Chapter Forty-Three
‘Oh gods,’ I whisper, breath sticking like tar in my chest, at the sight laid out before us.
As young girls, Lillienne and I had a distinct obsession with building hideouts at the bottom of our cottage garden. Some days it would be a fairy house, others a storefront where we’d take turns to buy and sell imaginary goods.
Our favourite thing to pretend, however, was that our hide-out was an endless cave, Lillienne the hero venturing deep, stick-sword drawn in pursuit of treasure and riches, and I, the growling, relentless monster that guarded it all.
Our imaginings could never have conjured up something quite as terrifying as the cave the emperor’s men lead us through.
The spiking stone that drops from the ceilings like permanent, red icicles overhead.
The layers to the cavern, like the tiers of a theatre, with us shuffling with great caution across the open balcony, trying desperately not to focus on the void of the stage below.
Scattered fires, untamed by torch or sconce, wave their sharp orange fingers at us as we pass by, beckoning.
‘This has to be a trap,’ I say to Eliaz.
‘Only broken men rely on fear to control their people. Do not fall victim. You are safe, I promise.’
‘Says the master of torment himself,’ I mutter.
‘Low blow, Princess. I thought you had left such events in the past.’ He is smiling despite the hurtful tone of his echoing voice.
‘Keep moving,’ Finch orders, pushing at my side.
But something doesn’t feel right. I stop by a patch of flame in the ground, and crouch, hovering a hand over it.
No heat. Just cold, orange flames. My stomach drops to the floor.
I scan the surroundings, the crumbling dusty floor, the rubble of fallen stone spears scattered around us.
The gaping hole and the spiralling ledge around it. How unending it is. How empty it is.
The cave echoes with falling rocks crashing against the bottom of the pit. No footsteps. Ahead of us, where the rest of our group should be, nothing.
‘I can’t see the others. We were only a few moments behind them. Something isn’t right,’ I say to Eliaz, his hand still firm in mine. He is sheet white, his features twisted with something close to concern, he looks ahead of us as I just did, and then back to me, eyes searching.
‘Eira, listen to me, we’re all still here.
Everything’s fine, I promise.’ He takes my other hand, running his thumbs over my knuckles.
For a moment it is enough to calm me, staring into his eyes, finding reassurance there where I used to find resentment.
A howl of wind blows the chill of the fire into us, causing me to shiver, sobering me.
A desperate moan clutching to the air, weaving in and out the gaps in the wall, the red spikes.
With it, comes the smell of wet iron. Drip. Drip. Drip.
‘No,’ I retract my hands, tightening my arms across my waist, blocking him off from me. ‘You’re lying to me. I can’t see them. Something isn’t right.’
His face drops, brows knitted, cheeks taut and eyes searching. ‘Eira, what’s—’
‘Stop it, girl.’ Finch grabs my arm and attempts to tug me along. ‘You must keep going.’
The ground begins to rumble under our feet, disrupting the settled red dust in the air. A screech tears through the cavern, high-pitched and sharp. Familiar. A resounding snarl proceeds.
The hero has ventured too deep. The monster.
‘Lillienne!’ I scream, tearing myself from Finch. ‘I’m coming.’ Without a clear idea of where the source of her screams is, I break into a run, tripping on lumps of rock and charging through the bursts of glacial fire, my face and hair already damp with the tears of distress.
The only path I can follow is the one that leads down, the red trail bleeding into the dark void. Eliaz’s shouts are distant now, drowned by the sound of my pulse, the grating of dust in my lungs, the screaming.
The screaming. Like my mother did, the night they came.
The bad men. Mother. ‘Mother!’ I call out for her, my voice as it was then, small and whining, feeble.
The primal cry of a child seeking her mother.
I run faster, grabbing out into the air in front of me as though I can grasp the stringing screams and pull them towards me.
There are children giggling somewhere, above me, behind me. Snickering and laughing in that bubbly way innocent minds do. The scent of damp, upturned earth. Of grass. Of him. Ori.
‘Ori!’ It comes out little more than a strangled whisper.
My brother. Stay there. I will come for you, save you, let you back in.
An unseen dip in the ground swallows up my foot, and my ankle cracks, twists, and I fall to the ground.
Crying into the dirt. Clutching where the pain lies. My chest. My heart.
Oh Ori. Oh mother. Oh father.
You have all left me.
At one point all I knew was my family. A father that pressed kisses on my mother’s temple every morning.
A brother who would steal me treats from the kitchens even though he’d be reprimanded for it every time.
The parents who held me. The sibling who slept on the floor of my room on stormy nights. Come back to me, all of you.
