THE UNDERREALM
FEAR SLICED THROUGH ME like a hot knife.
The Mother looked just the same as she had in the bloody trenches. White hair fell to the ground in sheets. She was tall and rake-thin, her cheeks sunken and hollow, her skin grey as the piles of ash around her. She wore black robes that reached up to her jaw, and the only flesh visible besides her face belonged to spidery hands. Her pointed nails were so long that they curled back on themselves in grotesque helixes, like fossils or snakes or something far worse.
Sitting atop a natural dais of raised ground, her throne, too, was made of bones. The shards had been unnaturally twisted around each other into the shape of roses, their stems woven together like braids. A curious substance swirled around her feet, a dark, metallic fog, as though the evil were seeping out of her in noxious whorls.
A dozen hooded figures swanned around her, spectral and almost floating as they sank to her feet in prayer.
Devils.
I understood this with a lurch in my chest, with unwavering clarity – because I had been one.
To the left-hand side of the dais, there was a white-hot bed of coals, burning silent and deadly. The glade echoed with that awful ritornelle of suffering, and I had to fight the childish urge to clap my hands to my ears. I knew it wouldn’t work, anyway; the voices of my long-lost loved ones emanated from the deepest caverns of my own mind.
At the sight of us, the Mother grinned broadly, revealing a row of teeth so white they were almost silver.
‘We meet again, at last.’ Her voice was cool, crisp, with a choral purity to it that sent shivers down my spine. ‘Quite the game of cat-and-mouse you’ve been playing.’
Emotions pirouetted inside me: fear and loss and grief and yearning and … adoration, simple and childlike and terrible.
She was not just the Mother. She was my Mother.
She stared at me and only me. ‘Evelyn.’
Maybe I imagined it, maybe I was just projecting, but there was a trace of tenderness beneath the name, the syllables fractured by some painfully human emotion. The name I had chosen for myself, and yet, on her lips, it sounded like the one I’d been born into. I could almost imagine her calling it out through the trees as she tried to find me in a game of hide-and-seek. Could almost imagine her cooing it as I fell asleep.
Did devils sleep?
I could not remember.
Arden looked from me to her, confused, angry . ‘Evelyn is not yours any more.’
A scathing bark. ‘Nor is she yours. You said it yourself.’ She threw her tone low in an approximation of Arden’s voice. ‘“I will always be yours. But I gave up the right to call you mine a long time ago.”’
My wistful reverie shattered. ‘You were listening?’
The Mother shook her head, sheets of glossy hair shining in the unnatural glow of the glade. ‘No. I was feeling . I have felt everything you have felt for a thousand years.’
Arden took a step towards the dais, not-body writhing with hatred. ‘Why do you have us wait to turn eighteen before we start reaping? Do you have some semblance of a conscience? An aversion to child labour?’
It figured that Arden would bypass the emotion and spring straight into the logistical questions. And I understood it, after so many lifetimes of trying to fathom the how , the why . We didn’t know how long we had to find answers.
With an almighty clap of her hands, the Mother laughed rapturously, as though nobody had ever said anything quite so funny. ‘Good grief, no. Children are simply too messy. Emotional, gullible, sloppy in their execution. They create too many unwitting loopholes in their bargains. The sheer incompetence of them. Hardly worth the trouble.’
‘But this deal has a loophole,’ argued Arden. ‘It has always bothered me, the internal logic of it. Surely you had to know that someone would figure this out, sooner or later. That if we die before we turn eighteen, we never have to reap another soul.’
A curious flicker across her skeletal face. ‘Souls aren’t the only thing that sustain me. Suffering does too. It flows to me along our tether, like blood through an artery. And my, have you two suffered so deliciously . I have dined upon it for centuries.’
‘So why come after us in the trenches?’ I asked, voice nowhere near as steady or forceful as Arden’s, and yet I did not think I was afraid . Not really. ‘Why did you decide then that this had gone on long enough?’
A shrug. ‘I grew greedy and impatient. Because you existed in one of the darkest moments the mortal world had ever known, and you were surrounded by souls for the reaping. More than at any other point in history. Enough to recruit me an entire army of my own. How many of your fellow soldiers would’ve sold their soul to end that war? How many would have sold their soul to revive their fallen? How many would’ve sold their soul to ease their loved ones’ suffering? It was fertile ground, and I wanted you to reap it.’
I remembered the strange feeling I’d got when she’d appeared in those trenches – the foreign desire to run to her. It made a twisted sort of sense. She had been my mother, once, and I was but a child in a futile war, surrounded by pain so towering I could barely breathe. Little wonder I craved her comfort.
‘And our wedding?’ Arden snarled. ‘There was no misery, that day. No souls on the brink of ruin. Just us, and joy.’
