Crystalise: The Exaltation System: ASCENDANT F.R. Brooks (the snowy day read aloud .TXT) 📖

that only came from the throats of malefic beasts.

Liam turned his comms back on. “Sounds like a mob.”

“It… just keeps screaming. I’ve never heard one sit and scream non-stop like that before,” James said with a grimace.

James had a point.

Mobs rarely sat around and wailed their monstrous little heads off for no reason.

Typically, mobs weren’t even all that vocal.

“Hm. Guess we’re going to find out what it’s crying about.”

“Yeah… I’m just glad you hear it, too. ”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

James said nothing and pressed onward through the double doors. Liam trailed behind and waited for a response that never came. He wanted to believe that his brother simply had no interest in elaborating.

“Let’s keep going.”

James’s silence, however, unsettled Liam.

Liam gave up on attempting to interrogate his brother. There would be time for that later.

Hopefully.

* * *

10 | Thorns

The Chevalier’s Trial opened to a serene chamber with the same pale lighting as the foyer down below. Vines and foliage climbed across the ceiling and walls. Ivies spread throughout the room like an image of nature reclaiming a room of cold, sterile steel.

At the heart of the chamber, a statue towered before them. Easily twice their size and ornate in all its monstrous detail. James circled slowly around it with an impressed whistle.

A magnificent beast carved from marble welcomed them to the Chevalier’s Trial. Elongated arms hung at its side with clawed digits. A smooth, featureless face turned up toward the bright lights overhead. Tentacles protruded from the statue’s thick back, all reaching up for the light.

Evigilari…

The statue captured a moment in history that all citizens of Libelle learned of in school—the death of the last evigilari. A moment that marked the end of the war that had rendered their planet a frozen wasteland.

A spear ran through the evigilari’s body, pinning it in place and posing it in defeat.

That spear had belonged to the first exalt—Kai Odonata. A name and legacy which lived on through the same corporation that branded their sentisuits.

“Let’s find that screamer and put it out of its misery before I get a migraine.” James went ahead of Liam again, following the shrill cries down a nearby corridor.

Liam had fallen silent, caught up in the awe of the exquisitely carved effigy. At the base of the statue, Liam noticed three round indentations.

Something’s supposed to go here.

Something we need to collect from the trials?

Not far beyond the statue lay a descending corridor with low, cerulean light. On either side, the walls shimmered with the refracted light of lively, colorful aquariums. Prismatic angelfish fluttered into hiding within crags and rocks.

“This is some pretty cozy decor,” James said. “I might keep it when I take this place over. Chicks love aquariums.”

“Alyssa hates aquariums,” Liam said.

“Really?”

“Yes. She’s afraid of fish. Remember?”

“Oh, right…”

The uncomfortable awareness of something Alyssa kept hidden from James wrenched through Liam. Knowledge he’d been unfortunate to guess at during a conversation with Alyssa when no one else was present.

Just blurt it. Just say what she told you.

Get it off your chest.

How much would his convictions against Chrysid weigh against the possibility of never holding his own child?

“James, Alyssa’s…” Liam trailed off, attention grabbed by movement in the shadows beyond the aquarium tanks.

James stopped and waited with visible impatience.

“What about her?”

A beautiful face on the other side of the aquarium entranced Liam. The face of a woman who could stop him in his tracks, whether printed in glossy magazine pages or physically standing right there before him. Beyond a wall of glass and artificial sea stood the Chevalier, Serena Lucienne.

The Chevalier watched the two of them with a look that Liam could only describe as indifference. Refracted, rippling lights danced with shadows on her features. A white and gold sentisuit adorned her small, athletic body.

Cyan lucidium veins pulsed across her suit. The lucidium color of an electric exalt.

“Oh… shit,” James whispered as he noticed the Chevalier watching them. A coy smirk rose on his features. “Hey, girl.”

The Chevalier looked as if she hadn’t heard him. Her umber eyes fell back upon Liam and his pulse spiked with all the resurrected memories of his boyhood crush.

Perhaps the only sign that any time had passed for the Chevalier came in the slimming of her face and faint, violet circles under her eyes. She looked as if she hadn’t slept in days.

James’s smirk seamlessly dissolved into something darker.

“You want to talk with us about Outpost 14 at all? The shit Chrysid’s been using the Destrier for?”

The Chevalier remained silent.

The intensity in James’s voice grew harsh as he demanded, “You wanna talk about what Chrysid did to Jove Darner? Huh!?”

When Liam realized just how long her gaze had lingered on him, he also realized how long it had been since he’d last breathed.

“ANSWER ME!” James roared. Liam flinched when James’s fist slammed against the surface of the aquarium. A frenzy of scattering fish darted to opposite ends of the tank.

The Chevalier, however, neither reacted nor seemed to hear him. She turned and disappeared into the shadows.

“Bitch,” James sneered through grit teeth.

Liam eyed James warily. A certain thought drifted through his mind. One that he had become quite familiar with over the last year of Exaltation.

I don’t have to be here. I’m only here because of James.

The truth is… I don’t know if I want to kill her.

There must be a reason why she chose ambivalence.

James’s fist slid away from the tank. He stared at the ground in silence and Liam tensed as if he watched a flipped coin land on its side and begin to wobble.

When that coin landed, James looked back up to Liam with a ghost of pleasantry in his voice. “Anyway, what were you saying about Alyssa?”

Liam swallowed dryly.

“Nothing. I… just meant that you should take care of her.”

With suspicion on his features, James quirked one brow.

“What, is she dying or something?”

Liam squinted. “What?”

“You just got all somber and shit. Is she okay?”

“She’s fine. Damn.”

“Well, what did you