CHAPTER 4 ADRIA
CHAPTER
ADRIA
Overcharge. That’s what Father calls it after Isek’s body has gone cold, after the severed head rolls abandoned across the stones and comes to a lifeless, wide-eyed rest. Father carries the dead child with two of his four arms like a sack of supplies, like a thing and not a vessel for being—shattered far too soon.
Er uses his own telekinesis to levitate Father out of the Depths and back to the surface, while Mother and I use our wings.
Mine feel impossibly heavy at my back, almost too much to move them at all.
The Elysian and my parents exchange reassurances that I hardly hear over my mounting headache, my heartbeat roaring through my entire skull.
Only when Er is long gone, completely swallowed back into the Elysian labyrinth, does Father turn to me, his gaze wide with wonder where it should be deathly serious.
“For so long, my child, we’ve approached the Diakópsei with open hands, waiting to receive.
But we’ve grown stronger since the Cataclysm.
” He seizes either side of my face with his free pair of hands, the ones that aren’t carrying the murdered child.
Forces me to look at him, and I glare, unblinking,
back. “Now we can take that power for ourselves, seize it in a closed fist. Become more.”
I don’t know how to tell him that I can’t imagine anything worse than being more of what he is, of what I’m expected—maybe biologically destined—to become.
Forget more. I would settle for other, for being anything or anyone but the sort of leader who prods a child into the Depths, knowing full well that they’ll never see the surface again.
“That isn’t what you told the cultist,” I say, in a terribly steady voice that seems to come from someone else. “You said this was a mistake. That this would never be repeated.”
“A child could not be trusted with such power. Even a soldier’s son.”
“Why use a child at all?” My throat cracks, splintering the edges of my words. “You have how many loyal soldiers? You could’ve sent any one of them. Hell, even the boy’s father would’ve been a willing volunteer—”
“What if the experiment had failed?” Mother interrupts, brow furrowed gravely. “A grown soldier is not so easily replaceable.”
I turn away in a rush of wind and wings, my pulse pounding. “Do you think his father considered him replaceable?”
“His father knows his betters,” Father snarls at my back, “unlike certain children.” My stomach roils.
“There will be a ceremony,” he goes on, “that both yourself and our most revered soldiers shall attend. And together, they will witness their lords’ ascension to a higher state.
” I barely hear him through the pulse in my eardrums.
“We won’t be confined to the shadows anymore,” Mother breathes, voice rich with awe, devoid of regret.
“With this sort of power at our command, perhaps also gifted to our most trusted warriors, we can seize the Daylands, too. At long last, after generations of lost history, we can take their archived memories for ourselves—and so honor where we came from, even as we grow far beyond those origins.”
I swallow a thousand curses, instead saying only, “Elysium will never allow it.”
“Elysium,” my father says, even as he slams Isek’s corpse to the ground with a horrible, wet, fleshy sound, “will have no choice in the matter.”
“You mean to go to war.”
“Not a war,” Mother says, arms and wings both folded, poised.
“It will be a purge. The Elysians provide nothing to the Shadowlands. They cower below ground like accursed dayfolk, grovel before a power that would elevate us all if they only had the boldness to claim it. They will concede before our proper nightfolk army, or they will be consigned to the annals of history, where they belong.”
Father takes one knee to retrieve Isek’s body, now even more mangled just so he could make a point.
I don’t know where they intend to dispose of it, but surely the boy’s family will never know what happened here.
They’ll be fed a false story of some fashion, then made to march into the Depths and execute a merciless genocide, goaded by promises of the Diakópsei’s power—which was clearly never meant to directly touch mortal flesh.
How many will lose their minds upon overcharge?
Will their fellow soldiers snap their necks, too, leaving only the most resilient to return to the surface and rule less evolved nightfolk with unholy strength?
How many lives are my parents willing to trample underfoot to secure leadership beyond challenge, to prevent someone like Uncle Azarii from ever daring to raise claw or freezeshot rifle against our dynasty ever again?
Words claw their way from me without my consent. “And then what?”
“Then what?” From Mother, the echoed words are a laugh. “Anything we want, Adria. At long last, as it always ought to have been, the planet will truly belong to the strong—to the ones who fully embrace what the Diakópsei gifted.”
