Chapter 17 #2
The black tentacle dissolved into darkness that crackled blue, charged with some unnamed magic.
Now hundreds of tentacles spread through darkness, as if it became them.
The eyeballs rolled along each tentacle while each appendage undulated and split into more, their ends squirming like long, spindly fingers.
“The Ancient One.” The hum turned into words that sounded directly in my head. “Jahanam, the Lord of the Abyss.”
The sirens clasped their hands together, then raised them over their heads in worship. I realized I was now free from their grip. I kicked my feet, quickly raking my hands through the water to swim up, up, up... Back to the world of the living.
I was not going to stay down here in the darkness.
I’d rather die on my way up to the surface.
A freezing cold chilled my feet, instantly making them grow numb. A tendril of chill travelled up my leg. Another one seized my knee.
“Warm...” The word didn’t come from the sirens’ hum. Neither was it spoken into my ear. It formed like a thought in my mind, a thought that brought an explosion of pain in my head.
I opened my mouth in a silent scream and arched my back, desperate to escape the icy grip on my legs. The black tentacles held me. Their touch seemed to prick through my muscles and scrape against my bones like claws.
“Warm,” the word pounded inside my head again. “Weak. And so eager to escape. Where are you going, you soft, pathetic slug?”
“Let me go!” I screamed in my head since I couldn’t scream through my mouth.
The tentacles slithered higher up my body. There were more than two now, and their number grew as more of the undulating appendages with wandering eyes emerged from the darkness.
“You’ve been given a privilege no human ever had,” the voice boomed with pain and resonance as my head threatened to explode. “You have the honor to gaze upon a god!”
I shoved my hands into my hair, clawing at my skull with my fingers and writhing in pain. I squeezed my head in my hands in fear that it would indeed explode into pieces.
The darkness split in the middle. Waves rippled from its center like a receding tide. Then a pair of giant eyelids opened, revealing an enormous eye in the middle of the cluster of black appendages. The eye stared at me, its pupil black like the barrel of a cannon.
“Behold the Ancient One of the Abyss!” the words burst through my brain. “May your weak human mind survive the splendid sight of my greatness.”
I really felt like I was losing my mind, but not from the “splendor” of the god, who frankly looked more hideous than great to me. The freezing sensation of his touch and the cacophony of his voice in my head were what drove me insane.
The cold crept up my thighs. It slithered between my legs, up my belly, around my torso... The tentacles circled my breasts, leaving a slime on my skin that the ocean water wouldn’t wash away.
“Get off me!” I shrieked in my head, then sank my nails into a tentacle, trying to rip it away from my body.
My fingers went into the soft flesh that wasn’t flesh at all. It felt more like thick mud. The substance spread when I pressed, then coagulated around my fingers, filling me with more disgust.
“Give yourself to me,” the god demanded, “and you will have your freedom when I’m done with you.”
Was he really going to let me go? Only what would be left of me once he was “done” with me?
The cold spread higher. The tentacles wouldn’t touch my neck, keeping away from the pearls. But they slithered up my cheeks. Crawled over my eyes. One wiggled between my teeth and into my mouth, making me gag.
My tongue grew numb with cold. Then tingles pricked the insides of my cheeks.
A million icy needles seemed to be stabbing my skin.
My nipples ached. The cold, heavy sensation low in my belly slowly dissolved into tingles too.
It wasn’t a pleasurable kind of tingling but the one I got when my leg fell asleep—painful and intense.
The sensation stabbed me through my core, making me double over in pain.
I could see from only one eye now, the other one was sealed shut with sticky slime I couldn’t blink away.
A tentacle vomited a string of black pearls out of its split end, then wrapped it around my chest. Another appendage released a long string of pearls too, winding it around my left leg.
“Give yourself to meeeee...” the god drawled with the rumble of an earthquake. Only I wasn’t sure if the bottom of the ocean really shook or if it was just my body that trembled from cold and terror.
The tentacles moved all around me. Their black shapes blended with the darkness, twisting it into an underwater tornado.
The blue light crackled like lightning, zapping my skin, as the strings of pearls snaked around me loop after loop.
They crisscrossed my torso, wound up my arms and legs, circled my wrists so densely, I feared I could no longer lift my arms with so many pearls weighing them down.
Indigo blue sparks skittered over the pearls—the dark blue light of the god’s magic.
More strings of black pearls coiled around my body. Fear that they would bury me under their weight sliced through me with panic.
“Stop!” I yelled in my head, opening my mouth in the futile attempt to scream.
I flailed my arms and kicked my legs until the tentacles dissolved and the blue light went out. The absolute darkness that followed was even more terrifying. I sensed movement all around me, but I could see nothing.
Panic blinded me. I kicked, thrashed, and swung my arms, with a single goal—leave here. Get back to the surface. Back to the light.
Disoriented, I didn’t know where up or down was. Was I swimming up? Or sinking instead?
But I no longer saw the cloaked shapes of the sirens or their god’s numerous eyes. A pale, decomposing face broke through the darkness instead.
“Going so soon?” The undead woman sneered, exposing her rotten teeth between her decaying lips.
I jerked away from her, kicking my feet harder. The weight of the pearls on my body seemed to drag me down. Yet the water felt lighter somehow. The darkness was no longer so absolute. It turned from pitch black to dark teal.
And then I finally surfaced, but not in the room with the black marble altar. Glass surrounded me instead. The large portrait of the royal family hung on one of the walls, with the long, shimmering string of magnificent pearls below it.
This was the great hall of Kye’s glass palace, and the only place I wanted to be right now. The usually stifling air in here didn’t feel even remotely as oppressing as the sinister waters of the dark Abyss. The dancing green and blue glow even felt welcoming to me now.
“Kye!” I called the only man I trusted in this entire fucking world.
His name reverberated under the high ceiling. At least, I had my voice again.
Moving my arms, heavy with loops of black pearls, I swam to the narrow ledge of the remaining floor in the hall. With my knees trembling, I climbed out of the water. My stomach spasmed. I gathered my hands and feet under me before vomiting a gush of black seawater.
Something long and dark slapped onto the glass next to me.
A tentacle! The monsters weren’t done with me yet.
“No!” I screamed in desperation, staggering to my feet.
Another tentacle slithered out of the water after me. It had no eyeballs, but a curved bone hook on its end. It lashed after me, aiming for my ankle and cutting off my way to the back of the palace with our old bedroom and the west tower.
My only way to Kye.