It didn’t take long for my legs to give out beneath me, and I slumped to the stone floor, my head falling into my hands.
“Come on, Soldier,” I muttered to myself, the words getting stuck in my throat. “You’ve been in trouble before. It’s no big deal. You can find a way out of this …”
Except … no. I really couldn’t. The room was completely sealed-up. No windows. No rat-holes. There wasn’t even a crack in the wall where the door frame should have been, as though it had been sealed right to the wall with magic. I screamed, slamming my fists against the door again, and then I drew away.
I had to do something. The Abcurses should have found me by now. There had to be a reason they were staying away. Someone had to be keeping them away.
What if they’re in danger? Why can’t they hear me?
I paced around the edges of the room, the pain tearing at me a little more with each step, my heart thudding painfully hard. It was working overtime, it seemed. Beating so fast, so heavily, that I couldn’t help but feel like I was starting the dying process already. My skin was feverish and my pulse fluttered weakly. It was a familiar feeling, because I had almost died from a sickness that ate away at me from the inside when I was nine life-cycles old.
Back then, it had been caused by a cut on my leg. I’d torn my skin on a piece of metal sticking out of the metalworker’s stall, and three sun-cycles later, I could no longer walk. The healer had come to our home and covered my legs and arms in leeches, giving Emmy special brews of tea to keep me sustained, since nothing else would stay in my stomach.
Now …
Now, it seemed to be caused by another cut. More than one, even. The five slices through my soul that had separated me into pieces. They were slowly becoming infected, slowly poisoning my body, slowly trying to take me from the world of the living.
I had to do something.
The door handle kept catching my eye, since it was the only thing in the room that glinted silver, standing out against the bleak, stone backdrop. I moved back to it, slumping against the door, my eyes assessing every angle of it. There was a small mechanism attached to the base of the handle, almost like a tiny pin, popping out. I frowned, picking at it with my nail. It clicked out of place, and the handle moved, just a little bit. I grabbed it triumphantly, yanking it downwards, expecting the door to magically become a door again and swing open.
Instead, the handle snapped off.
“You guys are so freaking funny,” I cursed, directing my eyes heavenward, to the asshole gods who might have been watching …
But that wasn’t possible. Elowin had even admitted that the gods were keeping an eye on me, so why would she hide me within Blesswood? It must have had something to do with the stone room. It must have been under some kind of magical influence—that was already obvious, by the way the door seemed to have disappeared. It would also explain why the Abcurses couldn’t find me or hear me calling out to them. This forgotten wing of the castle must have been drowning in dangerous enchantments.
Unfortunately for Elowin, I had life-cycles upon life-cycles of half-lectures piled up in my head, all narrated by the voice of my best friend, Emmy The Sol-Lover. They were only half-lectures because I usually worked to tune her out pretty quickly, but half-lectures were enough. They were enough for me to know that physical materials put under the strain of magic for too long were always weakened by that magic.
I looked down at the broken door handle, turning it over, and then I kneeled, taking a moment to close my eyes and concentrate through the worsening agony. After a moment, I refocused, gripping the stem in my hand and scraping the handle part against the stone. It had the effect that scraping something partly metal against rough stone would have. Both showed signs of wear. I scraped harder, wearing the handle down on both sides until it was tapered off at the end, and sharp. It didn’t take as long as it normally would have, because both the handle and the stone had already been weakened by the heavy burden of magic. I moved back to the door, inserting the sharp point against the spot where the door should have met the stone, and stabbed.
A jarring clang reverberated right up to my shoulder, but I repositioned the handle, and slammed it down again, over and over, until a crack started to appear. When it was large enough, I wedged the battered point of the handle into it and used it as leverage to widen the crack. My hands were getting sore, blisters covering my palms, so I worked on getting the crack to spread all the way to the ground, and then I sat, wedging it in harder so that I could notch my foot against it and kick it toward the wall.