Chapter 38
Rosabel La Rouge
Present day
Water at the bottom of the statue.
Water coming straight out of the lake trapped underneath the ice.
The lake that was going to heal my vulcera.
Goddess, it had actually worked. The talons had broken the surface, and there was water underneath it just like I knew there would be.
It was finally time to get off the fucking statue.
I was laughing when I began to climb down. I was laughing and praying to Iris that I didn’t fall and break my back now when I was so close. I was laughing and praying and climbing as fast as my limbs allowed, until I heard that one word— jump!
Taland was somewhere below me.
If I looked, I’d be too afraid, and I didn’t want to be. I just wanted it to be over. Even if the fall killed me, it would be over. This hell would come to an end.
So, I closed my eyes, took in a deep breath, and I let go.
Such an incredible feeling.
For a second there, I was flying, not falling. I was free, not about to die. I was completely healed from everything, from this rotten world and its rotten people, from all my guilt—I was healed.
Then I reached the bottom and fell right in Taland’s arms.
He must have overestimated his strength because the moment I made impact, we both fell against the ice. He couldn’t stop me, but he wrapped those arms around me and didn’t let go while we rolled and rolled on the cold ice, protecting me with his body so that I barely felt any pain.
“You’re….you’re…you’re…” he said with each new sharp intake of breath when we stopped—and the most wonderful thing was, my fingers touched water.
There really was water on the surface of the ice.
There I went, laughing and crying again, still on the ground.
“You’re fucking… crazy ,” Taland finally finished.
Like I said—a hundred times better than traitor.
I turned to him—we were both on our backs, and he was smiling and looking up at the roc statue. I grabbed his face, turned it to me, and kissed his lips with all that was left in me.
I kissed the hell out of his ice-cold, dry lips.
Then I got my shit together and I stood up.
Players around us, but none came close yet. They were only watching from afar. The crack that the talons had made on the surface of the lake wasn’t big—barely the size of my fist. Fuck, this ice was really, really thick .
Water slipped out of the cracks constantly, and I knew there was a lot of it underneath even though we couldn’t really see it. But it was water, and that biggest crack was half filled with it, and I took off my holster because I had nothing else to carry it with. The holster would do just fine—it was leather and sturdy, and it didn’t have any holes in it. I filled it up while praying that it worked the way I hoped.
And what if it doesn’t? an ugly voice in my head said.
But then….
“Rose, look.”
I turned to Taland who was kneeling on the ground right next to the ice of the lake. He was kneeling in front of his eagle that had been wrapped up in his leather jacket. His eagle who’d been barely breathing and barely keeping his eyes open the last time I was down here.
His eagle that was now standing, testing his large wings, the feathers on them a rich brown.
“It works,” said Taland, an awe-struck smile on his face.
“Did you…did you…” I couldn’t even finish speaking. My vision was blurry from the tears, too.
“It did. I gave him the water. It works ,” Taland said.
I was running with a gun holster full of ice-cold water in my hands before he finished speaking.
Big green eyes bored into mine. I was smiling like an idiot, lying on my back, a complete mess as the vulcera sniffed my neck and looked at me like she wasn’t sure if I’d lost it or not.
But I had. I fucking had—and I didn’t mind at all .
It worked —but let me say it another couple hundred times because I still didn’t quite believe it.
The lake was really the lake of the Valley from the stories. I’d brought the water to the vulcera, had poured it into her mouth while Taland’s eagle flew over our heads, and then I’d collapsed, but she’d stood up. She was standing right now, looking at me like she didn’t understand what was happening.
Goddess, I wanted nothing more than to just lie here and have her be moving around me. Sniffing and licking and biting—I didn’t care. I just wanted to lie here and understand that it had worked. By some miracle, I no longer was forced to kill the creature that was bonded to my soul. She was healed. She was okay.
But now we had to go.
“Sweetness, I hate to interrupt,” said Taland from my side, chuckling, his face completely transformed. “But we have to get you to the Rainbow.”
The Rainbow. The colors. My magic coming back to me.
The thing I thought I could not live without, that I’d be paralyzed without. The thing I’d completed this whole game without.
Almost funny, that fact, but I sat up. The vulcera growled and it was playful. She was weak, I thought, and her antennas didn’t glow as brightly as before, but she was coming to herself slowly.
