Exquisite Ruin (The Labyrinth #1)

Chapter 16

I DON’T know what’s happening. There’s a cold, hard pressure on my ankle, and the mirror is flaking away all around me, the quicksilver fading to dull gray and drifting away like ash against a black sky.

And then I understand: Something broke the mirror before I could finish reliving the memory. Someone , apparently, because they pulled me back out at the same time, keeping me from leaving this godsforsaken platform of ice.

Like when I dove behind the quicksilver curtain, I can still hear the sound of something shattering. It’s as if I’ve been gone for less than a second—maybe that’s all the time the memories take in the maze. But it’s not the mirror’s destruction that I hear, because it’s already gone. I turn around and choke on a scream.

Deos’s peg-leg of ice has splintered, leaving him balanced precariously on his remaining foot. The Other-Me who was closest apparently lunged through it to seize my ankle with an icy, tentacle-like appendage. She broke the mirror either with her attack or by dragging me back out.

She’s poised to do more, her too-wide translucent jaws with their glittering sharp teeth nearing the meat of my leg, when Deos’s marble arm catches her around the neck. He flings her aside so violently that she flies across the ice and slides over the edge of the platform, falling into darkness. Fortunately, her grip wasn’t strong enough to take me with her or to break my own leg—the memory of the roots sends phantom pain echoing through my bone.

Such effort causes Deos to totter off-balance and fall. I hear the crack in the ice before I see it crumbling out from under him. He looks down, and then up at me with his carved, unblinking eyes and that beautiful, serene face, seeming to hold my gaze for a stretched moment.

When he moves, he begins to shuffle away from me on his remaining limbs.

“Deos, no!” I cry, but the warning groan underfoot keeps me from reaching for him. “What are you doing?”

But it’s plain to see. He’s pulling back, not only to avoid risking the ice beneath us more than he already has, but to place himself in front of the Other-Mes still clamoring for us.

Giving himself to them in my stead.

I scream when two of them seize his arm and head and wrench in opposite directions. One even begins bashing her face against his shoulder—targeting the fracture in the marble that cuts to his navel. It doesn’t seem to bother her that she smashes her own skull until only the back side is left, or that she’s creating a spiderweb of faults in the ice below. She only seems to want one thing.

Deos is on his knees when he splits entirely down the middle. Both marble halves of him crash down with the Other-Mes hanging off either side. The ice sags in a shallow, crack-woven basket to cradle them, creaking precipitously. No part of him so much as twitches anymore, lying utterly still—lifeless—though his eyes still seemed locked on mine.

All I can do is look on in horror, no sound escaping my open mouth. I imagined that I’d broken Daesra in the past by binding him, but I didn’t think I’d see it demonstrated so plainly. Those ice figures depict the worst imaginable version of me. The marble statue, the best of him.

Those horrible shattered faces of mine turn to look up at me, apparently finished with Deos. And they lunge for me.

But they don’t reach me, because the ice drops out from underneath them in a crackling whoosh, and then there’s only a gaping maw and silence where they once were. Where Deos was, too.

There will be no climbing out of that darkness. It’s no pit or lake or even underground river. It’s total absence. Irreversible loss. Memory forever forgotten. I know in my gut that Deos is gone for good this time. Part of me thinks he should have taken me with him. He saved me, but why? Was it his own choice—or did Daesra decide for him?

Perhaps I’ll never know. I’ll soon follow him into oblivion, anyway. Most of the Other-Mes are now toppling into the widening fissures and plummeting into the seemingly bottomless depths. The entire platform is breaking up around me. Without the mirror, I have nowhere else to go.

I never thought I would wish for another mirror.

Turning to look where it once was, I gasp. There’s no quicksilver curtain in the center of the platform, but there’s something else.

A well . The stacked blocks of its sides are composed of ice like everything else, and it’s surrounded by darkness, but otherwise it looks as solid as any village well. Never mind that the center shaft drops into the same nothingness beneath the crumbling, shuddering platform. It’s more like a well at the end of the world.

