Chapter Fifteen
A gasp escapes me when I open my eyes to find I’m standing in a world of dusk. Beneath my feet, a thick liquid undulates, having no color of its own with no light to reflect, but I know what it is: aether. I stand surrounded by a sea of aether, so vast it’s near impossible for my mind to grasp. The sky above me is dark; only the very edge of the sky, a small sliver right where it touches the aether in the distance, holds any traces of light. It’s like I’m in the middle of an eclipse, the path of totality.
I turn around and spot a statue of Invictis on an altar eight or so inches above the aether. His six golden wings are outspread, his metal hands palms-up and arms open, as if he’s welcoming any and all into his embrace.
Death welcomes all.
Moving to stand before the altar, I angle my head back and gaze up at his head. No face, just a metal outline where his chin and cheeks would be, continuing up and curving where a head would. A light emanates from inside him, making it look like a golden halo. A golden, eight-foot-tall figure, anyone who didn’t know what they were seeing would assume he’s heavenly, angelic, here to deliver them.
But he’s not. His golden form and that light are just facades, lies. He is nothing more than a being of pure destruction—and my heart does funny things when I think about him too long. How pathetic is that? How fucked up am I?
Don’t answer that.
With all that he’s done, all that he would do if I unbound him from me, I still can’t help myself. I step up onto that altar and stand inches away from him. Even though it’s nothing more than a statue, I can close my eyes and smell him.
Sun-kissed skin. Sweat. Warmth. The scent of burning wood with just the slightest hint of ash.
I open my eyes as I reach for him. I place a hand on his lower chest—basically all I can reach since this form is stupidly huge—and I’m immediately met with a flood of heat surging through me. My breath catches, and for the quickest of moments I want nothing more than to surrender to him and all that he is.
But I don’t get the chance to, because the moment I touch his golden form, it ripples. The metal sizzles and changes, and I’m frozen in place as I watch him morph into something else. The light inside him dwindles to the point where it dies completely, and the gold that makes his form shine dulls as a result. It rusts to an ugly reddish-brown hue.
I try to take a step back, to push away from the changing figure, but the statue’s arms come to life. They creak as they move, and two seconds later they’re wrapped around my back, stopping me from leaving.
That’s when I notice it’s not done changing yet. The rust peels off, bit by bit until a new figure stands before me. The sky above me changes, as does the dark, murky aether below. It’s like someone flipped a switch. The sky turns to a bright white, and the aether beneath us glows a silvery hue.
I don’t feel warmth anymore. I feel so cold.
A low, deep, monstrous voice enters my head: “You toy with forces beyond your kin, mortal.” It reminds me of the voice Invictis used in my dreams, when he was trying to get me to give into him, to let him drive me mad as he drove the other empresses—but it’s not the same voice. It’s different. Deeper. It makes me want to be sick, like it’s a timbre my ears shouldn’t hear.
In an attempt to push away from the being, I duck in an effort to untangle myself from it, but it responds by tightening its arms around me and slamming me against its body. I’m held so tightly against it I can hardly breath, and I can barely angle my head up.
It’s Invictis’s opposite. Same form, same height, same build of metal… only there is no light. No halo. This being is made of pure blackness, a void so pure it’s hard to get my eyes to focus on him.
“Who are you?” I manage to ask, and though I’m not scared, I do sound uneasy.
The head bends, tilting down toward me. Thanks to the switch in the sky, I’m able to see just how black this being is. Where the outline of its face is, I can’t even see metal. I see nothing but the outline of him with the white sky in the background.
“ Absence .” The single word reverberates through me, and I find it hard to swallow after that. “I am unstoppable mayhem, the harsh disorder nature dictates. Tumultuous havoc which demands sacrifice.”
With each word I hear, the arms around me stiffen even more. Soon enough I can’t breathe, and no amount of struggling breaks me free.
“The opposite of light is not darkness. It is omission. I am that absence, that which you can never grasp.” The arms circle me so tightly I feel as if my body might get squished against him, but then one of his hands moves to the back of my head. “I am oblivion.”
The same moment he says the final word, he pushes me inside his black, colorless body. I can’t fight him, I can’t do a thing. All I can do is soundlessly scream as the void itself swallows me whole.