And Taland’s familiar was already soaring higher. “Wow. That is one hell of an eagle.” Big and so rich in color against the white, beating those powerful wings so steadily.
The pride I saw in Taland’s eyes in those moments was something I’d never forget. “That, he is.” He reached out and grabbed my chin between his thumb and index finger. “And he doesn’t have to die because of you.”
The vulcera growled again, nudging me with her head.
My cheeks flushed. “Let’s just get this over with, can we?”
By the time we started running, other players were slowly approaching the lake where we broke the ice. Half of me wanted to scream to them to just go, grab some water, heal their familiars—they didn’t have to die. Nobody had to fucking die, at least not in this challenge.
But I lacked the energy. The best I could do was run alongside Taland, as the vulcera led the way by land, and his eagle led the way by air.
It was one of the most fulfilling moments of my life.
At first, I thought the white was never going to be over, that this frozen hell was never-ending, but then I began to see color.
Dark brown soil began where the ice that had started to melt left way for the ground—which then raised into a steep hill very much like the one I’d fallen on when I first arrived in Night City. The vulcera and the eagle growled and cried out at the sky, and they didn’t stop. They went straight for it.
I looked at Taland as we ran, his grin spread across his face, his hair flying behind his head, the spark in his eyes mad.
And I thought, goddess, I love this man.
Together, we climbed the hill.
That’s when everything changed again.
“Greetings, players!” said the voice of the man made of light, except this time he wasn’t there. Only his voice echoed in the dark.
We stopped, all of us, and the eagle landed on Taland’s shoulder, while the vulcera came to stand beside me.
“Congratulations! You made it to the Rainbow mountain. I’m sure you have your keys with you, and if you don’t, do go back and get them is my advice!” said the voice, and we looked up at the dark sky.
Dark—like it had been in Night City, and a clean line separated it from the white sky we left behind that hill in the Valley of the Roc. The sky that we could still see.
“But if you do have your keys, we urge you to proceed, to find your prize and claim it. Make yourself the luckiest person in the whole entire world…”
The voice faded away. I looked at Taland, and he nodded once— let’s keep moving.
We did. Slowly, we walked closer and closer to the mountain inside which was the Rainbow, a mountain we’d somehow all seen when we entered this game, yet now it was maybe half in size of the statue of the Roc. I wasn’t nearly as scared of it as I had been of the ice bird.
Together, we kept on going, until?—
“Rose, run .”
Taland was looking behind us—at the other players. Five other players at the top of that hill.
The moment they saw us, they began to run, too.
We had barely fifty feet on them, but we ran with the last of our strength together with our familiars. I didn’t let myself think—about finding the Rainbow mountain or making it there first or not making it to the colors at all. I just ran, and the eagle and the vulcera showed us the way to the other side of it, to the very edge .
The moment they stopped, the ground groaned and shifted, almost knocking us on our asses.
That’s because it was starting to change.
The map we saw on the ice cube of the statue was right—the playground changed, even though the mountain didn’t move an inch, at first. Everything else around it did.
The vulcera raised her head to the sky and howled like a wolf, and Taland’s eagle cried out so hard I had to cover my ears for fear I’d go deaf.
Then the mountain moved, too.
It opened right in front of us. The dark brown soil moved like it was being pushed to the sides from within, and a set of stone stairs appeared right there in the dirt.
About fifty stairs that ended with a square piece of rock with five holes in it.
For the five keys.
“Sweetness, now’s the time,” said Taland, turning to the side to look for the other players who were coming. We couldn’t see them yet, but we heard them approaching because their footfalls echoed like we were in an enclosed space.
“But I don’t have five keys,” I whispered, and the vulcera pushed me forward with her muzzle on my thigh.
“Look in your pocket. Mine appeared there when my eagle healed,” Taland said. “And I’m going to have to borrow a couple of your knives.” He reached inside my jacket without waiting for a confirmation and grabbed the last of my knives from their sheaths.
“Taland, I don’t have the?—”
I undid the zipper of the inside pocket of my jacket when he stepped away.
A brand-new cylinder had appeared with a single rock at the top that looked exactly like ice—the same ice that the roc statue was made of. It was right there in my pocket together with all the other keys I’d won.
