6. The Serpentine Forest
6
THE SERPENTINE FOREST
Finnian
The Present
Finnian awoke to a veil of fog melting between the thicket of branches.
His body jolted, and he gasped, his airway free from moths.
Fucking High God of Chaos.
Finnian couldn’t ever fathom loathing another person more than he did Cassian, but after his encounter with Chaos—and a newfound fear of moths—he was beginning to believe otherwise.
Slowly, as if not to disturb the eerie silence enveloping him, he rose to a sitting position and did a sweep of his surroundings. Through the monochrome hue and the dense layer of gnarled beech trees, he peered into the hazy shadows as far ahead as his eyes could reach. There was no birdsong, no breeze. Only an unnerving stillness.
The Serpentine Forest .
Something he’d come across during his studies. Geographically, Finnian assumed the forest’s placement was close to Moros. It made sense for it to act as a barrier to keep souls from stumbling into the Land’s prison, and even more sense to keep those from ever truly leaving Moros. The forest’s layout would no doubt be something detesting and fiendish. A labyrinth or maze, or maybe some sort of grotesque illusion.
He climbed up to his feet, eyes flicking around to keep a lookout for jostled movement. His divine power quickly activated in his left ear. The sound waves extended farther out, and with a slow rotation of his head, he managed to grab onto the bubbling of water in the distance.
He followed the direction with his gaze, analyzing the churning darkness and the silhouettes of trees. Through a sliver of prodding gray light between the leaves, he made out the steep incline of ground cover ahead. The sound came from the other side.
He hiked to the top. At the bottom was a hot spring in the clearing, surrounded by bald cypress trees. The anthropomorphic roots protruded from the water, twisting and reaching across the ground cover like skeletal hands. An entanglement of midnight-violet blossoms suffocated the bank. Amid their bell-shaped bodies were fat berries.
Finnian’s knowledge of belladonna flowers was extensive due to the amount of grimoires he’d written. He primarily used the poisonous flower as an ingredient in potions to cast temporary illusions or to conjure up a lethal poison of intense paranoia—many of which he had sold in his black market to stir attraction.
Hollow City’s prosperity and longevity had been his constant focus.
Only a few years had passed after his banishment when he discovered the belladonna’s origin. The flower first blossomed, supposedly, in the very forest Finnian stood in. Where, over five thousand years ago, the High God of Death and Curses bled for seven days and seven nights after becoming one of the first deities in existence.
Envisioning the High God bleeding for days on end was satisfying.
Finnian approached the pool of steaming water. Distant, muffled, animalistic screams caught in his ear.
He stopped with his toes inches from the belladonna, eyeing the gurgling surface of the hot spring.
Interesting.
He lifted a hand, fingers curled. With the command of his magic, he caressed a single droplet from the water, elevating it eye-level with him.
Water held the energy of those it touched.
Finnian twisted his head, angling his ear towards it. The cacophony of hushed sounds amplified and violated his eardrum. He winced, forcing himself to listen carefully to discern the noise.
The spiraling of hurricane wind; a murmuration of deep-toned birds screeching in pulses; a woman’s voice echoing an atonal siren song; the rumbling and cracking of earthy crust. It was an uncomfortable, violent ensemble.
Finnian flexed his fingers, releasing the droplet from his control. It splattered on one of the black petals of the nightshade near his shoe. The substance blackened and frothed, burning a hole straight through the blossom.
Finnian backed away, his eyes jumping to the hot spring. The cloudy water’s depth was endless, like a void, all too similar to the inferno in Moros. Where did it lead? Was there more of this dreadful place beneath his feet?
His pulse flickered with dread, blaring his senses into flight.
He spun and started back the way he came. In his periphery, he spotted a fat, blush-toned blossom.
Finnian halted in his step, his breath catching.
Father.
Against the desire to run towards it, Finnian glanced around before slowly making his way through the crunch of twigs and corpse-gray leaves. Wary of his surroundings, he kept the muscles in his arms stiff, ready to call on his magic at the first sign of a threat.
He crouched down and examined its frail layers of petals. Delicate and whimsical, pale pink and stunning.