And then everything stops.
Or, it feels like it stops, but the moment a gentle breeze caresses my cheek, my eyelids fly open. A part of me thinks I’m waking up near Frederick and Invictis, but when I open my eyes I see I’m not at a makeshift camp.
I’m in a city. Cobblestones line the street beneath my feet, and houses on either side of me alert me to the fact that I’m someplace I’ve never been before. The way the houses are built, hanging over the street, the architecture… where am I?
I don’t see a single living soul around me, and a weird sense of déjà vu falls upon me. It’s the same unnerving thing I felt when I first stepped foot in a village in Magnysia, before I realized damn near everyone is dead.
I’m alone in the street. I don’t hear a single thing. I need a better vantage point.
I walk until I find a house that I can easily climb up. I get a boost to the second story of the house thanks to some oddly-placed barrels, and from there I can swing myself around to the front of the house, where a balcony sits, jutting out over the street. After climbing onto the balcony’s railing, I jump for the edge of the roof, just barely able to reach. Soon enough I’m hauling myself onto the roof and carefully move to the peak.
The houses around are the same size, so when I do a three-sixty spin, I’m able to have a good view all around. And what I see… my instincts were right.
Rows and rows of houses just like the one I stand on now, countless, as far as the eye can see. In the far distance, miles away, I see a few watchtowers. It’s only when I’m nearing the end of my spin that I spot an impressive castle built high above the rest of the city—larger than any castle I’ve ever seen, bigger than all three empresses’ castles put together.
This isn’t Laconia. This is someplace else.
Once I get down from the roof, I start walking. I don’t know what I’m supposed to see, but there must be more to it than realizing this is another kingdom in a land far away from Laconia. As I walk, I wonder if this is where the spies came from, the ones who unleashed Invictis twenty years ago.
Hmm. There’s still more to this puzzle. Has to be.
I walk for what feels like ages until I reach a market of some kind, with stalls built into the outer edge of the houses. I see not a soul. No people going about their daily business, no one at all, and if there’s one thing I learned in Laconia, it’s that a people-less city is never a good sign.
The breeze blows by again, and I catch a whiff of something. Something off, something rancid. Though following a smell like that is the last thing I want to do, that’s exactly what I end up doing. My nose leads the way, and I eventually find myself in an intersection of two streets, which wouldn’t be worthy of note on a normal day, but this definitely ain’t a normal day.
Why?
Oh, no reason. It’s just that, in the center of this intersection is a pile of charred bodies. No longer burning, but still sizzling and smoking. The clothes have completely burned away, along with the outer layer of skin. It’s a horrible sight, and I hold a hand over my mouth to stop myself from retching when I notice a small arm sticking out of the pile.
A child’s arm.
What the fuck happened here?
I move around the pile of burnt bodies, and as I do so, a second pile comes into focus, one that was blocked by the initial charred mound of corpses. This second pile wasn’t burned, but it’s close enough to the first that it makes me think these bodies were meant to be thrown onto the fire as it burned.
How… how can you toss people into a fire like that? What the fuck kind of reasoning do you use to defend an action like this?
All the bodies in the second pile are facedown. Something tugs at me, an invisible string that forces me to kneel beside the pile and pull at the arm of the corpse on top to roll it over. The body slumps as I move it, and the moment the man’s corpse rolls, I stand and take a step back.
The man was sick. The veins in his body turned black and bulging. The blood vessels in his eyes popped, the corners of his eyes leaking some kind of black liquid. His mouth is much the same: dried-up, dark liquid had oozed out of either side.
I glance at the second pile. Now that his body wasn’t blocking the rest of the pile, I’m able to see other faces—and what I see tells me whatever this man was sick from, these other poor people were sick with, too.
What the hell is going on here?
I turn away from the piles of bodies, intent on figuring it out, but the moment I turn, a large, cold hand wraps itself around my neck. I’m lifted off the ground easily, as if I weigh nothing, by an eight-foot-tall, six-winged creature with no face. Invictis’s opposite, the black being, the absence of light.
