Chapter 46
Chapter forty-six
Talia
Mysai still stank of smoke and death.
Talia swept through the narrow, winding streets of the lower district, her Witchsworn at her back and Skatia prowling at her side. For once, her Sister was silent and brooding rather than filling the air with mocking laughter.
Around them, the city held its breath.
Ash clung to the walls and drifted in gray ghosts along every alley, every courtyard.
The last light of day bled across the sea, glinting off helms as Drakmori and Arathian soldiers alike patrolled.
They marched like packs of roving jackals rather than in rigid formations, but still their boots struck the stones in a rhythm of conquest.
All else was silent.
The silence of a tomb.
Civilians—those who dared to remain in the occupied city—did not walk the streets. They peered from behind shuttered windows and cracked doors. Talia could not see them, but she could feel them. Their gazes pricked at her skin. Hundreds of eyes.
Watching. Fearing.
They had every reason to be afraid.
“This is a waste of time,” Skatia muttered, crimson robes whispering around her ankles as they turned down a narrow lane and approached what had once been a marketplace.
Her hand tightened around the hilt of her blade.
Its jewel glowed faintly in reply. “We should be out hunting those Elmorian stragglers, not…” Her lips twisted. “Not chasing after trinkets.”
Talia said nothing. To agree was to question.
To question was too dangerous.
She knew Skatia questioned out of fear—fear of her wayward Witchsworn, now out there in the desert once more. Fear that the Mother would learn of him.
Fear that the Lady might finally punish her for her failure.
“But the Lady said it is a weapon we seek,” Talia reminded, softly. Carefully. “Perhaps it is a weapon that will end the war.”
The Lady had shown her the tunnels. The sense of something buried like a sleeping beast beneath the rock. A treasure. Dangerous. Priceless.
But for all that they had been searching for the object ever since their arrival in the city, all she had found within the tunnels of Old Mysai thus far were broken stairwells, flooded passages, and dead ends filled with rubble.
Disappointment shushed through her chest like grains of sand slipping through an hourglass. She was running out of time.
Skatia’s lip curled as they passed a shop with its door hanging partially off its hinges, lamplight leaking through the crack.
“But the Lady has never cared for things before, even weapons,” she went on, pitching her voice low enough that only Talia and the four Witchsworn trailing them could hear. “Souls, yes. But physical objects?”
Skatia tossed a look over her shoulder, as if hunting for eavesdroppers in the dying light. “Tell me you do not find this strange, Sister.”
She did. Of course she did.
But she would never admit to such a thing aloud—
Before she could draw another breath, the air around her seized. The world went cold. The evening breeze died. Sound itself seemed to dull, the distant crash of waves smothered beneath a ringing silence.
A bell tolled inside her skull.
You dare question me?
The Lady’s voice was more than mere sound. It was thunder crashing through her thoughts. It was smoke filling her lungs.
Pain lanced behind Talia’s eyes. White exploded across her vision. Her knees buckled.
She fell.
Through the roaring in her ears, she was vaguely aware of Skatia beside her letting out a strangled gasp, of crimson silk collapsing in a blur of color. The street tilted, stone rushing up to meet her—
And then there was nothing. Nothing but black.
Not the empty black of a room with no candle, but a living darkness that pressed close on all sides, thick as ink and twice as cold.
It curled around her ankles and wrists in lazy, drifting tendrils, seeping into her bones, gnawing at the strength she hadn’t realized she still possessed.
The Underworld.
She swayed.
A soft groan sounded nearby. “Talia?” Skatia’s voice.
Her heart constricted. She was not alone here in the black.
Shapes began to materialize from the writhing murk. Crimson robes. Faces she knew. The Sisters with them in Mysai—Yara, Nadia, Shula. Others, too. Witches she’d only ever glimpsed in passing in the temple, like Princess Mariana.
And there, at the center of them all, stood a small, bent figure draped in black silk: The Mother.
Even here, her golden eyes were sharp within her wizened face as she swept her gaze across the gathered Sisters.
But for the first time in her life, Talia saw an emotion she had never before seen upon the High Priestess’s features—fear.
Her pulse quickened.
“Mother, what is this?” Skatia asked, stepping forward through the gloom. Her fingers twitched as if on the verge of reaching for her soulblade.
Before the Mother could answer, the darkness itself spoke.
I am growing tired of these delays.
