CHAPTER 17 KORI #5
The path is long, and compared to Adria’s exasperating bulk, my legs are all too short—so instead of walking, she spreads her wings and gestures to the strong, solid arch of spine between them. Swallowing hard, I clamber up on Adria’s back like a small child into her first starship cockpit.
When she, without a word, takes flight, my stomach lurches at the sudden ascent, my vision blurring even through my mask at the speed.
I’m forced to wrap my gloved hands around her horns for balance, stray strands of her ink-dark hair tangling between my gloved fingers.
Eventually, once we’re high enough to transition from near-total verticality to a more familiar horizontal axis, I hold tight to the ridges of her wings instead.
Despite my gloves and armor separating my body from Adria’s, I swear every sensation burns through me like unfiltered sun.
The core structure of her wings feels almost but not quite like bones, more like the cartilage of an ear than anything else.
But the wing membranes, which I absently expected to feel leathery, are more like weathered velvet, rough and soft all at once.
As much as I’ve come to fear and flee sleep, I think any rest under such a fabric would be perfectly, beautifully dreamless.
The only sound is the steady, weighty rise and fall of her wings.
Gradually my eyes adjust to the endless void around us, and pinpricks of starlight appear, alongside streaks of violet and indigo, the entire galaxy seemingly at my fingertips.
I know we’re going somewhere important, but I don’t want this moment to end. If I were to remove
the memory, seal it securely in a Morpheus sphere, I don’t think there’s any price or offering, anywhere on this entire planet, that would be worth giving it up.
But, of course, after what was surely many miles but felt like a mere few feet, our journey concludes, and we dive back to solid ground.
Then, to my confusion, beneath said solid ground.
We descend into a massive pit, at the bottom of which we’re greeted by hooded guards, all bearing rifles and blades.
Eventually, after a smattering of shouts back and forth (and a few bolder soldiers visibly readying their weapons), Adria waves them away, and we proceed farther into the planet’s mysterious underbelly.
Adria warns me no less than twelve times to keep a safe distance from what I’m about to observe, to squint even behind my mask. And she wasn’t joking.
If Pagomènos had a soul, the Diakópsei is what I imagine it would look like: brilliantly blue, misshapen, perhaps twenty feet long, and pulsing, all but flaming, impossibly bright yet undeniably born of the dark.
On either side of it are sealed vessels containing smaller gemlike structures of intricate crystal and rock.
Their shapes are alien but also nearly organic, like unholy fruit bursting with cursed seeds.
Involuntarily, despite standing a great distance away, I extend an open palm as if to touch one of the gemfruit vessels, my fingertips itching to remove my glove.
Adria catches my hand between barely controlled claws and yanks me back.
“After all you’ve already survived, are you trying to kill yourself? ”
“No, no, I …” I want to knot my fingers in my hair, but my hands are gloved, my hair secured in a tight braid within my helmet, so I’m just gripping the sides of said helmet, overwhelmed.
“I don’t know how to explain. I thought it would be horrible.
I thought it would make me afraid. But it’s not, and I’m not.
” I stare into the azure light until my eyes sting and water.
My vision blurs. “It’s the end of everything that was, and the beginning of everything that is. And somehow … I just want to touch it.”
Adria gives her head a stern shake. “It belongs to the planet, all of it, as surely as any of us do. It was never meant for a mortal touch,” she says, stepping forward to stand between me and the asteroid.
She hesitates, breaths heavy and uneven, before adding, barely audible, “It made me what I am.”
Somehow, all I can think to reply is, “Then it can’t be all bad.”
Adria curls one hand into a rigid fist, wipes her eyes with the bone-white knuckles.
I ask, “Why did you bring me here?”
She turns her head to meet my gaze. Her own eyes are watering now—whether from the staggering strength of the Diakópsei’s light or from repressed emotion, it’s impossible to tell.
“Because you should be afraid, Kori.” Adria’s wings flare wide, blocking the brilliant light, casting me into cold, hard shadow.
“One false step could open your armor and condemn you to death. Rebels scrape and claw at the gate. The court, the army, even my dearest friend, all question your presence here, and part of me fears they’re right. The Shadowlands aren’t meant for you.”
