Chapter 45
Madness is the monster that devours thought
Wrath is what’s left in the rubble
~ Ingrid Salyer
I had one thing left to feel. Rage. A rage so vast, it hollowed me out, marrow first, until even my bones trembled beneath its weight.
My body was breaking, splintering under the pressure of a fury too immense for flesh to hold.
I stared at the monster before me with hatred sharp enough to flay the air between us. He had taken everything. What I loved. What I was. He’d left me a husk scraped clean by his cruelty.
I feared no death, no god, no shadow. There was nothing left to take.
And when his sons slipped from the darkness, their eyes glinting like the edges of knives, I did not flinch.
Let them come.
Let them see what they have made of me, a vessel of ruin, burning with the last light of my own undoing.
I tottered to my feet, staring unyieldingly into the figure’s bottomless gaze.
“Akareth,” I snarled.
He closed his eyes, the first sign of expression washing across his pallid features.
“It pleases me to hear my name on your lips,” he murmured.
His voice was soft. Too soft. And yet it struck me like a blade dragged across glass.
The sound lingered, a shrill, merciless ringing, burrowing deep behind my eyes, as if the air itself recoiled from the shape of his words.
I winced at the discomfort, my hand flexing, missing the weight of my cutlass.
“Why?” I hissed.
“Why?” he tilted his head, his fingers twitching.
He stepped forward, his bones crunching with every movement. I moved back from him, wrinkling my nose at the sound as I scrutinized his morbid form. He was tall. Too tall. He stood four heads over me with proportions that looked stretched and unnatural.
“What are you?”
“I am… whatever you see,” he answered. “Whatever form you can fathom, daughter. That is what I am to all who dare to look.” He reached out, his lanky fingers drawing toward my face. I took another step back, my stomach pitching at the thought of him touching me. “You are so… beautiful.”
I wanted to retch at that word. The way he said it, the way it lingered in my ears like wax in the weaves of cloth, made me feel ill.
“Why do you take such pleasure in tearing apart your children? In watching us suffer?”
“Pleasure?” he echoed, the word curdling in his mouth.
“My daughter, what use is it to speak of desire to an insect, or whisper of dreams to a fish gasping on the shore? You are not a companion to me. You are a curio, a flicker of motion in the long stillness of my eternity. This world has long since grown dull. Only in these little games do I find reason to remain awake.”
“So, we are nothing to you.”
“Nothing would have been destroyed long ago, had I wished it,” he said, voice calm yet thrumming with something vast. “Destruction is easy—the simplest indulgence of the dull and the desperate.”
He raised his hand and snapped his fingers. The sound cracked through the air like thunder splitting bone, and even the xhoth recoiled.
“But to mold what exists. To shape the remnants into something new. That is art. That is the beautiful game.” His smile widened, a crescent of malice and delight. “Now… allow me to play.”
“I am through with your games,” I hissed between my teeth.
He regarded me in silence, that vast, incomprehensible gaze swallowing all meaning. The numbness crept through my mind. Gentle. Deceitful. Cradling me as a mother would a dying child and whispering lullabies to keep the fear at bay.
I smiled then, hollow and serene, the last mask of the condemned.
“You cannot have me,” I said, and the words felt like a prayer torn from ash.
I spun, rushing toward one of the xhoth.
The stupid beast snarled as I ripped his spear from his hand, bracing it against the stone floor.
Then I pinned the spearhead against my chest and began to lean into it when cold, wet appendages began to coil around every limb.
I could even feel them knotting in my hair, snapping my head back so hard, I was certain some had been loosed from my scalp.
My whole body tumbled backward onto the stone.
Even as I squirmed, I could not gain my footing.
The tendrils dragged me back with little effort, placing me in the middle of the chamber, just under the moon’s gaze.
When I was released, the crumbs of my resolve began to dwindle, shriveling to ashes inside me.
I recalled what Lyla said, that hope lost was worse than no hope at all.
And I was quickly realizing how true that was.
The loss of Vidar and not knowing what was going to happen to Meridan and the others stabbed at me until I could not breathe.
I turned onto my side, curling in on myself like a cold little child deprived a blanket, and I screamed.
