Chapter 35 FEEL IT ALL TOGETHER
FEEL IT ALL TOGETHER
Marina
Marina gasped for air.
“Welcome back, bitch.” Finnian wrenched a syringe from her chest. “About time you return to the living.”
An agonizing pinch shot up her neck and into her jaw as she blinked up at the sky, her lilting vision slowly returning.
Explosions rumbled through the ringing of her ears, the sound of snapping trees and debris being plucked from the ground. She felt its earthquake under her weight.
Her senses returned, and the realization snapped her out of her slurred state.
She reared up. “Ash?” An excruciating jolt of pain struck down her chest. She winced and hunched over, rubbing at the spot on her sternum.
“Careful.” Cassian knelt at her side, his golden gaze scouring her in concern. “Finnian used an antidote to Ash’s blood to bring you back. It’s new, so we aren’t sure of its effects yet.”
An aggressive beat of wind ripped her hair in all directions as she looked up at the medley of gnashing waves, spiraling like an open cut in the atmosphere. A black hole threw jagged pieces of the earth down like comets.
Above it all was a transparent barrier containing the catastrophe from spreading to the rest of the world.
Monsters filled the land under its arch. The Daemons sprinted on all six limbs and smashed against the transparent barrier. The Heralds gathered along its boundary and rested their hands against its structure, infusing surges of their divine power into its walls.
Marina’s eyes followed the trail of the dome’s magic down to Finnian.
He stood with his back to her, one arm lifted, palm up, his silver rings glinting in the glow as he commanded the spell. “Consider yourself my test subject.”
She blinked at her little brother in awe.
“Ash is safe,” the familiar voice of their sister called out from behind.
Marina twisted to look back, the motion swaying her equilibrium.
Cassian supported her by the arm.
Naia was crouched beside Ash, holding the child as her silver hair slapped all over the place. She acknowledged Marina with a look, as if to ask if she were okay.
Marina had no idea how to reply. Her skin felt cold and her insides even colder. The machinations of her muscles and brain stammered, like a system slowly reconnecting after a long rest.
Tears and snot ran down Ash’s blood-stained cheeks as he watched Marina. The poor child would be traumatized by what had happened.
Ronin stood over them, both arms up, with slivers of scarlet magic stretching up from his palms and into the barrier, assisting its fortification with barbed defense.
Kneeling on the other side of Ash was the winter god, his focus on the destruction ahead of them, unease pinching his brows.
She turned her attention back to Finnian and the swelling storm, her heart sinking at the sight of Acacius’s absence.
“You can thank your unhinged boyfriend for this fucking nightmare.” Finnian signaled her to come stand at his side with a crisp flick of his free hand. “According to our nephew, it appears that when he saw your corpse, he lost himself to his Chaos.”
Marina’s face fell as dread coiled in her stomach.
Oh, Acacius, no.
Marina rose to her feet with Cassian’s aid, her pulse like a sputtering engine from the physical movement. A wave of vertigo assaulted her vision.
She set her jaws, fighting through it as she started to her brother, slipping her arm from Cassian’s hand.
She stood at Finnian’s side, observing the murmuration of monsters. Their sinister clicking echoed over the harsh amalgamation of noises. These Daemons were real, not mere illusions crafted by Soren.
“Soren,” she said. “Where is he?”
“Gone.” Cassian came up to her other side. “Alke is searching for him now.”
It was a relief to hear that they wouldn’t have to deal with him amidst the calamity that brewed before them.
“I removed his illusions with a spell. It appears that the monsters you fought were real beasts, just disguised as Acacius’s sick things,” Finnian explained.
“What the base creature was underneath, who fucking knows. There seems to be a witch involved, though.” A smirk lifted one side of his mouth as he looked out at the agitating carnage.
Soren hadn’t been working alone. The revelation filled her stomach with nausea.
She watched as meteors were spit out from the contained apotheosis of Chaos. They crashed and craters split into the soil. Chunks of rock and trees collided with the sides of the cliff. Daemons ascended the rocky edges and hurled themselves at the barrier.
Marina swallowed down the dread welling up in her chest. “And Acacius?”
Cassian pointed to their left, atop the highest peak. “Over there.”
Through the deadly landscape of Olethros was the birth of the foaming tide. He floated above the bluff, arms extended, in a constant scream. Midnight-blue power gushed from his mouth and gave fuel to the anarchy around him.
The path to him was barricaded by a churning mass that bled from a tear behind him—Daemons and Heralds and a perpetual spin of debris.
I bring my Chaos with me everywhere I go. It is in my nature to disrupt the quiet.
The back of her nose stung, remembering his words.
She flexed her jaw.
I will bring him back.
No matter what it took.
“Are you ready, Night Goddess? I can see you’re still adjusting, but we’re out of time.” Cassian adjusted his cufflinks, preparing.
Marina pushed her shoulders back and stretched her stiff neck. “Plan?”
“I will drop you both inside the storm raging around Acacius, and you two stop this madness.” Finnian eyed the spell surging from his hand. “I stay here and keep shit from hitting the fan on a much larger scale. Ronin helps to keep the spell going, and Naia and Theon protect Ash.”
Cassian slipped off the watch from his wrist and stuffed it in the front of Finnian’s pocket. “Hold that for me, would you, love?”
Finnian rolled his eyes, grinning.
Cassian peered up at the pandemonium. “His Chaos is tethered to his—”
“Emotions,” Marina finished. She shook out her hands to rid the tingling from her fingertips. “I know. He told me.”
Cassian made a face, impressed. “I’ll help carve the way. When you make it to him, be prepared. He is not in his right mind at the moment.”
Marina took one final breath before exchanging a look with Cassian. “Let’s go.”
