Chapter 6 Daesra #2
I would rather part his head from his neck while his back is to me, but instead I banish my sword—which would be useless in such close quarters—and follow him, my claws flexing readily at my side.
Maybe I should have tried killing him first, but he is supposedly the gatekeeper.
If he died, perhaps the passage would never open for me.
Sure enough, when we make our way into the cave, the rock face is gone and only darkness awaits. As he ducks into it, he says, “Make sure to follow the sound of my voice if you lose me.”
In situations like these, I really miss my ability to summon fire from nothing—to see by or to kill by. Being a god of chaos isn’t that useful. In fact, it’s downright unhelpful most of the time. Being a daemon came with far more practical abilities. And if I’m a monster either way…
No, best not to follow that path, in my mind or otherwise. I need to find Sadaré, and she needs to be able to recognize me when I do.
“How do I know you’re not leading me astray?” I mutter, weaving around the rough walls when they lean in, the tunnel growing darker as they narrow.
“If I didn’t want you to reach the underworld, I wouldn’t have bothered guiding you in the first place.
And if I wanted to harm you, I would keep doing exactly as I am, since what we’re headed for is worse than anything you’d find in this cave.
” He somehow sounds ruthlessly matter-of-fact and brightly optimistic at the same time.
“That’s… comforting.”
I catch his casual wave in the deepening shadows. “Besides, you can’t make it back out if you don’t even make it in.”
“Ah, so this is all for the sake of my pieces,” I muse.
“I would honestly prefer you whole and hale.” His eyes glint as he glances back at me with sly humor. “The underworld isn’t for the faint of heart. I won’t fault your courage if you want to return immediately upon arrival.”
“No, I’m sure you wouldn’t,” I respond dryly.
“This cave is still quite dangerous, so stay close. Feel free to take my hand.”
“I feel very free not to.”
Nonetheless, I pick up my pace in the darkness despite not wanting to get any nearer to him than I have to.
Pogli has obviously gotten the message since he’s so close to me that he’s partially underfoot and almost tripping me with every step.
He whines faintly, obviously scared, so I don’t shoo him out from under me.
Maybe his eyesight is terrible. I wouldn’t be surprised.
At least my godly eyes can see well in the dark, nearly as well as my daemonic eyes could. I wonder if that’s a function of all gods or just me, ever unique, with my evident proclivities better suited to the nighttime.
Lasciviousness. Murderousness. Madness. All one would need in addition to my presence is copious wine, a willing human sacrifice, and maybe some blood-covered witches dancing around a bonfire, and the perfect scene would be set.
Despite myself, I nearly laugh as I imagine Sadaré’s expression if I asked her to drench herself in animal blood and dance around a bonfire for me. But then I remember she might actually agree to something so outlandish with my newfound, questionable inspiration… and then I remember she’s dead.
Suddenly, all I can see are her unblinking green eyes. Her too-pale lips.
My foot catches on a rock in the near-total darkness, and I might have fallen if I hadn’t fetched up against the walls, which are now pressing in so close they catch on my tunic and scrape along my skin.
I’m nearly wedged, but I don’t care. The sudden ache of her loss is nearly enough to make me scream.
Her laughter, silenced. Her neck, bruised. Her ring, taken.
“Don’t stop.” Orseus’s voice echoes from up ahead. “The cave wants you to stop.”
“I’m coming,” I pant more to Sadaré than to him, despite his eerie warning. I force myself through the gap, even though I would rather fall to my knees and weep for her. Or for me. Or for the people I’ve already killed since I lost her. “I’m coming.”
“Mm, say that again,” he purrs.
“Fuck you,” I snarl, lurching after him unseeing. Fury scorches away my despair, just like before. I still have enough presence of mind to duck to feel for Pogli to make sure he’s following.
“Are you offering?” Orseus taunts.
If I could have caught him in the darkness, which is now all-consuming to match my anger, I would have ripped him open. I surge forward, cramming myself through the tightest crevice yet, baited by his laughter.
Just as I realize he might be goading me on purpose, trying to get me to follow faster, I come bursting out into near-blinding light—and fall flat on my face in sand. Pogli comes tumbling after, huffing and sneezing after he lands.
“We’d better not be back on the same beach,” I groan, spitting sand out of my mouth, “because then I will definitely kill you.”
“Look around, my petulant, ungrateful friend, and behold.”
