32 Elle To Rise
Elle
To Rise
Exhaustion courses through me as strong as the stiletto’s power did.
The fury-fueled determination to destroy this place I had only moments ago drains with every breath.
Like the spiral’s last threads of connection to me are extracting rather than granting energy.
Every nerve is frayed like a tree after it’s been struck by lightning.
Too much even with Douglas’s help. Clumps of meat fall around me, but I can’t move.
In the pit of my stomach, the muscles of my calves, the back of my throat, I’m deteriorating. The rot has finally caught up to me. Is this why Pratterman used others for his work?
I should form my next plan, escape, but I need to recoup my strength. I hope Bridget made it to the lighthouse in one piece. What if I sent her to an in-between nothing? What if I destroyed her? Yet something in my gut has me convinced she arrived where she needed to.
The water begins to lap behind me. It’s been still since swallowing Mr. Pratterman. I haven’t processed that fact. Mr. Pratterman is gone. Consumed by those he used as fuel.
I’m no longer bound to anything.
I turn around. There’s something bright in the water. A small orb of light below the surface. The same color as the dagger’s glow.
Douglas. Relief floods through me. Withered hands from within the water hold him up as far as they can reach. They saved him. Despite their torment, and my hand in it, they brought him back to me.
Douglas doesn’t belong here. They feel it as much as I do. I swallow back a sob as I reach over and tenderly pluck him out of the water. He glimmers in my hand, small and vulnerable.
When he forms back into the man I know, the smile on his face is brighter than his light was.
“I knew you could,” he whispers, kneeling beside me.
“He was a man. Mortal. This whole time.” My jaw trembles. “He tricked me. I was a fool.”
The sweltering air of the spiral weighs me down almost as much as my guilt. Every action I took was for a man. No different from my father or Thomas. Pratterman’s trick was in the beliefs he held over me: that I was unworthy and he was divine.
So many deaths. For nothing. For ash in my mouth and rot in my veins.
“Thank God,” Douglas mutters. “You wouldn’t be here now if he were anything he’d claimed.”
True. I shift over and lie on the ground.
“There’s something by your…” Douglas points beside my right ear. I turn. A dark clump of viscera as big as my whole arm has fallen beside me. It doesn’t unsettle me as it should.
“I’m going to destroy the spiral. The island. Everything,” I say, looking back up through the staircase that will soon collapse without its landlord. That’s all he was, wasn’t he? “It must end now, before someone else finds it.”
“Not before you leave here, though,” he finally says. It’s half question, half hope.
I nod. “Though I’m a tool of this place. Is it better if I’m gone with it?”
Douglas sits beside me. His hand dangles inches from my own on the floor. “Perhaps your sister needs you still.”
Bait. Ever a game between us. Creaks and splashes echo across the water. I don’t have long before this place makes my decision for me.
“She has Bridget,” I mumble, but one leg twitches against the stone. Even at my weakest, I can’t leave others to do my work.
“That’s enough, for you. Of course.”
I lift my head up to look at him. He’s smiling. He knows me. I laugh, he laughs, and our genuine glee echoes up the spiral for probably the first time in its history.
It’s ridiculous. To lie in the dying hall of the Devil, his blood bloomed across my shirt, discussing plans with my closest confidant—the good man I murdered. The man I, perhaps, love.
“I don’t know if this will work,” I admit. “I don’t even have a plan.”
“I’ll give you step one: We leave.”
It hurts my ribs to laugh again, enough that I double over.
I look once again at the pool when I get up. What would destroying this place do to the souls trapped within? Do I risk destroying them?
I don’t understand these forces. But knowing Mr. Pratterman was nothing biblical grants me hope that this place can be toppled.
A science I don’t understand, that’s all.
No more mystical than the ocean tides. But I won’t decide another’s fate anymore.
I won’t reap them like grain. I kneel once again at the edge of the pool.
“I want to use what’s left here to end this place! All of it!” I call out to the souls I helped trap here. “I don’t know what’ll happen to you when I do. Help me. Lend me your strength one last time. Or stay, but I can’t promise what’ll become of you.”
They have no reason to trust me. Would I grant this request in their position? How can they believe that an acolyte of the toppled Lord of Darkness will keep their word?
The surface churns. I squint in the low crimson light. A rush of water begins, but not forward. Inward. A whirlpool. A spiral within a spiral. Foaming caps appear in arcs around the center.
“Can you see what’s happening?” I ask Douglas.