Paeonia lactiflora. A key ingredient for a calming tincture. Father’s favorite flower.
“Where are you?” Finnian murmured.
He waited, hoping his father would hear his plea and give him another sign.
Yards ahead, between two lifeless beech trees, a peony sprouted from the dry soil. Beyond it, the path followed a chasm of darkness.
Finnian’s gut spit something foul into the back of his throat as he rose.
The darkness enclosed around him the moment he stepped into its threshold, drowning out the light peeking in through the blanket of branches.
“Belyse. ” The incantation brazed swiftly off his tongue.
With it, his sight sharpened in shades of gray. Through the spell, he could make out the forest beyond him. A dark pit. In its belly were several hollow tunnels. Dead branches twisted into canopies.
A labyrinth.
Finnian was aware that casting a spell to dissolve the darkness would be futile. A spell he had learned in his younger days to disperse the night Marina wrought in the halls of their mother’s palace. This darkness, Death’s shadows, it was something else entirely. Primordial.
If Finnian attempted to burn the trees, they’d only grow back. He could sense the ancient power emanating from them, an energy he was reluctant to siphon out and use.
He turned and studied each path. In the tunnel's mouth to his left, another blossom unfurled, its petals stretching apart and extending in Finnian’s direction, as if he were the sun.
He chose the path the peony beckoned him down.
The tunnel moaned in response to his presence. Every flicker in the grainy outline of the twined branches forming the tunnel had his fingers coiling in his palms. One hasty movement and he would strike it down with a sharp cut of his hand.
About three yards from the tunnel’s entrance, another peony sprouted.
Finnian swallowed thickly, glancing between it and the crevices of the braided branches above. Eyes, small and piercing, beamed through their creases at him. Proof of life in this ghastly forest.
Shivers pricked down his spine. He felt a presence approaching from behind.
Angling his head slightly towards the left, he held his breath and listened closely through his divine hearing. The grating, wheezing sound drew closer, growing louder than the echo of his heartbeat.
His muscles tensed and he quickly spun with a hand drawn.
A woman crawled towards him, her fingers clinging to the terrain. “Help...” she croaked.
Only her torso remained, no legs. Mutilated flesh and the casings of her intestines dragged behind as her pace picked up, reaching an arm out for Finnian.
“Help me!”
His eyes flitted up into the abyss she’d crawled out of, more concerned by what had torn her in half.
Through the gray outlines of the spell procuring his night vision, he stared deeper into the darkness that spat back a sinister aura.
“Help me,” the woman cried, wrapping her fingers around his ankle.
He raised his gaze to the branch-covered canopy, only to find the nocturnal creatures gone. They’d fled.
The woman wept harder.
His nostrils flared with the urge to kick her away. It was clear she was only a soul. Her touch felt like a wet feather, despite the grip she had on his leg. Her fingernails were like pricks of straw against his skin.
Finnian had also used this spell several times, accustomed to the black-and-white filtered view it provided. Within it, bodies were solid, tangible. The same could not be said for the woman. When he looked at her, she appeared grainy and transparent, almost wraith-like.
Her wounds were not real in a physical sense. Whatever had attacked her was not after flesh to sate its hunger. It had intended to devour her soul until there was nothing left but a memory. He needed to think fast before it?—
A beast on all fours stepped out of the shadows behind her, its spine curled and hunched like a hairless, mutated werewolf. Its thin, elongated legs, and pale gray skin stretched thin over bone, every vertebrae beneath it visible.
Fuck me.
He recognized the creature as an Achlys .
Souls who disturb the realm’s peace ended up in the Serpentine Forest, where they would eventually devour one another and become beasts who feasted on more souls—a macabre cycle.
Its small eyes glowed white, and its mouth, shaped like a pear, exposed folds of teeth that reminded Finnian too much of the executioners. In the grasp of its twine-bone fingers was the woman’s leg.
It moved at an unreliable speed.
One blink, a step.
Another blink, four steps.
Its form flickered in and out of focus until it was an arm’s length away from Finnian.
The woman at his feet screeched, the sound piercing his temporary shock.
