Chapter 26
Rosabel La Rouge
Taland was dying right in front of my eyes. He was being torn apart completely by the very souls that he was setting free. He was being torn apart literally . His clothes were nearly gone, and there was almost no inch of skin on him left without a cut, without blood.
Taland was dying, and if I couldn’t stop it, I was going down with him.
The world around us no longer mattered. I’d made him this circle with my own blood, damn it, and I wasn’t going to let him die in it all alone. The soldiers and the crowd and the IDD—none of it mattered except for this: I would try to stop whatever was doing this to Taland, and if I couldn’t, I’d already accepted my fate. There really was no better way to go, anyway.
I begged him to let me through, to share the soldiers with me, so that maybe I could carry at least half the load that setting them free was putting on him.
Taland finally agreed.
I felt the switch as if it flipped somewhere in my own mind, and the world around me turned dark.
Suddenly, there was no bus underneath me, no lines drawn in my blood. There was no Taland in front of me, either. It was just me—and everything I had just seen happening to him with my own eyes felt like it had happened to me.
I couldn’t even begin to explain it if I tried, but it’s like for a moment, we eclipsed each other, Taland and I. In my mind, we were in perfect alignment, perfectly connected, truly one . We didn’t exist as individuals at all for as long as the darkness kept me under, and I was completely disoriented until…
The pain began.
I’d seen those tears on Taland’s body, had heard his screams, had felt the horror in his every breath. Yet now, it was me who’d been torn apart, and me who’d screamed, and me who’d been horrified with every breath—not him.
Just me and those souls, so many of them tied to my very core, and they were now tearing that core apart little by little, like tearing pieces of the fabric of my soul.
Almost a hundred of them, and the more I tried to hold in that scream, to hold back the pain, the faster that number declined. Ninety, eighty six, eighty-two, seventy-nine…
The scream came out of me and I gave it every ounce of energy I had left. Because I realized that these souls weren’t being set free at all.
They were disappearing.
Their lights shone in the darkness I’d been thrust in, and I saw them only in the distance—until they were no more. Until they simply turned off, ceased to exist. Gone for good.
Goddess, this was wrong.
And I had no idea how to stop it.
Soon, the lights came to me, grew bigger and brighter and warmer against my skin that was being torn apart exactly like Taland’s had been. I thought I knew what I was doing, thought I would carry the weight of their release together with him so we could both see the light at the end of the tunnel, but this was no tunnel at all. The only light came from the tricked souls of those soldiers, who were now being released from their linking with Taland— no.
They were being released from their bond to me.
I got to watch them as they flickered off and died like they had never breathed the air of this world at all.
Lights all around me—and the soldiers were screaming. Goddess, I heard their voices in my head and I couldn’t stop screaming myself, hoping to make them stop.
So heavy. So all consuming. I’d give up my life just for a second of silence.
How I’d taken being alone in my head for granted all my life. How I wished I could go back to when I only heard my own voice…
Now, I heard them all, begging, pleading, their lights sticking to my skin— stop, please stop, don’t let us go! they screamed in one language or the other, but I understood all of it. Of course, I did—our souls were linked together.
So much light died in front of my eyes, and I couldn’t stop it, didn’t know how. No thoughts in my head except for them, their pain, the way they dimmed, the way they turned off, never to be seen again—and the way they all took a part of me with them.
Now I was dying, it seemed, and the more I screamed, the heavier the souls, and the bigger those sources of light became. Until they morphed into humanoid figures, and grabbed me by the hands and feet, and pulled me down as they begged— please, please, please, please!
Over and over they begged.
A mistake. All of it, a mistake. I couldn’t stop tearing, and the lights around me wouldn’t stop going off. It had been a mistake to start this ritual because this wasn’t going to set them free at all.
But there had to be a way, right? Wasn’t that what always happened—wasn’t there always another way?
“ Remember the quest for a body that had come to its death by natural causes?” I asked Taland—or Taland asked me, but it was also my own voice.
So strange. None of it really made any sense, but that didn’t mean that all of it wasn’t real to me. The dark and the souls dragging me under and my fight to keep afloat as if I was in water and only my head was above the surface.
“ Remember those beautiful moss-green eyes and the impossible task of getting an animal the size of a vulcera to bond to a person without accessible magic?” I asked or Taland asked—it really didn’t matter.
“Remember how she lay on that ice? How impossible the challenge given to us seemed?”
And finally, “Remember how it became perfectly possible then? ”
There was always another way. The Iris Roe had taught me that, even if it had scarred me for life, had almost killed me on multiple occasions.
There was always another way.