‘Precisely.’ The Mother gazed at him with utter indifference; whatever she felt for me did not extend to him. ‘I couldn’t allow that. Not when there was such a glorious opportunity to turn the best day of your lives into the worst. That suffering was delectable. Like a heaping mound of dessert.’
I shook my head, once again trying to banish the undercurrent of childlike love I felt for her. ‘Surely it still would’ve been better for you to have us reaping more souls than simply letting us suffer. You have a pyramid scheme to uphold.’
I briefly wondered whether she’d understand the modern concept, but she bared her teeth in that sharp grin once more. ‘Suffering is in itself a pyramid scheme. Hurt people hurt people. One soul feels pain, so they inflict the same upon three more, in a bid to rid themselves of it. Those three pass it on to more still, and it spirals beyond all control. The human condition, so it seems.’
‘How did you come to be?’ Arden asked, almost as soon as she’d finished talking. ‘You’re the top of the pyramid, so you can’t have made a bargain.’
The Mother’s eyes – black as coal – narrowed in appraisal. ‘My, you’re quite the inquisitive little soul, aren’t you?’
Arden’s teeth ground together like pestle and mortar. ‘I have years of wondering behind me.’
The Mother hooked a finger at one of the devils, who scurried over and began polishing the longest of their master’s grim nails. ‘I have never understood my own origins well enough to explain them. Only a sense that I am suffering, manifest. I am the product of human pain, of millennia of hatred and bloodshed, loss and grief. I did not ask to exist, and yet I do. And whatever I am, I could not bear to be alone. So I soon taught myself how to find company, willing or otherwise.’
Arden surveyed the barren landscape. ‘Still looks rather desolate to me.’
The Mother’s shoulders hitched almost imperceptibly; the slightest show of tension that anyone but her offspring might have missed. ‘The others are wandering the mortal realm, bringing me more souls, more suffering.’
The devils exchanged the most curious of glances.
‘You’re lying,’ Arden said slowly, watching them, piecing it all together – a thousand years of theorizing finally bearing fruit. ‘Your numbers are dwindling. That ’s why you came after us in the trenches.’
Arden peered at the devil polishing her nail, and my gaze followed. The devil was fading around the edges; even less corporeal than the two of us. Glitching, almost, like a printer running out of ink. There was something wrong with them. They didn’t look or feel at all how I remembered. Arden seemed to come to the same realization, glaring back at the Mother.
‘Something happens to the devils who reap. They’re … crumbling.’ A frenetic calculation took place behind Arden’s eyes. ‘Because the more broken souls they recruit, the more suffering flows towards them. And souls can only absorb so much suffering before it destroys them.’ Arden said this with the profound weight of a soul who had already borne too much pain, who had also begun to crumple beneath the weight of it. ‘They are not built like you. They are humans in devils’ clothing. And so the suffering is too much to bear.’
The Mother rearranged herself on the throne, and by now the tension had become fully fledged loathing.
Arden had struck a nerve.
‘I trust you are ready to begin reaping for me,’ she said calmly – too calmly.
‘No.’ I glared at her with the sun’s own fury, and the Mother regarded me with a look I could not parse.
Emotions towered in my chest – shame and rejection, fear and desperation, and love, love, love. I longed to carve out everything I felt for her.
This woman – this being – had raised me as her own. Had we drawn hopscotch on the ground in trails of ash? Made dice out of carved femurs? Did she offer counsel on reaping, or was it woven into the very fabric of me?
‘Where did I come from?’ I whispered. ‘Did you give birth to me, like mortal women do? Do I have a father?’
She gave a twisted, self-satisfied smile. ‘Now, why would I tell you that, when the pain of not knowing tastes so good ?’
‘You’re evil.’ The words were like globules of spit landing at her feet, but I didn’t even know if I truly meant them.
The Mother blinked in surprise. ‘Am I? Or am I simply doing what I must to survive? How am I so different to every other soul who enters willingly into a bargain with me? We are all primal creatures. We think of our own continuance above all else, irrespective of the cost.’
Her tone was preening, and I wanted to rip it from her mouth.
Hatred trembled at the core of me like an avalanche hurtling down a slope.
‘Why are you here, Evelyn?’ the Mother murmured. The air between us shook like a ribcage. Another smug smile nicked at the corner of her lips. ‘I think some small part of you wanted to see me again.’
There was almost something searching in her gaze, some last wisp of kinship, a single drop of humanity in the vast ocean of her evil. As though she wanted to hear something tender – that I missed her, or loved her, or, at the very least, respected her.
It almost drew me in, the glint of it, like I was a child stooping to examine an old penny in a pond.
But now I knew what real motherhood was – jam and croissants and cups of tea, warm hugs by glowing fires. You are the lights of my life.
Resolve tightened my grip on the bone in my hand.