He flexed his fingers. The silent command of his magic slung the half-eaten soul a few feet away as he ripped his other arm up, throwing the beast backwards and against a nearby tree trunk.
It let out an ear-piercing cry that quivered the ground beneath Finnian’s feet.
His stomach dropped. It was calling the others.
Finnian took off in a sprint. The tunnel of branches did not relent and the further he went, strewn body parts greeted him.
Voices of the souls cried out all around him, muffled and distorted without his hearing aid.
H—l—p m ? —!
D—leave—e ? —!
Ta—m—wi—you!
He came to a stop at an intersection of tunnels, spinning to gauge each one, crushingly aware of the malevolent presence behind him.
It chilled his spine. He ducked before the monster could grab him in its clutches.
He brutally flicked his hand, throwing the horrid thing against the tunnel walls. The interwoven limbs moaned against the Achlys’s weight as it slunk down onto the ground.
Finnian’s breath went shallow. He gave the tunnels another look, casting a double take to the one on his right, quickly noting the peony standing sprightly in its mouth.
An elated sense of relief burst like a blueberry in his chest.
Without looking back, he fled towards it.
“Finny.”
It came to him like a whisper caught in a breeze. The soft note of her familiar voice was nearly drowned out by the rushing of blood in his left ear.
The soles of his feet skidded in the dirt, and he whirled around. “Naia?”
An itch burrowed in the center of his skull. A droning, black pang. A tick latching into skin.
The hairs on his nape rose as he took in his sister standing before him in hues of gray. Her silver-coined waves hit her waistline. It was still an odd sight to see her in jeans and a crop-top and not some gaudy gown forced upon her by their mother.
“Finny.” Her eyes flicked back and forth on his face, her expression severe. “Make haste. We must leave. Now .”
Hope had him lifting his hand to meet hers as a sense of rationality collided with his relief and desire.
He closed his fingers into a fist and squeezed. The itch in his brain quivered the nerves in his jaws. He rolled his shoulders. Something did not feel right.
He pinned his focus on Naia, scrutinizing the feel of her energy. Something he could easily identify in a sea of people. Naia was tranquil, like standing before a morning sunrise, sipping on espresso and gazing out a window during a thunderstorm. An energy he could not pick up on then.
The sister he knew would’ve thrown herself at him in a bone-crushing hug, crying and smiling like the emotional fool she was.
Finnian glanced behind his shoulder. The beast was gone. Maybe it was never there at all.
“You are not real,” he murmured.
A deep rumble of laughter spread goosebumps down his arms.
He jerked his head around to find the tall, curvy figure of his sister being swallowed by an oil-sodden cloud.
Finnian’s stomach twisted and he backed up on his heel.
Her silhouette transformed a foot taller, and her shoulders filled out into broad ones hidden beneath a fitted suit.
Cassian’s eyes shone like golden jewels through the abyss, turning and swirling around him. “Why hello again, Little Nightmare.”
Finnian’s eyes jumped from the High God’s lips to his eyes. The fear thudding his pulse made his hearing unreliable. It twined like a vine in his ribcage. There was no telling how Cassian would punish him for escaping Moros.
The cage of darkness lifted from around them, an inky mist ascending overhead and dissolving through the creases of the woven canopy of the tunnel.
Metallic light pierced through the branches. It shone across Cassian’s profile as he stopped a few feet in front of Finnian, his hands stowed away in his front pockets, suave disposition fully intact.
He tilted his head, the movement dropping that singular, maddening curl into his face. “I must say it is impressive how much destruction you spawned in my prison.”
Finnian dug his fingers into his palms, capping the urge to hex the High God. “Come to drag me back?”
“Since Moros wasn’t to your liking, I figured the Serpentine Forest with the roaming Achlys would suffice.”
Finnian glowered at him. “I’ll burn this entire godsforsaken forest to ash before they touch me.”
“I do enjoy your fire.” Cassian pulled a vial from his pocket filled with a glittering silver substance. He held it up. “Do you know what this is?”
Finnian swallowed, unease tightening in his throat. “A binding potion.”
It was strong from the looks of it. Magic glistened in the liquid particles like tiny stars. Whoever ingested it would be bound to the person they received it from. In this case, since it was in Cassian’s possession, the victim would be bound to him.