“Stop! ”
I screamed it at the top of my lungs. I called with my everything—and again, half my voice could have been Taland’s and half my thoughts could have belonged to him, but we were one. We’d become one through magic, and now, with these tears in our bodies and our souls in pieces, disappeared with long-dead soldiers into this never-ending abyss, we were one physically, too.
The souls stopped pulling. The lights stopped flickering, dying. So few of them left—only sixty. Half of what they once were. Only half.
But they stopped. They heard me. They listened.
I urged them to come forward, to slip under my skin, to see into my mind the way I saw in theirs. To see all I’d gone through, all that I’d ever thought. Everything from the very beginning.
I was completely bare in front of them.
There is always another way, and I promise you I will find it. I promise you with my life that I will set you free if we stop this spell right now, break free of it together.
I wasn’t sure if they believed me, or if they even heard the thoughts in my head in the state they were in, screaming and begging and pulling at my limbs. I wasn’t sure if they saw what I was trying to show them, if they knew what it all meant. The vulcera and the ice statue of the roc and the dead crow on the rooftop and the legs of Madame Weaver with tips as sharp as blades. I wasn’t sure if what I promised could even be done, but I bet my life on it—quite literally. Because without them I couldn’t make this stop.
And I didn’t wait for an answer. I gave every ounce of me, all my energy and every bit of magic in my veins to the bracelet and aimed at the curse that had pulled them and unraveled them so mercilessly, had simply turned off their lights. I aimed to destroy it just as thoroughly as it had destroyed those souls, as thoroughly as it had torn through Taland and through me.
I didn’t know if the soldiers joined me, if they helped.
But when I gave it all away, I stopped hearing their voices in my head, and I stopped seeing their lights in the darkness.
Light—the kind that comes from the sky. Not overly bright, but it was there and I could see it, though barely. I could see it and I chased it with my everything because I knew that if I couldn’t get to it, everything would be lost. I knew that if I couldn’t get to it, I would never see Taland again.
Nothing ever motivated me the way Taland did. Nothing could ever make me want to get out of my own skin so badly. And I launched at that light with my entire strength, which grew the more aware of myself I was, the more I awoke from that never-ending darkness. The more I realized that nothing was pulling me down anymore and nobody was screaming in my head.
My eyes opened.
The light over me had seemed brighter than it actually was. The sun continued to hide behind thick grey clouds that no longer even wept—a visual representation of the earth’s anger at what had happened. What we’d done. Us—all of us.
The fear was strong, forever present in my very bones because of what my life had looked like since I could remember myself. Always fear. Always running.
But right now, I just needed to sit up and look.
Since sitting up was out of the question, I tried to move my head, at least, to see where I was, where Taland was. I began to hear noises, but they seemed to be coming from every far away. The more I blinked the clearer the image of the sky in front of me, the smell of blood and magic in my nostrils. The smell of something burning.
My heart was in my throat. I managed to turn my head to the side just slightly, desperate to see where Taland was.
I saw.
He lay next to me, on his side, eyes closed, hair all over the place, blood all over him. His skin was torn everywhere, big and small cuts, surrounded by fresh and dried blood. A scream built up in me because my heart simply couldn’t handle the sight of him like that, but…his chest.
It moved.
Taland was alive.
The sky could have been mine. The earth and all the seas—but it still wouldn’t compare to what I felt in those moments.
Until something else moved, shook me to my core.
We must have still been lying on the rooftop of that bus because it moved, and it sounded like someone was climbing it.
Get up! my mind shouted at me.
I couldn’t.
All I could do was look up at the sky and thank Goddess that Taland was still breathing—right until they came, from all sides at once, and looked down at me.
The soldiers. What remained of the Delaetus Army. Men whose souls were tethered to my own, wearing helmets and armors and white in their eyes.
I expected a lot of things to happen in that moment. For them to kill me, stab me, burn me, call to me in that awful robotic voice, throw me to the ground—or pick me up and put me on my feet.
I waited, but all they did was look down at me, eyes unblinking, bodies perfectly still.
Do something! I wanted to say, but of course, I couldn’t. At least Taland would be okay, wouldn’t he? These soldiers were his… weren’t they ? They wouldn’t hurt him.
Safety, said another voice in my head—and I could have sworn it belonged to someone else. But it must have been me, my own self trying to think of a safe place, of somewhere to take Taland to, somewhere where nobody could hurt him. Not the IDD, not Radock, not the soldiers.
I had no such place in mind, though. Taland was always the one who knew the places and had the plans to keep me safe. All I had was my room at the mansion that was never really my home.
The darkness claimed me again.