Chapter 31 COME TO ME
COME TO ME
Marina
Marina’s boots crunched down on a thin layer of packed snow. The flat terrain was enveloped in it, with layers of white beauty softly collecting on the tall evergreens that swallowed the land around the clearing.
Tenebris, her beloved village, was just beyond the cliffs.
Ash squeezed her neck, his breath quick in her ear. The boy was frightened and probably had no idea who she was. He was without his parents—without their constant aegis of protection.
Despite her apprehension to soothe the child with physical affection, she thought of her older sister and how overtly loving she was. That was the comfort that Ash was used to.
Marina lightly placed her palm on his back and rubbed in circles. “Do you know who I am, Ash?”
Sniveling into her hair, she felt him nod. “Aunt Marina,” he said through his phlegm.
“I realize that you don’t know me, but I am here to keep you safe.” She hugged the child tightly. “Do you think, just for now, you can trust that?”
Ash lifted his head to look at her, searching her face with his tear-filled gaze. The child was merely five years old, but the look in his eyes, as rich as the earth, held an endless depth she had seen before.
“Promise to take me back to Mom and Dad?” He held his small pinky finger up between them.
She locked her pinky with his, giving him a small, reassuring smile. “I swear it.”
Ash threw his arms back around her neck and stuffed his face into her hair. “We aren’t alone,” he whispered.
Gooseflesh ripened down her arms.
She cut her eyes around the clearing, through the slivers of the trees, down to the bed of snow. She didn’t sense another’s aura. She didn’t see footsteps.
What is happening?
“Behind you,” Ash murmured. “The man in the mask.”
Marina’s stomach dropped as she spun.
Nothing was there but the forest line. Why couldn’t she see him? Or better yet, sense him?
What if Ash wasn’t really seeing Soren, but just another illusion?
Or Soren had truly anticipated her bold move and intended to snipe the child. Maybe he wanted them here all along.
She dipped her chin, sharpening her glare through her hooded eyes in the space that the High God supposedly stood. An inky, sage-colored smog seeped onto the ground around her legs, curling around her and dancing like fire.
“Stop being a coward and show yourself,” she demanded.
Soren emerged from the mist, quickly followed by another replica of his body, and then another. Soon, dozens of copies surrounded them, slowly walking a circle in synchronous steps.
Marina readied her Night as the first one jumped for her.
She formed a cage around her and Ash, sending crescent waves of her ebony power through each attacking duplicate of the High God.
They charged her one at a time, then two, then three, as she scrambled to preserve her focus. He would not wear her down with these games.
The fading frames of his mimics melted into the wintry ground.
Marina’s palm rose and her darkness gathered in a phalanx of spikes around her and the child. In a harsh motion, she sent them out, catching the rest of the replicas and trapping them to the trunks of the faraway pines.
The copies all evaporated and left only one Soren in their wake.
The High God strolled toward them, unhurried, as if his victory was inevitable.
Marina’s heartbeat ricocheted in her throat. “Hold onto me, and continue to take deep breaths, okay?”
Ash nodded against her collarbone, tightening his arms and legs around her torso in a secure grip.
She materialized across the clearing behind Soren and reared her hand up. Ribbons of her Night sped forward and pierced through the back of Soren’s ribcage, throwing him forward and pinning him into the bark of a tree.
Marina’s vision flickered, and the sight of the snowy forest transformed into a cove. Palms and island greenery blossomed up from the sand, casting shade over the tombstone in front of her.
A plumeria wreath hung above Father’s name.
Her breath hitched, and she spun around, searching past the sea and the island flora.
A collection of nimbus clouds collected above her, instantly churning out a torrent of rain.
It began to pelt the sand, slowly eroding away her father’s grave.
The level of silt lowered and exposed his lifeless body in an infinite slumber, still adorned in his elegant, verdant robes.
Then the rain melted away his clothes, his skin, into an amalgam of bones.
They quickly washed away into the sea, leaving only a handful of magnolia blossoms that decayed before her eyes.
This isn’t real.
Her skin prickled.
She closed her eyes and focused outside of her mind on the physical sensations surrounding her—Ash in her arms, the frigid crisp of winter, the crunch of snow beneath her boots.
