Chapter 10 #2
This creature is composed of ten arms, walking on its ten large, muscular, three-fingered hands.
It looks as if it has a severed neck, but that’s actually where five small, hungry mouths are.
A long, snake-like tongue flicks out into the air, tasting my scent as a horrendous screech rattles my bones.
It picks up the pace, teeth-like spikes along its elbows glinting red in the setting sunlight.
Fuck. This thing can definitely climb faster than me.
Holding my body weight with my left hand and foot, I reach for one crossbow bolt and put it in my mouth for backup.
Then, using my right hand, I free the crossbow on my back, which I had pre-loaded—a dangerous choice, but it hadn’t misfired along the course.
Loading even a small crossbow with one hand is a bitch.
The ball of arms and hands is hurtling towards my sweaty scent—where to aim?
I slow my breath as the monstrosity moves closer and closer, the gap between us shortening, just like the gap between my shaky breaths.
I notice pumping veins coursing up each arm, all meeting in one spot. That has to be the heart.
It’s closing in on me fast. My skin pebbles in the wake of a howling screech of delight, as if it can already taste my sinew along its whipping tongue. I steady my right arm as I gaze down the sight.
Trying to land on a pinpoint spot in a sea of moving arms is no fucking easy feat. I focus. Becoming the weapon Sully trained me to be, honing in on a rhythm to its movement, a pattern where my target becomes visible, again and again.
I breathe out. Three. Two. One. Shoot.
The bolt lands slightly to the right of my exact target. I spit out a string of curses. Celestials be dimmed. The fucking Fates are never on my side.
The pain rattles the Pykavow, freezing for a beat before its arms crawl up at a slower pace, black blood dripping from its wound. I lodge my crossbow on my thigh, dropping the arrow from my mouth. I need to climb—and fucking fast. I won’t survive if this thing catches me in its clutches.
I sling myself up to the next hold and then the next, rallying all my strength to bound upwards to the next rock jetting out of the mountainside.
The loud cracking of rocks crumbling beneath the monster below gets closer and closer.
I don’t have time to look down as I leap for the next rock and propel myself to the next hold.
I grasp the edge of the cliff, heaving myself up and over as I see the Pykavow just three feet below me.
I sprint to the stone door before loading my crossbow again and shooting another arrow slightly to the left of my previous mark.
Bullseye. It slows, blood now pouring from the second wound.
Surely I can use magic up here. Who would see?
Ugh, it’s not worth it. I’m not getting disqualified after all this Ritherin-shit.
My furious scream cleaves the air. Grabbing my short sword in one hand and my poison dagger in the other, I run straight at the beast. I leap onto the center mass of the Pykavow, using my poison dagger as a landing anchor.
Its hands violently grasp my legs and arms—my joints groan, burning in the stretch as it pulls me apart, its tongue slithering putrid, digestive slime along my neck.
Its five mouths snap greedily at my chest. I jam my short sword into the space between my arrows, gutting its heart wide open.
I dislodge my poison dagger from its body just as we begin to… fall.
The world spins in slow motion as my gut bounces from my head to my toes, over and over again. Maybe the Fates want a short life for me after all. I ponder my new fate as we tumble down the mountainside, the Pykavow’s arms still tearing at me, hunger consuming its last heartbeats.
I drop my sword, trying to grasp onto the rocky mountain with one hand, while frantically stabbing the cracks with the dagger in my other. Rock after rock crumbles beneath me. Crumbling like the broken bits of my shattered soul.
Finally, my dagger catches, snapping my middle and ring fingers backwards under the weight of the circular hilt.
Damn, I really liked those fingers. I let out a manic laugh as I consume the screech of pain that wallows in the back of my throat.
I find a hold for my left hand and both my feet. I’m about halfway down the mountain. Again. I glare upwards, unamused. No problem. Just have to climb the fucking mountain again, with a broken hand. Sarcasm drips with the sweat from my brow as I sheathe my dagger.
Holding my weight on the left side of my body, my teeth rip a piece of leather from my vest, and I wrap it around my fingers.
After making sure my mental shields are solid, I start to climb.
Yep, that fucking hurts, but I summon my darkness to feed off the pain.
Eventually, I become numb to it. I lumber on at a dreadfully slow pace. But hey, I’m still climbing.
Not today, death. Not today.
I sling myself over the cliff once more, narrowly avoiding slipping in the giant puddle of black blood on my way to the entrance carved into the mountainside. A stone door groans open, mist uncurling from the pitch within. Now for the hard part. A sardonic laugh creaks out of my chest.
I carefully maneuver through the Ethereal Maze of Whispers, navigating around the constantly changing stone walls, moving in all directions. The magic is tugging at my mind, scavenging for my worst fears in an attempt to break me just like a Wuvon would.
My next turn brings me into an open space. A spotlight strikes, lighting up a wooden chair. A chair I know all too well. My foster father’s laugh echoes.
His gangly body crawls around the edge of a wall. I dart straight for him, slitting his throat, and the illusion dissolves in front of me.
