Risen Episode One

  Odette C. Bell

  All characters in this publication are fictitious, any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Risen

  Episode One

  Copyright © 2022 Odette C Bell

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art stock photos licensed from Depositphotos.

  www.odettecbell.com

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  What Should You Do Next?

  Prologue

  Three Months Ago

  There was no way I would stop. No way I could.

  The end was finally here.

  I raced down the side of the hill. The wastelands spread around me, just so much death and destruction, just so much dust, barren land, and ash.

  “Arwyn,” Richard roared from behind me. Too late. My destiny was here, right? Because this was me – how I would end, why I’d been born, my sole reason to be.

  As I skidded down the scree made of tightly clumped rocks and dust – always more dust – I saw Fenrir. The largest wolf of all sat in the valley. Its body was made of the void – pure dark death. Its power wrapped around it in coiling clouds, each one more malignant than the last.

  They reached up its massive pulsing body to its eyes. They glowed these two flecks of deadly purple. They locked on me. And my gaze locked on it.

  I didn’t have a moment where time stood still – I would never be that lucky. The final fight was here, and I was going to take it. Fenrir had murdered too many, taken too much land, destroyed so many dreams. I knew what I would do, but still, as he looked into my eyes and I looked into his, we were two enemies facing the same moment. I’d been born to kill him, and he had been born to kill me. Maybe the only thing that mattered about that equation wasn’t the fact we were of equal power. It was that we were equally trapped.

  “Arwyn,” Richard bellowed louder from behind me.

  I turned around and saw his uniform. It was already burned from the other wolves we’d fought through to get here. Only a few scraps of his royal blue remained. They barely made it over his large arm muscles, but at least they matched his eyes.

  I even saw one fill with tears. Would he really miss me that much? Sure, we were together. And I suppose, in his arms, I’d briefly felt what it was like to actually belong to something other than a cruel destiny. But the whole point was it was over now. Sweet things don’t last. Everything ends.

  I skidded to a stop at the bottom of the valley. Fenrir rose up. In the distance, I heard all the other wolves it had given birth to. I called them wolves, but they were nothing like the mammals. These were pockets of void space – complete pure destruction. Chaos given a mind, given hatred, and given one task – the annihilation of others.

  Maybe the rest of the Boys – the elite fighting squad from the Academy – would be out there, fighting the small voids back. Did it really matter? None of our battles would count after this. There’d be no more nonstop, bloody, unforgiving wars. For everyone else, anyway.

  Today, it would all end. Both the fight and my life.

  I lifted two fingers above me using my left hand. I ensured my wrist was rigid and there was a strong line between it and my shoulder blade. The energy channels within aligned. There was a rush like I’d just jumped into the deep end of a swimming pool.

  All the while, behind me, Richard screamed my name. “Come back. You’re not ready.”

  Not ready? Funny, because Fenrir rose.

  He didn’t have a body – not like mine. He could decide what his form would become, and now these two massive paws as large as houses pushed down into the base of the valley below him. The pressure was too much, and it created fissure lines that danced and cracked through the barren wasteland. There was no water here – hadn’t rained in years, ever since Fenrir and the wolves had moved in. This particular place had once been farmland, and to my left, just up the hill, I could see a few ruined buildings. There’d been a city out here. I’d been born there, in fact. Flashes of the past sparked through my mind now. Happy summers, cozy winters, family, friends – a life worth living, until the void had moved in.

  All of that rage at all of that loss cascaded through me. It forced its way through my energy channels. I started to glow.

  Richard reached me. He tried to pull me back, but I was already pulsing with bright energy. He might have been a royal himself, but that didn’t matter. His fingers were burnt. More of his uniform fell off, but those crystal sapphire eyes still locked on me. “It won’t work, so don’t do it. Don’t sacrifice yourself for no damn point.”

  Sacrifice, ha? You know, everyone thinks sacrifice is something different. It’s only when you are asked to give up your life – the greatest sacrifice of all – that you truly find out what it means. There are facts you know with your head. There are facts you know with your hands. Then there are facts you learn with the last beat of your heart.

  Fenrir roared. The scream split across the wastelands. It pounded into me from every angle. If I hadn’t already called on my energy, I would’ve been blasted off my feet. Richard was. Though his arm had been burnt, he went to clutch my wrist again, but the scream struck him in the chest, blasting him backward. He landed several meters away, grunting, the air knocked from his lungs. His shirt fell from his chest. There went his regalia – a glowing badge just above his heart. One that signaled he was from the most important royal clan of all. Or at least he would be once I was gone. I was the last of the brights. The rest of my lineage had all gone the same way.

  This was what we were born for.

  So many people grope toward purpose in their life. I’d had mine from birth. But meaning requires sacrifice.

  Trust me, in the end, everything requires sacrifice.

  Fenrir roared one last time, brought his glowing eyes down, and locked them on mine.

  I did it. I summoned.

