Chapter 72: His Self-Inflicted Wound

Raziel crumpled the poster and let it drop.

Five hundred coins?

That was enough for a family to eat for a whole year.

Enough for every pair of eyes in this city to turn into an enemy.

“We have to move,” Odessa spoke first, her hand already on the hilt of her sword. “Now.”

“Where to?” Lucian pointed at the street with a wide gesture. “There are posters even on the lampposts and if we go back to St. Celeste they’ll arrest him at the gate.”

“You aren’t going to St. Celeste.”

Aerion’s voice sounded worn but firm.

Everyone turned around.

The Prince had straightened up.

He was no longer the broken man who sat on the cot with dead hands between his knees.

“Odessa.”

“Your Highness.”

“There is a Crown house in the Shipyard District, my mother used it for private meetings before she died. Officially it doesn’t exist so take Raziel and Lucian there.”

Odessa frowned. “And you?”

“I’m going with you.”

Kiera intervened. “Your Highness, with all due respect, the Royal Palace is twenty minutes away. Your father has men looking for you and if you return now—”

“I’m not going back.”

He said it without raising his voice and without looking away from Raziel.

“I saw what they did to my brother, what he did to himself. And I don’t understand anything so I need to understand what they put in his body and why Ayres attacked me as if I were his enemy, I won’t find those answers sitting on a throne that isn’t even mine yet.”

Silence.

Odessa looked at him for three long seconds and nodded.

“Shipyard District. Twenty minutes on foot if we avoid the main avenues.”

“Then let’s walk fast,” Aerion stumbled taking the first step and Kiera grabbed him by the arm without saying anything.

Raziel watched them move forward.

Lucian got closer. “Hey.”

“What?”

“Five hundred coins is quite a lot, I would have sold you for three hundred.”

Raziel looked at him.

Lucian held his gaze with that idiot smile he put on.

Raziel didn’t smile, but something in his chest loosened a bit.

“Walk, you imbecile.”

The Crown house was a two-story building stuck to a rope and pitch warehouse in the oldest part of the Shipyard.

The facade had peeling paint and an oak door reinforced with iron that didn’t match anything around it.

Odessa took a key from a loose brick in the wall and opened it.

Inside there was furniture covered with white sheets.

Aerion ran his fingers along a door frame and stood still for a moment, looking at the empty living room.

“My mother used to sit there,” he pointed to a covered chair by the window. “I remember because she always left the curtains open, she said secrets need light so they don’t rot.”

Nobody answered.

Aerion sat in another chair and closed his eyes.

Kiera secured the entrances and Odessa distributed the positions: she was at the main door, Kiera at the back, Lucian with Aerion.

Raziel stayed in a room on the second floor.

A small room with a cot, an empty desk, and a window that looked out to the alley.

He sat on the cot.

The parasite throbbed.

Raziel brought his hand to his chest.

It wasn’t a System warning.

There was no notification, no alert, no text floating in his retina.

It was like someone pulled his soul downwards.

The room disappeared.

The cot, the walls, the smell of salt and pitch of the Shipyard.

Everything was gone.

There was only Darkness and wet Stone under his knees.

The sound of water dripping from somewhere he couldn’t see.

Raziel knew this place.

It looked like an underground cell.

No windows, no visible door.

The walls had scratch marks, hundreds of them, and symbols that he himself had carved with a piece of bone.

He raised his hands.

They weren’t the hands of a fifteen-year-old boy.

They were big, with thick calluses on the knuckles and scars that crossed every finger, the nails were broken and dirty.

The tendons stood out under skin that had forgotten the sun.

’This is a memory.’

Not a memory, it was an echo.

The version of him that existed before this cycle.

The adult Raziel was kneeling in front of a circle drawn on the floor with his own blood.

The lines were precise, geometric, traced with the patience of someone who had been planning this for weeks.

In the center of the circle there was a small vial.

Something moved inside, slow, dense, alive.

The Shadow.

Raziel saw himself open the vial.

’No.’

He saw himself tip the contents onto his left hand.

The substance fell on his palm and it was like seeing ink spill on wet paper, but the ink had a will of its own.

It spread through his veins, went up his wrist, his forearm, towards his chest.

The old Raziel clenched his teeth so hard he broke one.

A thread of blood ran down the corner of his mouth.

His whole body shook, his muscles tensed until it seemed like his bones were going to break under the pressure.

He fell on his side against the wet stone, his cheek against the cold floor and the veins in his neck swollen and black.

But he didn’t scream.

He had bitten his tongue so he wouldn’t.

When the substance reached his heart, something changed.

The trembling stopped and his breathing normalized.

The old Raziel stayed motionless on the floor for a whole minute and then opened his eyes.

They were black, completely black.

And he smiled.

It was the saddest smile Raziel had ever seen in his life.

The old Raziel sat up, his back against the cell wall and blood still dripping from his mouth, and spoke.

“If you can’t kill the darkness… make it part of you.”

He coughed black blood.

“It’s the only way to survive Her.”

Raziel’s heart stopped.

’Her?’

Not Zion.

He said it like something that all the threats Raziel knew were nothing more than symptoms of a greater disease.

The old Raziel looked up towards where Raziel was, as if he could see him through time, through the cycles, through death itself.

His lips moved one last time. Without sound.

Raziel read the words.

“She is coming.”

The cell started to crumble.

The walls cracked, the darkness swallowed the edges and the cold became unbearable.

Raziel wanted to speak, ask, scream but he couldn’t.

The vision expelled him.

!THUMP!

He had hands on his shoulders shaking him.

“Raziel!”

The room in the Shipyard came back all at once.

And Lucian, with his eyes wide open, his face white and sweat running down his temples.

“Raziel, listen to me!”

“What…?”

“They found us! There are Inquisitors at the door!”

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