I clamp my eyes tight and plead into the ground. ‘Please don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me.’ I am wrenched from my wallowing by a nudge at my shoulder, and I open my eyes to see a boot, black. Like everything around me. I must have made it to the bottom, to the void.
‘Get up.’
I blink up at the man, rubbing my eyes with disbelief. The dark beard, the roughness of his skin, the harshness of his countenance.
‘Father,’ I say, getting to my feet. ‘You came back for me.’
He looks past me. Through me. ‘I intend to see it through – they all must die.’
I snap my neck to where his gaze lands. There is no one there. ‘Father, it’s me, I—’
But when I turn back to him, he is gone. In his place, Eliaz, his face brimming with agony and exhaustion. Flecks of anger glint in his eyes.
‘Eliaz?’ My mouth moves but the sound comes from elsewhere, a mimic of my own voice from behind me. Eliaz walks right by me, as if I do not exist to him.
‘You have some nerve, Eira.’
He stalks over to a woman hunched over in the darkness. Her dark hair a waterfall of loose waves down her back. She looks up to him as he nears, face splotchy and wet. Eyes rimmed with red. She is me. And I am weeping. Over a body.
‘You picked the wrong side, and now you face the consequences.’
‘Get away from her,’ she – I scream, cradling the blood-soaked head of the deceased.
‘This is what happens, when you forget your place, forget who your people are.’
Eliaz pulls something from his pocket, a fine blade of metal, a dagger that extends and extends into the length of a sword. A scream pushes forth from my chest and hers. ‘No!’
Oh mother. Oh Ori. Oh father. Oh Eira.
A rush of cold air floods into my body through my gaping mouth, breathing on the embers that lie down there, in the pits of me, coaxing fire. It ignites in the beat of a heart. Waves of fire crashing into the walls of me. A tidal flame pulled by the moon of my balled-up emotion.
‘No,’ I say, just as the sword points its steel end to that other-me’s chest, where her heart is. Where her hope is. I erupt. Everything becomes fire. Everything that was, that is, that will be. Fire. Fire. Fire.
I am a beacon in the darkness of the void and I—
‘Eira!’ Lillienne screams, and I take one heaving breath, as though I have never used my lungs before.
We are not in the darkness at the bottom of the spiral. There is no other me, no sword pointed, eager to kill, no unidentifiable body. But there is an Eliaz, and he reaches out to me.
‘No,’ I retreat from him. He breathes a nervous laugh, confusion tugging at his brows, like he can’t quite believe his eyes at the action.
‘You set my dress on fire, Eira. What in the name of the gods is wrong with you?’ Lillienne says, kicking her leg out to show me the patch there on the hem, burned right through to her boots.
‘I think the real question here is how the fuck did she use her powers here?’ Cole pushes Lillienne and her smoking dress aside, to get to Eliaz. ‘You said she had to be in the vicinity of that damned Relic. And I see no such thing.’
We are still at the entrance to the cave, all spikes and no fires this time. No sudden drop into darkness, just levels and dips in the dusted red terrain.
When I turn my head, the atmosphere around me seems to slop and sludge like treacle, slow and viscous. When I flip my hands over to inspect them further it is laborious, the edges blurring with the movement.
‘She shouldn’t be able to,’ Eliaz says to Cole. ‘We’re two-hundred miles from Reyhen, never mind the fact that the Relic’s magic only extends to their protective borders.’
‘Her power was gifted right?’ Calli pipes up from Lillienne’s side. ‘Maybe that kind of magic stays with you somehow, even this far from the source.’
‘But she hasn’t used it until now, and she certainly had plenty of opportunities to use it in Umbra,’ Lillienne says, eyeing up Cole.
The dark-haired man in beige approaches from the gathering of his men, as they huddle, probably to discuss the risk of bringing a fire-wielding mad woman to their emperor. ‘Either we take you to our emperor right this second, or you head back where you came from. No more dramatics.’
‘We will come,’ Eliaz tells him with sincerity.
‘Lillienne.’ Her name falls from my lips as a tear escapes the brimming wetness of my eye. I don’t know exactly what makes me say it, but it feels bitter and sharp on my tongue, like desperation.
Everyone looks at me. Lillienne comes to me and wraps an arm over my shoulder. ‘Look, maybe this was all a really bad idea. It’s not too late to go back.’
‘We came all this way, we cannot leave now,’ Eliaz says through clenched teeth, holding back harsher words.
‘Can’t you see? She’s obviously not well.’
Calli bites on her cheek. ‘I’m sorry but I am with Eliaz on this one, we can’t just turn back because Eira doesn’t feel well.’