Chapter 43
Chapter Forty-Three
Camilla
Ihad officially gone mad.
After all this time, I thought I had escaped the clutches of insanity, but I’d been wrong. So terribly wrong.
Visions were hitting me so rapidly I could hardly hold myself steady as I crouched in the corner of my room with my head in my hands and my feet pressing firmly against the floorboards, as if I could ground myself in this space by shoving against the hardwood.
It wasn’t fucking working.
One minute I saw the room in front of me.
The next I saw Rankor talking with a dark-haired woman who glared at him with a look of utter impatience.
Then I was staring at that tiny single-person bed Elaina and I had been sharing every night.
Then, I saw Iris clutching the reins of a horse, wind tearing through her hair while Nikolai sat behind her, his weight an unnatural heaviness against her back.
The transitions from one world to the next were like violently being ripped from my body and then thrown back into it, all while the sights and sounds were still fading from the last place my soul had hovered.
I couldn’t stop it. Couldn’t control it.
I couldn't tell what was real and what wasn’t.
There was no way of knowing where I was or even who I was.
I couldn’t bring myself to speak when there was a quick knock at the door before Elaina pushed open the door. She rushed to me instantly, dropping to her knees and brushing away the tears that streaked down my face in her absence. Anxiously, she glanced over her shoulder to Clay and—
“Thea?” My voice cracked as I breathed her name.
Her presence was a momentary balm that soothed away the noise in my mind.
She was so thin that the borrowed clothes she wore seemed to hang off her.
Her blonde hair was so long now that it touched the tops of her hips.
She looked like herself, and yet so much older and more haunted than when I had last seen her.
Her blue eyes seemed dimmed when they locked on me.
I looked to Clay instantly, shivering against his concerned frown. “You found her?”
Clay nodded, taking a step into the room and guiding Thea in after him so he could shut the door behind him.
“I was right?” I laughed deliriously, shoving hair out of my eyes. Impossible. Wonderful, of course, that he had saved her. And yet, utterly impossible. “What I saw was right?”
I had expected Clay to respond, but it was Thea who stepped further into the room and looked between us in confusion before asking, “What do you mean by that?”
“I saw you,” I told her, craning my head to look up at her. I was painfully aware that the cadence of my voice sounded as crazed as I felt. “In those woods. With those monsters. I saw you and your friend.”
Her body jerked, stiffening as her eyes went distant for a moment before she shook her head and turned to Elaina. “What’s wrong with her?”
Once again Elaina smoothed down my hair, as if a gentle touch could chase away the madness lingering in the corners of my mind. She watched me with a furrowed brow, wrinkles forming around her eyes before she turned back to Thea and Clay.
“I’m not sure. She’s complaining of seeing things. I thought they might be prophecies at first, but...”
Her voice trailed off nervously, and Clay instinctively angled himself in front of Thea. I didn’t even have it in me to be offended by the movement. He should protect her from me.
You never knew what someone as mad as I was capable of.
“But?” he prompted.
Elaina looked at me and sighed before rising to her feet and talking to them in a hushed whisper. She kept her back to me, oblivious to the fact that I could hear her every word ringing in my oversensitive mind.
I heard her words.
I saw through Kent’s eyes.
I felt the blood dripping onto Iris’ back.
“Well, anyone who spends time with her demonstrates strange symptoms.”
Thea crossed her arms over her chest, glancing at me peripherally. “Like what?”
Elaina shifted her weight, eyes darting away uncomfortably. “They report seeing and hearing things that aren’t there. I wouldn’t have believed it, but then a few moments ago I myself saw dozens of doves flying in this very room.”
A laugh bubbled out of me just as Thea went rigidly still.
Clay instinctively turned toward her, touching her shoulder, but the Goddess had focused her attention on me.
There was shock on her face—shock that settled into a small expression of odd resignation.
She stared at me without blinking, mouth ajar.
Then, she took a tentative step towards me.
“I would like to speak to Camilla alone,” she requested, not even turning back to them.
Clay took her hand in his own. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
He thought I might hurt her again.
Maybe I would.
It wouldn’t be on purpose, of course, but I was past the point of controlling myself.
What if I lost myself in one of those visions?
“Yes.” The order fell heavily in the room, Thea’s voice taking on a cadence that did not seek any negotiation. Clay drew back, and for a moment he looked as if he wanted to protest further, but he nodded and backed away when Thea amended the command with a gentle, “Please.”
His gaze lingered on her even as he backed away, as if it were impossible for him to look away for a single second. She didn’t return the attention, not noticing the adoration he gave to her so obviously.
