CHAPTER TWELVE
The stone on either side rubbed against my shoulders as we filed down the slippery stairs. Each scrape intensified the sweat dripping across my spine, the heaving and bile settling in my throat. The walls wept with moisture, glistening in the Noctis-powered light at my back.
Five thousand and two… five thousand and three… Was there even an end?
Pressure built behind my chest wall similar to the narrowing stone, and the breaths I managed to sip were short like needles prickling the organ. We descended for miles, the men shuffling sideways to fit through the further we traveled.
There had to have been another way.
“Want to play a game?” The god’s voice filled the corridor, and I shot him a glare over my shoulder. A game would become a distraction to the only thing holding me together—my mind searching for memories. “It will help. I promise.” If he noticed my trepidation, his face didn’t betray it.
I swallowed, the gesture of him trying to calm us fluttering deep in my stomach.
What was I thinking?
“If it’s like our card game, I’m down,” Calvin called out from the front of the line.
“Somewhat,” the god answered. “It’s called Light the Lie.”
“Ironic, coming from the biggest liar I know,” I muttered.
“We take turns holding the light and tell a tale. Inside the tale, you must fabricate one lie. If we guess the lie within the story, the light flares,” Noctis explained behind me, ignoring my remark.
He trailed the group but demonstrated the light flare, which illuminated another endless number of stairs before us. We all groaned.
It’ll never end, I whined in my head.
“So, you finally feel like telling us more than vague theater performances that provide nothing but drama?” Calvin jested.
Noctis hummed. “Maybe a little at a time. Good things aren’t meant to be rushed.”
“You go first,” Zahara ordered, the tension in her clipped, sharp words palpable, the ache of protection for her boys as we headed into the unknown.
“When I was eight, the divine council called me to my first meeting, one that was to bring judgement on an elderly man for attempting to mess with his fate. He found a sorcerer to fake his death, and it enraged the gods. They sent me on a search for him through Sindlewood and ordered for me to return with him dead. I found him with his family, but I couldn’t kill him.
When I returned, I told them I lost his body in the ocean.
It was the first time I betrayed the gods’ orders. ”
We descended in silence for a moment, all pondering which part of his story was untrue. Zahara guessed first.
“You can’t mess with fate. The man couldn’t have faked his death. The fates would have just cut his cord,” she declared, but the light remained dimmed.
“Incorrect. You can try to defy fate, but they’ll always know. Which is why I was sent to find him,” Noctis corrected.
Jun made his guess next. “You weren’t eight. That’s too young for them to send you on a mission that important.”
The light did not flare.
“You actually did kill him,” I guessed, but still the light remained unchanged. Maybe I was wrong about him.
Calvin waited, thinking for a minute before giving his guess. “It was not the first time you defied the gods’ orders.”
The glow multiplied throughout the chamber.
“I defied them the day I was born.” Joy laced through Noctis’s words, a lilt to the sentence.
We played for hours, each giving stories of ourselves that lowered the tension through the narrow corridor. They thankfully skipped me, a story not forming in my muddied mind to offer.
Once surrounded by nothing but shadows, a barely noticeable glimmer in the distance grew warmer and brighter. Like hope finally finding its voice. The flourishing light guided each step, a quiet assurance that the darkness was never meant to last. The exit neared.
My feet sunk deep into forgiving, sandy ground, a stark juxtaposition to the cobbled, cracking stone of the tunnel.
Knees locking to catch myself as I dropped from the staggered edge, Noctis’s grip wrapped around my bicep.
Heat immediately amplified in the opening, my eyes blinded at the influx of light.
The Shadeborne Bound.
What should have been relief of exiting the corridor only spiked immense panic.
A vast expanse of humanoid skeletons swayed in a suffocating, fevered breeze, each tied to metal spikes in the cracked ground.
As far as I could see. They clattered in a hollow rhythm, a sound too dry to belong to anything living.
Screams echoed over the brittle rattling of skeletal remains in every location, so scattered and far away that I couldn’t pinpoint who or where exactly they came from.
Flames erupted from our right side, billowing like fields of crimson flowers, burning the picked clean bones to charred ash. The fire worked its way over the ruins like waves of devastation. Heat radiated into our faces with strong gusts, scorching the hair that stood on my body.
