12. Phaeron
“No!” Myuna roared.
I muttered a curse as pain shredded through my already aching head. The Void laughed behind my ears. It knew I was weakened by mortal needs despite my kind’s functional immortality. Myuna didn’t notice my wince, and it was better that way. The moments that trickled by in her presence were more pleasant when the mistress didn’t notice me.
I hissed under my breath. No, I told myself. You have no mistress.
It was hard to focus for long enough to remind myself of that fact. I’d been awake five eternities now or longer, clinging to the merest trickle of power and sanity at the back of my head. Braza couldn’t feed me more than a drop of energy at a time without Myuna noticing the drip-drab of relief and coherency. Still, my body should’ve long given up.
Myuna and Garroway ignored the occasional unhinged laugh I uttered, in chorus with the Void or off-tune, when I was just so exhausted all I could do was chuckle at my own flaws. I was going mad one excruciating minute at a time, and surely that was the purpose of my continued existence at the goddess’s side. She wanted me desperate enough to bend a knee to her. She bid me every day to submit to her will for the opportunity to finally rest.
And Cress help me, there seemed no other option than to give in.
Cress. The tones of her voice haunted me, and I was convinced it was the Void playing a trick. The version of her in my head was a distorted mirage of sound, and yet I listened anyway. She lisped in my mind in pleading tones. A human dialect, strange and blunt… I did not understand the words anymore.
“They killed the first of my children that managed to escape the pit they call a library,” Myuna sighed. That’s right. She’d called out in distress six seconds or hours ago, upset over something.
Garroway, who’d taken to whiling away many of the daylight hours on the dais next to her, patted her arm. He simpered something her way, and I nearly mustered the energy to sneer. How quickly he’d fallen in line and served her with devotion, even when Endaeron was not the dominant personality in his body.
Considering every supernatural he brought before her was consumed, Garroway had taken to catching animals for Myuna to experiment on. She’d twisted more than a few stray dogs into creatures resembling doskalos and created new unnaturals from other animals.
The goddess delighted in corrupting the fauna of Cerris City when they began hunting survivors for her at the times Garroway could not. Her white skin had gained a pearly sheen from regular feedings. She was a beautiful, deadly monster again, making sure to tap my awareness so I would be forced to watch as she bloated poor grackles and seabirds into bulbous harridans and other innocent creatures into her twisted slaves.
She took to playing with her food, sucking souls one piece at a time so their screams of agony joined the Void’s chorus long after they were gone. “Don’t you want to look away?” she’d whispered. “Just submit to me. I will do the rest.”
Submit. Rest.
Had she just said that? No, just a recollection. Yet another voice stirring in the Void.
What she was really saying was, “…consume the group murdering my children and take the powercore for myself. We grow stronger each day.”
“While time may be of the essence.” Garroway pitched his tone to soothe as he rubbed her shoulder. His voice had gained the two-toned hiss of the Hungering Darkness. “You have yet to claim any other supernatural to serve you.”
“I have hungered so desperately. Surely you do not fault me for eating the candidates you’ve already brought me?” she asked. Their foreheads leaned toward one another, and her white-filmed eyes gave his a searching look.
“Of course not, my lady,” Garroway and Endaeron purred. The vampire skimmed her cheek with his fingertips, drawing her ice-white hair back behind one ear. A daring touch, so close to her mouth pit.
I recognized what I was witnessing with a sick lurch. Affection. The worst monster to grace Soiluire had found what may be the most desperate on Earth. As Myuna slowly caressed her hand down the vampire’s back, I wondered if her expression was that of lust or avarice. Did the self-proclaimed reaper of worlds have what it took to feel romantically for another? Or would she consume his soul the moment he stopped giving her what she wanted?
“Come nightfall, I will bring you new candidates, my lady. We can try until you succeed in taking their souls to serve you,” he promised.
“Very good,” she said, sitting straight once more. She loomed over him, glowing vibrantly in anticipation.
Once night arrived, Garroway came and went thrice, delivering victims one at a time that Myuna held in her massive palms, hesitated over, and then consumed their souls and bodies in a few gruesome moments. She couldn’t seem to help herself.
Time whirred on, and my body grew too heavy to support. Myuna did not permit me to sit, so I collapsed, splayed before her like a dying animal. The hunger and thirst had grown nearly as unbearable as the fatigue, my needs eclipsing Braza’s careful drips of energy.
“Give in. Submit,” she whispered.
My tongue felt like a flap of parchment in the desert of my mouth. “No,” I rasped, tasting blood.
“Very well… Watch,” she ordered. Wavering, I lifted my head and did as she bid. She consumed a wounded animal brought to her and twisted a dozen more, releasing a new pack of her monsters into the city to hunt for her.
I dipped my chin, humiliated. The great Phaeron et Sudair could not save a housecat, let alone the innocents still trapped in this pocket dimension. The blood and gore, corruption and death… It blurred together into the Void’s giggling seams.
