CHAPTER 2 ADRIA #2
The dayfolk fled from it, fled even from the light of their own sun, burrowing like vermin to live beneath the surface.
But the nightfolk embraced this present from the Beyond, their bodies reformed into something new—wings, multiplied limbs, height once uncommon.
They and their children were also graced with gifts.
Telekinesis. Telepathy. Summoning and manipulation of the planet’s own energy. Superhuman healing.
Within a generation, they were hardly human anymore. They were better.
The Diakópsei is our maker and remaker, our greatest strength and heaviest burden as a people. Every nightfolk knows it. But none have seen it in generations, save for the Elysians who worship it.
And yet an Elysian in the flesh greets us around the next bend.
“Er,” he says, by way of greeting, offering no more than his name.
He’s a telekinetic like Isek, without arms, and where the aboveground nightfolk wear loose, flowing robes that somewhat portray the architecture of the bodies beneath, the cultists wear thick, heavy, draping things, with raised hoods.
So it is a nearly faceless, subsequently silent Er who leads myself, my parents, and Isek through the labyrinth and toward the Diakópsei’s central chamber.
Stalactites and stalagmites sprout, toothy and jagged, above and below us, as though we are walking, like so much foolish prey, into a massive beast’s waiting maw.
It isn’t as though the aboveground nightfolk have never cooperated with Elysium.
Beyond those who are born Elysians, nightfolk occasionally join from aboveground, including my father’s little brother, my uncle Azarii.
But Azarii went rapidly from newfound believer to religious fanatic, convinced that proximity to the Diakópsei had elevated him beyond his brother, bequeathing to him a right to rule the Shadowlands aboveground, too.
The Elysians collaborated with my father to stop the subsequent coup, and Azarii has been imprisoned somewhere in this labyrinth ever since.
Preventing (and punishing) Azarii’s coup is the last time my parents and the aboveground nightfolk’s government willingly worked with Elysium, and I was a small child at the time.
So I can hardly fathom what may be unfolding now.
Ever since Azarii’s betrayal, it’s not as though my father is overly fond of Elysians.
For him to partner with them … there must be larger stakes here than I can fathom.
The Diakópsei’s blue light gleams brighter and brighter as we near its central chamber.
I watch in barely leashed awe as Mother confidently proceeds, clearly feeling none of my lingering trepidation.
The chill in this chasm is crisp, pure, welding my feet to the floor like twin blocks of ice, despite the powerful wings at my back.
I flap them hard to force myself forward.
Isek, duty bound, is already several steps ahead of me, my father at his back, urging him forward with all four hands. Briefly, the brightness is too much. My eyes sting, racked with tears, desperate to close. I force them open. My vision shifts.
We enter the Diakópsei’s chamber, and I can see everything.
The asteroid itself is here before us, in all its rumored glory.
When it first collided with Pagomènos, our records indicate it was miles wide.
But it broke apart on impact, leaving this core piece as the Diakópsei we know: a jagged oval perhaps twenty feet long, large enough that even if a massive nightfolk lay upon it, their arms would reach not even halfway around.
It resembles an immense slab of obsidian at first, but
upon further examination, it pulses and shifts like an organ, veins of deeper azure flickering through it like savage lightning. The beating heart at the center of my world.
My own heart races at a strange rhythm, like music brought to heel in a foreign key, harmonizing with the asteroid’s resonant power.
This chamber holds the Diakópsei’s surviving smaller shards, too—those that didn’t simply shatter into so much dust on impact, that is. Twin sconces, only accessible by a cultist’s Elysian key, bookend the asteroid—each filled to the brim with palm-sized spherical gems like fruit in a bowl.
I’m so caught up in staring that I don’t notice Isek until I hear the crunch of his knees meeting the ground. If he had hands, they would doubtless be uplifted, palms open and pleading. “My lords, my lieges, my king and my queen, twin scythes of the Shadowlands—”
“Spit it out,” Father snarls, not even deigning to use the child’s name.
I flinch, somewhere else for a moment. A girl much younger, chastised not only by her father but by her king, taught a lesson not only by words but by wounds.
Isek shakes his head rapidly, as if forcing some cerebral sediment to settle. His voice rattling on every word, he asks, “Will I ever see my mother again?”
“Perhaps, if you honor his calling and our summons,” Mother says, wings spread so wide that they actually cast a shadow amidst the surrounding blue glow. “But certainly never again if you fail upon the threshold.”
My own voice bursts out of me like an animal cry, against my own will.
“What in the Beyond is this?” I wheel upon my father, both pairs of his arms defiantly crossed; I turn to my mother, whose visage betrays no emotion.
Er, the Elysian, hovers behind us at the door, wordless.
“You tell me nothing of what to expect. You greet me with a stranger’s son, more boy than man.
And you ask me to watch as you threaten him ever closer to the planet’s forbidden heart? ”
My chest aches. I look at them, the people who raised me, the leaders whose legacy I will someday be asked to preserve, and I’m not even surprised by the lack of compassion.
