Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
Aela gasped awake and immediately coughed up a lungful of sand. She pushed herself up with a wince, struggling to work moisture back into her throat. Her mind reeled as it came back to reality after dreaming, where darkness lurked everywhere she went.
Aela panted and blinked several times, but everything was still dark.
Her captor dumped her in a nondescript room.
Rust and decay permeated the air, blending with the arid scent of sand.
Aela released the damper on her starlight a trifle and glowed until she bathed the room—the cell—in a soft light.
The chamber had two entry points: a wooden door and a larger solid iron gate on the opposite side.
Aela rushed to the doorway, trying the handle.
It didn’t budge, and the slat at the top was sealed shut.
She glanced at the iron gate and opted to move onto the rough walls first, seeking a seam or crack or something she could pry open to hatch an escape.
The thick walls of the cell felt impregnable, and when nothing but bedrock met her frantic hands, she resisted the urge to scream.
She was trapped.
Aela ran her thumbnail along her bottom lip as she paced her cage. No way out. No way out. No way out. All at once her internal thoughts spiraled into a memory.
“Hurry!” a feminine voice called. Her mother’s voice. “They’re coming!” A terrible shake rattled the building as dirt and dust rained from between the worn stones in the curved ceiling.
“You must get her to safety. It has to be now, Epsilon!”
A warm hand tugged Aela from her hiding place beneath the floorboards.
She and her parents raced along the corridor and came to a halt by an arched window overlooking a massive body of water that reflected the pitch-black sky above them.
Striations of light caught her attention as star after star zipped into the sky, the tail of their light a farewell.
Aela’s fingers raked through her ashy-gray hair, getting caught in her disheveled braid.
“Fates!”
She struggled to control her breathing and master herself. Aela ran through everything that had happened since arriving in Avarice.
I might not even be in Avarice anymore. Aela shook her head. No, I’m still in Avarice. The Minori said the Sagittarians would be held for The Games.
Aela swore again and kicked at the sandy ground, sifting more sand into her threadbare boots.
She needed to focus. Aela closed her eyes, dimmed her light, and planted her feet.
She brought her hands up to clutch the quartz dangling from her neck and forced her body to relax.
After a few rounds of deep breathing, she roused the cunning celestial who had survived isolation on a desert planet.
Aela licked her lips and called to her power. Energy filled her veins, but she hesitated. What was she to do? Unleash lightning in her cell? It dawned on her then what had heralded her arrival to Avarice.
“So much for going undetected,” Aela murmured.
Whoever Kaitos wanted to deliver her to likely already knew she was in the Taureon city.
A loud impact sounded from the iron gate, followed by muffled grunting and clanging.
Aela’s heart flew into her throat, and she bit down on the inside of her lip to keep from screeching.
A pointed scream pierced through her iron confinement before it was suddenly cut off.
She cautiously approached the gate and pressed her ear against it.
For several moments, Aela stood there pressed against the gate and listened to the muffled, continuous roar outside.
While she had received basic combat training, what felt like an eon ago on Solara, in the century she spent on Prente, she hadn’t trained in weaponry.
Not once. As an Heir, she had been instructed on how to defend herself should her guards fall or her power wane.
Though she was young at the time of her instruction, they were lessons she would never forget.
She was her own last line of defense. Perhaps the one advantage she had heading into a fight for her life was her speed.
Her body was toned from her runs in the desert, work in the mines, and climbs across The Spine—so she was far from being out of shape—but it took a different level of training and dedication to be a warrior.
“By the Unrested,” she spat the curse without thinking and slammed a hand against the wall beside the gate.
Turning away, she placed her hands on her hips, letting out a bitter laugh. Aela hadn’t invoked a curse at the Gods since she was a youngling—which she had made sure to utter outside the earshot of her mother and tutors.
The Gods didn’t deserve even that level of acknowledgment from her.
Her slip was telling of how rattled she was, as she usually favored cursing the Fates instead.
Sensing that her time to compete in The Games was near, Aela tunneled into herself, compartmentalizing her unease while pacing the perimeter of her cell again.