Fucking hell, I really had all five keys of the Iris Roe.
Something came over me, a wave of heat from within.
“Move!” Taland shouted, and the vulcera pushed me forward—the other players were already there.
I ran like my tail was on fire, taking those stone stairs two at a time until I was in front of the panel. It was so much more detailed than I’d realized from farther away. Every inch of the smooth gray surface was engraved with runes and spells and flowers, and each one of the holes fit one of the keys perfectly.
I made it.
I finished the Iris Roe.
It sounded like a damn joke to me, but here we were.
I turned around to look at Taland, at the other players who were cursing and slamming their fists to the ground, mad that they hadn’t gotten here first—but they hadn’t attacked Taland or anything. He hadn’t raised the knives against them, either—he just stood there, watching them with the eagle on his shoulder, and my vulcera sitting quietly at the bottom of the stairs.
She was watching them, too.
Just get it over with!
My hands were shaking so badly while I placed the keys in their respective places, exactly as I’d gotten them—Red, then Green, Black, and Blue, and White.
The mountain groaned one more time, and when the ground shook, people screamed.
I held onto the edges of the rock panel until it subsided, and a second later, colors exploded into the air.
So. Much. Color.
I went momentarily blind, and I imagined everyone else did judging by their screams. The top of the mountain that seemed a bit bigger now than it had in the darkness, had opened, and the Rainbow had sprung out just like we saw in the beginning—a collection of all possible colors woven together to perfection, a magical light, something so unearthly it could very well be just a hologram.
But it wasn’t because I felt the energy of it. I felt it in my bones, and it was real.
It was magic, raw and uncontrolled.
Moments later, letters began to rise from each key I’d put in that panel—letters made of colored smoke. I wasn’t breathing, blinking rapidly to try to adjust my sight to the blinding new light, but when I could make out what they were saying, I realized…
“ It’s a spell. ”
The words slipped from my lips in a whisper.
A spell was in front of me, written in the air, waiting for me to speak it.
I turned around again, so panicked so suddenly my throat was tight. Taland was looking at me, together with the other five players, four men, one woman, all with their familiars nearby, the biggest one some sort of a miniature bear the size of my vulcera.
Taland’s eyes held fear, raw fear. He knew as well as I did that I was screwed, yet still he mouthed, go ahead.
Tears in my eyes.
I faced the keys and the letters in the air again, and I forced myself to breathe. To speak. To whisper every Iridian word in front of my eyes.
When the spell was over, that heat gathered in the pit of my stomach again and exploded outward.
I screamed at the top of my lungs. The pain was incredible, like being burned and frozen at the same time time, and it was all over me. It didn’t last, barely a second, but in that second, I felt like I was torn apart into a million little pieces.
Somehow, I’d managed to stay on my feet, holding onto the edges of the rock, but when I blinked enough times that I could see again, nothing had changed in front of me.
The letters were still there. The Rainbow was still there.
It hadn’t worked.
“What the…”
“Why is she stalling?” said one of the players behind me.
I turned, terrified already. It hadn’t worked— of course it hadn’t worked because I had no fucking magic!
“What the hell—I saw her chanting? Why isn’t she draining the Rainbow?!”
“Why?”
“How?”
“Who the hell is she?”
“Why isn’t she claiming the colors?!”
And then…
“I know who she is!” the woman said. “She’s the Mud. It’s her— the Mud !”
Heart in my throat, I looked at Taland, and he looked at me. He wasn’t concerned, though. Not in the least. He smiled and winked at me, and he mouthed, be right there.
I shook my head— I should have never come here . I should have never fucking bothered, and now I was trapped in the middle of this mountain with bloodthirsty players behind me.
I looked around, hoping to find a way out of here—just one way, that’s all I needed. One way out.
Unfortunately for me, there was complete darkness all around the mountain that I could see—except the way in which we’d come. The white sky. The Whitefire challenge. It was the only way back, away from the mountain, and I wouldn’t even be in the Valley of the Roc at all now, if that map was correct. I would be walking straight into The Drainage.
Nowhere to go.
She doesn’t deserve to be here!
She doesn’t deserve to win.
Fuck that—she doesn’t get the colors.
It’s cheating—how did she even get up there?!