I’ve seen that stony apathy before, in moments I’ve tried and failed to forget.
Claws against my face. Cruel words scraping at my ears, burrowing in forever.
I never stood up for the girl I once was. But I can speak for this shuddering boy who pleads to see his own mother.
Mother glares. “Adria.” It’s not an admonition; it’s a command. It means, Sit and watch, my child. Remember who you are. Do not force me to mold you into a leader with my own hands. I take no pleasure in it.
“Answer me.” My chest heaves, breaths coming too fast. “Why bring him here? Why bring me here? What have you done?”
“It’s not what we’ve done,” Mother says, “but what we’ve come here to do.” Before I can react, she drives one powerful foot between Isek’s shoulder blades.
I hear a scream, tortured, faraway. I don’t recognize it as my own, but my throat burns from the force.
Isek staggers forward, sobbing now—without arms to catch his fall, and too startled to telekinetically break it.
He lurches headlong toward the asteroid.
The impact of his forehead on the rock is a wet, fleshy sound, followed by a heavier booming one from the rock itself, like a primordial response to the contact.
The light down here was already ferocious, but now it flares beyond belief.
Even the inside of my eyelids is blue, blue, blue.
I hear Father’s and Mother’s exultant shouts, Isek’s faint weeping, my own uneven gasps for air.
When the rush of light recedes to the Diakópsei, Isek is still there, curled into a ball, like a child in the womb.
But that ball is much larger than it would’ve been mere moments ago.
He’s taller, thicker, corded with muscle that threatens to swallow his frail, developing bones.
His mouth is a grimace, graced with fangs. His face looks generations old.
“Isek,” Father snaps, a call to attention. “Look at me.”
Shaking, Isek does. When his eyes slide open, they’re the same electric blue as the asteroid itself.
He opens his mouth on a scream, and the very ground beneath us shudders, splits.
Cracking open. Telekinesis is supposed to demand a specific target, visible and defined, but Isek seems to be molding the planet’s very surface to his will like pottery clay.
Mother is wordless, her gaze wide with wonder.
“What have you done to me?” Isek howls, earsplitting, as the ground threatens to devour us all whole at his command.
Only now does Er, the Elysian, peel himself away from the entrance, sauntering toward us, his bootsteps heavy on the stone floor.
“So we see, it is as the Elysian scholars always predicted,” he half snarls through his teeth.
“The Diakópsei graced us with visitation, but its divinity is beyond us. It is to be beheld, not crudely held. Not violated with mortal flesh.” Telekinetically, he pulls his hood back, at last revealing his face.
Yellowed, sulfuric eyes. Wrinkled black-blue flesh.
Long, dutifully polished horns. He is an old man, set in his ways, those ways now as validated for him as ever by the horror that deviating from them has produced.
He wheels upon my father. “You will fix this.” It’s neither a question nor a request.
The splintering ground worsens. I stagger as a new crack opens between my feet, nearly knocking me down to one knee.
Isek keens and cries and howls. Understanding eludes me.
Why go through all the trouble of convincing the cultists to run this experiment?
Why sacrifice a child, of all people, to science?
How will they possibly soothe his torture now?
He’s suffering, I try to say, but my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth, no sound forming at all.
“You’ve done well, Isek.” Father smiles at the child, the way I’ve always wished he would smile at me. “You’ve honored your people, honored your father.”
I am the inheritor of the Shadowlands, a warrior in my own right, the only inhabitant of Pagomènos who could possibly hope to stand
against my father. But when I see that smile I’ve craved for years, that explosive joy spread across his face, I resent every bit of the longing in my body. Whatever I do, whoever I become, I hope to the Beyond that I never, ever make him proud.
I fear I’m making him proud now, my strength brought low in his wake, very nearly the deadly, deferent daughter he always wanted—my feet stuck to the rumbling floor, my jaw slack, my voice caged like a domesticated beast. I can’t find the will to move. I can hardly breathe.
Isek recovers himself for the briefest instant. The ground stops splitting, though it does not reform. The surrounding dome of the chamber rattles but doesn’t threaten to entirely collapse and bury us. Not yet, anyway.
Isek straightens, teeth gritted, shoulders drawn back, and pleads in the steadiest voice he can manage, “I want … to see … my mother.” Flames flicker in his newly blue eyes. “She … will be … so proud.”
“Indeed she will,” my father says.
Two of his four hands seize either side of Isek’s head.
The child stares at him, irises blazing with indigo power but watery, shimmering, a baleful plea beyond language.
Father doesn’t break their locked eyes, doesn’t so much as blink, as he twists, and twists, like tearing a weed out at the root.
The first twist isn’t enough. The sound, forever seared into my memory, is one of breaking, but not ending.
A life dangling by a frayed thread, swinging loose from the tapestry, still fighting stubbornly against a merciful release.
“Finish it,” says the Elysian.
My mouth tastes like sick. Father adds his two other hands, all four on the child’s head now, and twists, twists, twists, until Isek’s skull snaps clean off the shoulders.