Starlight Manor

They leave the next morning. Weyah cries in Lise’s arms, and then into her brother’s, sniveling into his white shirt, and they say their tearful goodbyes before they break away.

“Why can’t we take her now?” Lise demands to him as they set off, but Alois just shakes his head. “I’m not kidnapping my own sister, Lise.”

“How could she want to stay?”

“I stayed,” Alois says. “I stayed for a long time.”

From the outside, the manor is a beautiful thing. Lise remembers how she felt the first time she’d seen it, the excitement, the promise of adventure. She had sensed something dark and strange about this place too, but it didn't matter. Now, she can’t wait to leave it behind.

She turns to Alois, ready to ask him if he wants to say any final words to his home, but the look on his face paralyzes her. It’s the face he had when she told him she’d known about the killing, about his family. That same fear, that same terror.

Without a word, he grabs her by the arm and pulls her into a sprint down the stone pathway towards the forest.

“Alois, why are we running?” she asks him. She attempts to slow their pace, her legs still burning from the previous day’s work.

But Alois’s legs are unrelenting, as is his grip on her hand, and he doesn’t deign her with a response.

“Alois,” she repeats, her lips turning down into a frown. “This is silly.”

“Lise,” Alois pants out. “Did you take the water I gave you?”

Lise grasps at her back, her fingers closing around the cool wooden handle of it. “Of course I do.”

“And your knife?” The desperation in his voice is strange, disorienting. “What about your knife? Do you have it on you right now?”

Confused, Lise turns her head to peer behind them.

His mother is outside now, watching them go. She isn’t too far, but she’s a good distance away. She knows the impact Alois’s mother has on him, the fear her anger instills in him, but Kwithra doesn’t look angry at all. In fact, she’s smiling. Smiling at them as they make their way down the hill, closer and closer to the forest. Lise’s gaze darts back to Alois and his alert eyes and blindingly fast legs, running for his life at a pace she’s struggling to keep up with, like his mother has thrown a giant metaphorical bomb at them that could end their lives at any minute. “Yes,” she says, turning back to him. “I have it. I have everything we need. But Alois—”

“Don’t look back,” Alois grits out.

“What are you talking about?” Lise asks softly. She gives him an unsure smile, giving his clammy hand a squeeze. “Your mom isn’t after us, Alois. You’re safe. We’re fine.”

“Lise,” he begs. His voice cracks. “I know what I feel. And I know my mother.” His icy blue eyes are sharp, pupils blown wide; his throat bobs. “We’re anything but safe.”

“What you feel?” Lise repeats. She squeezes her eyes shut, trying to sense an unease in the air. Unsuccessful, she looks back over at Alois, feeling frustrated now. “Alois—”

“Keep running, Lise, no matter what. Don’t stop.” His hand grows impossibly tighter around her own. “Don’t stop for anything.”

Lise just stares at him, half-afraid he may be losing his mind.

But this is Alois, she realizes. He isn’t stupid. He isn’t one to be fooled or misconstrued. And he certainly isn’t one to be speaking absolutely nonsense, or panicking and running for his life—for both of their lives—for no reason.

Slowly, Lise turns her head around one last time to look at Starlight Manor.

Kwithra is a near-distant figure on the hill of the Starlight estate. Even from this distance, Lise sees her long black dress with golden trim blow violently in the breeze. Slowly, she holds out her palm to them, an extended hand, like a kindness, with a sly twist of her lips. It makes Lise dizzy, the width and curve of that beautiful smile.

Then she jerks her wrist, her talon-like nails pointing towards the sky like claws, and the world seems to tilt on its axis.

Lise feels it before she sees it—the unknown, the pure, unadulterated power reverberating about them that Kwithra seems to hold up with a single wide, slender hand, like she’s holding the weight of the world, as she hoists her arm into the air. The world around her hand seems to crackle with something Lise can’t quite make out, something like clear lightning, like invisible punishment, like death. Her black eyes seem to bore right into Lise, and Lise gets the message clear as day: she doesn’t plan on letting them leave alive.

Lise whips her head back around.

“Holy shit,” she blurts out.

“Brace yourself, Lise,” Alois pants out, as they rip through the trees like the wind.

“For what?” Lise asks urgently. There’s a deep-seated panic in her gut that might feel like insanity if she pays it any mind, so she makes the conscious decision not to.

When Alois meets her eyes, his gaze is sharp.

“For the power of a god,” he says, before the earth gives out with an all-encompassing, rumbling crack under their feet.

Lise just barely holds back a strangled scream at the feeling of falling, of dying. At the sight of the ground she had just been touching being split in two and opening up, threatening to swallow her whole. But Alois is fast; he aims his palm at her, and what Lise expects to feel like a magical pull feels more like a frustrated jolt, like an invisibly angry hand fisting in her shirt and pulling her up and forward, yanking her through the air until she crashes back onto solid ground again. “Idiot!” he barks in her ear as soon as she blinks through the pain and the terror, but the familiar, albeit panicked, anger in his voice grounds her. “I told you to keep running!”

So they do. They run and they run, even as the ground shakes and rumbles and cracks below them, even as Lise sees things she never thought she would see. Trees bending, curling unnaturally like Kwithra’s long fingers, and swinging out at them in huge, fast swoops. Grasses and leafy plants curling around their ankles and pulling with the strength of a human child, attempting to halt them in their tracks. Fiercely, Alois yanks her through all of it; Lise just follows him and does her best to copy his motions.

It isn’t until fire starts spewing from the hollows of trees that Lise sees Alois finally starting to slow. As if the forest itself senses his mistake, the huge tree to the far right of them begins to fall. Lise sees its giant shadow too late, and it’s instead the loud thud and the gut-wrenching scream of her best friend that makes her whip her head around.

