Requiem for an Aberrant Chapter 24: Chapter 24- The Boy Who Closed His Eyes

Read chapter 24 of Requiem for an Aberrant by TheJestersGambit on NovelPedia.

The first blow landed with a crack that echoed across the silver sea, so excruciating that even the creatures descending from above seemed to momentarily hesitate. However, it wasn’t any creature which screamed. It was Filoa. The sound escaped her throat as her fist collided with the creature’s twisted bone, splintering the carapace that served as its face. The impact travelled up her arm, but she struck again before the thing could react, each blow carrying more force than the last. There was no Devourer’s Bloom within her onslaught. Only rage born from the uncertainty of whether the woman she had cared for over the past few years had truly been her mother at all, or if someone else had taken her place long ago without her ever noticing. The creature staggered backward with every hit she delivered, its skin flapping as fragments of bone cracked loose from the structure of its skull. It looked almost confused, as though it couldn’t understand how something so small in comparison could drive it back. “Filoa!” Aegis seized the back of her coat and dragged her sideways just as another deformed creature flailed down from the sky. She twisted against his grip, eyes threatening to accuse him next. “My—” “Faith is in the tower,” Aegis stated firmly, not raising his voice. “We’ll save her.” The certainty in those words was enough to make Filoa hesitate. Her mouth shut as she forced the anger down to nod, her body obeying a decision her heart had not yet accepted. “…R-Right.” Without another word she turned and sprinted toward the tower. Ariana let her blood recede back beneath her skin, refusing to squander any more of her strength on creatures that were not the true heart of this place. If Exrase was waiting ahead, then every drop of stamina she burned here would only become a weakness later. She dived past the warped reflection of herself just as it came shrieking down from above, chasing after Filoa. “What are we waiting for?!” she shouted. Cole was the only one who lagged behind. Not by much. Yet within the chaos of the silver sea, where doppelgangers rained from the sky like fallen omens and every second seemed to grow into a deeper desperation, that hesitation felt big enough to swallow him. He had failed his trial. Whether he had fought Exrase once before or twenty times no longer mattered. He was still in the Gorge, moving through a trial that had not accepted whatever answer he had tried to offer it. Which meant one thing. Killing Exrase had never been the victory he was supposed to claim. Ahead of him, Aegis moved at the front of the group with a kind of instinctive awareness, his every glance and shift of footing angled toward keeping Ariana from being surrounded. They were exhausted and yet still kept running for one another. A doppelganger leaped toward him from the side, its limbs existing in abnormal directions. His scythe swung out, the edge slicing through the thing’s neck and shoulder before it could fully rise from the shallow silver sea. At the very beginning, he had thought he understood them. Aegis had seemed solemn, like the type of person who held himself above others simply because he knew how to lead. Ariana had felt even more distant than that, as if she was always on the verge of being possessed. But somewhere between the beginning and now, that image had cracked. He didn’t know precisely when it had happened. Perhaps it had begun in the smaller moments when fear didn’t demand all of his attention. The way Aegis never asked anyone to endure something he would not shoulder himself. The way Ariana, for all the danger burdened beneath her silence, had chosen to stand with them. It was the way all three of them moved now, not as strangers bound by necessity, but as people who had, despite everything, begun to carry pieces of each other without realising it. “We’re almost there!” Aegis called, glancing back as they crossed the clearing of the silver sea, the tower now close enough to obscure part of the black wa