84. Rorax
White fire torches sporadically lit the walls of the tunnel, giving the shaft an eerie gray cast. Rorax followed the tunnel for what seemed like miles, fighting to keep her breath steady as she pressed on. She smelled damp earth and decaying foliage but didn’t hear any noises or detect any creatures scuttling about.
Finally, after what felt like hours of trudging through the gray passage, the tunnel gave way to a cave—giant, dark, and unending. It was so impenetrable, she couldn’t see her hand in front of her face, but she kept taking hesitant, careful steps forward. Where was the Oracle? She felt a faint stir in the air and detected soft movements ahead of her.
“Your energy . . . It is familiar to us. An old energy.” The darkness in front of her whispered. The sound seemed to seep around her, surrounding her on all sides.
Rorax froze, and her heart started beating a mile a minute in her chest.
“What is your name?” the darkness breathed.
“Rorax Greywood,” Rorax answered, taking a step back, and looking around desperately for something for her eyes to lock onto. There was nothing, only blackness.
“We will forage through your memories, your thoughts . . . to ensure you are worthy to be a Contestar.”
White, cold mist erupted on both sides of her, and before she could move, two sets of cold, slimy hands grasped her arms. Rorax could finally make out two shadowy figures on either side of her through the mist. She opened her mouth to scream, but before any sound came out, she felt the Oracle tiptoeing around her mind the same way Tressa had done weeks before.
A thrill of fear raced down her spine. She struggled harder. She didn’t want to be forced through her memories. She didn’t want to relive her training, the Siege, she didn’t want to see the Wolf.
Rorax squeezed her eyes shut and did whatever she could think of to push the Oracle away from her mind, but no matter what she did she couldn’t push the Oracle all the way out.
However, it seemed that no matter what the Oracle did, no matter where it went, or how hard it pushed and pushed and pushed, it couldn’t find a way into her mind.
There was a long silence, as the Oracle continued to press into her subconscious.
“Let me in, Pup,” the Oracle finally hissed from all around her.
At the nickname, Rorax felt a deadly calm steal over her.
“How do you know that name?” Rorax asked the darkness, watching the white mist writhe in frustration before her.
The Oracle didn’t say anything, but the pressure increased around her head. It was going to crush her skull. She had been the one chosen to die today. But if the Oracle had ever seen inside her mind, it hadn’t even given her a chance.
The unfairness of it all threatened to clog her throat. Someone must have told the Oracle who she was, what she had done, and now the Oracle was trying to kill her.
But if this was all the power the Oracle had, Rorax wouldn’t be dying today.
Rorax wrenched an arm away from the slimy hands grasping her, grabbed a knife at her belt, and shoved it up into the misty face of one the shadow guards. The misty shape grunted, then disappeared into a puff of black smoke. She swiveled and did the same to the guard on her other side and it disappeared, too.
“RESTRAIN HER!” the Oracle screamed, the sound reverberating and echoing all around her.
Rorax turned and tried to sprint back the way she had come, but another shadow guard materialized in front of her. She slit where she thought its throat would be, and it, too, dissipated into a puff of smoke.
She sprinted, arms pumping, for the mouth of the tunnel. The cave had become lighter, or maybe Rorax’s eyes had adjusted, but she saw the black hole, the abyss in the middle of the cave. She sprinted around it and headed toward the tunnel’s entrance.
Rorax was only a few strides away, but a guard appeared next to her and slammed her head with the butt of a blade with enough force that she went flying.
When she hit the ground, Rorax landed close enough to the abyss that black gravel and rocks scattered from the impact and flew over the edge of the cavern, disappearing over the cliff and into the darkness.
Fear burned through her and Rorax shoved her way to her feet.
Four more vaporous guards appeared in front of her, holding their swords, approaching closer.
She took a step back and felt the ledge behind her.
Rorax hissed.
“Let us in, or we will throw you over the edge.”
“I don’t even know how to let you inside,” she snapped, speaking to the ethereal voice.
The Oracle was silent for a moment, as if thinking. “Just imagine pushing open one of the corners of your mind. Push it open, like you’re lifting the shell of a clam.”
Rorax looked over to where she thought the Oracle was. “I’ll try to let you in if you vow you’ll look at my memories first before you try to do me harm.”
The Oracle paused, as if assessing the bargain and Rorax herself. “I so vow,” it finally said.
Rorax spent the next thirty minutes pushing. Pushing and pushing and pushing until some little corner at the edge of her mind seemed to agree to let the Oracle in.
The Oracle seeped into her consciousness gleefully, right before it dragged her through all her worst memories. Through her most brutal moments. Through her darkest deeds. Through the capture of her brother.
A sob, a true anguished sob ripped through Rorax. Then another, and another until her throat felt ravaged. She swore she could still hear the echoes of her brother screaming her name, so she covered her ears, desperately trying to block the sound, rocking back and forth on her knees.
Tears streamed down her face, and she couldn’t stop them.
She grabbed her hair knife and slit open her palm, using her old technique to focus her mind, hoping the pain would help her sharpen her senses, but it wasn’t real pain, and it didn’t help lessen her anguish.