He’s stuck, she realizes in terror, staring down at him. His leg is stuck under the giant tree. Lise’s eyes immediately dart to his crushed leg and she pales when she sees blood.

Alois’s face is scrunched up in pain, but he’s looking at Lise with something like determination. He hasn’t given up, Lise thinks, her heart clenching.

She takes a firm, large step towards him before Alois throws up a hand, and she’s sent flying forward several feet, in the direction they’d been running. The direction of Wobenn; the direction of escape.

Lise stumbles back to her feet, only barely keeping her balance. When she looks up again, Alois’s face is fierce.

Eyes narrowing, Lise sets off towards him again.

Another violent throw of Alois’s arm, and Lise is flung back again through the air. Her back slams against the trunk of a tree with a force that knocks the breath out of her, and all she can feel is pain.

Slowly, she brings herself to her feet, and all her body can do is propel itself forward, towards the boy with shaking shoulders and the leg trapped underneath a massive fallen tree.

Trembling with rage or fury or maybe both, Alois is already raising an arm again. To send her back again, sprawling through the air like a helpless, weightless ragdoll. To make the decision himself to die. To end his own life by preventing her from saving him. To save her instead.

Lise hates him for it.

A scream of frustration threatens to erupt from her throat, and she brings her knee down hard onto his arm, pinning it in place. “Don’t!” she snarls right at him, grabbing his face, forcing him to see her, to make him understand. Digging her fingers into the flesh of his cheeks, not caring if her fingernails break skin.

Alois just stares at her with emotions flitting on and off his bloody face, like one’s final memories flashing before their eyes. Pleading, upset, desperate. Furious. “You,” he hisses, “need to get out of here, now.”

“I’m not leaving you here, Alois!”

“Lise, this isn’t a game! We are dealing with a—”

“God or not—” She braces her arms under the massive trunk of the tree, feeling every bit of its punitive weight. This was the forest that allowed Alois to escape. These woods all around them, the woods Kwithra was trying so hard to turn against them, were what breathed life into Alois. The forest that led to Lise finding him that day, saving him. “God or not,” she repeats, her voice raising as her arms shake, as the tree raises with her, “I’m not letting anyone take your life in this place.”

“Lise,” Alois sobs out. He’s openly crying now, right in front of her for the very first time, his hunched shoulders heaving with the force of his sobs. Lise can’t even bring herself to look at his mangled leg. “I don’t want you to die.”

“Stop talking… like you’re already dead,” Lise grunts out, pushing harder. Sweat pools in rivers down her forehead, her chest, her back; her knees and feet scream in agony. “You know… how much I hate your pessimistic streak.”

“It’s too late for me,” Alois croaks out.

Lise closes her eyes tight. She can feel her lower lip trembling violently. “Bullshit.”

His voice raises, shaking in anger and fear. “Lise, please—”

“Bullshit!” Lise screams. Her arms shake like willows in the wind under the crushing weight of the tree, the bark furrowed and rough against her hands. The weather has turned almost violently windy, like an imperceptible tornado is whipping around them, the monstrosity already sending devastating gusts of winds powerful enough to take down a house around them. A large rock is sent flying and it slams right into her gut, nearly making her keel over, but she doesn’t. She just groans, knees bent, and pulls, pulls, pulls.

“Lise!” Alois screams.

With a roar that comes from the very core of her being, Lise sends the tree flying high and straight into the air, giving Alois and herself mere seconds to escape before it comes crashing back down. Alois’s mangled leg, now free, is limp and useless, a bone in his thigh jutting out in a horribly wrong direction, but he’s still quick to tackle her to the floor and roll themselves away, saving them both from both the tree and the second burst of fire that springs out from behind them, lapping at the area where they had been mere moments prior. They both stare, transfixed, as the massive tree before them bursts into flames.

With a grunt, Lise hoists Alois up onto her back, hands tight under his thighs. Alois doesn’t resist; in turn, he wraps his arms around her neck, nearly choking her with the strength of his hold.

“Run,” he chokes out, a hoarse command into Lise’s ear, and Lise obeys.

Alois is her eyes; she is his body. He tells her what’s coming from behind, how to avoid it, how to make up for her average speed. Lise feels like she’s been running for days, like all her legs were built for were to rip through this forest of blood and bone, of fire and smog, of pain and death.

She doesn’t know how or even when they reached Wobenn Village until she sees Aeriel running for them, his face horrified. “Give him to me!” he yells.

Lise hands Alois over, fighting the urge to cry when she sees how bad he looks in Aeriel’s arms. They run back to their hut, laying Alois on the cot. It’s a devastatingly familiar scene.

“Can you take care of it?” Lise demands urgently.

Aeriel is a damn near fiercer sight than Kwithra had been, wielding his bandages and medical tools like weapons. The look he gives her is withering, as if shaming her for even asking. “Of course I can.”

They sit there on the floor as Aeriel binds Alois’ leg, their tear-streaked faces smeared with dirt and blood-soaked in their tattered clothes, and they embrace each other with a fierceness neither one had ever shown the other. They stay that way for a long while. They hold each other until Lise feels that she can not separate from him, from this, ever, even if she wanted to. She, her and Alois—they are one single consciousness, one entity. What they were before they knew one another, what they could have once been defined to be, no longer mattered. What they were yesterday no longer mattered. Whatever binds them to themselves so far as words could go—it no longer mattered. Because now they were one in the same, the force that survived an indescribable strength, a godlike strength, an insurmountable terror, with nothing but their own bodies and spirits. With their own bloody hands and legs, with their bruised flesh and broken bones—a walking, breathing miracle.

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Thank you guys so, so much for reading! I had so much fun with this story and these characters, I hope you guys enjoyed! ♥️