Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
Malakai
Of the two times I’d stood atop the Spirit Volcano, I wasn’t sure which was worse.
Was it the first time, when I’d thought I was handing over my life, only to be betrayed by my father? He’d crushed the hope within me that night, and only continued to drive it out of me over the years following.
Or was tonight the darker of the two?
Tonight, I wasn’t alone, but I was more twisted than ever.
I stood with my hand in my mother’s. No sound could be heard over the crackle of the volcano’s flame, but my heartbeat shook my entire body, roaring in my ears.
Across the wide mouth of the volcano, a silhouette was barely visible through the sweetly-scented smoke.
The Master of Rites, Missyneth, did not speak; she only watched us, awaiting my nod.
Exchanging a glassy-eyed glance with my mother, I bobbed my head once.
The Master of Rites raised a hand. Two more silhouettes walked to the edge, a box between them. My knees wobbled as they gently opened the lid.
I squeezed my mother’s hand tighter as the acolytes removed a long, wrapped form from the box.
One held his ankles, the other his shoulders.
Each moved with a reverence he didn’t deserve, but it wasn’t their job to pass judgment.
A piece of me was grateful ritual demanded they do this; I wasn’t sure I could show the same respect.
I couldn’t even blink as they held the body over the fire and released him.
My mother’s sob broke my trance, and I wrapped my arm around her.
Together, we watched my father’s body fall into the Spirit Volcano to meet his final judgment.
What happened next, we’d never know—not until we one day joined the afterlife.
That would be centuries off, though. Perhaps by then we’d each find peace with his actions.
Part of me—the part of me that had tried to hope—doubted it. There was nothing left to hope for in this bleak world.
I realized I’d been dragging my thumb across my jaw, along the scar my father left there. He may be gone forever, but I’d always have that reminder of what he did, who he truly was.
The last speck of his body disappeared into the luminescent orange abyss, and I turned.
“Let’s go,” I grunted, fighting the burning behind my eyes.
My mother inhaled shakily but followed. As we wound down the volcano and along the footpath back toward Damenal, some of that pain my father had caused soothed.
Not healed but tucked in a cage. Maybe this was what closure felt like.
Maybe I’d now be able to seal it away, leave it in the volcano with his doomed body and never have to face it again.
Lock it and let the key melt in the flames.
At the edge of Damenal, my mother grabbed my wrist. When I turned to her, her eyes were red but dry.
“It’s time for me to go, Mali.” She brought a hand to my cheek. I wasn’t sure if she even realized she brushed a thumb over my scar.
“Go?” I asked, my voice cracking.
“Back to Palerman. Back to restoring my life.” She brushed my hair away from my face. “As you should.”
My life? I didn’t even know what it looked like.
Fuck, my years in chains had practically erased it from my mind.
What had I once dreamed of? What did I now desire?
No answers came to mind. Instead, I saw darkness.
No shining future, no valiant titles. Nothing but an endless path stretching before me.
Shadows curled at the edges, threatening to swallow me whole.
Did I want that path? Or did I want something better?
“I’m trying.” Or at least, I wanted to, but I didn’t know how.
I thought of the harsh accusations Ophelia and I had thrown at each other, the harsher ones we bit back, and how she’d pleaded with me to talk to her these past few days.
Fucking Spirits, it crushed me to see tears in her beautiful eyes, but it was all I knew, this running.
It was easier to turn away from the warring emotions wrapping their hands around my head and heart than it was to do anything about them. Throw up a wall and block it all out. Lock my heart in an iron cage.
“You’ll get there. He may have given you your blood, but he does not decide what you do with it. That choice is only yours.”
She pulled me in for a hug—the comforting kind only a mother can give, where for a moment you believe everything may actually be okay. But when she released me, the shadows loomed closer, their presence cold and destructive.
She was right, though. My father had given me my blood, but I didn’t have to become what he wanted. Spirits, I’d already proved as much by escaping that dreadful future he’d planned.
Some days I wanted to forget about it all completely and disappear. Fall into the volcano after my father’s body and let it send me to my fate. Perhaps it would not deem me fit for the Undertaking and the responsibility would be out of my hands completely. The thought was almost soothing.
Choices…I was tired of making the wrong ones. My mother said they were now up to me, but I was scared. Afraid of what I’d chosen before, afraid of the pressure resting on my shoulders.
And I was losing control. Everything I’d once wanted was slipping through my fingers. Me, desperate to hang on to anything familiar. Reality, tearing it away.
With a deep breath, I shoved it all into the cavern within my chest and locked it tight, using the heat of my pain to fortify the barred cage around where my heart belonged.
That was where everything would remain. The memories of today, the pain over my father, the guilt over my decisions, and the confusion with Ophelia.
It would all stay hidden behind those bars.
“Thank you, Mother.” I kissed her cheek. “You go ahead. I’m going to take the long road back.”
She hugged me, slipping down the direct route to Damenal.
I sank into the shadows along the path’s edge, contemplating the many choices forced upon me. Until a crunch of gravel made my head snap up.
“Jezebel?”
She whirled, eyes wide and shocked for a fraction of a second before they went dull. “I forgot you and your mother were…” Her gaze softened with pity I didn’t want. “How are you?”
No way in the Spirit-guarded hell was I talking about this. “What are you doing here? Didn’t everyone decide to go into the city tonight?”
“Out for a walk.”
Outside of Damenal, near the Spirit Volcano? Sure. But her tone said one thing: end of conversation. She slid her pendant along the chain around her neck, clearly avoiding something, but who was I to judge?
“I was just about to go meet them,” I said.
“Me too.”
We walked in a silence that hadn’t been normal of us before I left. One thick with some tension I couldn’t put a name to. But fuck if I didn’t know how to talk to anyone now.