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere, sliding over Talia’s skin like oil. The shadows thickened, pressing in until it felt as if she were slowly being suffocated—smothered by a giant, unseen hand.
Of these failures, the Lady hissed.
A knife of cold sliced into Talia’s chest. She gasped. Around her, Sisters staggered, hands flying to their hearts or heads as if struck.
My daughters in Elmoria: you have failed, the Lady continued, contempt dripping from every word. My daughters in Mysai: you have failed.
Talia’s stomach plummeted. She wanted to protest, to scream that she had only just arrived, that she was trying, but her tongue lay dead and heavy in her mouth.
Only Mariana succeeds in Drakmor, the voice purred, the tone shifting from scorn to a terrifying, possessive pride. Only she understands the cost of power.
The shadows surged, tightening the circle.
With every day that passes, you give my great enemy the openings He needs to fight against my influence. This cannot happen. He cannot succeed!
Pain exploded in Talia’s chest, as if an invisible fist had closed around her heart. Her back arched, her head flinging backward in a scream that never came. Her head swam. The world tilted again. Her legs buckled.
When her knees slammed against the unseen ground, she tasted metal.
She must have bitten her own tongue.
All around her, Sisters dropped like sheaves of wheat in a scythe’s path.
When my power grows, so does yours, the Lady crooned, and the pain eased just enough for Talia to drag in a shuddering breath once more. When mine wanes, yours will wane also. Our fates are tied, my daughters. And still, you fail me.
I am sorry, Talia whispered within her thoughts, her shoulders shaking with each fresh inhale she desperately drank in. Please, forgive me. Please, forgive me…
“Lady,” the Mother rasped, straightening with visible effort.
Every eye in the circle snapped to the High Priestess. The old woman was shaking, but still she raised her head to stare into the abyss.
“We hear you. We are trying to understand. These demands you place upon us now are…new. Never before have you called us like this. Never before have you sent us hunting—”
The Mother’s words cut off mid-sentence. One moment, she was standing there, ancient and solid. The next, she simply came apart at the seams.
Unraveling like black thread. Dissipating like smoke.
Gone.
One Sister screamed. Skatia collapsed beside her, falling to her knees. “Mother…”
It is not for you to understand me! I, who made you what you are, and who can unmake you just as easily. It is not for you to question. It is for you to obey!
The shadows writhed. They curled tighter around the circle of witches, drawing in like a noose. The cold deepened, sinking past flesh and bone.
Into the hollow places no fire could ever reach.
I have tried faith, the Lady whispered, Her voice suddenly soft, almost disappointed. And now we see how faith fails in the end.
The darkness stirred. What had once been only formless black began to thicken in front of Talia, twisting upward in a column of smoke. Limbs formed. A torso. Shoulders. A head. Like a statue being carved out of night itself.
Your fear will sustain me now.
The smoke cleared, revealing a man. Handsome. Devastatingly handsome.
He was tall, even for an Arathian—taller than any man she had ever seen—with warm burnt-umber skin and raven-black hair that fell in careless waves to his shoulders.
His jaw was clean-shaven and sharply cut, his cheekbones high, his mouth full.
His eyes shone molten gold, as if he were a witch. Though no man could ever be one.
Talia’s breath caught.
She knew that face, though the eyes were wrong.
He was the very man the Lady had shown her the day she became a witch. She had seen him in that first vision, standing beside her—the Witchsworn who would help her bend the world to her will.
Her Witchsworn. Her destiny.
Now he smiled—and somehow, the Underworld grew a little colder. A little darker.
Gasps rippled through the circle of Sisters. Someone whimpered.
Skatia bared her teeth. “You are no Lady,” she snarled, her voice shaking with fury. “You are a man.”
The man turned his head toward her, his expression smoothing into something almost bored. “Does this form displease you?”
Before anyone could answer, his body blurred.
He shrank, curled inward. His flesh wrinkled, and his hair bled to white. In the span of a heartbeat, the handsome Arathian was gone, and the Mother stood in his place.
Her hunched shoulders, her papery skin, her thin mouth.
Even her voice, when she spoke, was perfect. “Does this form please you better, child?” the false Mother rasped.
Skatia screamed—raw, feral—and lunged to her feet. Her hand flew to her hip, drawing her soulblade. It flared into being in her grip, casting a sickly light across the gathering.
“Skatia!” Talia cried, reaching for her Sister. “No!”