She just watched as the blood dripped down into the dirt. The same sound Sahana’s blood had made when she’d died.
The Oracle stood above her, draped in smoke and gray rags. It didn’t have any eyes but a gray fabric that stretched over the open sockets where its eyes and nose would be, but it had a mouth. A mouth that was open and full of rotting teeth, laughing at her as her memories brought back the horror of Volla’s corpse, laying in the dirt, staring lifelessly into the sky.
Rorax screamed and the memories switched to a balcony—familiar and in nearly all her nightmares when she dreamed about the Siege of Surmalinn.
Rorax bit back a sob as she looked down, and even her bloody handprints were there. The dark red blood visible against the light gray stone.
“See how many you have been responsible for killing, Pup?”
The Oracle pointed an old, gray-skinned finger to a woman lying on the stones at Rorax’s feet, her blood pooled on the ground under her cheek, her throat slit. Next to the woman lay a pile of bodies, but Rorax refused to look. She couldn’t for fear she would break.
Rorax’s throat burned, her heart burned, and she turned to the Oracle. “Is the tour over?’
“One more.”
The scene changed again, and then Rorax was kneeling in the main square in Surmalinn. The giant clocktower above her was on fire, and in danger of collapsing at any moment.
And there she was, stalking the Wolf on a street near the main square.
Rorax’s heart lurched in her chest as she took in the Wolf’s long, soft brown hair. Hair she had buried her face in as a child; the long willowy limbs that had soothed as many hurts as she had caused; the lips that had taught her so many things about survival. Her old trainer. Her old caretaker. Her mother.
“You’re wrong about this place, Wolf,” the Rorax in her vision spat. “There are no weapons here.”
“They have lied to you, Rorax, and you believed them. You have been lost.” The Wolf sounded sad, like she, too, was in mourning as she prowled around her. “This city must fall.”
But something about the casual way the Wolf dismissed the city, and the innocent lives there, snapped something inside of Rorax now. She focused on the scene in her head and came to herself in the present. The Wolf had been wrong, and through Rorax’s actions in killing the Wolf, she had saved thousands.
Rorax had had enough. She was done suffering for her mistakes.
She’d been the only person who could have stepped in during the Siege, and again she alone found herself in the position to protect the next Guardian.
Shakily, Rorax got to her feet then drew her sword. She took in two ragged breaths before she turned and stabbed the Oracle.
The sword sunk deep into the Oracle’s fabric-covered body, and she must have connected with something corporal because the Oracle screamed. The flaming buildings surrounding them in her mind shuddered, and Rorax could feel the Oracle thrashing around her mind, desperately trying to find a way out of Rorax’s cage. The Oracle in front of her shuddered in pain, so Rorax twisted the sword in its body until it screamed again, thrashing even more.
“LET US OUT,” the Oracle finally screamed, once again the sound all around her.
Rorax smiled manically, going even deeper. “You tried to trap me here. You tried to break me. Without even looking into my mind first. You broke your vow.”
She twisted her sword, dragged it down slightly, and the Oracle howled in agony.
Rorax cupped the back of the Oracle’s lumpy, hood-covered head, and brought it closer so she could whisper into its ear. “If you don’t let me out of this cave, I will kill you.”
Rorax knew only a blood oath would protect her once she let go of the Oracle. “Do you have any blood?”
The Oracle snarled but finally nodded.
“You’re going to take a blood oath. You are going to tell me what I need to know, what you would have and should have told me. Then I am going to let you go and you will leave me, unharmed and alive, to get out of this cave and to the safety of my Protectorate and then you will confirm to the Guardian that I have passed the trial.”
The Oracle nodded, taking in deep, hissing breaths. “Yes. Yes, we agree. Take our blood.” The Oracle used one of its own dirty, cracked nails to slice into its palm.
Rorax slapped her bloody palm on the Oracle’s gray blood that trickled out of its wound, and a shudder of magick traveled through Rorax’s veins as the agreement settled into her bones.
Rorax pulled her sword out of the Oracle’s shoulder, and the creature screamed again.
“Now let us out,” the Oracle whined.
“Tell me what I need to know first,” Rorax said through gritted teeth.
The Oracle hesitated for a moment before it trembled, and its voice seemed to fracture into more than one vocal sound—the volume of it amplifying as if thirty people were speaking to her simultaneously. “All roads that lead out of the Choosing are being closed to you, Contestar. The King of Alloy will betray you. The Prince of Death is not who he seems. You will need the thorn of the sea. The Realms will fall without your blood. Do not release the Star.”
The Oracle broke the bindings and staggered back, heaving in breaths.
“Is that it?” Rorax snapped.
The Oracle hissed in anger. “For now, that is all the Scribbler has shown us, now let us out.”
Rorax narrowed her eyes before lifting the corner of her mind and shoving them both through.
As soon as she had released them both from her mind, Rorax twirled to face the Oracle, only to feel another butt of a blade hit her across the temple and have darkness swallow her.