Chapter 35
ARIENNE
The illumination of her glass orb barely reached a step beyond her. In this place, darkness felt not like the absence of light but like substance that filled the air. She walked through it on and on, until she felt exhausted and hungry, but the black rock steps going down continued endlessly.
The stickiness of the air was getting worse. As she touched the orb, a stinging pain made her look down at her hand. It was now covered in countless little pustules.
Noam shivered in his room inside the wooden tower in her mind. He was clearly overwhelmed by the smell of the Grim King, but never once did he suggest they turn back.
“How strange. This can’t be right. It can’t be this deep…” Noam continued to mutter. “It was only once, but I have been here. It wasn’t this deep.”
How could the shadow of the Grim King be this thick nearly two centuries after his occupation of the castle?
Arienne stumbled and almost tripped. She looked down and saw a lump of what looked like stone and cloth on the stairs—then she realized the cloth was an Imperial uniform.
She looked closer and saw a nameplate. CENTURION JUNIA.
It was a skeleton, the bones so melted that she could barely comprehend that it was the remains of a person.
The darkness felt even more palpable. Then she realized that it was, somewhat, as there was a thin black fog—no, more like smoke—permeating the air.
“Danras wasn’t this bad…” she murmured, and suddenly she heard a whisper in the smoke, like the sound of a snake slithering by in the grass on a dark, calm night. Arienne held her breath and listened hard. She could hear it clearly.
“… hurts…”
A sudden piercing pain in her ear made her slip and fall on the steps.
She slammed into the makeshift wooden banister, and the half-melted and rotted wood broke off and fell into the bottomless abyss.
Arienne grabbed on to the side of the step before she fell with it, but the edge of the slick obsidian cut into her hand like a blade and she screamed.
Her scream did not echo, but the whisper multiplied into dozens, indiscernible in their cacophony.
Her heart pounded. Her hand kept slipping on her own blood.
Fearing she would fall in the attempt, Arienne swung herself to the other side of the staircase with all her might and grabbed on to the other step with her other hand.
Slowly, she pulled herself up. How glad she was that she hadn’t brought a rucksack with her!
She leaned against the wall of the steps and caught her breath, reminded of the collapsing stairs she had climbed in Danras.
How many near misses, she wondered, was she allowed before dying horribly?
There had been so many close calls in the last few years …
Something warm trickled down her neck. It was sticky. Only by the light of her orb did she realize her ear was bleeding, and the pustules on her hands had all burst from her exertions a moment ago. Just leaning a hand against the wall now hurt.
But Arienne stood and kept walking down.
“Noam, how is the tower?” In truth, she knew the tilt and creak of every single panel in that building, but she desperately needed to hear someone’s voice as she descended deeper into the unending darkness.
“It’s the same. Tychon is fine, too.”
“And the weather?”
She felt Noam get up and walk to the window.
“The usual. Nothing that you could really call weather.”
Her mind must be all right, then, but her body was getting worse with each step. She could feel her body wanting to melt into the thin black smoke, like the bones and wood of Mersia, melt with the pained voices that she couldn’t decipher. She knew, then, what permeated this place.
“Noam, remember how I said the thing that destroyed Mersia had come to be known as the ‘Star of Mersia’?” Arienne swallowed. “I think it’s still here somehow.”
It must have even made its way down into this deep, secret crack of the castle. But why it lingered after all those years, Arienne couldn’t even guess.
“… Should you be here then?”
“I think I’d have been dead a long time ago if this was anything more than just a residue of it. I should be fine, as long as I don’t stay for too long…”
But it was a force—a poison—that had taken down a whole country. No matter how faint the trace, no mortal could withstand it for too long. Could she live, if she turned back now? Her joints throbbed with a pain she had never felt before. She strained to keep up her pace.
The poisonous whispers continued. She tried not to listen to them, hoping that they wouldn’t affect her as long as she didn’t understand.
Soon, it felt like the words were being whispered directly into her head.
She kept ignoring them. If she gave them even a bit of thought, she would understand what they were saying.
And that must not happen. She must not understand them, else the poison would surely flood her mind and destroy her …
But then, Arienne lifted her head and glared into the dark.
“No.”
“No what?” asked Noam.
“I didn’t come all this way just to not listen.”
Arienne sat down in the middle of the steps and crossed her legs.
She listened intently to the many whispering voices.
Something poured over her like a waterfall, and there was a ringing in her head as if she’d been struck.
Her own heartbeat was like a war drum in her head. Something was filling up …
“Arienne! Arienne! Outside, there’s, there’s a storm!”
Noam’s shouts came to her like he was on a faraway hill. With his voice came the frantic cacophony of the wind chimes of the tower in her mind. Arienne ignored these sounds, instead focusing on each whisper and listening to them one by one.