  Summoning was a rare gift, but rarer still amongst the royal clans. It required one to give their energy, to open up their channels, and to literally burn power from their bodies. There was no one like we brights, no one who could burn just as much.

  “No, this isn’t how it should be,” Richard tried one last time.

  I made the mistake of tilting my chin to the side and staring at him with my fiery red hair flicking around my face like groping fingers. Our eyes met. I wanted to say this would be a bittersweet ending, but there was nothing sweet about it.

  In fractured blasts, I remembered us being together.

  That didn’t matter anymore. It became like all my other memories – food to feed the light.

  “Grieves,” I called. It was the ultimate form I could summon. As I whipped my left hand in a circle above my head, I felt the energy being pulled from my soul.

  It was just as Fenrir reared. The giant beast pulled back, opened its jaw wide then wider still, then threw its energy at me. A jaw formed, but the rest of it created this massive billowing cloud of chaos. It surged toward me, dark purple strikes of lightning dancing in every direction.

  It struck me with all its force just as Grieves took form above me. It was a glowing red-orange lion. It danced in a circle until it bit its own tail. Then the full force of my bright power was unleashed. I stood in the middle of the circle. Anything within the circle would burn, and that was the point – that was how I would die. But Fenrir tried to attack at the same time, concentrating the majority of his body just above me.

  “Grieves, burn,” I screamed with the last force of my magic.

  As my old life flashed in front of my eyes – from the ruined city beyond, to the magical academy where I’d trained for this exact moment – I got ready to let go, ready to give up. I’d come full circle, right? Hence Grieves biting his tail above. When you’re born but you go out into the world and learn your lessons only to come back, you complete your life. And this was me, at the end.

  “Arwyn,” Richard screamed one last time. “You’re not strong enough.”

  I let his words divert my concentration just at the wrong moment. Fenrir reared further back. Grieves had bitten his tail, and the summoning spell was manifesting in bright sparks of the deadliest flames. I was already on fire. Voracious licks of it chased around my cheeks, across my jaw, and down my back. I’d always wondered what it would feel like – and it was pain incarnate. Every single nerve ending exploded with it. All my body wanted was to get away. But I still channeled more and more force.

  It wasn’t enough.

  Fenrir suddenly broke away from me. The side of his face was burnt. But quickly the cloud of chaos consumed the damage, and he re-grew another head.

  And I—

  When you sacrifice everything, you do it to win. But when you don’t—

  Fenrir roared one last time. I watched that new head form and a new smile spread across his lips.

  He had me exactly where he wanted me – and the next move would be all his.

  But the next move never came. With a grunt, Richard threw himself in from behind. Somehow he found the strength to crack through Grieves’s circle of fire and grab my stomach. He locked his own burning arms around my middle and pulled me back. He had to use the brunt of his own force to do it.

  If I was fire, he was water, and I heard the crashing fo
rce of his magic like waves smashing against an already broken seawall.

  “I will not let you die. This has never been about you sacrificing yourself, Arwyn. This has always been about you living in any way you can.”

  On the words I will not let you die, it was like he gave a decree. He shoved his feet down into the burning dust just beneath us and yanked me back. It pulled me out of the spell.

  Fenrir roared.

  Though it seemed as if he’d absorbed all the damage I’d wrought, he was still wounded. I could see the flighty look in his eyes. He could take this moment to destroy me – and risk himself – or he could just take another in the future.

  He roared one last time, then turned.

  Richard kept a hand on my stomach and one flat on my chest. It was like he was trying to hold my heart in place. I couldn’t tell you if it beat anymore. My body… I’d never been in pain like this. This wasn’t just my burning skin. This was existential. I’d been born for this moment, but it had come and gone, and I’d lost—

  “This is enough, Arwyn. If you can’t see that you weren’t born to die, then you don’t get to play this game anymore.”

  I let out a spluttering breath, blood splashing over my charred chin. “It’s not a game. People’s lives are—”

  “At stake,” he snapped over me as he bodily grunted and started to drag us back. How he had the strength to pull us up the hill despite the fact my Grieves spell had given him deep burns all over his front, I didn’t know. Or maybe I did. I liked to think there was no one more determined than me. But the day I’d met Richard, that had all changed. I might be royalty – he was a true king in the making.

  “I’m done.” His breath cut past my cheek like a sword unsheathed.

  “There will be another chance—” I tried.

  “… Not for you,” he said after a bitter pause.

  He shoved his arms underneath me. He swayed. I looked into his eyes. Something had… broken. No, it had solidified. All the kindness I’d seen previously was gone. It was replaced with a hard stare that would no longer accept what it could not control.

  He lifted me up.

  “No, put me down. Fenrir has just retreated a little. He’ll come back—”

  “To kill you. I’m not gonna let that happen. Nobody gets to kill you – even you,” he growled. Grunting, swaying, legs practically breaking with every shaking step, he carried me up the hill. Then he turned. He stood atop it. In the distance to the left, we could see the magical academy. That was the last part of the land that was still safe. I could see the barrier around the back of the school that kept the wasteland back.