Until she arrived, days or moments or years later.
She screamed my name with a human accent. I knew the girl struggling in Garroway’s arms, and my eyes widened in recognition.
Some of the madness drained from my head, dimming the Void and muting the nonsense of time’s passing. I was truly returned the moment I whispered her name, Carly, an ordinary human with dirty ocean-blue hair and torn clothes.
My mate’s sister, here, being presented to Myuna. Panic turned my heart into a racing blur as Myuna’s white-glazed eyes danced toward me and a smile curved the morass of her mouth. “You know this girl, Phaeron. I seem to recall her likeness too, from your memories.”
“Leave her be.” My demand was weakened by the huff of effort it took for me to stand. Shadows lengthened in the room, bending to my command even though I’d long been obeying an order not to move from my spot.
Carly babbled, tears streaming down her face. She stared at my mouth all the while. The only thing I made out from her was my name, repeated like a plea…
My translation spell, I realized. She had to be begging me for help and it was not being translated in a way I understood. Myuna had broken the spell I relied on so heavily, probably with the sheer force of her own mind-turning voice.
Myuna gestured for Garroway to release the girl and caught her in a weave of light. Her usual trick had Carly clawing at the boundaries of the bubble she was trapped in, still staring at me, probably wondering when I would do something to help her. The presence of Myuna’s magic evaporated what few shadows I had the energy to call, rendering me useless for what was about to happen.
“What will you give me in exchange for her?” the goddess asked.
I could not give her anything.
I could not give in to her will.
But I also could not allow her to have Carly. I remembered a much more vibrant girl, who wished so desperately to be a supernatural like her adopted sister. She’d had me check and recheck her soul for any speck of magic in the hopes that proximity to the supernatural community would sprout something within her and spread flower petals toward the sun. She’d only seen the good side of magic; the Crystal Court with its friendly, honest fae folk and the tight-knit community of witches that lived with them.
Her soul flickered within her now, weak and ordinary, shrinking away from the monster that had her trapped in a cage of magic. Already, Myuna eyed her like she observed every other humanoid brought to her: like a full-course meal.
“Has bringing me low not already been sufficient payment?” I rasped.
In response, Myuna opened her mouth and sucked, tugging Carly’s soul loose within her body. The blue-haired girl screamed and clutched her chest. “Phaeron,” she begged. “Phaeron!”
What else did I even have to offer? My full will and body were the only things Myuna had not already taken from me. Falteringly, I offered the only other thing I could think of. “I will give you my knowledge. Several mortal lifetimes of information. Anything you would want to know about this world, here for the taking, if you would just let her go.”
Carly’s screams hit a feverish pitch as Myuna tugged her soul in a nearly playful way, untethering it from her body ever so slowly.
“Please. She is still so young,” I begged.
Another tug, and her soul left her body, which crumpled within the bubble of light, pristine except for the way her pupils rapidly smudged out of her unseeing eyes. Myuna cycled Carly’s soul around her lips, tongue darting out to taste it.
I was seized by the inevitability of Myuna. The death of civilizations here to spread entropy, starting with Cerris City. In a couple days at most, I would be too overcome by my body’s mortality, and then she’d wring control of me to help her agenda along.
Through the fog in my brain, I recognized the truth. The real reason for the methods of her torture when she so obviously wanted my subservience. She couldn’t take full control of me unless I agreed or she corrupted my soul. Unlike Carly’s soul, weak enough to be twisted from one lick, mine made for a challenge Myuna was obviously not willing to undertake in her current state.
I’d watched too many of the women in my life die; Carly could still be saved. And if I worded my surrender correctly…with a larger ration of luck than I deserved, so could I.
I breathed out, “Spare her, and I will slumber.”
A deliberate word choice, slumber, the kind of blackout exhaustion she was pushing me toward. As long as I did not wake, she could puppet my body and powers as she willed.
It was a close second to the complete submission she desired from me.
The goddess paused with Carly’s essence poised to be sucked into her pit of a mouth. “Very well,” she agreed, far too readily.
She blew the soul away from her maw and manipulated it like she tied strands of light. It gained a new shape, and then it was shoved back into Carly’s body, jerking her awake with a jolt. White light poured from her irises, marking her as the first human servant Myuna had successfully claimed. Back on my planet, we would call her a torchbearer, capable of wielding the goddess’s white light.
I watched her sit up and breathed out with relief. If I saw Cress again, I could tell her that I’d done everything I could to protect her family.
“There. Spared,” Myuna mocked. “Rest up.”
Before she could change her mind, I closed my eyes, feeling how dry and aching they were. It was the biggest gamble of my life, to go into her hands willingly, if temporarily.
Her awful, multi-layered voice whispered into the last remnants of my awareness. “We have a library to claim. Perhaps your slumber shall end…with your sweet mate in myhands.”