Soul Seeker

44: Sunlight Shrine

One heartbeat.

One lifetime.

What felt like an immeasurable amount of time had passed, unable to be quantified by anyone but an immortal, by the time Ciara opened her eyes.

She was floating on a soft, fluffy cloud, her limbs sinking in... When had she last been this relaxed? The tension had finally leaked from her body, and her relief was unutterable. That was all she could think about for now. Her brain had shrunk to the size of a hazelnut.

Above her, sunlight played across the ceiling of her bedroom: hers, the one she had grown up in. She bundled the covers to her chin – musty, unused, and long overdue a wash since long before she left – and inhaled deeply. The scent alone made her want to cry.

For hours, she was content to lie in bed drifting in and out of sleep at her leisure. She had not had this luxury in months, and a small, alert part of her revelled in the fact that her brain was too sleep-addled to process the events that had just come to pass. She watched the sunlight slowly change and grow stronger, brighter. Eventually, she pulled herself out of bed and padded downstairs.

The house was empty, dusty, and so quiet she could hear every creak of the timbers. Ciara stood silently gazing about her as a wave of blackness began to rise inside.

Before the wave could crest, before her resolve snapped completely, she heard the patter of many pairs of furious paws, and with whines and barks, her entire sled team of huskies pounced on her.

"Argh!" Ciara gave a cry of delight as they covered her in licks and nudges from their cool, wet noses.

Laughing so hard it hurt to breathe, overwhelmed with their simple loyal love, she sank to the floor with them and buried her hands and face in their thick fur. She held Rufus especially close. It was a miracle her dogs had made it through the journey unharmed, but she was happy to thank the guardians for small mercies.

She found some frozen hunks of meat in the cellar and once the dogs were busy devouring it – only the finest seal to thank them for their hard work – she got a fire going and prepared the hottest bath she had ever made. The work kept her hands busy, steadied her, helped her to forget about the black hole of Cali's absence, if only for now.

Ciara placed a tentative foot in the bath and almost screeched at the heat searing her skin. But after the lake ordeal, it was welcome. Maybe she couldn't scorch her powers away, but she could damn well try.

Soon she had sunk into the bath until only her nose and eyes were above the water, hair fanning about her, and she lay until the heat had soaked into her tense, sore muscles, some of them definitely torn. Her bruises smarted and cuts stung, but the heat was worth it. She lathered a sizeable amount of soap and scrubbed herself vigorously from head to toe, wishing she could feel truly clean, and knowing that she never would – not since that night in the woods with Sköll where she killed a man for the first time.

When she had taken several layers of skin off, she worked every single knot out of her curls with her fingers, smoothing seaweed extract through it to help give her coiled curls their bounce back. She tried not to think about the way her mother had been so excited when she had realised her daughter had curls, inherited from her grandmother, a woman with a formidable iron will who had left Nome and moved away to the opposite side of Skar long before Ciara was born. She tried not to think of the hazy memories she had of trips to the sea with her mother, walking hand in hand with her along the beach as they searched for seaweed and kelp to harvest for Ciara's hair. The long, warm, comfortable evenings in the depths of winter where her mother would grind the fresh ingredients into a paste and carefully seal them in bottles to use when Ciara needed them.