  He stared at it for one single second, then tilted his chin down as he locked the full fury of his gaze onto me. “Arwyn—”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll do it one day—”

  “Arwyn, you’re getting banished.”

  “What?” I could barely spit that out. My brain was still too strained by the pain charging through it. But my frazzled neurons still knew what the word banished meant, and I still knew that only his family could do it. They were the true kings of this land. “You can’t—”

  “I told you. Nobody gets to kill you under my watch.”

  “But Fenrir—”

  “Arwyn Bright, I banish you back to the real world. You will never come here again, and you will no longer be part of this fight.”

  He meant it… he actually meant it. But he didn’t add the thing that he should have. I would never defeat Fenrir, never save the land. And Richard and I would never be together again.

  Because this was over.

  Chapter One

  I woke in a sweat. I was so sopping wet, it was like someone had cut my jugular. Foolishly, knowing better but not able to stop, I yanked a trembling hand up and grabbed my neck. My stiff fingers searched my carotid artery, swept down my chest, even sat flat against my heart. No, I hadn’t been stabbed. Not by anything but a memory.

  I closed my eyes. I flopped my palm over them as I bit my lips and swore.

  Then the alarm clock beside me rang. Its droning beat felt like somebody smashing a bat around in my brain.

  I immediately curled a hand into a fist and went to punch magic toward it. I stopped. Because I couldn’t.

  That had been a dream. Nope – a memory. So much worse than a dream.

  I swung my legs over my bed, my pillow tumbling onto the floor beside me. I stared at the worn floorboards, eyes morosely searching the sections where the varnish had flaked back long ago.

  I stood. I ignored the tremble in my legs.

  I walked over to the alarm clock, paused, then weighed my palm down on it, putting my shoulder into the move until I almost forced the $10 device right off the table.

  I stared dead-eyed at the dawn peeking through the crack in my old, mildew-covered curtains.

  My apartment was a real dive. It was better than bunking at the boarding school, though. The very ordinary, very normal boarding school in this very normal town.

  I crept forward, not because I was scared, but because my limbs were still spiked with adrenaline. It pulsed right up there in my jaw like somebody had grabbed my gullet, filled me up with jet fuel, and set me alight.

  I’d get over it by the time I had to drag my ass into school. I always did. That particular torturous memory came and struck me nightly. Right between the brows. Then it would always follow up with a sucker punch.

  I closed my eyes again. I went to say Richard with thin, daggerlike lips, but then I stopped. He was the bastard who’d banished me. He was the one who didn’t want to have a damn thing to do with me ever again.

  Why call his name out now when I could just curse it forever as I rotted in this goddamn ordinary town?

  Here I was, in the so-called real world. Sure, world-ending voids called Fenrir didn’t threaten to take over whole continents daily. Sure, I wasn’t expected to burn myself to death in the final fight. But that didn’t mean I was happy. So far from it.

  My entire life, I’d known what I had been and what the world had demanded of me. Now? All I had to do was put on the uniform slung over my chipped plastic chair, drag myself to school, and learn boring, pointless topics while out there, back in the other dimension, everything I knew and loved was slowly destroyed.

  It took me an age to throw my clothes off, dress, pat down my knee-length pleated skirt, and back away from the window. I didn’t turn from it, almost like I expected it to grow hands to throttle me with. I looked at it, not because it was a threat, but because my eyes traced the light coming in from the dawn beyond. My dive of an apartment faced east. I’d picked it for that exact reason. I didn’t care about the paint flaking off the walls, didn’t even care that the tiles in the bathroom were all cracked through, mildew and damp rising up to the ceiling like vines. Dawn meant everything to me. Waking up with just a scrap of light reflected in my eyes reminded me of home, let me recall what I was on the inside. And speaking of that, I paused, not staring at myself in the full-length mirror to my side, but just dropping my gaze down to my hands and searching every whorl and scar.

  I knew power was still within me. It was pointless to search for it. You couldn’t practice magic in the real world under ordinary circumstances. There were technically some who could – but they usually had no clue what they were and did it unconsciously. But my dimension scanned for them all the time. They picked up every single new witch and wizard and spirited them away. It was different with me, though. I’d been banished. My magic was back there. My body was over here. I shouldn’t be able to practice.

  No. I’d never be able to practice, I added to myself. It had been three damn months. I had to stop looking for ways out, loopholes I could exploit to get back there. Because if I got back there, Richard would simply find out, and he’d banish me again.

  I forced myself through the door and slammed it so hard, the hinges protested with a groan. I looked across to see that I’d actually split the wood. I went to punch it. I stopped. That was the old me. I couldn’t tell you how many times I’d lashed out with anger and force and punched walls or doors or even the damn floor back at the magical academy. My passion would always get the better of me. And with power like mine—