He floats a few feet up. “They’re collecting. Perhaps they’ve made a decision.”
The water stills. I let out a long breath. They don’t want anything to do with me. I can’t blame them.
“Elle, they’re moving.”
A bright line beneath the water extends toward the shoreline.
It looks like a vein, branching out and coming back together with each pulse of light.
It doesn’t stop at the water’s edge. It slithers between the stones until it reaches my knees.
I place my hands on the ground, palms up.
It doesn’t hesitate. The line extends up my fingers and seeps beneath my skin.
The power granted to me by the souls is raw, electric, and it runs wild in my veins. It grows tenfold, then a hundredfold. They’re using me as their vessel. My exhaustion lifts for a moment as they take on the burden. They’re helping me. I want to thank them, but my throat tightens when I try.
I search among their consciousnesses. So many.
Most are strangers, yet each connects with a memory from their demises.
Sailors, mostly, but also passengers, soldiers, cooks, even a few children—I can’t linger on them or I may not get up again.
My parents are among their number, though they do not attempt to muscle through to me.
They linger on the far edges of the crowd in my mind.
Just hoping for a ride up to the surface.
I think back to those letters between my father and Mr. Seymour. That night in my parents’ backyard, Thomas talking of power and networks and new frontiers.
There’s one thought that permeates every soul I connect with. Different languages, phrasings, but the same idea: Make it end. Bring me home.
I turn back to the stairs. Step one, leave. I stand. Each footfall forward sparks at the ground like grinding metal. That’s new.
“I don’t mean to scare it out of you, Elle,” Douglas says tentatively beside me, “but is that hope I see in your face?”
I roll my eyes. “It’s going to take a lot more than hope to destroy all this.”
I can almost feel his smile against my back as I ascend the first stair. He stands beside me, egging me on and teasing me as though we were old friends. In a way, we are.
I push off the ground and grasp the souls’ power as I feel out the cavern.
Its enormity is now an extension of myself.
Every stalactite of meat is my own muscle.
Each worn stone is my own tortoise shell.
The whirlpool’s collection of souls are a second heart, fueling me upward as it laps against my ankles.
I pull the entirety of the structure up, stone grinding on stone, until the first stair is flush with the floor.
This is impossible, yet each titanic step upward flattens the spiral by one step.
To be wholly exhausted, yet fueled to the brim, creates a cycle in my movements. Douglas floats beside me to shout encouragement, but I can barely hear him. The souls within me help where they can, massaging muscle and pushing blood through my all-too-human heart.
Sisyphus would be proud. But I’ll ensure this is a one-way trip.
While the souls want this place destroyed, the spiral itself holds no such mercy. Has a lifetime passed that I raised my left leg, then the right, then pulled the entire realm upward once more? Closer, closer, every turn of the stairs promises an end.
“Ja-James,” I huff out. “Check. How many. More.”
Through squinting eyes rimmed with sweat, I watch him float upward. He takes too long.
“Not many left,” he promises, his smile too tight to be true.
I nearly lose my concentration when a laugh bubbles up. “Bastard,” I mutter. “Thank you.”
Another tug upward. Thousands of pounds, thousands of souls, one more foot higher.
“When you want to, Elle, you’re as much a force of nature as—”
“Save. The poetics.”
Sweat blinds me. Each step adds more of the spiral’s stone and meat to the portion I drag up. Can this work? The doubt nearly makes me lose my balance. I imagine myself tumbling back down as all my progress unravels. I stop, catch my breath.
“What happens at the top?” Douglas asks, closer to me now. As though proximity will help.
“The water. Have you noticed?” I ask, licking my lips at the thought of something to quench a thirst I hadn’t noticed until now. But even water would be rotten in my mouth now.
He shakes his head, peering behind me.
“It’s not. Water.” Each word is as hard to get out as each stone is to lift. “Too. Thick. I can feel it. Connect to it.”
Douglas shakes his head. “So, it’s…” he says, slowly, waiting for me to interrupt him.
“Fuel. I don’t…” I gulp down the heavy air, my thoughts as slow as my feet. “I think the lighthouse, the oil… Something merged. Took on. Chara—” I cough. Some of the souls rush to my lungs to calm them. “Characteristics.”
The oil can be burned for the lighthouse, for this, and for Mr. Pratterman’s grand plans. What else can it burn?
“I understand,” Douglas says, that same tight smile on his face.
It’s a relief to stop talking.