Binding potions were temporary, but they sold for a high price in Hollow City’s black market. Finnian would know, given he had been a major supplier in its earlier days when the city’s population ran small. It was one of the first potions he ever created—with the help of his apprentices.
Cassian flipped the vial upside down. The viscous liquid oozed along the inside of the glass. “A witch gave it to me a long time ago. I knew it would find its use one day.”
Finnian’s eyes thinned, his heart pounding like timpani against the cavities of his chest. “If you cannot keep me contained in Moros, your next grand idea is to chain me to you?”
Cassian popped the cork of the vial with his thumb. It rolled across the dirt-laden terrain. “I see no sense in torturing you in Moros when my curse is currently living within you. In time, you will fall to its insanity and tell me where you’re keeping Ash’s blood. Until then, I cannot give you free rein of my Land.”
To be powerless. Shivani’s words haunted Finnian.
The cords in his neck went rigid the more he thought about the potion touching his tongue. It grated on his composure. To be confined, stripped of his willpower.
Escape.
Leave Father behind.
Do not link yourself to Cassian.
He could envision his father somewhere in the hellish landscape, filled with hope at the sense of Finnian’s presence, only to be overcome with grave disappointment when Finnian turned his back on him once more.
Guilt chiseled down to his marrow.
Don’t be a coward.
The alternative was to be a leashed dog.
“Why the hell are you so desperate to get your hands on my nephew’s blood?” Finnian snapped, resentment frothing in his tone.
Cassian’s eyebrows rose, and he lowered the vial. “What an uncharacteristic outburst. It seems my curse is taking quite nicely to you.”
Finnian pressed his lips together, the itch prodding like an ice pick in his skull.
Cassian offered his empty hand. “We can avoid all of this. Simply return the item you stole.”
Finnian stared down at his pale fingers, the soft tint of his short fingernails, the blue roadway of veins beneath skin.
The Kiss of Delirium wouldn’t break him, but binding himself to Cassian might.
He suddenly yearned to be back in that sweltering hot dungeon with the executioner chewing on his insides and Shivani’s bating remarks.
Finnian squared Cassian with a defiant look, grinning, as if he found the whole situation amusing. “After all the years we’ve played together, it is disappointing you’d assume I would ingest any sort of potion you’d wave in my face voluntarily.”
Cassian took a menacing step forward, and the tunnels around them altered.
Their surroundings morphed into a completely different setting. The soil underneath Finnian’s feet transitioned into dark, glossy stone. The tunnel hovering over them became a room made of obsidian. Golden basins filled with firelight reflected along the shimmering black walls.
Finnian moved back.
His heel rammed into something solid.
He turned quickly, discovering an altar atop the platform he stood on.
Cassian’s temple.
A gust of mint and lemon engulfed him from behind, the mixture stirring nausea in his belly.
He spun and drove his arm up to cast a spell.
Cassian caught his wrist with one hand. The other planted on his chest and shoved him backwards.
Finnian’s back slammed down on the altar. A grunt pressed out of his lungs from the harsh impact.
He shot his free arm upwards, magic gathering in his palm.
Cassian hooked his index finger around Finnian’s wrist, locking both of his hands in a steel grip over his head.
Finnian’s nostrils flared. He curled his legs up to shove Cassian away. The High God’s knee pried in between Finnian’s legs and maneuvered in between them.
“I never assumed voluntarily .” Cassian leaned down, keeping him pinned. “You are far too stubborn to do something when I ask.”
Finnian jerked against his hold, cursing his unfathomable strength. He was much older, his divine power more honed. Finnian stood no chance against him in this position.
Worry beat thickly in Finnian’s racing pulse. He opened his mouth to cast an incantation.
Cassian’s movements were brisk, forcing the vial’s spout into Finnian’s mouth, drowning his spell. The glass clinked against his teeth. He clamped his throat closed. The potion fizzled on his tongue.
Cassian hooked the thumb of his other hand underneath Finnian’s chin, forcing his jaw closed. “If you wish to hex me with that pretty mouth of yours, you’ll have to swallow.” He smothered his palm over Finnian’s lips.