She let her braid loose and attempted to tame the gnarled mess of her ashy hair before reweaving the strands into submission.
The Gods had never answered her prayers, and she wasn’t about to give them any other piece of her.
They might have made the stars, granting them power and dominion over all other life in the realm, but as far as she was concerned, any semblance of faith was shattered the moment the Gods abandoned them.
No omnipotent being should have the right to walk away from something they brought into existence. Slim chance I’ll have at holding them accountable.
Aela huffed a wry breath, eyeing the iron gate once more.
During her years toiling under the dual suns of Prente, she had mulled over why the Gods might have abandoned their creations instead of wiping them out and starting anew if the stars had so egregiously displeased them.
She could surmise the cruel reasoning behind the celestial’s curse to be set in an orbit—the stars had rebelled against them after all.
But the Gods’ absence begged the question: why did they truly leave?
Their curse and exit felt a lot like a retreat. What would cause the Gods to run?
Aela’s thoughts continued their path around her mind as her feet continued theirs. She finished her braid and smoothed her hands down the rippled texture. She felt calmer now, having walked off her anxiousness. Even though she was detained, she was a survivor.
She had Ascended. She had fallen to a foreign planet amidst humans who would rather see her chained and used to gain status with masters who didn’t remember they existed. She had stared down hopelessness and refused to break. She learned to live in the silence of waiting.
Aela flared brighter and took in the details of her cell. She had escaped a much larger and hotter prison than this. No Goddess of her Line had swooped down into Prente’s atmosphere and delivered her back home. Fate might have watched out for her, but she had done it on her own.
If anything deserved her prayers, it was that fabric, the essence of the realms that filled in the gaps of what the Gods created.
Now that, she could believe in. That uncontrollable, unidentifiable, and unexplained source of magic that wasn’t tainted by the Gods.
Where else could her other gift have come from?
Fatesblessed. Aela muted her thoughts and homed in on the most pressing tasks before her: survive The Games, get home, and stay hidden.
Aela pulled her light into herself and leaned against the wooden door of her cell, training her gaze on the iron gate as she contented herself to wait. She would place her trust in the Fates and see the hand they dealt her.
Before long, rusted hinges sprang to life and creaked something awful.
Aela covered her ears and watched as buttery light spilled into the chamber.
As the gate reached its full capacity, the sound from outside her cell came roaring in with an assault of light.
After the ominous creaking subsided, there was nothing to do but accept whatever the Fates dealt her.
She rolled her shoulders back, brought a hand up to her chest—a promise to get home—then lifted her hand in front of her face to shield the glaring light as she walked forward out of the cell.
The deafening roar she heard from within her cell was from thousands of bodies that lined a stadium arena. Nausea churned in her gut as any doubt fled her mind that she wasn’t a contestant in the blood sport.
The Games.
Pale white quartz columns were staggered throughout the sandy arena, reaching high into the air at varying heights.
Her gaze trailed upward, noting connecting bridges that spanned the expanse of the sky, joining the columns together.
Aela walked toward one, which wasn’t purely cylindrical; none of them were.
Upon closer inspection, they were sculpted in the likeness of beings—celestials or Gods if Aela had to guess—and stood proudly, supporting the quartz overpass above their heads.
She did a quick tally of the columns and stopped counting after twelve.
Not the Gods then.
Caught unaware by the stonework’s captivating beauty, Aela didn’t hear the communal intake of breath from the crowd until near silence enveloped her.
Whirling around by some deep-buried instinct, Aela ducked and rolled just as a spear lanced into the column.
Her gaze darted to the gate to her cell, now firmly closed again.
She hadn’t heard it close. Aela’s eyes widened and she scrambled away from the spear vibrating from the impact into the quartz sculpture.
Frozen in place, Aela stared at where her body should be impaled.
The crowd’s cheer was bloodthirsty, though some voices cawed in a minor tone. With a curse, Aela spun around, seeking her attacker. All she saw was the forest of celestial columns.
“Fates,” Aela cursed and lunged for the spear.