Or, at least, to the bottom of this maze. I wonder what new depths it could possibly tap. I’d rather not know, but the cracks racing through the ice around it, the platform’s edges dropping away, will reveal the answer to me whether I like it or not.

Horizon’s words bubble up in my mind as if surfacing once more in the mirror’s silvery pool: Yield to that which you cannot fight.

I don’t have much time to consider. I lever myself up onto the well’s edge and toss my legs over, just as the ground falls out from underneath me. My feet now dangle, waiting, over a similar darkness within. But perhaps different. I can’t help but remember another voice.

When you’re scratching blindly at the bottom of this particular well with bloody fingernails and no hope of escape and no one who cares for you, just remember that I am the only one who can get you out.

It may have been a threat, but from this perspective, I see a different side to it. Daesra mentioned a well, and he said he could get me out. If anyone could, he could.

Maybe there’s a whisper of hope in such harsh words. Because he also told me to discover the truth about myself—and to come find him. Amazingly, impossibly , the truth is that I’m not seeking power. I put him in this maze not to gain immortality, but his freedom. Because I love him. I don’t have to hate myself, even if he does.

He doesn’t know the truth, but I do.

I swap my rope bindings, viciously tightening them until I can feel the burn in my frozen flesh once again. I also— finally —remove the leather packet and withdraw my needles one by one, stabbing a row of them into my right arm, relishing the sharp clarity each point brings me. I layer a second set over those in a cross shape, creating something like metal laces in my flesh. Agony spikes through me, and yet the pain allows me to heal myself. My torn shoulder, my myriad holes and scrapes and bruises. I even warm myself.

Most healing of all is the idea that I’m not a monster. And maybe I don’t have to defeat Daesra, even if he is . I can still save him, somehow. Enduring another mirror would be well worth figuring out how, where Horizon could finish telling me.

Maybe Daesra and I were meant to leave here together.

Or maybe I’m grasping at loose threads that I’m mistaking for sturdy rope.

Thread. I look down at my finger, at the red band there, once a string that Daesra tied between the two of us what feels like an age ago. I still can’t tell if it’s a boon or a trap to trip. A promise or a threat?

Come find me.

I know where he is. I’m sitting on the lip of a well surrounded by nothing. There’s only darkness outside and within, and I’m perched above it like a bird on a spire—except I can’t fly. It’s perverse, in a way, to make me jump instead of fall.

Daesra and I were always perverse.

I peer down into the horrible depths of the shaft, hoping for a shimmer of light in the darkness. Perhaps even the quicksilver of a mirror to catch me. But that’s far too much to hope for, and I see nothing but my legs, dangling over nothing.

I want to do anything but jump. Even after all I’ve been through, the terrible vistas I’ve seen and the cold and dark I’ve endured, the prospect of throwing myself into the well terrifies me beyond anything I’ve yet encountered. But I don’t want to wait until the well crumbles with the rest of the structure, stealing the choice from me.

My chance to make this darkness mine . Mine and Daesra’s.

I suck in a breath, as cold and catching as slivers of ice in my throat. And then I let my thighs slide over the well’s freezing rim. My stomach lurches in that awful way, chill air rushes through my hair, and I slip into darkness.

I fall.

And fall.

And fall.

I fall for so long that I get used to the sensation, adjusting to a steady sort of disorientation. Eventually, my body feels more like it’s floating in a midnight sea. I can’t tell which way is up or down, with nothing to anchor me in the blackness. I can’t see anything, not even my hand in front of my face.

Until I spot him , standing what looks like upside down, far in the distance. He becomes my anchor. Abruptly, I can roll over and sit up—upon nothing—facing his direction. He’s still the only thing I can see in the darkness. His horns and tail. Pale bluish skin and black tunic. He shines like a familiar light, despite his shuttered expression.

And then he turns away from me on his cloven hooves and vanishes.

“Daesra!” I cry out. “Wait!”