Squaring her shoulders, Adria looks away again.
Stares into the light. “And they were never meant for the likes of me either. Nothing on this planet is.” She hangs her head.
“Azarii’s rebels are radicals, terrorists, but of this, they too often speak the truth.
I should not exist. This power was never meant for any of us.
It can only inspire destruction. That,” she says, pointing forward with an extended claw, “is why I brought you here, Princess. Because if fear of both me and my feuding people still eludes you, perhaps fear of my maker would instill an inkling of self-preservation. And yet—”
Swearing under her breath, she stomps one foot on the stone in a cloud of dust and gravel.
“I bring you here to humble you. I bring you here to look into the face of what Elysium calls god and know it could breed only the cruelest of disciples. And you reach out a hand that cannot even bear to be free of its glove—and try to touch it.” Her wings
idly flap, the shifting shadows rippling over me like so much dark water. Oxygen feels very far away. “In your final moments, before the radiation overtook and unraveled you, would you truly want so badly to become like me? Do you not see what I’ve become?”
I know she wants me to look at the massive muscles flexing beneath her strained, bruised, blue-white flesh.
I know she wants me to look at the wings and the claws, the breadth and the might and the severity of her.
But all I can see is that the fists at her sides are so clenched as to control a relentless trembling.
All I can see is the girl who, upon encountering her first vision of sunlight, collapsed to her knees outside my cell.
My voice emerges as an unexpected snarl through my teeth.
“I’m not some foolish child, Adria. I knew what I was doing by coming to the Shadowlands,” I say.
“And I know what I’m doing by staying here.
” I cross my arms. “You’re wrong that I’m not afraid.
I’m more afraid than I think I’ve ever been in my whole life—but I’m more hopeful than I am frightened.
And you’ve given me that hope. You.” I spit my words like daggers at her back.
Still she doesn’t look at me, only at the asteroid she believes changed her beyond redemption. This room feels too small, suffocating. My breaths drag up and down my throat.
“You ask what you’ve become?” I half scream.
“I’ve spent almost my whole life underground.
Hiding from the light as surely as I was hiding from the shadows.
Aspect may still be reaching for true self-awareness, true being, but they’re the only person I’ve ever really trusted.
And you’ve helped me to help them to keep reaching out, reaching further.
Closer. When you could’ve slaughtered both of us.
When we could already be in the process of being truly, utterly forgotten. ”
I step forward and lay an open hand on the back of one velvety wing, fingers curling to grip the membrane, and it stills at my touch, the anxious flapping dulled to the barest of movements, undone. All at once my anger burns out of me. I lean forward, eyes drifting
shut against the vicious azure light, and rest my forehead against her spine.
“So I would say you’ve become something of a friend, Adria,” I murmur into her robes. “And I don’t have many of those.”
Adria simply shakes her head. Silence stretches, interminable, between us.
At long last, she says, with hard finality, “We should go.”
Turning to face me again, she seizes me by the arm with shocking force, pulling me after her and eventually onto her back again as we take flight out of the underground.
Another message breaks the tense, shimmering silence between us as we fly back.
FROM THAANE: You didn’t dream that earthquake along the fortress’s front wall. A particularly volatile rebel practically tore the ground’s maw open to swallow our defense forces. He’s dead now, but losses were sustained.
The rebellion takes more from Adria every moment.
When we first met, she told me her parents fell in the fighting.
Somewhere on Pagomènos, she presumably visits their graves.
But the whole flight back, I can’t shake the feeling that, even more so than those familial skeletons, I’ve met the being that birthed and molded and made her—a creature without words or face or flesh, like an eldritch deity of Pagomènos and its people, staring, bodiless, right back into my unblinking eyes.
Time passes, inexorable.
Sentience seemingly continues to evade Aspect. But joy has indeed found them—unreasonable, unexplainable in a place like this—like a shard of fallen starlight, alighting in their open metallic hand. They
cheer like a fitness coach during my training sessions with General Isek, throwing triumphant fists in the air as I complete even more exercise rotations without collapsing.