Chapter 14 #2
The corridor ended in a circular chamber that made her head ache to look at. The walls curved wrong, surfaces carved with symbols that seemed to writhe in her peripheral vision. When she tried to look directly at them, her eyes watered and refused to focus.
"The last human I kept spent three days here once," Eliam said, guiding her to the center. "She was defiant too. Liked to run away from her promises."
He released her arm and stepped back. Without his touch, the chamber felt colder and hungrier somehow.
"She screamed for the first day. Begged for the second. By the third..." He smiled, and in the strange light his beautiful features turned cruel and cold. "Well. She was much more agreeable when I finally let her out."
"Is that supposed to—"
The floor opened at her feet, the stone parting smoothly, folding inward to create a perfect circular void.
Where solid floor had been, a hole now yawned into existence.
Perfect darkness filled it so dense it seemed to have physical weight, pulling at her vision and making her inner ear scream warnings about depth.
She stumbled back, but his hand was there again, catching her wrist.
"Your punishment," he said softly, pulling the bracelet from his pocket.
He examined it a moment, as though still trying to comprehend what about it was so appealing.
“I hope this bit of plastic was worth all this trouble.” He slipped it over her hand, the beads now heavy against her skin.
"The Oubliette, a place of contemplation, to reflect on the price of looking me in the eye and speaking falsehood. "
"How long?"
"Until it pleases me to release you." He pulled her closer to the edge.
The darkness below exhaled cold air that smelled of centuries and stillness and things that grew without light.
"Could be hours, or days. Time moves strangely in the deep places.
Minutes stretch endlessly while years compress into moments. "
"Please." The word escaped before she could stop it. Terror crawled through her chest. She had never feared the dark, that is, until she had come to this awful place, and the thought of going down into that hole made her physically ill.
"Begging already? You'll want to save that for later." His thumb pressed against the plastic beads, and one cracked. "The ones who scream early always break faster. But then again, the ones who stay silent sometimes forget they have voices at all."
She tried to pull away, but the floor was already tilting. Not physically, she could see it remained level, but her body slid toward the hole anyway, pulled by forces that had nothing to do with gravity.
"Eliam—"
"Reflect well, little thief. I'm curious as to what truths will find you in the dark."
The slide became a fall that seemed to last forever and no time at all.
She hit bottom hard, her knees buckling on impact while her hands scraped against rough stone as she caught herself. The ground was damp earth mixed with rock, cold seeping immediately through her dress. It smelled of minerals and rot, of places that had never known sunlight.
Looking up, she watched the perfect circle of gray light contracting above her—smaller and smaller until it vanished completely.
Darkness consumed everything.
She waved her hand before her face and saw nothing. Desperation made her press fingers to her eyes to make sure they were open, and she felt her lashes move against her fingertips.
The mark on her arm, always warm, always present, felt suddenly distant.
It was still there, she could still feel it, but it felt muffled now, the connection weakened by layers of stone and earth between them.
Even that violation felt like comfort here, and its muting made her chest tight with a different kind of terror.
The air around her shifted.
Cold recognition crawled across her skin before her mind caught up to what her body already knew—something in the darkness was moving.
She scrambled back until she hit a wall of rough stone, slick with moisture and what felt like moss or slime. The surface was real and solid, but somehow that made it worse.
A whisper reached her ears, not words but something older than words, the sound of someone who'd forgotten language but remembered the shape of screaming. It came from everywhere and nowhere, so close she felt breath that wasn't breath on her neck.
Another movement pressed closer, an unnecessary reminder that the darkness wasn't empty.
It was very, very full.
And she was the newest thing to be swallowed by it.
Time dissolved into meaninglessness.
Had she been here minutes or hours? Her legs ached from crouching against the wall, but that could mean anything or nothing. The darkness made it impossible to track the passage of time.
She'd tried counting heartbeats at first—one, two, three—but gave up at what might have been a thousand when the numbers started losing meaning, when she couldn't remember if she'd said four hundred or four thousand.
