NOVEL NEXT Chapter 72: The First and the Last Time
Kess stood barefoot again in the Council chambers high above the city, a man's uncomfortable touch on her neck as she stared at her bloodied parents lying before her. They were alive, for now. Her own reflection, years younger, watched her from the glass, the world outside stormy. Blood tricked down her face from the beatings she'd taken earlier.
She couldn't remember the last time this version of herself had slept. Days? Weeks? Months? It was impossible to know. Her stomach seared with pain, no longer bothering to growl. When had she eaten that bread? It didn't seem that long ago. But looking at her emaciated legs, perhaps it had been longer than she thought. Guards crammed her into a dark box each night, so different from the house where she'd grown up. She wasn't quite sure she even remembered why she was here, or who she was. Thin lines of light crawled around her body, warm and comforting, yet alien—her Fulminancy.
Dimly, Kess realized that she was no longer this girl—that whatever had happened in this chamber, years ago, was long gone. She knew what happened next, and yet she couldn't stop the scene from playing out in her mind, vicious and brutal.
One of the men shoved her to her knees roughly. Ruise, a Councilman. He spoke, his voice gravelly over her head. "Mariel's Seat is always the worst to fill," he complained. "Figures we'd get the bad end of the deal."
A younger man wearing the blue and silver sash of a Fulminant Seat watched Kess carefully for a reaction. Tarlach had spent years trying to tutor Kess to use her powers, to no avail. Kess had seen what unchecked Fulminancy could do, and she wanted no part in it. And there was the added matter of what she would have to do to ascend to the Seat—a sacrifice to be made. It seemed they were determined to force her to make the sacrifice with or without her consent, but she couldn't fill the Seat if she was dead.
Her choice hadn't sat well with the Council. "Are you sure this is the one?" Tarlach asked, inclining his head towards her. "We've always had such problems with her. I don't see why we can't just—"
"Council's orders," Ruise replied. "The contract states it has to be someone from Mariel's bloodline, and the other is a Dud."
"This one might as well be."
Kess watched her bound hands as Fulminancy crackled over them. They couldn't make her use them, no matter how much they might want to, but then...it was getting harder to control them now. Her parents twisted before her, their bodies warping into shadows and creatures. She shook her head. Another hallucination. They were becoming more common, or at least she thought so. They wouldn't kill her parents. They were red and white sash, and no Uphill entity—not even the Council themselves—would dare make two such influential people disappear.
Or so she thought.
As she watched them, lying there in their own blood, battered and broken, she realized she wasn't entirely sure anymore. Blood spread across the room, covering the walls and dripping from the ceiling until Kess scrunched her eyes shut, fighting for a grip on reality again. Tarlach sighed, pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose and walked towards Kess.
"Let's get on with it then," he said, crouching in front of her. He grabbed her chin and forced her to look at him. His face lost all humanity in Kess's warped vision. None of it is real, she told herself. But it was hard to think rationally anymore—especially as Tarlach's face melted away. "You'll use your powers for us now, won't you?"
She jerked her chin away from the man's hands, avoiding his eyes as they popped out of the socket. Tarlach had tried for years to groom her, cajole her, and convince her. No amount of niceties had gotten her to touch her Fulminancy. What made him think abuse would make for better results?
For so many, ascending to a Seat was something to be sought after—a great honor, bestowed only upon the lucky few who shared blood with one of the Founders, or their friends and family. For Kess, it was a nightmare.
Because the ascension required the sacrifice of two close relations.
Tarlach sighed, getting to his feet and making his way towards her parents, who were huddled together by the windows, already too still. Kess had trouble looking at them, though she knew what they would say.
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No matter what happens, never use all of your Fulminancy, her mother had told her. Don't go beneath the surface. It was the first family rule Kess had learned, and one that she had learned well, even before she knew the reason for it. Now, those reasons were nebulous—washed away by time and repeated abuse—but Kess clung to the doctrine like it was life herself, even as her parents sat dying in front of her.