She opened her eyes as something hard struck her side. The impact knocked her off her feet, and she rolled across the icy ground. During the fall, she tensed her arms to keep the child in her hold, while keeping the hit from crushing his fragile bones.
The back of Marina’s head hit the ground, and a violent crack echoed in her ears. Pain lanced down her skull. She winced, rushing to sit up.
“Let me go!” Ash squirmed to climb out of her hold, gasping on choked breaths. “Let me go!”
Marina gawked down at him, baffled by his outburst. “Ash, wait!”
He crawled away from her. “Wipe it off! Hurry!”
Her vision blurred.
“I never needed to kill you. Even hurt you.” Soren reappeared in the distance in front of her, holding up the glint of a small blade in his grasp. “You kept your demise right there, next to your heart.”
She blinked, and that’s when she saw it: the streaks of red trailing in the snow behind Ash.
Her nephew sat up on his knees off to her side, gaping at his trembling hands in horrid realization. Blood gushed from the cut on his arm, pouring currents down into the crook of his elbow, up his wrist, and over his knuckles.
She went to reach for him when the crimson handprint caught her attention. The shape of Ash’s tiny fingers painted a fatal portrait around her forearm.
The breath evicted from her lungs.
No.
Her ears shrieked, and the hollow of her chest strained at the sight of it on her skin.
“W-what do I do?” Ash’s teeth chattered. He wept up at the sky. “N-Naia, High Goddess of Eternity, c-come to me!”
“We mustn’t… call her… the meeting…” Marina felt something warm and sticky draining down her face.
“Cassian, middle god of d-death, come t-to me!”
Her heart palpitated.
No.
She swallowed and brought her chilled hand up to her cheek, her fingertips smearing the red stream oozing from her eyes.
The memory of Father’s bloody tears flashed in her head.
She brushed up her jaw to the wetness purging from her ear.
Ash’s blood had soaked through her pores, and she could feel its venom in her system with a burst of nausea, violently spinning the world around her. Like a spear to her gut, the agony twisted, and her lungs grated through each breath.
She supported her weight on the heel of her hands. The bite of the snow grounded her senses enough to rise on her weak legs.
Not yet.
“W-we have t-to wipe i-it off!” Ash hyperventilated, digging through the sheet of white for a leaf or something else to clean her with. The blood from his wound stained the frosted vermillion, and the tips of his fingers were paling from the cold.
I cannot leave him yet.
Marina glanced up at the ashen sky as it sprinkled white specks across the land. There was no sight of it yet, but that fucking bird was a specter, always watching. She’d seen it, heard it, on every visit to Hollow City. She had faith in it, in her brother.
The approaching finality slurred her heart.
She snapped her eyes up over the boy’s head to Soren.
The High God stood yards away in awe, as if he hadn’t truly believed the rumors of the child’s power until now.
Marina gauged his distance, betting on her hunch.
She stepped into his line of sight, blocking his view of Ash, and leveled him with a blood-stained snarl. “You will not lay a hand on him.”
Soren cocked his head, amusement filling his twinkling gaze. “Death is coming for you, Marina. You’ve already lost.”
She unearthed something in her from long, long ago: the fusion of fear and hatred and desperation as she was hunted in her own home.
But, this time, she was in control of the raw, churning emotions; she had become the hunter.
He will have the family we never had.
A Stygian claw shot from the weeping darkness and plunged inside of Soren’s thigh. Another sliced through his wrist in a savage sweep.
A legion of her phantasmal beings swam up from the midnight, forming a circle around her and the child—one no god nor witch would dare breach.
The nightrazers levitated above the snow, growling and baring their needle-sharp teeth in the black folds of their face.
The High God stepped back in a surprised jolt, finally releasing a stream of sanguine red. There were no more fragments of forest green. This was him.
Her hunch was correct.
She flipped her palms out and curled her fingers, conjuring more of her grim apparitions up from the ground. They multiplied, swathes of floating shadow, all aimed for Soren.
She let out a feral scream and shoved her hands forward. The nightrazers burst forth like the ignition of Mansi’s bullets.