The whispers came in waves, then receded. Sometimes singular, a lone voice mumbling syllables that might have been words in languages she didn't know. Sometimes plural, a chorus of breathing that wasn't quite breathing, of sounds that weren't quite words. They circled her with endless patience.
Her throat hurt, and she realized she'd started talking to herself just to hear something real, something human.
"My name is Briar Delarosa." Her voice came out cracked. How long since she'd had water? "I'm twenty…four? Five? I'm twenty-something. I have a sister. Allegra. She makes ugly bracelets."
The bracelet on her wrist. She fumbled for it, fingers clumsy in the dark. The plastic beads were still there, tiny anchors to reality. She counted them—twelve, thirteen, fourteen? No, that wasn’t right. She counted them again.
Twelve. There were twelve.
Something brushed her foot.
Panic shot through her as she jerked back, skull cracking against stone. Warm wetness, blood she assumed, trickled down her neck. The pain felt real and good, sharp enough to cut through the creeping fog in her mind.
"Don't touch me." She meant it to be commanding, but it came out pleading.
The something retreated, or didn't, she couldn't tell when she couldn't see; when touch was the only sense left and touch meant danger.
Her stomach cramped with what might have been hunger or fear, she'd lost the ability to distinguish between the two.
Everything had become the same sensation of want.
Want for light. Want for sound. Want for the mark to burn properly instead of this muted throb that reminded her she existed without confirming it.
She pressed her palm against the mark, trying to force connection. "I know you can feel this. I know you're there."
Nothing came back. The mark pulsed dim and distant, the connection between them severed by distance and stone, leaving her truly alone.
"I lied." The words scraped out of her raw throat. "I lied about the bracelet. It wasn't mine. Someone gave it to me. Seraphin gave it to me." Speaking her name felt like betrayal and benediction both. "She's a tree now because she was kind. Because I was selfish."
The whispers seemed to press closer, interested.
"Is that what you want to hear?" Her voice rose, echoing strange in the darkness. "That I'm sorry? That I understand? I lied to the Forest King and this is my punishment and I've learned my lesson?"
Silence fell around her.
Then, so soft she might have imagined it, "He won't come."
An actual voice this time, not just whispers, clearer and maybe human, or something that remembered being human. Was the voice real? Was she losing her mind? Was this what Eliam had wanted all along?
"He always says until it pleases him," the voice continued. "But sometimes he forgets. Sometimes pleasing him means forgetting you exist."
"You're lying." But her heart hammered faster. The idea of being abandoned in this place was one she refused to entertain.
A laugh came from the darkness, sharp and brittle. "Am I? How long have you been here? Do you even know?"
She didn't. The darkness had erased her sense of time completely. Admitting it felt like admitting defeat so Briar remained silent.
"I was like you once. Pretty thing with a sharp tongue. He put me here for... what was it? Ah. Yes. Smiling at another male." The voice moved and circled. "That was years ago? Decades? Hard to say. You lose count after the first century."
"No." Briar protested. The word came out small. "No, he wouldn't—"
"Wouldn't he? You're not special, girl. Just the newest bauble. And baubles he breaks, he discards."
Briar pressed harder against the wall, stone scraping her spine through the ruined dress. She was real, still real, still breathing, still here.
"But don't worry." The voice was closer now, close enough that she felt breath on her face.
It smelled of ancient earth and endless dark.
"You won't be alone. We're all here. All the forgotten ones.
And eventually, you'll forget too. Forget the sun.
Forget your name. Forget everything but the dark. "
"Stop."
"That's what I said at first. Stop. Please. Let me out." A hand, it must have been a hand, though it felt wrong, too soft and too cold, touched her cheek. "Now I can't remember what out means. Can you?"
Terror erupted through her chest as Briar screamed, pushing at the thing that wasn't quite human anymore. It retreated, laughing with that sharp, brittle sound.
She scrambled sideways, hands scraping stone until she found a corner. She pressed herself into it and made herself as small as possible.
