Chapter 42
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
T hey were shockingly well-prepared for us. It was as if he knew we were coming.
The Pythora King was known to be isolated and paranoid, keeping his castle closed to all but very few select followers. He relied on the cliffs and his neighboring city-states to shield him from invaders, and didn’t keep a heavy force of warriors at the castle itself. But something must have changed recently, or maybe he had been bracing for Atrius’s potential retaliation, because there was an entire damned army here. A small army, yes, but it was enough to catch us off-guard coming straight from the cliffs, and they were charging at us before we had even caught our breath.
How they’d known we were here that quickly, I couldn’t fathom.
I didn’t have time to think about it.
At the approaching battle cries, Atrius’s warriors were on their feet immediately, rallying as if they weren’t already starving and injured and exhausted. Atrius roared a command in Obitraen, and we charged, meeting the Pythora King’s men with blades out and teeth bared.
Immediately, the field devolved into chaos.
Atrius’s men were outnumbered, but they were also far more skilled than these Pythora-afflicted soldiers. Blades clashed, blood spurted, voices roared as steel met steel, Atrius’s men forced to fight three-to-one. They were everywhere—pouring from the forest, from the barracks to the east and west, from every direction but the Pythora King’s palace itself.
“Go!” Erekkus screamed, single-handedly holding off four soldiers, yanking his sword from one of their throats as he whirled to us. “We’ll hold them.”
He jerked his chin up to the cliff ahead—to the steep upward steps, and the castle perched atop them. His presence reeked of fury, mouth twisted into a bloodthirsty snarl.
Atrius’s lips thinned. We were preoccupied too, fighting through body after body. Though they were cumbersome, they weren’t threatening. Still, I could sense his hesitation—torn between seizing this moment and leaving his men behind.
Tearing his blade from another body, Erekkus edged closer, teeth bared.
“Go make him fucking pay, Atrius,” he said. “We have this.”
Resolve sat heavy in my heart at that, echoing his.
Yes. We’d make him pay.
Atrius’s will hardened, too. His jaw tightened. He gave Erekkus a firm nod, and a quick clap on the shoulder that might as well have been a tear-soaked promise.
Then he turned to me. He nodded to the castle.
“How many?”
I couldn’t tell. Not this far away, and certainly not surrounded by this many souls.
“I don’t know,” I said, honestly.
“Too many?”
The smirk had already started at the corner of his lip.
I felt it at the corner of mine, too.
It didn’t matter that we were exhausted, injured, weak. We were this close to the Pythora King’s throat.
“Never,” I said.
Atrius casually took down another charging soldier, then grabbed my hand.
“Good,” he said, and I held him tight, drew a thread tight between us and the stairs, and together, we slipped through it, ready to face whatever lay on the other side.
Up here, it was too quiet. Too still.
Atrius and I had to fight our way across the fields between my thread steps, swiftly distributing death as we cut through the hordes. Between our efficient fighting and my use of the threads, we made it past the onslaught quickly, disappearing into the trees beyond and re-emerging on the steps that led up the palace.
The contrast between here and the world below was chilling. We were barely steps away, and yet here it was so quiet, the only sound the echoes of the battle we had left behind. We were ready, blades still poised, waiting for someone to chase us—waiting for someone to fling themselves from the doors of the castle.
It didn’t happen. I didn’t sense a soul.
The Pythora King kept his guards at arm’s length, yes. But… no one?
It was too easy. So easy it felt dangerous.
We made our way up the winding steps of the cliff, to the castle at its peak.
“Castle,” actually, was a generous word for it. It was a relatively small building, albeit beautiful, carved from a single piece of stone. Every face of it was covered in intricate carvings, each telling stories of the gods of the White Pantheon.
As we ventured further up the steps, the columns on either side of the pathway held these stories, too. The outstretched hands of Vitarus, the god of abundance and famine, one coaxing forth crops and the other distributing plague. Ix, the goddess of sex and fertility, placing a rosebud in the womb of a weeping woman—granting her a child. Each column was a tribute to another god, their importance in the hierarchy of the White Pantheon rising as we traveled higher. I couldn’t help but pause at Acaeja’s column, halfway up the steps—she stood upright, blindfolded, a web of threads tangling from her outstretched hands, faceless silhouettes caught within it like flies in a spider’s net. All of us at the mercy of fate—the mercy of the unknown.
I touched my blindfold, swallowed back an uncomfortable pang of guilt, and kept walking.
There was no column for Nyaxia, of course. There would be none for a goddess shunned and exiled by the White Pantheon. Atrius barely glanced at the carvings. Maybe by now he was used to the way humans worshipped our gods. Maybe, after all he’d been through, gods now meant nothing to him at all.
We didn’t speak until we neared the top of the stairs—the empty stairs—and Atrius leaned down to whisper in my ear, “Anything?”
