Celestara Veylin's Arc

Chapter 9 of 9

At dawn Celestara walked into the horde. She wore its shape in her mind, gray and hungry. Zax stayed back on higher ground, gun braced, watching the dead water. Hundreds of decayed bodies shuffled around her. She held her thorn barrier tight, imagined walls of black bramble around her thoughts. Behind those walls, her true mind hid. The caller sat at the water's edge. She felt it before she saw it, a heavy pull dragging every creature inward. She stepped closer, one shape among many. The gun hung ready under a fold of her cloak. She needed only to reach range, then fire. But the barrier cost her. Each step, the thorns thinned. Holding the disguise drained her the way the fortress bond drained her life. Her walls grew gaps. Alien thoughts pressed through, cold and wet. She patched one gap and two more opened. Sweat ran down her back. The caller's pull grew stronger the nearer she came. A thorn snapped. For one breath, her real mind flashed bare. The caller turned its head toward her. She had no time to reach shooting range. No time to rebuild the wall. In the folds of her cloak, beside the gun, her fingers found the reveal wand she had carried since the fortress. She had not planned to use it. But the wand stripped false forms. It could strip her own. Celestara made a choice. She stopped hiding. She raised the wand and turned its light on herself. Her gray disguise burned away. The horde saw a Veylin woman, blond and purple-eyed, standing among them. Every creature felt her mind at once, clear and loud. They screamed and surged. But so did the caller. It rose to strike her, fully exposed now, its attention locked on her alone. "Now!" she shouted. Zax fired from the ridge. The burst tore across the plain. She dropped the wand, pulled the gun, and fired too. Her three shots and his stitched into the caller's body. It jerked. It fell. The pull that held the horde together broke. The creatures around her froze. Their glowing eyes dimmed. Without the caller's voice, they had no purpose. They wandered apart, aimless, drifting from the dead water in every direction. Zax ran down the slope, still scanning. "You blew your own cover," he said, breathing hard. "That was the plan?" "The mask was going to break anyway," Celestara said. She picked up the wand. Her hand shook. "So I broke it my way. I made it look at me. You made it die." A purple cat slipped out from behind a stone and wound around her ankles, tail high. It had followed her the whole way. It looked up and gave a single sharp cry. Celestara looked east, past the scattering horde, past the dead water. The caller was dead. But something had sent it. And now that something knew her face.