The mark pulsed, still dim, still distant, but there.
"My name is Briar Delarosa," she whispered into her knees. "I have a sister named Allegra. She's twelve. She makes ugly bracelets. My mother's name is June. My father died before I was born. His name was Jeffrey."
Facts became anchors, things that were true before the dark and would be true after.
If there was an after.
The whispers resumed their circling, endlessly patient.
Waiting for her to forget.
She'd stopped counting breaths and stopped reciting names. The darkness pressed down with physical weight. Even the whispers had grown bored, drifting to distant corners to mumble their forgotten languages.
Then light appeared.
Not light exactly—that was too strong a word. A lessening of darkness emerged, a place where the black wasn't absolute.
Briar blinked hard, sure she was imagining it. Her eyes had been playing tricks with phantom colors and false stars. But this stayed.
Golden and faint, a tiny glow appeared near the base of the wall.
She crawled toward it, knees scraping stone. As she got closer, the glow morphed into shape, a flower with delicate petals unfurled from the solid rock, pulsing with faint luminescence.
Her fingers trembled as she reached out. The petals were real, warm, and alive.
As her hand brushed the petals, another bloom spiraled into existence a few feet away, then another. A path of impossible light led along the wall to where the corner should have been.
But there was no corner. Where solid stone had been, a passage yawned, narrow and dark beyond the flowers' glow, but a different dark. Dark that led somewhere.
"No." She pressed back. This was a trick, a test, another punishment disguised as hope.
The first flower began to wilt.
Its light dimmed as petals curled black at the edges. Soon it would be gone, and the darkness would rush back in.
Behind her, something shifted. Not the forgotten voices, something else had noticed the light and noticed her moving.
The second flower started to fade.
Instinct overrode thought as Briar lunged forward. The third flower bloomed as her hand touched the passage wall, then a fourth, always just enough light to see the next step. Behind her, darkness reclaimed each bloom as she passed, erasing every trace of her path.
The passage was older than the oubliette. These stones remembered when the world was young. They wept moisture that tasted of centuries, and things skittered just beyond the flowers' glow, pale, blind creatures that had never known the sun.
"Follow..."
She froze. That wasn't the broken voices from the pit. This was different, it was soft and almost encouraging.
"This way... not that way... this way..."
The flowers bloomed left when the passage split and bloomed straight when side tunnels beckoned. Always just one flower appearing, always dying as she passed. She was writing her path in light that existed only in the moment of her passing.
Time stretched strangely. She might have walked for minutes or days. Her legs burned with exhaustion. Her dress, already ruined, caught and tore on rough stone. The mark pulsed erratic, sometimes hot, sometimes cold, the connection unstable and searching.
Then sound reached her ears, not the whispers but something vast and rushing. Water. A lot of water.
The passage opened, and vertigo slammed into her.
A cavern stretched before her, so massive that the flowers' light couldn't find walls or ceiling, only the stone beneath her feet that ended abruptly in nothing.
Somewhere far below water roared, how far was impossible to tell.
An underground river perhaps, or something pretending to be water. In this place, anything was possible.
Behind her, new sounds emerged. It was the sound of claws scraping against stone. Something had finally noticed the light-trail, or the movement, and it was coming fast.
Briar pressed against the passage wall, but the flowers were blooming forward to the edge, right to where stone became air.
"No." But even as she said it, the second-to-last flower withered. Only one path remained—forward.
The last flower bloomed in the air itself, hanging over the chasm, its petals glowing bright against the void.
The scraping sounds grew closer, close enough that she could hear breathing that didn’t belong to anything she wanted to meet in these dark spaces..
The floating flower pulsed, waiting, beckoning her forward. It was as though it was speaking right to her. Trust the light you shouldn't have. Trust the flowers that shouldn't bloom.
She had a choice.
Jump, or turn back to the darkness and the things now hunting in it.
The mark flared, sudden and hot, Eliam's alarm burning through the weakened connection.
No time left.
Briar closed her eyes and leaped.