It took weeks before Zeriel accepted that his new powers were real. He’d spent the time learning how to use darkness to his advantage, but he’d had limited success. The most he’d been able to achieve was creating that same dark mist from his first use of the powers and cloaking himself in shadow. Though the latter was more of a natural progression of the former. For the time being, those two abilities gave him the edge he needed to make his missions as easy as he’d imagined they were for the rest of the Te Et Sha.
Plaxes hadn’t spoken to him since the first night, which was just fine with him. It was hard enough handling the voices he already had. He wasn’t sure he could handle a new voice he increasingly believed was attached to someone—or something—real. Just the thought of that brought a chill to his spine.
Zeriel’s current assignment was to infiltrate the city of Shyal in the nation of Wylsh and assassinate someone there who called themselves the Slave King. It hadn’t taken him long to sneak inside the city’s outer wall. He just had to avoid the King’s army that was besieging the city. Surprisingly, that wasn’t a problem. The army had been camped outside the city long enough that the soldiers had grown complacent, giving Zeriel every opportunity he needed to sneak past them, especially shrouded in shadow.
The wall itself was huge on the inside. Large enough to house a barracks, kitchens, and weapons stores. And that was just the section Zeriel stalked through. An entire army could have been housed inside the structure of the entire wall and no one inside or outside the city might have noticed.
White vine lanterns lit the hallways inside the wall and moss grew in the joints between stones, its soft green glow difficult to see in the overpowering of the lanterns’ brilliance.
A slave uprising had happened in the city months ago, and the very slaves who had cleaned the walls before now neglected that duty. Time in the heat and humidity of light months worked fast to foster the moss’s growth.
From the intelligence he was able to gather in the towns along his way to the city, he’d discovered that a woman known as the Liberator had led the slaves’ revolt. According to the stories, the Liberator had the power to control water, and used it to massacre anyone who owned a slave. Before he’d suddenly been able to command the very darkness around him, that would have sounded more legend than truth to Zeriel.
He stepped away from the corpse he’d made of a slave turned guard and navigated his way inward through the wall’s hallways toward the city. The brightness of the lanterns hurt his eyes and cast a strong white haze over his vision. Since his powers appeared, his eyes had become more sensitive. So sensitive that during the light months he was forced to cover his eyes with a threadbare cloth just to reduce the glare of the sun enough to make out blurry shapes in the world around him. Tired of the effects of the lanterns on his vision, Zeriel paused to tie his blindfold over his eyes.
Despite the illumination in the halls, he’d found shadowed corners and alcoves to hide in throughout the corridor’s stonework walls. In the months of experimentation, Zeriel had found his powers worked exceptionally well where darkness already fell. The effect made him practically invisible.
Zeriel drew on the shadows around him to cloak his presence once again, then stalked through the halls openly. If he moved in the light while cloaked, it was more likely someone would notice, though if he was careful, they might just attribute the movement to their own imagination.
Just as Zeriel rounded a corner he was stopped in his tracks by Jekjarah.
“Seems like a waste of these powers of yours, doesn’t it?” he said. “It’s not like there’s anyone here.”
Zeriel walked through the hallucination and continued down the hall. “There’s a corpse back there that might prove otherwise.” One more turn and a door to the city revealed itself against the wall at the end of another hallway.
Jekjarah appeared next to him. “But what if you have a limited supply of power? Once it’s all used up, poof!” He flared out his hands in front of him, fingers outspread, in a mock explosion. “Gone.”
“Plaxes never said anything about that.” Zeriel stalked toward the door. “Seems like something she would have mentioned.”
“She didn’t say much of anything.” Jekjarah said. “You can’t trust her.” The monotone way his voice flattened out at the last statement took on the inhuman tone of his other voices. It was jarring since the hallucination rarely spoke that way. “She’s just another voice, after all.”
“If she’s just another voice, and I can’t trust her, then maybe I can’t trust you either,” Zeriel said.
“Of course, you can trust me!” he exclaimed, his normal intonations returning. “I am the well-dressed exception to the rule.” He stood taller and straightened his doublet.
Zeriel approached the door and grabbed the handle. He looked Jekjarah in his eyes, something he rarely did. “At least Plaxes doesn’t torment me like the rest of you.” He pulled the door open slowly until he could peer through the gap and into the city beyond. It was pitch black inside the city, so Zeriel removed his blindfold. With his sensitive eyes uncovered, the district looked well-lit from just the starlight above.
The Northern Gate District was just beyond the door, nestled in the northeast corner of the city where the wall met the enormous cliff to the north. The normally bustling district lay in ruins. Buildings were reduced to wooden frames charred to gnarled fingers that pointed toward the sky. The smoke-stained remains of walls formed a decayed webbing between those fingers.
Rubble was strewn through the streets, but looking further revealed more devastation in the distance. The usual presence of multichromatic, bioluminescent plants was gone, and no white vine lanterns were mounted on tall poles to chase out the darkness. The lingering scent of burned wood and silence that blanketed the air added to the sight and created an alien atmosphere that set Zeriel’s teeth on edge. A haze of prismatic luminance rose in the distance as a beacon amidst the devastation.