What’d these people do to deserve this afterlife?
“Where is the piece of the trident, so we can get out of here?” I asked softly, scared that one of the fleshless bodies in the field might overhear.
“The only history books we have with it in record say it's guarded in the middle of the bones,” Zahara answered. “I should have reminded you all to bring extra blades.”
“If they’ll even work here,” Calvin ventured, voice tight as he unsheathed the sword along his back.
At the mention, I palmed my dagger, rotating it in my hand until it felt comfortable to grip.
One blade, thin and trembling in my grasp, poised to attack as if it could argue with what was coming; however, the awful knowing that it wouldn’t be enough settled deep in my stomach.
“Here,” Noctis said low at my side, offering another dagger from his own sheath.
My eyes trailed the blade first, then met his emerald gaze. There was something tucked far beneath his stare, flickering as if something in his eyes kept stepping back into shadow.
“You’re hiding something,” I shot, but Noctis’s lips only widened in a crooked smirk that didn’t reach his eyes.
“If there’s a secret, it’s only that I’ve started to hope again… and I’m just trying not to break under the fragility of that hope.” The scars along his jawline flared, catching my stranded attention.
His hand tried to gently close around mine as I reached for the dagger in his palm, but I turned ankle deep in the sand to join the crew who made their way further into the Shadeborne Bound.
If there was a secret, and he kept it from me again, I’d use the blades, including his own, to ensure I didn’t naively fall into his deceitful schemes again.
Knowing the blade alone wouldn’t kill him, I’d relish in the pain it’d bring.
Maybe that made me a bad person, or maybe it just proved I finally became ready to bite back.
We stalked slowly at first, Noctis shoving his sword into the eye sockets of the skulls hanging low at odd angles, knocking some of them to the ground and crumbling on impact.
“Just making sure,” he muttered to me with a scrunch of his nose. His disgust became palpable as he ventured widely around each bony structure.
“Does this Bound not have diplomacy? A ruler? People at all?” I asked as I scanned the vacant land, only hellish heat and charred bones occupying the Bound.
“King Wrenden rules Shadeborne Bound using the God of Death’s magic, Silethus,” Noctis answered. “Each Bound worships the god that reigns above them, and in return, that realm is gifted with magic as the god sees fit.”
“And what magic do the inhabitants have here?” I questioned further, trying to gauge what we were walking ourselves into.
“Many decades ago, it’s said that there were people who lived here within the realm to help run it.
And their magic was gruesome—control of blood and mind,” Zahara responded curtly over her shoulder.
“There are no inhabitants here now other than King Wrenden and the bodies you see around us. This realm is for the banished. The murderers. The evil people in the world. They are never granted a joyous afterlife.”
“Where is King Wrenden?” My tone dipped in uncertainty, trembling like the skeletons of the banished.
Calvin huffed. “If he didn’t have to rule this place, I’d want his job—traveling the Bounds in search of his next victim to bring here. In other circumstances, it might be enjoyable.”
Victim. “Do you consider each of these lives lost justified?”
“No,” Noctis responded firmly.
Our steps crunched in the sand, sweat dripping down my body, hair sticking uncomfortably to my face.
“It’s the reason we do not hesitate just coming in and taking their piece of the trident,” Jun answered quietly. “The other two Bounds will not be as easy.”
“Will the guards you all mentioned have powers?” I questioned.
No one answered beyond Zahara’s nod.
Great.
Bellows shattered my ears, desperate screaming in the realm that shook me to my core. We all froze mid step. Many voices, male and female, of all ages, in all directions. They bounced within my mind, ricocheting through the emptiness and taking root, dull murmurs staying behind.
If we survive receiving this trident fragment, I’m questioning the shit out of the crew on the next two Bounds, I thought, making the promise as I scoured for the source of the cries.
A soothing pull drew my soul inward, the rhythm unsteady, almost mocking, like it knew something I didn’t. My mind had always been my first weapon, even as the haze in my skull began chaining memories back where they belonged.
We hesitantly continued trudging forward, my legs trembling as we ascended a hill’s spine. Every movement slowed like rust creeping into the gears of an aging machine. The flames never advanced, but the heat bore into me until sweat copiously dripped along my body and into my eyes.