The threads were so silent, so devoid of life, that it was almost uncomfortable. It felt... unnatural, like the threads were being manipulated in some way, not unlike how I felt on Veratas. Except, while the soul of the island had been so overwhelming I had been effectively blinded, this was the opposite—a blanket of silence that choked out everything.
Still, somewhere deep inside the walls of the castle, I could sense... something. I wasn’t sure what. The Pythora King? A single soul alone, far within a house of stone, might feel that way. From this distance, it was hard to tell.
“He’s in there,” I said, with more confidence than I felt.
“No one else?”
Atrius did not hide his apprehension. Rightfully. All of this seemed wrong.
I shook my head. Neither of us were comforted by that answer.
We reached the top. The two columns that guarded the entrance honored the leader of the White Pantheon—Atroxus, the god of the sun. Ironic, for a place so steeped in fog it likely never saw any.
It seemed far too simple to just open the front door and walk through. Simpler still for that door to be unlocked. When Atrius put his hands on either side of the double doors and pushed, I was legitimately shocked when they ground open.
Before us, a streak of cool misty light spilled into a vast, grand room, our silhouettes stretched across the tile floor. Torches and lanterns lined the walls, as if this place had been occupied moments ago but had suddenly emptied. Like at any second, a slew of wealthy lords and ladies could come spilling out of all these darkened doorways, lounging on the various velvet couches with their expensive wines perched in their hands.
Before us, at the end of the long carpet, across the massive room, was a large, arched doorway, and steps beyond it that led up.
There were few records of the layout of the Pythora King’s palace. The building was ancient, among the oldest in all of Glaea. When the king took control twenty years ago, he had been careful to destroy as many descriptions of the place as he could. He was, after all, very paranoid, and the less anyone knew about the layout of his home, the better.
But no one could wipe all mentions of a thousand-year-old monument away, and no one was better at collecting information than the Arachessen archivists. I’d pored over every scrap of paper I could find, every mundane letter from the courts of previous kings, to piece together what I would face when, one day, I would be able to slay the Pythora King.
I knew what lay up those steps.
“The throne room,” I whispered. The words stuck in my throat. My pulse raced, my hands sweaty around my blade.
Atrius’s eyes burned into the side of my face as his steps matched mine.
We crossed the room, leaving behind the cold darkness of the misty plains for the warm darkness of the castle, which smelled strongly of Pythora blossoms and faintly of mold. That intangible presence I had sensed outside grew stronger, albeit still... strange in a way I couldn’t pinpoint.
We passed beneath the archway, ascending the stairs. Step by step, the throne room unfolded before us—first the elegant arched ceiling, painted with chipped frescos of the gods’ wrath, then the gold molding and the arms built into it to hold stained-glass lanterns.
We reached the top of the stairs. The throne room was just as grand as ancient visitors had said it was centuries ago. Probably even grander, to those viewing it with eyes, but its beauty was so aggressive, so ornate, that I still felt it through the threads.
At the end of the long, long room stood a single throne, high upon the dais.
And slumped in that chair, lounging to one side, was the Pythora King.
For a moment, Atrius and I both tensed—waiting for a shout, a command, an acknowledgment.
None came.
My brow furrowed. Atrius’s jaw tightened.
I couldn’t shake the strange numbness in the threads, the unnatural silence that felt like cotton stuffed into my ears, but I still followed when Atrius crossed the throne room, his steps firm and long, sword ready.
The Pythora King did not move or speak.
And we were several strides away from him when I realized why.
“Atrius,” I choked out, just as he lifted his sword and drove it into the king’s chest, piercing through layers of purple silk and hair-mottled skin.
The king slumped a little. His eyes, which stared blankly into the middle distance, fluttered.
Atrius stood there for a long moment, gripping his sword, eyes narrowing first in confusion, then realization. Perhaps he, too, was noticing all the other marks on the king’s body—a slash or three at his throat, tears in his chest, a brutal mark, perhaps from an arrow, right over his heart.
The steady—unnaturally steady—rise and fall of the Pythora King’s shoulders said he was not dead.
But he was certainly not alive, either.
He was a breathing corpse, and we weren’t even the first people to kill him.
Atrius stumbled back, yanking his sword free. The thick, purplish substance that stained his sword and globbed at the open wound only vaguely resembled blood.
“What in the—” he muttered.
A familiar presence fell over me like a long shadow.
Suddenly everything felt very cold.
Suddenly I was very, very afraid .
In a single abrupt movement, I stepped in front of Atrius, pushed him back, and bowed my head.
“Sightmother,” I breathed. “It’s such a relief to see you.”
I tried to make myself believe it—make every single one of my threads vibrate with my love for her, my gratefulness.
“I wish I could say the same,” the Sightmother said, emerging from the darkness to stand beside the Pythora King, a single casual hand on his shoulder.