Read Chapter 13: Aftermath: the Locket

The rain had stopped, leaving the streets of Ravensmoor slick and shining under the gaslights. Dain stood in the mouth of an alley, turning the locket over in his fingers. Silver, tarnished at the edges, worn smooth by years of handling. He knew it before he opened it. Knew the weight of it, the faint scratch on the back where a knife had slipped when she was learning to carve.

He pressed the catch. The lid sprang open.

A woman looked up at him. Dark hair pinned loose, a small smile that never quite reached her eyes. She was younger here than he remembered her last—before the fever, before the wasting. Before she’d stopped smiling altogether.

His hand closed around the locket so hard the edges bit into his palm.

*Elara.*

How long had she carried this? Since Halworth? Since before? He tried to remember when he’d told her about his sister, about Mira, about how she’d died and how he hadn’t been there. He remembered telling her in a barn outside some village whose name he’d already forgotten, both of them huddled against a storm, her hand pressed to a gash in his side he’d been too stubborn to let her heal until the bleeding had nearly stopped.

He hadn’t told her about the locket. He’d told her Mira was dead. That was all. He hadn’t told her how Mira had begged him not to go on that hunt. How he’d gone anyway. How she’d been dead by the time he came back, and the healer in the village had said it was a sickness that took her fast, that nothing could have been done.

Maybe that was true. Maybe he would never know.

But Elara had the locket. She’d found it somewhere—or been given it somewhere—and she’d kept it hidden, close to her chest, in all the time he’d known her. Why?

*Why didn’t you tell me you had it?*

He put the question away. There was no time for it. The creature had taken her, and she was out there, alone, in whatever dark place that thing called home. And he was here, unarmed, his crossbow lost somewhere in the cathedral rubble, the Canticle journal gone with it.

He pocketed the locket and started walking.

---

Elara woke to silence so complete it felt like a physical weight pressing on her ears.

She was on her back on something cold and smooth. Stone. She opened her eyes and saw darkness above her, absolute, unbroken. No stars, no moon, no torchlight. Just black.

She tried to move. Her arms were free. Her legs were free. She pushed herself up slowly, her body screaming in protest. The wound on her side—the boy’s wound, the one that would not close—throbbed with a dull, familiar ache. She pressed a hand to it. The fabric of her tunic was stiff with dried blood, but the bleeding had stopped for now.

*Where are you?* she thought.

She reached out with her senses, the way she’d learned to do in the dark, the way she did before she let a wound come into her. She felt for the texture of the place, the shape of the space around her.

Nothing.

No warmth. No cold. No current of life. It was as if she sat at the center of a dead thing, wrapped in a shroud of absence. She had felt this before—in the creature’s hide, in the boy Marten’s hollowed mind. The void.

But this was different. This was *all around her*.

She forced herself to breathe. In. Out. The air tasted of dust and old stone, faintly metallic, like the inside of a tomb.

She got to her feet. Her legs trembled. She had no memory of being brought here—only the creature’s hand closing around her, the sensation of being lifted, the world tilting away. Then nothing.

*Think,* she told herself. *You are not dead. You are not hollowed. You are still you.*

She held onto that. The you part. It had never been harder to believe.

Around her, the darkness began to resolve into shapes—or not shapes, but *shadows of absence*, places where the light seemed to withdraw even more deeply. She reached out a hand and touched stone. The wall. Rough-hewn, ancient, slick with damp.

She began to walk.

---

She kept one hand on the wall as she moved. The ground was uneven, littered with debris she couldn’t see, and she stumbled more than once, catching herself on the stones with scraped palms. The wound in her side complained with every step, a hot pulse that reminded her of the boy’s pain, still riding in her flesh.

After a time—she couldn’t say how long—she saw light. Faint, sickly, the color of a bruise. She moved toward it.

The corridor opened into a chamber. The light came from above, from a hole in the ceiling, and it pooled weakly over a circle of floor. In the center of that circle was the creature.

She stopped.

It was not what she had seen before. Before, it had been a thing of shadow and hunger, a shape that moved in the periphery like a wound in the world. Now she saw it clearly, and what she saw made her breath catch.

It was a woman.

She was tall, gaunt, her skin the color of old ash. Her hair hung in ropes around her face, grey and lank. Her eyes were open, staring at nothing, and they were the eyes of someone who had gone somewhere far away and never come back. She sat perfectly still, her hands folded in her lap, her posture almost prayerful.

She was not monstrous. She was *empty*.

Elara took a slow step forward. The creature did not move.

Another step. The woman’s eyes shifted. They found Elara, and for a moment Elara saw something flicker in them—recognition, maybe, or hunger, or both.

“You are awake,” the creature said. Her voice was soft, almost kind. It was the last thing Elara had expected.

“Yes,” Elara said.

“You are hurt.”

Elara did not answer. Her hand went to her side.

“I can feel it,” the creature said. “Even here. Your wound. It sings.”

“It came from a boy I healed,” Elara said. “His name is Marten. You hollowed him.”

The creature tilted her head, like a bird considering a worm. “I remember him. He was frightened. For a long time, he was the only one in that town who still felt anything. Then you came, and you took it all away.”

“I took the emptiness out of him,” Elara said. “I gave him back his fear.”

“Yes.” The creature’s lips twitched. It might have been a smile. “I felt that. It was like a bell ringing across the world. I knew where you were. I knew who you were.”

“Why did you bring me here?”

The creature did not answer. She rose to her feet, slow and fluid, like water moving uphill. She was taller than Elara had thought, and thinner, and the way she moved was wrong—too smooth, too seamless, as if her joints were not where they should be.

Elara took a step back.

“You know what I am,” the creature said. “You found my writings. You read them, in that place of glass and stone.”

“Ravensmoor,” Elara said. “The Canticle.”

“Yes.” The creature took a step toward her. “Then you know what you are becoming.”

Elara’s heart was beating too fast. She could feel the void inside her stirring, waking, responding to the emptiness in front of it like a wolf scenting blood. She forced herself to stay still, to keep her voice steady.

“I am not becoming anything.”

“You are,” the creature said. “I was a healer too, once. I took the pains of others, gladly, always gladly. I told myself I was strong enough. I told myself the darkness would not take root in me. I was wrong.”

“I am not you.”

“No.” The creature’s eyes were terrible and empty. “Not yet. But you have my emptiness in you now. The boy’s void. It is a seed, little healer, and it is growing.”

Elara’s hand went to her wound. The creature saw it and nodded.

“It will bloom,” the creature said. “And when it does, you will become what I am. You will feed on feeling. You will hollow out everything alive. It is the way it works. It is how it has always worked.”

“Then let me stop it,” Elara said. “Let me use it against you. Give me the chance.”

The creature looked at her for a long moment. And then something passed across her face—a shadow of the woman she had been, flickering like a candle in a draft of wind.

“You think you can poison me with myself,” the creature said. “You think you can give this curse back to me and walk away.”

“Yes.”

“Come here,” said the creature. “Touch me. See if you can.”

Elara did not move.

“You are a healer,” the creature said. “You cannot hurt another living thing. It is in your blood. It is in your soul. Even now, even with my poison inside you, you could not strike me.”

“I’m not going to strike you,” Elara said.

She took a step forward. Then another. The creature watched her, unblinking.

“Then what will you do?” the creature asked.

Elara was close enough to touch her now. Close enough to see the cracks in her grey skin, the faint shimmer of something beneath it, like light under water.

“I’m going to heal you,” Elara said.

And she reached out, and she put her hand on the creature’s chest.