Chapter 56
FIFTY-SIX
One heartbeat I’m lying on the bed in the fortress, the sheets cool under me; the next I’m standing in the place that always tastes like ash and roses.
Zepharion’s garden folds itself around me: obsidian petals gleam like knives, roots coil and pulse underfoot.
It should be silent, but there is noise—the far-off scrape of metal, a chorus of broken breathing. My stomach drops.
The same dream that has been plaguing me since I entered Hell.
Deimos is nailed to a gate of bone, wings torn out and hanging ragged, a red river slick beneath him.
He’s alive enough to spit, to curse, to try to twist free, but something invisible holds him.
His eyes find mine and for a breath—a single howling breath—he looks like a man I could have had a life with: ruined, brilliant, unbowed.
He mouths my name. It comes out like a prayer and a demand.
Bastion is next. He is on a pyre of dried leaves and hot iron, his chest caving under a blade someone thrusts through him slow and sure.
He doesn’t scream. He makes this small, animal sound, half disbelief, half plea.
His fingers twitch as if to reach for me; I want to catch them, to pull him through the dream, but my arms are lead. They don’t move.
Cassiel burns from the inside out. Holy light becomes rot in his mouth; he chokes on the brightness until his lips blister and split.
His wings catch like tinder, and the sound of him is haunting.
It is a tearing, a hymn gone wrong. He looks at me one last time and his eyes contain something soft and terrible: forgiveness I didn’t deserve.
And Zepharion stands behind them all, patient as a king watching a play he wrote. His smile never leaves his face. He leans forward and touches the air where my throat is. His voice is velvet and knives.
“Do you see how beautiful they die for you?” he asks. “How pure the sacrifice looks from this angle?”
I try to move. I try to scream. The dream folds my lips into a neat silence and hands them back to me. He takes pleasure in the restraint as if he were shaping clay.
“Why not stop me?” he continues, as if naming the things I promised myself. “Go on. Stop me, Lillien. Walk through the door. Make the choice that will keep them breathing.”
He turns and a door is there—blood-red and sweating black steam, the handle steaming as if it had just been pulled from some furnace. It hums with a promise I know too well. I know I have seen it before. I can feel my feet answering it’s call.
Somewhere in the shape of the dream Deimos is not a corpse.
He is a storm on the edge of the glass. I feel him as a pressure at my chest, a tug at the seam of the bond, like a hand trying to find mine through water.
He is there, watching and pulling, but he cannot cross.
His reach is a thin thread that frays against whatever Zepharion has wrapped this place in.
“Feel him,” Zepharion says softly, and I do. I feel Deimos’s anger like a heat against my ribs. It’s corrective, hard, a promise of fire if I will only return to him. “And feel how small it is.” He gestures, and the vision tightens like a fist. Deimos’s thread whimpers. My chest freezes.
Zepharion’s face is close then, the way a predator leans in to whisper at the moment of the kill.
“If you step through,” he tells me, “they stay. If you don’t—if you run home to your wolves—you’ll carry the memory of this instead.
You’ll sleep, and you’ll wake with the stench of ash in your mouth.
You will be safe, petal, and you will be empty. ”
He says the word safe as if it were a caress. He says empty like it is a gift.
I do not move. I am hollow and full at once: full of the taste of their blood and hollow with a thing like cold steel lodged beneath my sternum.
I press my hands to my chest and I can feel Cassiel’s white thread, flicking.
I think of the practice chamber and the way he taught me to cradle small holiness like a bird.
I think of Bastion’s plates, the way they felt like a borrowed shell.
I think of Deimos’ silence and the way he taught me to be a hole in the world.
I try to pull on them, not outward but in, the ember that lies under my hunger. I reach for that inner light and call their names.
It’s a small thing at first, a needle of warmth. Deimos answers, not with the full force of his rage, but with the small, steady heat that used to keep me from freezing in the dark. Bastion’s armor hums like iron in the back of my throat. Cassiel’s thread sings a single clear note.
For a second, one single bright, blinding, impossible second, the dream wavers.
Zepharion taps his chin as if I had entertained him. He smiles a slow, satisfied smile. The red door fans wider and the steam rises. The hands that hold the three men tighten. The thread that is Deimos in the dream sighs and thins. It is almost like hope, for a heartbeat. Then it is not.
My tether hits a silence that tastes of metal. The chord between us snaps. Deimos’s face, just then, is shattered with something worse than fear: impotent fury. He yells my name and his voice is thick with smoke.
I lunge for him, for the sound, for the thread… and the dream flips me.
I awake with a gasp that tastes like brimstone.
My hands claw at the blanket; my mouth makes a sound I don’t recognize, half-sob, half-bark.
The bed is too steady beneath me. The fortress is too near.
For one blessed second I think he’s there, that Deimos is at my shoulder, fingers on my neck, pulling me home.
I open my eyes.
Deimos is across the room, standing in the dark, palms pressed together at his chest like a man who is trying not to rip out his own throat.
His jaw is tight; his eyes are molten and raw.
When he sees me awake, something breaks open on his face and he hurries to my side as if he could still reach the seam I dreamed across.
“You were screaming,” he says, voice a low thing that could have been a prayer or a threat. He reaches for my hand and when his fingers close around mine the world tilts toward rightness for an instant. The bond hums faintly beneath my skin, not as loud as it had in the dream, but enough.
“Zepharion put the door in front of me,” I whisper, the words scraping out. “He showed me… you.”
Deimos's thumb strokes my palm, slow. “We saw.” His voice is small. “We felt him. We felt it. He’s playing with you. With us.”
My throat tightens. I can still taste ash.
“I’ll go,” I say, because the door in the dream has already begun to feel like a promise I am meant to keep. “I have to—”
“No.” His hand clamps around mine, fierce, sudden. “You can’t.”
But even as he pulls me closer, his fingers are trembling. And in the hollow of my ribs the echo of Zepharion’s smile lingers, and the image of that red door burns like a brand.