Finnian snapped his free hand, and a runic sigil appeared under them, circling their feet in a glowing language unknown to Marina. She could see a similar pattern appearing inside the contained cataclysm, right at its edge.
Finnian faintly strained at using more power. “This is as far as I can get you.” He shot out his index finger toward the connected glyph and Marina’s world flipped into itself, leveling out amidst the maelstrom.
The change was instantaneous. Zephyrs of arctic wind thrashed her hair around while dust peppered her vision. She couldn’t hear her own thoughts against the clamoring, screeching, rasping that pressed down on her ears from every angle.
The legion of Olethros turned toward the two intruders.
Cassian thrusted his arms out, and the pack of Daemons speeding toward him lost their footing and crashed into the snow. The beasts convulsed and screeched out shrill cries. Through the white, Marina could see their skin shrinking and blackening from their bones like rot.
A group of nearby Heralds joined hands and chanted a foreign hymn.
Cassian’s vision locked onto them as bursts of invisible force began pelting him from the deathly mass. He swerved, but a transparent orb of Ruin caught his palm and breached it from his wrist.
As he danced to dodge more damage, he flicked his other, attached set of fingers towards the Heralds. Sears of symbols appeared on their foreheads at once, causing them to fall and convulse in animalistic bursts, their pain palpable.
A tortuous curse.
Cassian pointed the fresh flesh of his recovering hand toward his brother. “Go!”
Marina released her oily power into the snow at her feet as she ran for the jagged cliffside ahead.
Nightrazers crawled from the onyx mouth, monstrous apparitions soaring forward to slice open another trio of Heralds that glitched toward her, their birch crowns piercing the dirt below as they fell.
She ascended the icy ridge, forming a sharp whip of her dark energy as she teleported in small leaps up the steep terrain.
The forceful gust beat against her. Spheres of dense sand, dirt, and gravel rained from above, but Marina used calculated flicks of her wrist to cut through the plummeting hazards and break them before they ground her to paste.
Her bare feet touched down on the rough surface of the cliff.
Up this high, the view of Tenebris shined through its cloak of night, its village included in the magical barrier.
Marina’s heart jumped up in her throat.
But before her panic could spread, she noticed how her village was untouched. No fires, no explosions decimating buildings, no frantic prayers from her worshipers, no Olethros raiding its streets. It was how she’d left it.
That bastard.
It was silly and selfish, but she was furious at him for taking her death this hard, for causing her to worry about him this much.
She ripped her head up at the place Acacius floated.
He was ascended, inhuman. An empyrean being in every sense, and she finally understood the power of the three primordial gods.
His hands were extended, palms up in a ruinous prayer.
She couldn’t hear his scream over the crunching of earth and shrills of dying Olethros below, but she could see the vibrating veins in his throat as his divinity poured from him like an infinite vase.
A battalion of his Daemons separated them, knowing to protect their master at all costs in his vulnerable state.
The choir of clicks unnerved her. The illusions she fought before would pale gravely against the strength of these.
Her shadow crept up from the terrain, twisting and taking shape like the flicker of a black flame. Nightrazers manifested out of the dancing mass.
A few of the Daemons lunged and ran full speed at her, galloping on all six limbs in a vengeful pack.
She drove her arms out.
Her nightrazers fled forward, meeting the band of Daemons head on.
The creatures traded violent blows.
Curled, darkened talons pierced through thin skin, just to be gored by sharp antlers. One nightrazer held each end of a skull before ripping it in half. A Daemon pounced and forced the nightmare back to its wispy home.
“Acacius!” Marina bellowed her plea through the wailing wind.
Alongside her army of gloaming, she herself continued on in a desperate path to her lover.
Forming a long, thick spear from the depths of her Night, she charged against his creatures, collecting them on the end of her weapon as they jumped for her like a spit being loaded with meat.
She needed to connect with him, make him believe that she was there, real, right in front of him.
Memories of the last six months played in the background of her mind as she charged on, and where their aversion toward one another began to blossom into something more.
She thought of the violence of her spikes and his grin as they plunged into him, and his indigo swimming in her veins as he buried himself inside of her.
From the beginning, the collision of their energy had always been the catalyst that sparked eruption between them.
You are not too much.
Even at the start, their relationship was messy and dark and chaotic, but it was also safe and trusting. It was those very things that kept her gravitating right back to him, ready to hurt by his hands again and again.
She kept her eyes on him as she advanced, dispersing her weapon and teleporting her way through the small pockets free from the Daemons, carefully carved by her phantasmal beasts. They held them back as she gave a battle cry and conjured her strength forward in a final push.
Night surged out from her back like the release of a chrysalis before cresting a monstrous wave. From its maw, a colossal nightrazer began to take shape, its churning shadow blotting out the daylight above them.
Like a dark, spectral titan, its torso and a single arm fully emerged from the pool of pure shadow, towering above Acacius and making him look as if he were an insect to its frame.
It sent a roar up to the calamitous sky as it plunged its arm up, the end of its limb fully extending, before puncturing its sharp claws straight through Acacius’s chest.
As her divine power invaded him, the movements of his Olethros lagged, before collapsing entirely. The jagged portals to Tavora began to knit themselves up, the sound of the harsh breeze beginning to return. The rain of broken earth halted.
Marina watched as the stream spilling from Acacius’s mouth ceased, and his jaws slowly ground back together.
The leviathan of smoky midnight that towered above her gradually lowered the High God, slowly releasing the skewer of its fingers, one at a time.
As Acacius’s frame finally returned to the ground, she collided into his back and wrapped her arms around him, burying her face between his shoulder blades.
“Come back to me, Acacius, so we can feel it all together.”