He’s still a daemon. He may yet hate me. He might even be the monster I have to face. But I need to tell him what I know: I didn’t lock him in this maze out of greed. He’s not here to become more of a monster, but less of one, and I’m here to save him, not best him once and for all. I want to shout that I love him.

Except his name falls heavily from my lips, muffled into instant silence. My strange—nonexistent?—surroundings don’t want to carry my voice. I hope they’ll continue to carry my weight, at least—if that’s even what it’s doing and I’m not still tumbling into nothing. It doesn’t feel as though I’m falling. I reach out, fingers stretching blindly, in the direction Daesra disappeared. I touch only darkness.

I’m not even sure that was him and not a trick. But what else can I do?

I start crawling in his direction—not because Daesra would like it, I think ironically, but because it feels too precarious to stand when I can’t see anything, not even my own body. I can’t entirely feel the solidity of whatever lies under my hands and knees, either. It’s as though I’m swaddled in velvet so soft I can barely sense it. I’m blindfolded, muffled, numb to everything, except I can still move.

I’m truly alone. Touching and touched by nothing, no one.

Isn’t this what you wanted? I think.

No , I snap back at myself. I’ve never wanted this. I want to cling to Daesra, and Pogli, and poor Deos—gods, Deos meant so much to me in the end—never mind Hawk and even my mother , whom I never let myself want before. I want her now.

Sometimes I feel as if the Sadaré of the past, the one living in those mirrors, was an entirely different person.

Didn’t you want to be free of everything? that niggling question persists.

This isn’t freedom , I think, remembering Horizon’s words. Freedom is fearing nothing while everything is open to you. This darkness is like a box, buried deep underground. And what is that but a grave?

I hope I’m not dead.

Not yet , whispers that same voice—and I begin to wonder if it’s wholly mine.

The silence around me is so thick I can almost hear it. Fear climbs up my throat, so much that I try to swallow it.

Suddenly, I can taste it. The musty flavor of earth. For a moment, I wonder if I truly am underground, but then I smell the leaves as well, moldering underneath a whiff of woodsmoke.

It’s the scent of a crisp autumn day, back on my aunt’s island.

I know the exact day now. When dirt found its way into my mouth after the men who arrived on the ship held me down, pressing my cheek into the earth. Gathering above me in a looming circle of shadows against the sky. Eager to begin. I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to watch what they would do to me.

I’d never in my life been so afraid. If fear had a flavor, it would be this.

But the taste of blood soon washes it down. Not mine—theirs, after their throats burst overhead and rained down upon me, coppery and warm. In the end, Hawk merely helped me up off the body-strewn ground and offered me a cloth to wipe my lips, as if in afterthought.

Inexplicably, I can almost taste my own blood from when it splashed crimson across Daesra’s face as I rode atop him. Another act of violence to douse my fear, except this time by my own hand. My own throat’s blood to put a collar on the daemon’s.

I tried to swallow my fear. Bury it. Chain it. Anything but face it.

Unsurprising, then, that I never quite managed to rid myself of it.

Fear builds walls, as Horizon said. I’m running into them now, as I crawl forward.

This time, the only way around them is through . And so I lift a shaking hand and keep feeling my way ahead.

I can’t help but cry out when something like a spiderweb catches on my face. It breaks before I can wipe it away. Flailing, I search for the rest of it, but I come across nothing else when I pat down my shoulders.

Spiders. Of course.

I try not to imagine them as I move forward in the darkness, though I’ve grown more tentative, searching, as I reach blindly in front of me.

Something light and many-legged skitters across the back of my hand. I jerk away with a gasp, but something is still crawling up my arm. When I claw at it, there’s nothing there. My neck prickles so fiercely that I paw at that , like I can’t at the invisible spiders. A ragged gasp escapes me.

Even though I can’t see, I try to summon fire. Nothing happens. There’s no one here except me and my living fear, and nothing in between.

There’s only one way out of this—forward and down. I screw my eyes shut. And I press onward on hands and knees.