You can’t go there, whispered a voice in Zeriel’s mind. They’ll be waiting for you.
Those former slaves will know what you’ve come for, came another voice right on the heels of the other. You should leave. Leave now!
It doesn’t matter if you leave or not, you’re worthless either way. Just kill yourself, said yet another voice. Then you’ll be free of all these burdens.
He shook his head as the voices increased in volume until they screamed their evils into his ears. “Shut up,” Zeriel said through gritted teeth. Years of practice taught Zeriel to ignore the voices most of the time, but they were too loud inside his head now to shut out completely. Pushing forward was the only thing he could do now.
He opened the door the rest of the way and stepped out into the wasteland that was once the Northern Gate District. Covered in shadows as he was, no one would see him moving through the rubble. That allowed Zeriel to avoid his normal stealthiness and push on toward the lights in the distance.
Jekjarah appeared next to him and the voices quieted. “You think it’s still there?”
“The Square of Virtues?” It was the major religious center of the southern half of the Western Continent and people traveled for hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles to visit. Even slaves who’d overthrown their masters would have the reverence to leave such a place unscathed. And the brightness of it indicated as much. “I think there’s a good chance. If the church is standing, there’s likely plenty of refugees there. It’ll be a good place to get information.”
“You always prolong these things. Gathering information, watching your targets for days on end, learning their routines, etcetera, etcetera.” The hallucination waved his hands in a circle emphasizing his last words. “Wouldn’t it be easier to just find them, kill them, and be done with it?”
Zeriel eyed Jekjarah. The hallucination walked with a casual gait, and the rhythmic click of his cane as it struck the ground was strangely soothing. For a moment, Zeriel wondered at how real the sound seemed in his ears. It echoed off the intact portions of walls around him. How did his mind create such nuanced and realistic sound?
He chose not to think too hard on it, so he didn’t drive himself any more insane than he already was. “You know what I know, Jek. I was trained to be careful, thorough, and most importantly, undetected.”
“True, but if I’m saying it, there’s a part of your mind that’s thinking about it.” He made a show of poking Zeriel’s head with his finger. “I’m a projection of what’s in there, after all.”
“Perhaps,” Zeriel said as he swatted at the hallucination’s hand.
Jekjarah moved on, abruptly changing topics. He started with the philosophical, moral, and psychological implications of talking to a self-aware hallucination. Zeriel often thought about that, but he never came to a satisfying answer. The hallucination continued onto other topics, but Zeriel let the man’s voice turn to noise as he focused on his task.
The transition out of the ruins and into the District of Virtues was dramatic. Where the Norther Gate District was burned to ashes behind him, the District of Virtues was full of life and light ahead. On his right was the Square of Virtues with its huge gardens and massive church at the center. Even from his current distance, he could see the building’s towers rising above the trees.
A garden called Ded’s Flame stood in the southeast corner, its trees glowing with red and orange leaves. White vine plants were left to grow along the ground to illuminate the gardens from below, enhancing the fire-like hues. Red glowing hedges lined the garden’s border, placed there to push visitors toward the main entrance further down the path.
On the south side of the district, living quarters for the priests who tended to the gardens and ministered to its visitors were nestled in the trees of an otherwise untouched forest. Those buildings were set in a circle of five structures that faced inward toward a communal fire pit. The life of these priests was a modest one. The beauty that surrounded them was enough to tempt Zeriel to join the church for the peace such a life promised, but he never could accept its foreign beliefs.
As he approached the Square’s main entrance, Zeriel glimpsed The Ponds of Na on its western side. Its trees draped with vine-like branches that hung close to the ground. Blue glowing puffballs ran down the length of the branches. Bridges skipped over the ponds, extending the pathways that meandered through the garden. Like Ded’s Flame with its spectrum of red and orange, the flora of The Ponds radiated its hues of emerald and blue.
The main gate led to a path that cut its way between the two gardens. Red light emanated from the garden on his right, and blue from the one on his left, created a purple equilibrium between them. The Church of Virtues stood on the path ahead, towering fifty feet high. Ornate carvings of the four deities of the Virtues adorned its outer walls framed by glowing vines—red for fire, blue for water, white for air, and green for earth. Behind the church was the white glow of Thaid’s Spires, and the green glow of The Fields of Obe. The church stood in the center of all the gardens, a reminder that the four deities worked together to form the Church of Virtues.
Halted in his tracks by the sight, Zeriel took it in.
Shyal was one of the largest, and most influential cities in Eleshar, so Zeriel had killed many a person inside its walls. Each time he approached this building, though, he couldn’t hold back his awe of its beauty.
“It never gets old,” Jekjarah said.
“No, it doesn’t,” Zeriel said. He nodded to himself, then walked toward the main entrance. “We’ve got work to do, though.”