The door clicked shut after them, and for a moment Thea just stood there looking down at me. I braced myself for her wrath and hatred. Prepared myself for the moment she would tell me that I was a liability to their cause and still needed to pay for my crimes.
I didn’t even know if we had prison cells here. Perhaps there was something similar they would use to lock me up.
“You feel it in your gut, don’t you?” she asked, moving towards me. Her slow steps echoed.
As she reached my side, she turned and let her back hit the wall before sliding down to sit next to me on the floor. Stretching out her legs, she crossed her feet at the ankles and rested her hands on her thighs, leaning her head back as she stared out the window.
“It’s like a pit deep inside of you.”
I opened my mouth to answer her, but gasped as I fell haphazardly into another vision. Rankor was bickering with that dark-haired woman. She stormed off and Kent frowned at her.
“I want you to breathe,” Thea instructed, taking my hand and pressing it onto her chest. Above her heart. She took a deep breath in, and her chest lifted under my hand. With her exhale, it fell. “Like this. You have to breathe, Camilla.”
I glanced sideways at her, swallowing when I took in her encouraging smile. Feeling each rise and fall of her chest, I worked to match my breath with hers.
In and out.
In and out.
“Good, keep going,” she encouraged.
And I did. I continued those deep inhales and exhales until my body seemed to sink onto the floor under me, steadying me in this time and place as the roaring in my ears faded away.
“That pit inside of you,” Thea continued, releasing my hand. “It feels never-ending. Like you could dig to the very depths of your magic and there would still be more there for you to grasp onto.”
My lower lip trembled, confusion stealing my voice.
“I haven’t used my powers since...” I swallowed, struggling to admit it to the woman I had hurt so deeply. “Since everything. It’s been getting worse the longer I suppress it.”
Thea chuckled, giving me a sad smile I couldn’t quite make sense of.
“Camilla,” her voice was soft, cajoling, like she was talking to a temperamental child. “Do you know what happens to a God’s magic when they die?”
Something inside me, maybe that force in my gut, roared with her words. Somewhere deep inside of me, something in her words registered even as I couldn’t quite follow her implication.
“A new God must rise to take their place,” she explained, again giving me that sympathetic smile.
She reached to take my hand in hers, and I realized exactly what she was implying.
No.
I scrambled back away from her, reaching for the hateful part of my soul that I’d always relied on to protect myself when the world got too harsh to bear.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about!” I sneered at her, rushing to my feet. “And I don’t want your help!”
If she were bothered by my outburst, it didn’t show.
She simply rose after me, dusting herself off from where she had sat on the floor.
“Pasnia had an animus that she could use to see visions of other people and places. Hers was a butterfly, but in the woods I saw a cat. I saw that same cat several times at the castle.”
A cat.
My cousin Erilea had a cat once—a fluffy, white beast which she had doted on endlessly. I’d hallucinated Erilea killing the creature when Pasnia had poisoned my mind with her magic.
No, Thea was wrong. She had to be mistaken. It wasn’t possible.
I didn’t want it to be possible.
Shaking my head violently, I brushed away the tears that trailed down my cheeks and dripped onto the floor. “I want you to leave.”
Thea crossed her arms over her chest. “Pasnia had no direct Descendants to serve as an heir. No bloodline for her magic to choose a successor from.”
I couldn’t accept this.
“You’re wrong!” I screeched, backing away and stumbling over an upturned chair. I fell heavily onto the floor, and she reached to help me.
“Get out, Thea!” I screamed at her, viciousness pouring out of me. “You think you know everything because you’re a Goddess, but you don’t. So just leave me alone!”
“It only makes sense that her magic would seek someone who it had touched extensively before. Out of everyone in this realm, you were the most familiar. The magic recognized you. It chose you.”
I felt it then, building in me like an electric storm. It tingled down my spine, shooting into my arms and legs. It was as if it had a mind of its own and it was happy to finally be acknowledged for what it was.
It wasn't witchcraft inherited from the God I had descended from.
It wasn't my magic.
It was hers.
Divine magic.
My shoulders slumped, and I looked to Thea with a plea in my eyes, silently begging her to change her mind and say she was wrong.
“I don’t want it,” I whispered to her.
She looked at me for a long while before she sighed and nodded. “I know you don’t Camilla.”
I would happily go to a cell. I would happily accept any form of torture or punishment over this. This was a fate worse than any I might have imagined for myself and I did. not. want it.
I didn’t want to be the Goddess of Madness.