Terror hits me in an unstoppable wave when tiny legs and bodies are suddenly swarming all over me like a living shroud. I would scream, except they would crawl in my mouth. I choke, shuddering, paralyzed with panic, my breath blowing like a winded horse’s through my nostrils. I desperately hope they can’t get in through my nose.

What if this darkness isn’t an illusion, and spiders are truly swarming all over me? How can I go forward into that ?

That’s absurd , my own internal voice screams back. If I must face my fear, then running from what I can’t even see is utter foolishness.

And yet, I’ve feared many invisible things. The thought of pain that I can’t control. Love and the bonds it creates. I feared the latter such that I bound another against his will—my lover—and walled myself off, letting my fear twist me into something ugly.

Utter foolishness turned poison.

Abruptly, the crawling on my skin ceases as if it never were. Shivering and gasping, I pass my hands over my face, my arms. Nothing.

I can’t enjoy the feeling—or lack thereof—for long.

There’s a scraping noise behind me, making me freeze. Something is dragging itself through the darkness toward me. My first thought, like when I was back in the ice halls, is to run. Maybe it’s the Other-Me once again, a horror, still not dead. Still coming for me.

Ah , I think. Here is my fear of myself. The sound of my maimed and gruesome soul, writhing after me through the darkness.

But it’s not just my darkness, I remember. Not only my fear. Daesra is trapped here as well. This is his soul tied up in this lonely prison. His fear is the mirror of mine, the other side of the knife’s edge that is love’s betrayal. While I fear that blade at my throat, holding me down, he fears the severance of love’s bonds as if they were nothing. Abandonment. That violent shove out the door in place of a welcoming embrace. And so he forced himself to shove first.

It’s my desire to comfort him, to embrace him, that gives me the strength to turn on my hands and knees and crawl toward the terrible sound. My skin rebels, trying to shiver off me in the opposite direction as the scraping and rasping grows ahead of me. I screw up my eyes even though I can’t see anything. Any moment I expect to feel broken shards of ice in place of limb or face, or even ripped flesh. Blood on my fingertips. The stench of rot in my nose. The taste of poison in my mouth. Or even jagged teeth ripping into me.

Except my palm only slaps onto a smooth, flat surface covered in a thin sheet of water, not even deep enough to cover my hand. At the light splash, I open my eyes. I can see my body again—and so much more in my surroundings.

Shapes coalesce in the darkness—huge, floating—as my vision adjusts to the murky, cavernous space before me. A severed head as big as a house, carved of stone, drifts far in the gloom. A hand grips a broken sword here, the haunch of some hoofed animal stomps upon nothing over there. Columns stand on naught but air, supporting no ceiling I can see in the shadows high above. A spiral staircase wide enough for many people abreast hangs shattered into twirling, misaligned chunks that somehow stack upon themselves and yet climb nowhere. I feel small, unwelcome, in the godlike landscape. I, at least, am anchored to the ground, even if the shapes above me aren’t bound by the same rules.

Underlying it all is a familiar black floor as smooth as glass, stretching as far as the eye can see, covered in a layer of water that flows over it as sleekly as silk. But in the center, the floor falls away into the maw of the deepest, darkest pit I’ve ever seen, wider than any of the colossal broken forms floating above it. Perhaps waiting to swallow them. Or me. Or everything.

This is the abyss at the end of it all. I thought I’d already fallen into it, through the well, but that was just the entryway. Friendly, in comparison. The water flows silently but inexorably over the brink in silent, glinting invitation.

Water finds a way , I remember thinking. Forward and always down.

Standing at the rim of the abyss, where the ground begins to slope before vanishing into the terrifying darkness, is Daesra. He’s staring down into it, as if ready to jump, water parting around his hooves with barely a ripple.

“Daesra, don’t!” I cry. My voice carries this time, echoing over the water, bouncing off the strange stone shapes drifting through the gloom. Sounding minuscule, inconsequential, as it returns to me.

He looks over his shoulder and smiles. “Why would I? I was waiting for you.” He holds out a hand. “Care to join me?”