‘Because I want to destroy you,’ I whispered, the faintest trace of a breath.
The quirk of an eyebrow. ‘Pardon?’
‘BECAUSE I WANT TO DESTROY YOU!’ I screamed.
And then I lunged towards the dais.
Instead of leaping to their master’s defence, the devils parted like a sea – whether through some vague sense of self-preservation or because, in the deepest part of their indentured selves, they wanted to see the Mother taken down.
I launched myself into the air, and for a few moments it felt like I was floating. Below me, the Mother’s expression was one of shock and hate.
She twisted out of the way, but it was not enough.
The bone shard plunged into the back of her neck.
There was no spurt of blood, but rather a puff of pale-grey mist emanating from the wound; the same immaterial fog that slicked around her ankles.
Wild arms grappled at me, then she weakened like a rag doll.
I wrenched the makeshift blade free of her neck and then plunged again, this time into the back of her shoulder.
Wrench, lift, bone into her heart.
Under the third blow, she crumpled next to the hot coals.
Breathing jaggedly, I stood back, this time leaving the blade inside her. I waited for myself to die too, the way Arden and I always did together, but nothing happened.
Yet she was folded around herself on the ground, small and sad and lifeless.
The servants stared at their fallen Mother. Arden stood silently behind me, not daring to move to my side.
I had done it.
I had destroyed the Mother.
My Mother.
And yet something was wrong.
I didn’t know what I’d expected, but it had been more. Surely, at the defeat of the Mother, the Underrealm would crumble to dust, the other devils would slump to the ground, all their tethers severed at last. All the cruel tension would leave the world. We would be free – and we would be able to feel it.
Instead, everything teetered on a precipice.
After several taut beats, the Mother twitched, then breathed in a shallow, rasping breath. Horror licked at me like a white flame.
The devils leaped into action.
Three crouched at her side and turned her body over; almost-vacant eyes stared up to the falling ash. They plugged the wounds on her neck and shoulder with their hands, so the peculiar grey mist stopped flowing. They muttered low chants, like a litany.
Four more strode towards Arden.
Arden took a step back, face twisting with horror as the cloaked figures closed in and grabbed a limb each.
Despite Arden’s writhing, the servants seemed unfathomably strong.
They dragged my love towards the bed of hot coals.
‘No!’ I screamed, but four more servants were at my own arms and legs, and I could not move. They had locked me in place so suddenly and absolutely that I was powerless.
They were so strong. Too strong. An ungodly power at their fingertips.
Arden’s back was slammed against the hot coals, and coiling bonds appeared at the corners of the terrible bed. The servants secured them round Arden’s wrists and ankles. The coals glowed a thousand times brighter than they had before, and an immense burst of heat burned at the peaks of my face, like the hottest Saharan wind I’d ever endured.
And Arden was pressed bare against the source.
The agony must have been world-ending.
And yet … Arden did not struggle, nor scream, nor call out.
Somehow that was worse.
Instead, something black and vaporous began to seep out of Arden’s body – and towards the Mother.
‘What are you doing?’ I yelled, wrenching futilely at the clawed hands gripping me.
No response.
The black mist swirled around the Mother. The servants removed their hands from their master’s wounds, tearing free the bone shard from her chest.
And the blackness pressed into the wounds.
‘What are you doing?’ I repeated, a soprano cry.
Panic rose in my chest, the tortured voices in the shadows howled with me, and I didn’t understand what was happening but I knew it was bad, that the Mother was taking something fundamental from Arden.
And it was healing her.
Held back by the iron grip of the devils, I could do nothing but watch.
Tears streaked down my face, hatred scorched through my veins.
I was no longer cold. I burned with a long, rich fury built up over a thousand years.
Yet I could not unleash it.
After several awful moments of leeching the black vapour, the Mother stirred.
Blinked.
Turned her cruel face towards me.
‘Did you really think it would be that easy?’ she growled, her voice no longer the honeyed trill of earlier, but rather a low, gravelly rasp.
‘What are you doing to Arden?’ I hated the begging in my voice, but I couldn’t help it. ‘Why is there no screaming?’
The Mother was regaining strength with every passing second. Now she sat up, propping one palm against the bone forest floor, though there was a strain, a discomfort to her actions. She no longer moved as fluidly as she had before. She clicked and jerked like a twitching spider.
As she replied, her eyes were alight with cruelty. ‘I find the suffering is more intense without a release valve. And the more intense the suffering … the greater its power.’
The sheer horror of it was almost impossible to comprehend. That was what the black mist was – Arden’s suffering. Not only could it sustain the Mother, but it could also heal her.
Why hadn’t I anticipated it?
I had lost my chance. I had failed.
The Mother was alive.
And now we were trapped in the Underrealm.