On and on went the players, as I tried to chant the spell in the air one last time, but all I got was the pain. The game demanding magic of me that wasn’t there. Even the ground didn’t shake anymore—it just wouldn’t work.
Then the fight began.
I no longer had any knives on me, and my gun wasn’t on my person—who knew where it had ended up? I had my mind made up to grab two of the keys to use as weapons, but the moment I turned to see what the hell was happening, I found Taland running toward me, while the vulcera and the eagle were keeping the other players back.
“Taland, what are you?—”
“Chant the spell, now! ”
He was halfway up the stairs when he said this, and the look in his darkened eyes said he wasn’t messing around.
So, I did.
I began to whisper once more—the first words of the spell I’d already learned by memory—and when he was close enough, I read the last of the letters made out of colorful smoke.
“Take my hand!” shouted Taland, and I did.
I turned. I reached for him just as that wave of heat hit me from the inside .
Our hands connected, and the pain began.
Taland’s magic shot throughout me, faster, stronger than before. It went up my arm, to my chest, and exploded everywhere around me, throwing me against the rock panel, and Taland down the stairs.
His name was at the tip of my tongue. Nobody was fighting anymore—the players had stopped, and the vulcera was looking at me, too.
But before I could spit out a single word, and before Taland rolled all the way down the stairs, it began.
I was robbed of sight and smell and sound.
I was robbed and instead all I saw and smelled and heard was colors. All colors, bright and muted, dark and light. Some hard and wild, some soft and gentle. I was surrounded by them and they picked me up and spun me around in the air, promising me greatness. Promising me happiness.
For a moment there, I was wrapped up in them, and I was in complete, pure bliss.
Until they began to slip inside me, the colors.
Until they found the center of my being, my very soul hidden away inside my ribcage, and they infused it with their magic, with their brightness.
That’s when I knew that something was wrong.
I knew close to nothing about the winners of the Iris Roe, but none had ever mentioned pain. None that I remembered had ever mentioned how the colors felt foreign, dirty, an enemy coming to invade me from the inside, rather than magic that came to stay, to settle with mine, to infuse itself in my bones.
I should have never entered the City of Games…
That was the only thought in my mind before the last of those colors slipped inside me, disappeared into my chest, and left the world naked and dark again.
My eyes opened but I barely saw. A dark sky was over me. Darkness behind me, but…there was also light.
No, not light—just white . That awful, awful white…
I tried to move before I realized I was not standing or lying on the ground or on those stairs. I was in Taland’s arms instead, and he was standing at the top of that hill, looking down at the others.
The other players who had come close, so close. Four of them only—one of the men was lying on the ground near the edge of the mountain—him and his snake familiar perfectly motionless. Dead.
The vulcera was in front of Taland, and the eagle was flying over our heads, too.
I could have been stuck in a nightmare and I’d have been less scared—and that wasn’t even the worst part.
Yes, we were surrounded by the players, and they looked murderous. Yes, the vulcera was bloody, and that bear familiar, whatever creature it was, was barely standing on all fours, dark fur matted with blood. Yes, Taland had me in his arms, his chest rising and falling rapidly, and his eagle cried out every few seconds as it flew over our heads, waiting…
But when I tried to move, I couldn’t.
When I tried to push myself off him, to stand on my own feet, I couldn’t.
The Rainbow was gone, the mountain dark again. The colors had disappeared— inside me. I felt them like a layer of ice over my chest. I felt them and they weren’t pleasant.
It wasn’t magic like mine used to be .
It was… bad.
“Taland,” I whispered, barely able to speak because I couldn’t fucking move my jaws well enough. I tried to just raise my hand a bit—I couldn’t. My body was paralyzed.
The panic took the air from my lungs, too.
“They’re not ending the game,” Taland said, his voice strained.
Sweat beads lined his forehead. He was exhausted, on the verge of collapsing.
“Why? What is?—”
“We’re gonna need those colors back,” the woman said—Bluefire, and she looked about ready to eat me raw.
“You don’t deserve our colors, Mud,” said a man.
“You cheated. Give them back or we will make you.”
“I’ll cut them out of you myself,” said the woman again, raising a tiny blade between her fingers.
“You are not getting that money!”
The vulcera growled low in her throat—a threat. The eagle cried out again.
The players continued to climb the hill slowly.