I roll over onto my elbows, blinking and struggling to make out my surroundings as my eyes adjust. And then I wish I could close them again.
Only a short way down the white-splotched, ashen sand of the beach, dark waves froth and crash hungrily, lapping toward my feet. Black clouds dominate the threatening sky—which is yet nowhere near as threatening as the iron-gray sea below.
No, this isn’t the same beach.
In the distance, ruins rise above the waves like teeth in a broken jawbone, so far away they could be lost cities.
This is one of those dead, desolate ocean views I saw from a safe distance through an impossible window in the maze, except now I’m in the frame.
I spot something within one of the closest waves, too much like a drifting arm with flesh hanging off it.
It almost seems to undulate on its own, though I tell myself it’s just the ebb and flow of the water.
I still shift away uneasily, and my elbow crunches disconcertingly into one of the white patches on the sand, kicking up the smell of salt and unmistakable rot. I look down.
I’m surrounded by bones. So many bones. Fragile fish bones, dainty animal bones, human finger bones, apparently deposited by the waves.
Those closest to me are of the smaller variety, but as I scramble up and away from them with more haste than dignity, shaking sand out of my tunic, I spot bones as big as tree trunks farther up the beach, along with actual bleached-out tree trunks.
The beach is heaped with the bones of whatever once lived.
Orseus stands nearby, regarding me coolly now, with no lust in his gaze or his voice. “I think thanks are in order. You only made it through there because of me. You got caught up in the grief of death.”
Grief that I replaced with fury. That was rather more to my credit than his, though he did nearly irritate me to death. His death.
“Yes, well…” I begin hesitatingly, and then snap, “Pogli, stop that!” My attention skips to the little chimera, who is digging and wrenching at a bone in the sand that looks distinctly like a human arm.
I glance back at Orseus a little apologetically, as if this were his beach, his bones. “Right. My thanks?”
He only smirks in response.
I can’t help looking over my shoulder in the direction we came from. There’s nothing but upward-sloping sand until it meets distant scrub at the head of the beach—which is dead, of course. There’s no cave. No opening of any kind.
“Seeking the way back already?” Orseus steps forward, gesturing. “I can show you—”
“No, no.” I wave him off. “It’s all just… disorienting.” I sidle a few more steps up the beach, away from the waves. “It’s all very… dead.”
His smile is knowing. “Not everything.” And then his brow furrows. “Well, if you want to be perfectly precise, everything is dead, but not yet resigned to the fact. Many of the underworld’s inhabitants are still quite lively in their own way. Hungry.”
Even the sea looks hungry—no, it’s the very essence of fathomless hunger. It seems as though it could swallow the entire world and wouldn’t be satiated.
I gaze upon the ruins with sinking dread. Maybe it has swallowed worlds. I back even farther away.
Until Pogli yelps in alarm nearby, and I spin toward him.
He’s no longer trying to dig up and chew on the arm since a stringy hand has unearthed itself and is now gripping his hind leg with sharp, skeletal fingers.
Unfortunately, the arm is also attached to a shoulder on the opposite end, which has much more tissue and apparently more strength, and is pulling Pogli toward it as he ineffectively scrabbles in the sand and flaps his mostly useless wing to get away.
A bulge begins to rise behind him right where a head would be buried.
Even if it’s more of a skull, it might still have teeth.
I’m moving before I’m thinking, my sword coming free from the air and into my hand.
I don’t even pause to appreciate that I still have it here, though I suppose it’s a part of me.
Just as clumps of lank, soggy hair break the surface, followed by an eyeless gaze from the black pits of empty sockets, I slice the thing’s arm off at the shoulder and sweep up Pogli in the same motion, dislodging the clinging hand.
I turn, ready to stab it though the back of the skull—only to find it facing me at entirely the wrong angle for its neck.
As much flesh falls away from it as sand, and its lipless mouth indeed gapes with scraggly rows of broken teeth.
So I take the thing’s head clean off its oozing, pock-ridden shoulders. The head goes bouncing along the beach, flinging globs of black goop from its neck hole until it rolls to a stop, still dribbling. The stench is beyond foul. I would cover my nose, but I’m holding both my sword and Pogli.
I face Orseus with an expression of complete revulsion.
He winces in what I first take for sympathy, but then he says, “I wouldn’t have done that if I were you.”