Finnian bucked and squirmed to break his arms free. The potion burned and tingled the inside of his cheeks. The harsh fumes of it tickled his throat. Tears stung his eyes.
He pushed the liquid to the front of his teeth, refusing to swallow. Dribbles leaked from the corners of his mouth, puddling in his ears.
Cassian lifted his hand from Finnian’s mouth.
In a fit of coughing, he turned his head and spat out the potion onto the altar. He blinked through the moisture clouding his eyes.
Rage quaked in his limbs.
Cassian tightened his grip on Finnian’s wrists, momentarily straightening up.
Finnian locked his thighs around Cassian’s waist, lodging his knees in the High God’s ribcage to force him back. Anything to prolong the small time he’d been given to clear his mouth.
“ Remotionem— ”
“Don’t bother.” The High God threw his head back with the vial to his lips and downed the remains.
He tossed the empty vial aside.
The glass shattered.
Cassian’s abdomen flexed against Finnian’s knees as he bent forward.
He snaked his hand underneath the base of Finnian’s skull.
Finnian gasped. “Remo ? —”
Cassian sucked him into a kiss.
His eyes went wide, and he sealed his lips together.
The fight of a dying life force blazed in him, while simultaneously, his body slackened in Cassian’s hold. He couldn’t make sense of it and had little time to try as Cassian’s tongue pried in between his lips to create access for the sterling liquid.
The filmy, bubbling concoction filled the back of his mouth again.
He clenched the sides of his throat and bit down hard on Cassian’s bottom lip. The taste of iron infiltrated the potent, bitter taste of the potion.
Cassian tore his lip free from Finnian’s teeth and reared up. Crimson ran down the High God’s chin.
Before Finnian could spit the potion out, Cassian cupped his face and dug his thumb and index finger into the joint on the sides of his jaw and applied pressure, locking against Finnian’s bones. He had no choice but to keep his mouth shut.
Finnian rolled the back of his head over the altar, fighting Cassian’s hold. He pushed the potion through his teeth. Trickles of it leaked from his lips.
Cassian planted his palm across Finnian’s mouth for the second time. “Quit being so stubborn and just swallow,” he growled.
Finnian glared at him.
Cassian cataloged the rebellion in his eyes and responded by settling in closer. He swept down and grazed his lips along the side of Finnian’s neck.
Warmth kindled in Finnian’s bloodstream.
Cassian’s breath fanned over his collarbones, traveling down to his waistband. He pulled the hem of Finnian’s shirt up with his teeth, dragging his chin over his abdomen.
Finnian’s breath sped up. Tingles scurried up his spine.
He ground his jaw, glowering over Cassian’s knuckles plastered over his mouth.
As if he could sense Finnian’s eyes on him, he lifted his hooded gaze, a sly determination twinkling within it.
“All—have—swallow,” he said against Finnian’s stomach.
All you have to do is swallow.
Heat blossomed in his lower belly, nearly forcing him to draw in a breath through his mouth.
Cassian lowered his lips down on the side of Finnian’s torso. Gooseflesh spread across his skin. A stroke of Cassian’s tongue over the ridges of his ribcage. A wet, staggering kiss, teeth bruising?—
A tremor zapped down into Finnian’s groin. The tense muscles of his throat gave way and the potion poured down his esophagus.
He gasped and coughed as he gulped it down. Defeat gnawed at his insides—a feeling that never dissolved well. One that would eventually harden into bitterness.
Satisfied, Cassian released his wrists and stepped down from the altar. One hand smoothed back his disheveled strands.
Finnian stared up at the glimmering firelight on the onyx ceiling with the burning of blood beating fiercely in his skull.
A feverish heat surged in his blood. Every nerve ending in his body tingled from Cassian’s touch. Desire for more flooded his cheeks. The touch of the person he hated the most.
The contents of the potion bubbled in his stomach. A harrowing reminder of how he was now bound to Cassian.
A fresh wave of fury roared through him, the intensity sending quivers down his limbs.
He ripped up and threw his arm out, siphoning the energy residing in the ancient walls of the temple.