“Taland, what’s happening?” I thought I whispered, turning back toward him, toward the white sky on the other side of the steep hill.
“Don’t you worry your pretty head about it, sweetness. I’m gonna get you out of here, okay?”
I shook my head. “There’s no way out. Why can’t I move, Taland?”
Why are they not ending the fucking game?!
“Hush, Rose. Close your eyes. Lean on me,” he said—and he turned round.
He turned around toward the white sky, as the players all charged us, and the vulcera and the eagle charged at them .
The sound of it cut me wide open.
Screams and falls and teeth snapping, animals hissing.
Stop! I shouted in my head, but my chin was shaking now and I couldn’t bring myself to scream.
Taland began to descend the hill.
“Taland, what are you doing?!” I whispered a little while later, more panicked by the second. “This is the Drainage—go back! It will lead us to the Drainage—the Valley is gone!”
“I know, sweetness. Close your eyes for me, will you? It will be over in no time.”
Tears fell from my eyes without stop. I tried to move my hand again, and I managed but only barely. I couldn’t even reach out to grab his jacket. To make him let go of me. To make him stop.
“I can’t move, damn it!” I cried. “Please, please—I can’t move. Stop, Taland. Stop walking!” Or at least I thought I said all of this.
He didn’t.
The sound of the fight we left behind grew more and more distant the farther down the hill we went.
I made the mistake of looking at where we were headed, foolishly hoping I’d find the Valley as I left it, even knowing that I wouldn’t.
But the Drainage of the Iris Roe was very different from the furnace at the Headquarters. This Drainage was simply the ground set with bones and a blinding white sky overhead.
Small bones, like the ones Whitefires kept about them as anchors. Finger bones, small skulls, small ribcages— bones . The ground was completely covered with them as far as my eyes could see .
“Taland,” I choked, as the panic raised the alarms in my head, and my mind began to shut down on me.
“Yes, sweetness?” Taland said and stepped onto the bones.
One step.
“Please,” was all I managed to whisper.
This was the Drainage. If it did what the name suggested, he was going to be turned to Mud, too. He’d have his color drained out of him. He’d be half dead—just like me.
No. I would never allow it. Take it, I thought, giving him all of my magic, all that foreign substance that was now inside me. It felt wrong, anyway—not like magic should. To him, it would feel right. Take it, all of it… and I opened myself to him the best I knew how. Take the magic, Taland…
“It’s all right. Sleep—we will be just fine,” he whispered, but didn’t take anything from me, not that I felt.
Another step.
The sound of bones breaking under his boots cut me wide open. I was crying so hard it felt like I should be shaking, but I wasn’t. My body was completely paralyzed, and my head slid a bit off his shoulder, and my eyes closed a little more.
Please, please, please, I begged, no longer able to speak out loud. Please, take it.
Taland took another step over those bones. All those fucking bones…
He didn’t stop.
He held me to his chest with all his strength, and though his legs shook, and he wobbled to the sides the farther we went, he never once let go.
Taland was walking right through the Drainage to get me away from those players, while the eagle and the vulcera fought to hold them back.
For me.
They were all fighting for me.
“ Please,” I thought I whispered one more time, or maybe it was just my imagination.
Please stop, all of you. I am not worth it. I promise, I am not. Just take this magic and let me go.
My jaws barely moved. Was I even doing it? Was I giving him that energy that still refused to settle inside me?
No idea.
One last time I forced myself to open my eyes, to look at his face, and I almost wished I hadn’t.
Taland’s skin was white. Not pale, but white, except the deep black under his eyes. His hair stuck to his sweat-covered forehead, and he seemed to have lost fifty pounds in the last few seconds. His teeth were gritted, his eyes on me, though it felt like he couldn’t even see me.
It seemed like nobody was home.
I love you, I thought, anyway, because I knew we were both going to die here today, and my last wish was for him to hear my most important truth. To understand it.
It was never a lie, Taland. I love you. Please take the magic…
The words remained inside me. I don’t know if he saw them in my eyes, but I thought them loudly. I thought them clearly, until my lids became too heavy to keep open.
My mind shut down completely, leaving me something even worse than simply Rosabel La Rouge.
Leaving me the victor of the Iris Roe in the middle of the Drainage, costing the man she loved everything once again.