Revenant Slaves Chapter 66: Chapter 62: Zain

Read chapter 66 of Revenant Slaves by Zee on NovelPedia.

The roar of the enormous ship touching down outside the city pierced the night of celebrations going on in the temple grounds. Everyone watched in stunned silence as the ship slowly touched down, blowing huge plumes of fire from its thrusters, until the city's ruined skyline eventually blotted out the ship as it landed outside the city. The rebels knew what they were seeing. Many of Cinderwake’s citizens probably did as well. The freed slaves only stared in frightened awe. His people started calling out to the gathered crowd, probably preparing for another speech, to try to explain the gift the rebellion had brought them on this auspicious day. Thankfully, he wasn’t needed here for the speeches this time. Zain didn’t stick around; he made his way back to the station, to the train car with Miru and her parents. As he entered, he spotted Rain, sitting beside Miru’s cot, her wheelchair lying next to the wall at their back. She was holding onto Miru’s hand. Hardy sat on the other side of Miru. His arm with the HPC extended above their daughter; it seemed they were watching the speech on the temple grounds. Zain quietly made his way over to his cot, which lay in the corner of the train car. Zain reached out with an essence thread to check on Miru. As brutal as the past few days had been, Zain was already near the limits of what a novice weaver should have been capable of. Straining to use his manifested ability to its absolute limit—while trying not to cross the severance threshold—had taught him a lot. It wasn’t fair to draw parallels between healing the little girl’s suffering and training to improve as a weaver, but that was where things stood. Working on Miru tirelessly, day and night, had pushed the boundaries of his abilities in ways that would otherwise have taken months. There was also that alien thread attached to his soul. Zain was sure that it had been responsible for the freak incident in which he had lost control of his own body. Studying how the possessing threads wove around his limbs and channeled his ability at that time provided an ideal guide for developing his own skills. As much as Zain had hated that feeling then, he still felt slight shivers thinking about it—he really was grateful to that person. Oddly enough, Zain felt a little at peace when he looked at the foreign thread linked to his soul. It hadn’t done anything to harm him; it only took control of him to heal Miru. Zain also felt a sort of familiarity with it. Whatever this ability was, it didn’t belong to any of the Imams he had met and studied under. There was one other plausible figure who would help him. Because it truly did help him, that it had come in such a grotesque manner could maybe be forgiven—his father, Ibrahim. Zain faintly remembered his mother consoling him once that his father watched over them at all times; Ibrahim was closer than they could imagine. ‘Was this what she meant?’ Zain looked wistfully at the thread extending from his soul until it passed through the train car’s floor and out of his line of sight. Zain took in a deep breath and nudged an essence thread of his own to wrap around the foreign one. If this really was his father, Zain wanted to express his gratitude; this was the closest thing to a hug he could give. Zain hadn’t let it show back at the ceremony, but the moment his sister and Ash were bound together, Zain had almost sobbed. Maya had been the last person for whom Zain came first. Especially so after his mother had died. Now, even that place belonged to someone else. Zain didn’t even know if the gesture would work, but he wanted to believe it would, just for a moment. Zain wasn’t naive; neither was he a child waiting for his father to return. The force had controlled him; that it had done good didn’t guarantee that the next time it possessed him, it wouldn’t cause irreparable harm. He would be powerless to stop it either way, and that left a bad taste in his mouth. With a mental sigh, he diverted his attention b