wiped at her nose.
“I...” he paused, looking away for a moment before fixing her with a somber expression. “I wish I could fix it for you, child. Truly. I owe your mother so much more than I was able to give her... and didn’t listen when I should have...,” he lifted a balled hand to his face, his fist tightening as he glared at it with a strange mixture of anger and remorse. “I should have believed her back then. If I did, maybe I could have done things differently.”
He shook his head and coughed into his fist, forcing himself to relax as he took a deep, steadying breath.
“No, I can’t fix the past, but hopefully, with no small amount of effort and a great deal of luck, I can change the future. With your help, and with Cal’s. I will tell you the same thing I told him. Tell no one else of your abilities. No one who you wouldn’t trust with your life. Be absolutely sure,” he tapped his chest. “In here, before you bring them into your circle of trust. There is too much at stake to risk our adversaries finding out about the two of you. In time, I will be able to share more. It is up to you and Cal if you trust each other enough to share your secrets. Until then, please trust me at the very least, and follow the instructions I give you.”
Head-bob.
“Good,” Demos said, his smile finally returning as he rose to his feet. “Now, before I forget, there is one more thing Evronia asked me to tell you. She asked that I save it till the end.”
Ria glanced up at him, her tears finally starting to slow as she came to terms with all she had learned from him. This time, she moved her hair away from her face so she could see him clearly.
“If you would have followed her last night, and strayed from what you know to be your destiny, you both would have died having never met again. You must have faith in yourself and in your abilities, and follow the path you know is right.” He tapped his chest near his heart once more. “If you do, there is a small chance that you will see each other again in this life.”
Just like that, the tireless war that had waged within her for the past year came to an abrupt end. The drive to run away from him and find her mother disintegrated into ash, creating a small, lonely void in her chest.
At least she was no longer conflicted. She now knew the path she had to take. Replaying Demos’ words in her head, her eyes widened as she realized what he meant.
She could have both!
A sudden burst of optimism spread throughout her entire body. In that moment, as she realized that she could have what she knew she wanted while maintaining a chance to see her mother again...
The empty void in Ria’s chest was quickly filled to the brim with something completely new. Something powerful, grand, and yes, even a little weird.
Hope.
The tent flap opened once again, pulling Ria from her thoughts, and Jarrold made his way into the room.
“They should be right in here,” he said as another man followed the Hexinblade into the tent.
Her spirit soared when he came into view, and she quickly flicked her head forward to make sure her hair would cover her eyes and block his view of her.
It wasn’t that she didn’t want him to see her. She was no longer trying to prevent her destiny. In fact, she was finally ready to embrace it.
Instead, it was out of pure embarrassment, as she had felt her cheeks heat instantly in his presence. Her breathing quickened and she bowed her head, her eyes never actually leaving him from underneath her black and blue shield.
Despite her actions, she knew that she desperately wanted to open herself up to him now.
All of her.
In a way, she always had, ever since the first moment she saw him on that street last night, coming to her rescue. She knew exactly who he was and what he meant to her.
That he would be important.
She had stupidly fought it until her mother’s words, given to her by Lord Demos, showed her the light. She realized that now.
No, I won’t fight it. Not anymore. Instead, I will embrace it, and him.
“Ria,” Cal exclaimed, a wide smile blooming on his handsome face. She knew it was the one that overtook his striking features when he saw something that made him happy. “I’m so glad to see you’re alright. I was worried.”
Her heart leaped impossibly higher at the excitingly new, yet intimately familiar sound of his voice.
Chapter sixteen
“Ria,” I exclaimed, unable to help my smile. “I’m so glad to see you’re alright. I was worried.”
I couldn’t see much of her face behind her black and blue curls, just a few glimpses of the pale skin that glowed scarlet faintly behind her raven hair.
As I quickly looked her over for signs of injury, I noticed that her shoulders were moving up and down much faster than what would be normal of someone who had just woken up. Her breath came out in short, rapid bursts as if she had just been running.
“Is everything okay?” I asked, concern evident in my voice.
I got another head-bob, but it was sharper than it normally was. Quicker.
“Alright, I’ll chalk it up to crystal side effects then,” I said. “But something seems off. No need to answer. Just... Will you tell me if it’s something I can help with?”
She sat motionless as she took a few more shallow breaths, then gave a micro-head-bob.
“Good enough,” I relented. “What’s the plan…” I struggled to remember his title as I glanced over at Demos. “Lord Blade?”