It had been important to her mother for some reason, long ago. Maybe it had only been important to avoid detection—something her family had obviously failed at. Regardless, their family was finished now. The Council wouldn't give up until Kess ascended or the whole family died with her. Kess felt the weight of that realization settle over her shoulders and wished desperately that her sluggish mind was incapable of such clarity.
Tarlach crouched before her father and withdrew a knife with a metallic ring. Kess held her breath, watching him. A particularly nasty bolt of Fulminancy snapped away from her body and cracked into the air before she could reign it in.
"Don't touch them," she whispered. The Councilman cocked his head at her, eyes curious.
"And why not?" he asked.
"Touch them again and I'll kill you." Kess wasn't entirely sure how she would accomplish that—she'd never killed a man before, certainly, and while she'd used her powers before in short outings with her parents by the lake, she had none of the finesse or control of a normal Fulminancer. And that was to say nothing of her control now. Kess was seconds away from blowing the entire room anyway. Emotions had always made her powers stronger, and after weeks of being treated like an animal, Kess was on the verge of a breakdown. There was nothing logical left in her mind.
Her mother mouthed something that Kess couldn't quite make out as that white-hot heat welled up inside of her, brutal and animalistic. Her mother and father had protected her, hidden away her brother, and kept her far from the Council. But it had been too little too late. Kess's own volatility had meant it was impossible to hide her forever, no matter how determined her parents had been.
The Councilman watched Kess for several moments, then shoved the knife into her father's shoulder. He grunted, but refused to react further, ever a stoic man.
Kess scrambled to pull her Fulminancy back in as it crept away from her body, filling the room. Ice crept into her limbs. Her father's blood warped and twisted in her vision, filling the room with corpses. Tarlach killed them both. And there are more. Bodies everywhere. Blood dripped from the ceiling, Kess was sure of it. Reality and dream twisted together, like a dance that Kess couldn't stay in step with. But still, she'd promised her mother.
Her powers were feral now as Tarlach stabbed her father over and over again, though when Kess blinked, he was simply sitting there, knife held still. What was real? What was a lie? Did it matter anymore?
The sky grew darker overhead as lightning cracked outside, and the lightning of Kess's Fulminancy crawled down her arms and wrapped her body in a glowing blue light. Desperately, she tried to tug it back into herself, but it was like a boulder that rolled downhill and gathered more power the further it went—at this point she had little chance of stopping it.
She would kill Tarlach and Ruise, but what of her parents?
She would kill them too, she realized.
Inwardly, Kess clawed at that well of power, searching for a way to dampen it, but it was too late. Her Fulminancy sprang to the surface, wild and untamed with its crackling energy. The bolts filled the room itself and left into the sky, searching the clouds for a future Kess would never see. Her mother was still mouthing something, though Kess could barely see it through the tears. She lost her last desperate grip on that well of power, and everything exploded.
No matter what.
It was the first and last time she'd used Fulminancy. Hours of searching for her parents' bodies yielded nothing, though she did find both Councilmen, dead and piled beneath the wreckage. She stood for a moment over the two men, memorizing the faces of the people who had destroyed everything she'd loved. Two lockets lay in the dirt, strangely dry in the storm. She knelt and took them after a moment of consideration.
On that day, as she stood in the wreckage of the city street below and picked up a third locket surrounded by blood—her mother's—she swore to never use it again.
Kess had broken that promise.
She now broke it again, wholeheartedly this time, out of a desperate desire to live.
Rae's hand pulsed beneath hers, warm and strong. The storm overhead became a tempest as raw energy coursed through the two women, something primal and terrifying in its midst. Kess lost her grip on reality, lost her grip on who she was. She was a storm, raging and fierce, destroying everything in its path. The storm consumed her, eating everything inside until she was a hollow shell and had nothing left to give. Then, everything went black.