All of my grief and frustration and odium scraped at my throat, echoing through that chamber like there were a hundred of me, all crying out at the same time.
“What wonderful music you play.”
My eyes were slitted as I watched the tentacles slide away from me once more and burrow beneath the tattered fabric of Akareth’s cloak like they’d never existed at all.
“Let me go.”
My tone was vacant, stripped of the emotions I used to covet so dearly.
“I cannot. You are mine.”
“I’m not yours. I’ve never been yours.”
“Once said your mother. But I relieved her of that foolish thought. None can defy a god.” He paused, his head twitching slightly to one side. “Isn’t that right, Lyla?”
The textured wall to my right slowly began to warp, the colors fading into the hues of ashen skin and inky, wet hair.
Lyla emerged from the wall, shedding her perfect disguise, and returned to her true form.
Her naked body was long and slender, her muscles lean.
Her skin stretched so taut over her that I could see every fiber of every curve.
She crept forward, her face as emotionless and gaunt as ever, and lowered her head before our coldblooded father.
“Lyla,” I whispered.
Her gaze slowly wandered in my direction.
“How she screamed as I unburdened her of her mortal fears,” Akareth murmured, his voice traveling about the room as if untethered by whatever form he’d taken.
“I’ve come to enjoy the sounds. You are all different but all the same in one way.
” He leaned forward, his neck elongating to draw closer to me while his body remained stationary.
“You all break. And that silence when you realize it.” He let out a shuddering sigh like a wave of pleasure had just rippled over him. “That is the sweetest sound there is.”
My eyes found Lyla again. She was watching me… not Akareth. Her attention was fixed on me as if waiting for me to do something.
Or perhaps she was taking as much pleasure from my circumstance as our father was, praying it would undo me. Vengeance was a potent motivation and she had plenty to avenge.
“And once we’re silent? Then what?” I said. “You cast us aside. You call another to see how they can entertain your curiosities?”
“Like little buds, peeled apart for me to see what lies beneath. Yes. I watch my most beautiful designs kill. Devour. Skeem. It’s… fascinating. For now.”
I recoiled at the imagery.
“How long have you been here?”
“I have always been here. Older than stone. Older than breath. I am the silence between heartbeats, the pause before creation remembers itself. When I slumber, the world softens. It grows complacent, stagnant, rotting in its stillness. But boredom is a cruel hunger, and chaos... chaos is my feast. The Kroans were all too eager to offer themselves to my need.”
“You made us this way…out of boredom.”
“A creator, I am not. I did not make anything. I simply encouraged. Added. You are all a magnificently dreadful species, thirsty for disorder. For conflict. Near perfect.”
I took in a deep breath of the increasingly foul-smelling air, reminding myself that I had nothing else to lose.
Nothing else to give. I glimpsed my empty hands and imagined myself cutting open my head, pulling my brain from my skull, and surrendering it to Akareth.
It was a nauseating thought to give my mind to another.
To allow it to be used as theater. As a thing to be molded, broken, and restitched in a thousand different ways only to ease his boredom.
“You’re no god.” I slowly rolled onto my knees and slouched back on my ankles, hair hanging in strings around my face. “You are just a creature displaced in a world that is not yours.”
“Very bold of you, daughter.”
“I’m not your daughter. Sirens do not need a seed to be born. We are the seed. The ocean is our mother. You are just a pretender. You always have been. Even now you wear a mask.”
“No seed? I pull the strings on your thoughts as a man pulls the strings on a puppet. How then do you think Kroans have been blessed with such power to sway men the same way? By will of the sea? Daughter, it is my seed that planted such a gift. You are my daughters. All of you. And I am your god. The source of your terrifying power.”
I was going to die that night. Of that, I was certain. My heart had already perished. My body was soon to follow. I lurched unstably to my feet one final time, trembling under my own, oppressive weight.
“The only way you ever gained control over us is by stripping us of everything we are. So, you control nothing but empty vessels. And that is like a child calling itself a god over its wooden toys.”
His pale, deformed head slowly slanted to one side, but still, his expression was as dead as a rock like he was donning a guise over which he had no control. He did not know how to feel. How to express. He was nothing. He was nothing.
“Is a child not a god over its toys?” he said.