Chapter 41: Wailborn
Valens stood by the carriage, utterly motionless, peering at the sacred warriors as they hauled the steely cage off from the extension. Faces straining, it took three of them to place it to the bare patch of dirt by the path, the first lights of the day sprinkling across in the backdrop, the captain watching all of it with a solemn face.
It had been a silent evening, and Valens slept through it all, caring not the occasional jump from the holes across the path that caught the Ironmanes’ hooves. The creatures were masterful in their ride and had provided much more comfort than Valens would’ve expected.
“It can’t really be a ghost, can it?” he muttered as the morning breeze picked at the tails of his robe. Marcus was eerily silent a few paces ahead, while Celme had decided to steer away from him after the night’s talk, sneaking glances from him as if Valens had grown a third eye by the side of his face.
“It’s a shadow,” Captain Eldric answered as the cage thumped hard into the ground, the four corners of it sinking deep into the earth. “One that has a few differences from the ones you’d often see in kids’ books.”
“And you’ll burn it?” Valens scowled at the cage, at the frequencies seeping from between the gaps of the bars. Something was decisively wrong with the tunes as if an outer influence purposefully jabbed at them to scatter their rhythm. What was this outside influence, though, Valens had no clue. “Because fire is the answer to anything that’s wicked in nature?”
“Fire is for making sure the shadow can’t latch onto anyone else after the purification,” Captain Eldric said gravely. “To do the killing, we use something else.”
Garran patted his hands off once he was done with the cage, trudged silently back to the carriage and reached underneath it, picking a long, wooden stake that was strapped there with both hands. One edge was sharpened in a way that resembled the tip of a sword, the shaft riddled with runes and characters that seemed to have blended into an unreadable mess.
“That’s for the killing?” Valens embraced Apathy lest he’d gawk at the absurdity of it. “You’re going to stab her with a wooden stake.”
“More or less,” Captain Eldric said and waved a hand at the warriors. The fourth member of the group, whose job was to handle the horses, a scarred man with a balding head but still clad in golden armor, reached forth and tapped at the side of the cage where there was a small lock.
With a click, the bars dropped into the holes below. They didn’t go all the way down but folded neatly out of sight, revealing the figure inside the cage.
It really is a woman.
Valens expected to get a clearer sense now that the cage was open, but the rhythm of the woman’s song was still reflected over the Resonance as a scattered mess. So then, he presumed, the cage wasn’t that outside influence that kept her a mystery, but rather something else was at play here, something that was affecting the woman from within.