I tense against a full-body chill as the realization dawns. “You mean to invade the Daylands.”
Father nods as though I were merely commenting on the weather. “Yes.”
“With an overcharged army.”
“Yes.”
“To do what?” I’m fighting a scream so fiercely, my voice is barely audible at all. “Assert absolute planetary authority? Enslave them? Slaughter them all?”
“That will depend on how well they concede defeat,” Father says mildly, as though he were merely commenting on wind patterns or the current strength of the timekeeping torch. “Adria, the opportunity here cannot be understated. Surely you understand that.”
I shake my head, which does nothing to lessen my pounding skull, but he keeps talking.
“The dayfolk have further-reaching historical records than the nightfolk. Locked away to rot, useless, in their bunkers underground. We have a right to that knowledge, to fully understand where we came from—that we may fully embrace all we can now become. If they turn it over without heatshot-blazing resistance, then perhaps we can arrange something of a truce.” Two of Father’s hands curl into defiant fists.
“But they will finally, fully, know their betters.”
My blood could freeze solid in my veins right now.
Dayfolk haven’t interfered with nightfolk business in generations.
They may be disgusted by our mutations, even terrified of us, but nobody could say they’ve aimed for armed conflict.
Invading the Daylands would be an unprovoked act of war.
If the dayfolk are unprepared, invading them will be an extinction-level event, wiping them out entirely.
All in the name of asserting our superiority—and seizing the Daylands’ historical records for ourselves.
My tongue feels like a lump of sand in my mouth. I choke out a single dry word. “When?”
Father’s voice is venom. “When what?”
“When do we return to the Depths? Blaze a path through Elysium? Overcharge the army?”
“Soon” is all Mother says, through a smile that makes me want to keel over and be sick upon the stone underfoot.
“You’ll know.” Father’s voice, but I don’t look at him.
Refuse to see what Isek’s body looks like now.
So small held against my father’s bulk. Mangled, wasted.
Tortured in his final moments, only to be tossed aside.
“We will summon you, Adria. It would be a terrible shame,” he says, “to miss the final stage of our evolution.”
Father leaves us to dispose of Isek’s body—where and how, I am too horrified to ask.
Mother and I leave him behind and complete our flight back to the fortress together, the distance between me and her nevertheless cavernous.
When we arrive home, the torch has burned nearly to azure cinders, signaling the cycle’s end.
Mother and I part ways to our respective chambers.
The fortress consists of layered rectangles, shrinking in size as the levels increase in height, with the torch burning at our home’s highest point, giving light to both the fortress and the civilian areas beneath it.
My room is on the fourth highest of seven levels, so it would necessitate ascending multiple stairways, were it not for my wings.
The fortress also features towering cubic parapets at its four corners, with one additional parapet along each of the walls.
As the current shift of guards knows my face and questions me not at all, I alight on the southmost parapet, the one directly above the building’s looming entrance gate.
Then it’s only around three levels down and a turn west to reach my chambers; not too much of a difference, I suppose, but at least it’s downhill instead of uphill.
My legs feel like lead, impossibly heavy to haul up and down, even with the help of my wings.
I could roll like a stone down these stairways, if I allowed myself.
Crash through the wall into my chamber, propelled by gravity alone, and simply lie there, waiting to disappear.
Eventually, I do reach my chambers, though not by careening into them like an avalanche.
Where most nightfolk have just enough space to call a home, I could lay four or five of myself lengthwise in any direction around this jagged, unevenly circular room that houses my relentlessly racing thoughts.
I hardly even register my surroundings, opulent as they are for the overlords’ only heir.
Glimmering, ever-polished mirrors on the walls, perfectly reflecting how the blood has entirely drained from my face.
Metal shelves installed cleanly, embedded in the otherwise-stone walls, but not strong enough to hold the weight I now carry.
I collapse onto a vast double bed and stare, eyes heavy, up at the domed ceiling, painted like a brilliant twilight where the Shadowlands meets the Passage: swaths of hand-brushed purples, blues, and emeralds, hues befitting honored royalty soon to violently subjugate their own people.