His unnerving, creepy voice enters my brain as his large hand squeezes my neck: “You have seen the chaos I bring. Find me, so that I may end you and free my brother from his shackles once and for all. I will be waiting for you. Prepare yourself. Your end is nigh.”
His grip around my throat tightens, and my vision grows blurry. Seconds later, everything turns black.
Although it doesn’t stay that way for long. I wake up with a sick feeling in my stomach, greeted by a beautiful blue sky and a gentle breeze, telling me we’re out of the final labyrinth. I struggle to sit up, a queasy feeling in my gut that just won’t go away.
What I saw… the sick feeling in my gut only grows when I remember everything I saw. The burnt bodies, the pile waiting for their turn, the weird sickness they all had, like some kind of plague…
Frederick sits a few feet to my left, working on something in his journal, but when he sees me and the expression on my face, he shuts it and asks, “Rey, are you all right?”
The question causes Invictis, who stands ten or so feet away with his arms crossed, gazing off into the distance like he’s deep in thought, to turn around and study me.
Okay. Nope. Can’t hold it down.
I turn away from Frederick and heave up whatever’s in my stomach. At this point, it’s mostly bile—it ain’t like we’re living in the lap of luxury while traveling—but it’s still disgusting, and the feeling of that bile coming up my throat and out of my mouth makes me want to vomit even more.
We’re thirty or so feet away from the waterfall that covers the labyrinth’s entrance, so once I finish vomiting, I get to my feet and shuffle over to the water. I cup my hands together and stuff them beneath the waterfall, catching some water in them and bringing it straight to my mouth.
Both men are right behind me, though it’s Frederick who asks again, “Are you okay? What’s wrong? What did you see?”
Once my mouth is rinsed out, I turn toward them, knowing I have to face it. I pushed it away for so long, it’s come full center now. The time to ignore the truth has passed, and when we return to Laconia, the conclave needs to know the truth.
I don’t look at either of them. Instead, I stare at the grass between us as I whisper, “I didn’t want to come to the labyrinths because of my magic. I thought… I thought they’d have answers.” I swallow, my knees suddenly weak. It’s like the wind had gotten knocked out of me.
Fuck. When I think about how hard it was to fight Invictis… how the hell can I face another?
“I had a vision, after I bound Invictis to me,” I explain. “I saw another one.”
“Another one?” Frederick starts, “What do you mean, another…” He must realize it, because the way he trails off, coupled with how his eyes widen in shock, tell me enough.
“He’s… not golden. He’s black, the absence of light. He called himself chaos, and he said he was your brother.” I finally lift my gaze to Invictis, unsure of what I’d see, but all Invictis does is stare back with a stony expression. “I think he’s… terrorizing some other kingdom. He wants me to find him so he can kill me and free you.”
Frederick shakes his head. “No. No, he’s not your responsibility to fight—”
“He’s killing people, Frederick. Kids like Prim. I have to try. You know that.”
The look he gives me in return tells me he knows and he understands, but at the same time he doesn’t want me to do it because it’ll put me in harm’s way once again—and this time, I have no magic.
But I do have one thing I didn’t have before.
I look at Invictis, who’s remained oddly silent during the truth bomb. “What do you say? You up for a family reunion? You might have to kick your brother’s ass for me if I don’t get my magic back in time.”
“A brother,” Invictis whispers, strangely thoughtful. It’s times like these when I wish I could peek inside his head. His gaze refocuses on me. “I have no brother, but I am up for a challenge. Let’s find this chaos-bringer and, as you say, kick his ass.” The smirk that spreads across his face after that makes my stomach twist for a whole different reason.
Whether I want to admit it or not, I’m in it with him. Right or wrong, it doesn’t matter. Fate brought us together, and it seems fate still has more in store for us.
My gaze shifts to Frederick, and with the way he stares at me, I can tell he’s wishing things were different. I can also assume he’ll try to go with me, just as he invited himself on this little quest. The sad thing is, I don’t know if I have it in my heart to forbid him from coming.
I think… fuck me, I think I’d miss him too much, but it’s going to be dangerous and I don’t know if I want to put him in harm’s way just because I’ll miss him otherwise.
A dramatic sigh escapes me. I guess an empress’s job is never truly done.
Here we go again.