A sobbing filled with sorrow, from the shaman Yarin of the distant southern island country of Arpheia.
The king with his long black hair and renowned skill on the lute had been her husband, and the queen with her famously fine singing voice and embroidery her wife.
When both were murdered by the legionaries as they breached the palace, Yarin had chosen to end her life during the battle by hanging herself on a length of silk rope.
In the Circuit of Destiny, Yarin was number 21.
Radegunt was a priest of the thunder god of Tythonia.
When their god was torn limb from limb by a gigatherion, he held a mourning ceremony in secret, which led to a spy informing on him to the prefect.
Dragged to the Capital, he awaited trial for five years before dying in prison.
In the Circuit of Destiny, Radegunt was number 217.
Horatia, native to the Imperial Capital, was considered the brightest sorcerer of her era, ever since she was young.
On the night of her twenty-fourth birthday, as she was returning home from drinking with friends, she was assaulted in an alley and strangled to death.
As she died, she glimpsed that her assailant was her sister.
The Office of Truth had paid a handsome fee to her sister when her body was handed over, and their family business managed to pay off its debts and thrive again.
In the Circuit of Destiny, Horatia was number 134.
Sandur was a shadow actor in the peninsular country of Feredan in the southwest. He was impressively tall, and completely hairless from head to toe.
A sorcerer of unprecedented talent in the history of Feredan, he used his magic only for the stage, just as he had been taught.
He had easily surrendered to the Empire and lived for four years in a house too small for him before his death by suicide.
In the Circuit of Destiny, Sandur was number 182.
Dalan was the Host of the city of Danras in Mersia, the last in a long line.
Understanding his fate when the Empire came to his country, he walked into the Imperial Capital of his own accord, but a year later was held under investigation by the Office of Truth and executed.
His whispers carried the smell of the wooden tower in Arienne’s mind.
In the Circuit of Destiny, Dalan was number 314.
And the Grim King of Mersia, Eldred … She knew his story all too well. In the Circuit of Destiny, he was number 328.
The whispers dug into Arienne’s mind. Each of them a famed sorcerer at one time, and now Power generator of the Circuit of Destiny. Trapped in a death that wasn’t death, watching over the world, taking in all that had happened.
Everything they had seen, heard, and predicted for the Empire, the destinies they created—all of it poured into Arienne, through her eyes, ears, and pores.
Arienne witnessed the Thiopsian Famine, which lasted three years and ended with a million dead.
She suffered the Calidian Purge, where the defiant followers of the One God were massacred by the thousands by Powered war machines.
She ran from the hounds of the Tanvalian prefect, goaded into the jungle to live like an animal. And more. The torment felt endless.
The backs of her eyes were hot. Something like tears or blood kept welling up there. These low whispers must have been screams unbearable to the mortal ear, when they were first unleashed onto Mersia all those years ago.
“Arienne! Can you hear me?”
Noam’s shouts felt even farther away than before. Arienne tried to hold on to her consciousness through the flood of stories.
“Noam,” she gasped, barely managing to speak. “How … is Tychon?” she gritted out.
“Asleep!”
“Wake him.”
“He won’t wake up! The whole building is about to fly away, but he’s still sleeping!”
But it was because the storm was so turbulent that he was fast asleep. Her mind was collapsing. Which in this moment was better than her body collapsing, because she still needed to continue on.
Arienne fought to stand up and then began limping down the stairs.
Each step was an agony like nothing she’d ever suffered, but she willed herself to walk, and soon, she was running through the pain.
Her knees and ankles hurt and her eyes were burning and her head felt like it was about to burst, but she went down the steps three at a time, seeing nothing in front of her but relying completely on the intuition of her feet.
She knew she might die here. But she had to meet her first. She had to find Yuma, the Chief Herder of Danras.
Her feet met something hard quicker than she’d expected and she stumbled forward onto her hands and knees as the whispers and the visions came to a sudden stop.
There were no more steps now, just a level floor.
Arienne, with much difficulty, got to her feet again.
She had broken something, but what she noticed was not the pain of a fractured bone, but the quiet.
The air wasn’t sticky anymore. The orb around her neck was brighter than ever, but her vision was too blurry to make out anything.
Something at her feet sparkled in the light. Not the black of obsidian but a yellow. Arienne picked it up. Only after peering at it closely with her nearly blind eyes and touching it all over did she realize it was a broken crown. Gold entangled with bone …
“Noam, how are things now?”
He sighed. “Better. I thought we were going to die. But the building is fine now.”
“Wake Tychon.”
“He looks really tired—”
“Wake him. Tell him his mother is coming to see him.”