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The Somewhere Sister – Extract

A Black Library Imprint

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The Somewhere Sister

Jeremy Lambert

I’d been here before, and so had she.

I was outside, once again, looking at the Somewhere Sister.

The old inn was nestled in what trees remained at the foot of the mountain, a towering thing with too many stairs and too many rooms. The snow-covered road beneath my feet bent towards the inn briefly and continued past it into the wasteland expanse of Syar. The Somewhere Sister was the last stop before the impossible road to Ar-Ennascath, home of the annual festival of mastersmiths and their wonderful works… but it was a death wish for anyone foolish enough to attempt the journey.

We catered to those fools, and there were many of them once, though few now remain. The rooms at our – at my – inn remain empty most nights. But that is not what concerned me.

What concerned me, what made my blood run cold, was my twin sister.

She had been missing these many moons, yet there she stood – motionless in the middle of the road before me, barefoot in the snow, her mouth stretched open in a scream I would never hear.

Her eyes glared like moonlight, shining back at me. I wished she would move. A turn of the head, a stumbled foot forward. Something, anything, would be better, would be less of a horror, than nothing. But she did not indulge. She never did.

Until now.

I felt myself take a step towards her. It all felt distant, like something someone else had done. I took another. And another. I could walk, which meant tonight was different, which meant tonight was no nightmare.

I was close now. I tried to find her eyes inside the lights, her real ones, not the bright, pleading things wandering the night like search lanterns. For all of her stillness, she was panicked. I wanted to tell her that I was here, that I would care for her. That I wouldn’t leave.

Leave like she did.

The voice echoed in my head, though her lips did not move. Yet something was moving in her mouth. I could see it now. Even with her eyes near blinding my own. I would have been forgiven for thinking it was her tongue, as the thing inside searched for something it couldn’t find, but no.

It was a finger. And it wasn’t alone.

There were others – long, thin things. They belonged to a hand, reaching out for me.

Another hand now, its pale and spindly fingers worming past the edges of my sister’s lips, gripping them. Her scream was pulled wider, her jaw impossibly open, impossibly broken, until I could see the thing’s face.

The violet creature was climbing out of her mouth, blood streaming through its fingers, its claw-like nails drawing even more as the skin stretched and tore. Its terrible eyes glowered in the dark, finding me.

Vendriel.

I heard the voice again.

Last sister of somewhere.

It knew my name.

The lights in her eyes went out and the road went dark. Not just the road. Everything. No lights from the inn, no moonlight by which to see anything at all. Nothing. A cold, dark void.

But I am here.

Here with you.

What felt like the brush of frigid lips against my ear sent a shiver through me. I pulled back, turning away as if it would change my circumstances, a spell that would propel me elsewhere.

But here–

With me.

–it was still dark.

The next thing I remember, I was back inside the Somewhere Sister. The third room, on the third floor, sitting in front of the only companion I truly had left – my mother’s aetherquartz mirror. My reflection in it was like a fading memory, the exhausted aelf staring back at me nearly as pale as the moon itself. Even my hair was near white in the moonlight. I half expected my reflection to wither away. Crumble into ash and fall to the floor to be forgotten.

To disappear.

Every time I found myself wandering, which was indeed Mother’s word for it – Mother’s just had one of her wanderings, little one, not to worry even though I left you alone, all alone with the many guests of many rooms, each of them hungry, oh so starving now, and who is going to feed them? Can it be you? – I would find myself back in her room, sitting before her mirror, like one of the Syari time-warping curses had wound out of the wastes and landed here. Like time itself had leapt forward to place me back before the mirror, staring at myself looking so like my sister Velethir but never quite as put together, never quite as flawless as my twin… My memory of the gap in time was as much a dark void as the night itself.

The old room was still empty – no longer my mother’s, no longer my sister’s and something less than mine, though it had served as my bed since Velethir disappeared.

I was left wondering what it was, the thing in the dark. Not Velethir, that much I knew. My mind is quiet, and it never used to be when she was here – always connected, Iliathan twins.

Even now I reach out to her, but where I would normally find her thoughts, her very feelings along with my own, in tune with my own, there is a harrowing silence. In my head it means she is no longer there. In my heart, she remains. Somewhere. Taken, hidden, trapped and not just some discarded bit of blood, flesh and bone with its castaway eyes alight no longer. Because she would never–

Leave me.

I would have thought all of it a nightmare but for my frozen bare feet, still wet from the snow outside the inn. The trail of puddled footprints on the floor leading back to the door would suggest the same. My apron, too, wet as it was. It wasn’t the first time this had happened, with me left wondering how I got here. How I had come back in from the cold, or another room at the inn–

The cellar.

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Warhammer horror

A Black Library Imprint

First published in Great Britain in 2022.
This eBook edition published in 2022 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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ISBN: 978-1-80407-184-7

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