The Dead Dove Locker -- "I don't know what I expected."

[Mamorien]

Headless Over Heels.

The sun reached its apex and began its downward path. The carriage and its attendant wagon was passing a ring of sacraliths. Someone had taken a chisel to their caps, and defaced the rough-hewn, blobby faces of the Plainland protogods who had abandoned the world to the seraphs. Seth had never seen any of these intact, but in places along the roads they remained: the holy-world equivalent of a mummified thief hung in a gibbet to warn the rest.

It was here, beside the mangled gods of the old world, that Riccana il Teremi awoke for the first time since her soul was ripped from her.

By the time Annalise had gotten Draco and Draka to a halt, Riccana was sitting up and screaming. They hurried from the carriage to the wagon, where Tiago had dismounted, presumably to help the girl off the wagon. For his troubles he was being kicked repeatedly in the chest.

“Let me off,” Riccana barked. “Don’t touch me.”

“Okay.” Tiago backed away, hands up. “Okay, not touching. But you’re still only partway healed. If you exert yourself too hard—”

Riccana tipped out of the wagon and fell on her face.

You should have been touching.

“You should have been touching,” Ofelia noted. Tiago wiped the straw-strewn footprint off his black tunic.

Demetrius’s startlingly blue eyes stared with skepticism at the carework girl who clung to the edge of his wagon as she dragged herself upright again. “Where are we? Where’d you take me? Where’s Shaheill?”

“Poor girl.” Annalise gave a matronly tut of her tongue. “You really ought to be sitting. There’s a carriage, if you like. Very expensive cushions in there.”

“No. No, I—” Riccana teetered and came close to falling again. She found her footing before Tiago could help her and scowled at him. “No. I have to go back—they—the blackfeather. I can’t leave them.”

“The blackfeather is gone,” Annalise said. “You and your people killed it.”

If they were being fair, Seth killed it. But he kept his mouth shut.

”Gone?“ Riccana swiped the chaos of her curls away from her face. Straw drifted out of it. ”We… we won?”

”That’s right.” Annalise smiled encouragingly. ”A big bleeding blackfeather broke through the deathspell and the first village it came to killed it dead. No massacres, no burning burgs. Might well be the only time that’s ever happened. And that’s cause of Shaheill. And its sacrifices.”

“Its—” Riccana’s hands went to her midsection. She looked down at them, and their pale-as-chalk skin.

She did fall then, onto her rear, wide black gaze fixed to her hands like they were covered in blood. Like the bleached skin on them belonged to someone else.

“You won’t go scarecrow,” Tiago said. “You would have already if it was a danger. Shaheill lent you their last animaxis. There was never a question of who’d get it.”

Shaheill, he’d said, because she wasn’t ready to hear Simon.

“My soul,” Riccana mumbled, barely audible.

“It’s here.” Ofelia emerged from the carriage and held the animaxis out. ”Safe.”

Riccana took the mirrored animaxis and gazed into its surface. A facet caught the light and glinted unearthly emerald.

She held it at an angle where the obsidian surface caught the light and resolved into just enough reflection that she could make herself out. The bright white pupils burned in her murky image like twinned candle flames.

She stood and went walking into the woods, as stiff and derelict as if her soul had never been snared. She left the animaxis in the dirt.

“We can’t take you back,” Annalise called. “I’m sorry.”

She made no indication of having heard. Tiago moved a hesitant halfspan, then stood rooted, fists clenching and unclenching. Ofelia touched his arm, all traces of mirth at her brother’s expense gone. “She’ll come around.”

Tiago attempted to recapture his nonchalance with an ineffective shrug.

“Seth,” Annalise murmured. “Would you follow her, love? Unobtrusive-like? She deserves her time, but we can’t lose track of her.”

He nodded, kissed her shoulder, and took off after Riccana, secreting himself behind oak and between shadows. The newly minted unlit girl’s march gradually lost its purpose, and ended at a mossy stone. She sat upon it and wept.

He was so afraid.

Seth stood on the other side of a thick tree trunk to wait out the storm. When it began to subside he stepped into the path and onto a twig, for politeness’s sake.

Riccana turned, face shining in the dappled light.

“Hey,” Seth said.

Riccana’s sorrow had burnt itself into flat gray ash. “You’re the boyfriend.”

Seth quarter-bowed. “Seth il Gutierre. Craven cutpurse and amateur stormship pilot. And pretty new at this unlit thing, too. Fresh turned a few weeks ago. So if you’re—”

“How many did we lose, Seth il Gutierre?”

“Maybe let’s focus on you for a moment, yeah?”

“How many,” Riccana repeated.

Seth sighed and gave up the bedside manner. “About a dozen.”

”How many Teremis?”

“Two whose name I didn’t catch,” Seth said. “And Simon.”

Silence but for Riccana’s heavy breathing. A woodpecker drilled its way into the canopy.

“He was so afraid, when he was the one in command,” she said, eventually. “I told him not to be. That the Legion would come. That they’d take care of us. And when that didn’t come true, when it was just…” She looked him up and down. “When it was just you, and we had to do it ourselves. I said I’d take care of him instead. And that was wrong, too.”

She returned to her hands, her new favorite staring target.

“He was so afraid,” she whispered.

“He wasn’t afraid at the end,” Seth said.

“Don’t lie to me.”

“I’m not.” Seth thought of Simon’s request, and gave the man a silent apology; his niece deserved the truth. “He asked us to tell you it was on the field with a pointy stick. But the truth is it was after, and he was turning. And it was between the two of you. And he picked you. So.”

She stayed motionless.

“So however you reckon he’d prefer you use this chance, do that,” he said. “I wish I knew him well enough to say what that means. Suppose I’ll defer to you.” He held his hand out. “Let me help you back.”

She recoiled from him, as if following the ingrained instinct not to touch the unlit. But that was her now, too, and haltingly she let him help her off the rock and back toward the carriage. “I need to know who else went. The other Teremis. I don’t care that I’ll never see any of them again.”

“We’ll find out for you,” he said. “I promise.”

She nodded at this. Entirely by accident, Seth was developing a trustworthy reputation. He quietly returned the three braces he’d removed from her back into her hip pocket.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“The Necropolis. I hear it’s lovely this time of year.”

“I hear it’s smoggy shit.”

“Whatever else it is,” he said. “For us, I suppose it’s home.”

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...-so-afraid
https://www.scribblehub.com/read/2385004...r/2588915/