Velvet by Xavier Axelson

Author:Xavier Axelson [Axelson, Xavier]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: JMS Books LLC
Published: 2018-02-22T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

If the room felt different, the streets and the people elated by Duir’s earlier procession seemed like they belonged to another world. A mirror world, something I saw from a distance. I knew it and yet knew nothing of how it worked. The sounds of drunken laughter chilled me and rang like distant cathedral chimes, a pending tolling of an inevitable fate. Faces I passed wore masks of adulation for a king they watched grow from boy prince to what they believed would be a stately lord. Even the air had changed. I took short breaths, each catching in my lungs as if my body were afraid holding it too long might taint me further.

Confusion, laughter, celebration, and panic were my companions now as I walked the streets. The noise and rapture were jarring, but protective. I felt safe from what had befallen me within the high and guarded walls of Duir’s house.

“Home.” The word, now a mantra repeated over and over in my head until my feet found themselves before the gate. As I undid the latch and came close to the house, I found myself rooted before the door.

“Has it changed?” I wondered aloud.

I clutched my pack closer, secretly wishing the velvet inside would somehow empower me with the need for vengeance and rage I’d felt earlier. Now all I felt was weariness and the weight of the night upon me like a boulder.

How long had I been away? It seemed ages.

The clock is a cruel master…

Horace’s words rang in my ears. “So it is, Horace, so it is,” I muttered, and then forced myself to move to the door and push it open. The kitchen was silent. There were the remains of a meal, and the savory smells of stew coming from the glowing hearth.

Only this morning I left this place intact and now return torn asunder, I thought as I lay my pack on the table. I closed my eyes only to find Cale’s leering face spring up like some macabre toy of a devil’s spawn. Would I ever know peace in the blackness behind my eyes or had those fields been sewn with such horrors that only some ghastly mechanism could untangle their guilty roots?

“Sylvain?” I croaked into the silence and was rewarded not with a reply but with the sound of people raucously yelling from the street outside.

The kitchen offered nothing of my brother’s whereabouts. I sought the stairs and climbed two at a time until I found myself at his open door. Sylvain’s room was spacious and the brightest room in the house. Even now there were a few remaining streams of light coming from the room.

“Sylvain?”

As I entered, I heard rustling and a low growl. The sound was foreign, and stopped me in my tracks. It was not uncommon for Sylvain to harbor animals that had been abandoned by their mothers or those he found wounded in the woods or fields where he worked.

I was about to say his name but

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