I come around another corner to a female with long, translucent hair and a dress adorned with the heavenly constellations from the night’s sky. She’s standing beside a male with dark hair and dark eyes. They’re smiling and singing to a baby in their arms.
Wait, is that supposed to be me? They look happy. Good for them. Maybe it would mean something if I ever knew them. I quickly walk through the illusion, waving my arms dismissively as it dissolves into dust.
A colorful, bright mist billows in front of me. I’m dressed in a stunning gown, smiling up at a dark-haired male. Are those tears of joy coming from my eyes? A dark laugh resonates from my hollow chest. The male is drawing a vow rune on the back of my hand.
Oh, no. Fuck this. I tear through the mist. It evaporates around me. Crackling sparks slash between my ribs, as if that illusion was something special. This maze is going to have to try harder to break me. I am not meant for pretty endings.
The twisting passages blur with each dizzying turn.
Turn after turn. I suck in a breath, shimmying between two walls right before they finish their turns, severing the passage.
My eyes squint as a light cleaves the eerie umber, pupils finally adjusting—the exit!
I’m so close, just another step, when a towering figure swells before me, taking on the shape of a bear with a smaller shadow below it.
I teeter closer and freeze, the illusion shimmering to life.
The smaller one is me, the night I met… Sully.
He stands young and healthy, full of life, with that big, stupid grin.
His hearty chuckle coils around me as my heart sputters and limps, attempting to beat again.
It’s not real Savaé! I scream to myself. But I want it to be real. I want it to be real more than anything I have wanted in my wretched life.
A new memory shimmers to life. Sully messing up my hair and calling me his little Starborne dragon. I want to reach out, wrap my arms around him, and never let go. It looks so real.
My heart fractures into a million pieces, slashing the inside of my chest into a stringy mess of sinew and crimson.
I miss him so much. Maybe I can just stay here, with my memories of him, in utter madness. That wouldn’t be so bad…
A haunted sound sunders the illusion—his serrated cough.
No.
No.
Not that fucking sound. Anything but that fucking sound.
I howl in agony. The walls of my glacial palace splinter under the weight of that sound, smashing what’s left of my frozen heart until the pieces are too small to ever hope to put back together again.
“Make it stop!” I scream, covering my ears.
But it doesn’t. The images uncurl. Him withering away. Second by second, in front of my eyes. I slam them shut, only for the sound of his labored breathing to scrape across the seams of my soul.
Then, a twisted version of my voice echoes across the moving walls.
“Why didn’t you do more for him? Why didn’t you bring him to a healer instead of continuing to train for the trials? You’re a selfish bitch.”
The voice morphs again, into my foster father.
“You are a curse upon this world. A vermin to be exterminated.”
The voice shifts into a warped version of Sully’s voice.
“You were just using me. You never loved me. You don’t even know what love is. All you do is take and take.”
“No, no, no! That isn’t true,” I scream in protest, covering my ears harder and squeezing my eyelids tighter as tears rip down my cheeks.
“You can never love or be loved. You have no soul. No heart. Anyone close to you dies. You are a curse. You beckon darkness to consume everything you hold dear.” The words of Sully’s warped voice reverberate in my head, like a broken melody, hauntingly stuck on repeat.
Perhaps the voices are right after all. I am curseborne.
I didn’t force Sully to go to a healer sooner.
I do not know how to love or be loved. How could I when all I have known is how to survive?
Maybe my love for Sully is just a well-crafted lie I told myself.
How could I let someone I truly love wither away like that?
My presence is a corrupting darkness, consuming all the light around me.
As the words repeat again and again, I latch on to the last sentence of his distorted threat, slashing me from my spiral.
I have already lost everything I hold dear.
I have nothing left to lose but my will to fight.
And oh, how the darkness inside loves to fight.
I suppose I do have something left after all.
A wicked grin curves up my lips. Sully taught me there is more to this world than darkness and terror. He taught me how to become a weapon. The villagers say fear turned my hair translucent, like a wraith. Perhaps I was the wraith all along. Forever a harbinger of death and destruction.
I will not let fear paralyze me. I need to fight. For him. For me. Just like he taught me. I have to get out of here alive.
I need to keep moving. I listen to my intuition, humming a song Sully used to hum by the fire at night, keeping the voices of the illusions out of my head.
“From the mountain tops to the valley low.
The moonlight guides us as the Mysticwoods grow.
A symphony of silence, the world holds its breath as the heavens crumble, a Celestial death.
Oh, the stars are falling. Hear their call.
Dancing like firelights in the night's soft thrall. With all their shimmer, a wish takes flight, in this enchanted realm where day kisses the night. And with their love, a power born, full of dreams they do not mourn.”
A rough surface bites into my palms, fingertips fumbling along chilled crevices and notches.
Searching for any chance of escape. Click.
A stone door releases with a grumbling groan as light spills in.
I open my eyes to a beautiful view. Snow-capped peaks of Eldoria pierce the late sunset clouds to my left, curving to fall into the Dragon Spine Mountains before ending along the eastern border of the Amberwood below.
I have survived my second trial.
Or have I?