Soren jumped swiftly in and out of focus. Replicas of himself swept through the battlefield.
Marina’s eyes jumped over the ones attempting to squeeze through her barrier of nightrazers, hunting for the real Soren who bled from his leg.
Lethargy pulled at her bones, the vibration of her heartbeat fading against the walls of her chest.
Not fucking yet.
She pushed her fading energy, expunging every drop of her divine power as it churned in her core. The abyss whorled and convulsed like a living being at her feet, snaking through the snow and birthing more of her creatures.
They jumped in and out from it like creatures of her mother’s sea, the sharp ends of their talons slicing through the illusions before sinking back into the pool of darkness.
Marina’s gaze fell back onto Ash as he sobbed and shook at her feet, still fumbling around to find something to help her.
I can’t leave him alone.
Marina forced out the rest of her strength before allowing her knees to fold into the snow.
Copper filled her throat, but she swallowed it down, refusing to cough it up in front of Ash. The nightmare would etch in his mind forever.
She grabbed him by the wrist, halting him from digging in the cold.
He looked up at her, lips turned down and quivering, eyes wide and leaking with fat tears. “I-I-I—”
She yanked him into her embrace. His weight knocked her balance off, and they crumbled into the snow.
She curled her body around him, and everything went black as a protective shield of her Night draped over them like a shell.
Death might’ve been taking her into its hollows, but she would protect him still. Even in death, if she had to.
Ash collapsed in her hold, blood coating the inside of her arms in a gummy texture. He wailed, no longer fighting against her.
“I’m sorry,” Ash cried into her chest. His short arms squeezed around her frame as tightly as he could. “Mommy said she would come if I called her!”
He was a demigod, capable of summoning. And yet, it was as if his call was mute among the deities.
Marina could hear the distant sound of her nightrazers growling, still serving her, all the way to her bitter end.
The end.
Of my life.
A wistful grief filled her chest, and she buried her nose into Ash’s silver hair, inhaling the jasmine and floral fragrance. Beneath it, she could smell the faint aroma of a sugared pastry.
A smile touched her lips, envisioning Naia shaping batter on a pan, flour coating the countertops, and Ash at her side, licking the spoon.
In her closing moments, Marina allowed herself to dream of such fantasies.
Acacius came to her mind: on his altar as he tucked her white hair behind her ear; the intricacies of his realm and his creatures and the zealous light in his eyes as he spoke of it all; the secret smiles he wore during their bantering; how he gave her sweet touches and gentle looks during their dips in his hot spring, always aware of her, like a planet orbiting its sun.
Greed gripped at her heart, wishing she could’ve had more time with him.
She thought of the rose pendant, and how she’d heard it jingling around in his pocket as he walked. Marina wondered when he would give in and give it to her after finding it by accident in his bedchamber while picking up their clothes off the floor.
He’d been a blacksmith in his mortal days, enjoying the craft of forming things with his hands. He’d told her once, at a feast for the High Goddess of Autumn. Though, she doubted that he even recalled the conversation.
She knew what her death would do to him. After losing Ruelle, it was a primal fear of his, and here she was, delivering the same wound to him once more.
Could you ever?
She should’ve told him the truth then, the truth of her oceanic love for him.
“Aunt Marina?” Ash’s tearful call lulled her back.
“I am here.” Her voice strained against the viscous liquid clogging the back of her throat. “Stay with me. Don’t leave… no matter… what. Until he…finds you, okay? Your… bastard… uncle.”
Ash nodded against her sternum, sobbing against her.
The structure of the shield around them began to thin, its surface cracking like broken tiles. In the center, the view of the sky poured in.
A sudden loud caw echoed in the pale gray clouds, and an indigo plume flashed overhead, disappearing into the treetops.
Ash gasped, lifting his chin with restored hope. “Alke! Uncle Finny w-will f-find us!”
Marina watched the calm of the snowfall. Her little brother would protect Ash when she could no longer.
Her consciousness faded in and out.
This really was the end for her.
Garnet tears leaked down her temples.
She closed her eyes.
I want to see him one last time.
“Acacius.” She smiled as her heart took its final breath. “Come to me.”