Chapter Sixteen #2
Elara watched through the Moon’s eyes, stricken, as Ariete stood, pacing the room while he thought. Then, finally, he turned and held out a hand to her.
‘It’s a deal,’ he said. She clasped his offered hand but gasped as Ariete jerked her forwards. ‘But, Moon,’ he murmured into her ear, ‘once you have relinquished this power, I can promise you I won’t give it back.’
She shook her head, pulling away. ‘I don’t want it. All I want is to live a life with my Sun and not be tortured by immortality—to never feel his touch.’
Ariete nodded. ‘Tomorrow, be here. I will rally the Stars, make them think we’re revolting. Most resent your rule as much as I do. We will bind you first, then the others. The Dark last.’
‘You can’t breathe a word of this to anyone. They must think this is all your doing. And you let us escape, you hear me? You give us a head start once we’re bound.’
Ariete nodded once. ‘It won’t be painless.’
Elara felt herself stiffen. ‘I know. But the pain will be worth it.’
Ariete shrugged, turning to the door. ‘I hope for your sake it is.’
The Moon bowed her head, and Elara’s view was met with her hands clasped tightly in her lap, jewels adorning every finger.
‘Oh, and before I forget,’ Ariete said, and the Moon raised her eyes.
Ariete extended a card between two fingers.
She took it, the familiar red-and-black foil shimmering in the light.
Ariete’s eyes flashed from red to hazel as a different voice echoed through him.
‘Your future,’ Isra’s voice purred, so disconcerting in Ariete’s body.
Elara turned the card over, still sitting on the throne, still the Moon, as Ariete began to stroll down the throne room. She recoiled, though her body wouldn’t move.
‘Death’ was written in a curling script, and the image showed a skeletal horse with a rider atop it.
The rider was a woman—hair ink-black and flowing, the face grotesquely blank with no features at all as it stared eerily back at her.
One hand was raised, and shadows poured from it. Gods, it looked…it looked like her.
Elara scanned the rest of the card and saw in the background a body, and a figure hunched over it, corpses surrounding them both. The hunched figure seemed to be crying. She peered closer, morbid fascination taking over as the card began to whisper to her, calling her in.
Elara shivered, trying to pull away from the card.
But colour began to seep out of it, tendrils of it wrapping around her as it pulled her in, the surroundings shifting once again from blues to greens and browns and reds.
She looked up once to the now familiar throne room, Ariete with his back to her, hands in his pockets as he reached the door.
But just as the room spun, the Ariete from this memory seemed to turn his head and look right at Elara.
The world shifted, and Elara tumbled into the next card.
She cowered instantly, the sound of battle assaulting her.
The sky glared red, lighting a battlefield—barren and coated in mud and blood.
She looked around her. She was kneeling in the dirt as the cries of the dying reached her.
Her face was wet, body shaking, and Elara realized she was crying.
Her shoulder throbbed and, looking at it, she saw blood pouring out of a wound.
But then her body became aware that her arms were in the air, holding something up.
She raised her head, seeing what was held between her hands.
A sword, its hilt curled like a dragun, a sapphire the size of an egg at its centre, its blade pointed down.
She trembled, tears still falling down her cheeks as her eyes followed the blade, finally seeing who was beneath her.
Ariete coughed, a shadow wisping from his mouth, glittering blood and dirt marring his face.
‘It’s okay,’ he said, his tone soft, and the Elara within, who was observing the whole thing, jolted, the tone so foreign in the god of wrath’s voice. ‘You have to do this.’ Blood and shadow leaked from the corner of his mouth, seeping outwards.
‘I can’t,’ Elara wept, her arms shaking as she held the sword there.
‘It’s the only way.’
‘But what about—’
Ariete gripped Elara’s armour, hauling himself up as he cut off her sentence. ‘To die by sword in battle is honourable, Elara. I welcome it. Please. Before the shadows take me too.’
He coughed again, and Elara could feel it then—the vile energy that poured from his mouth in heavy black smoke. It smelled like decay, felt like death.
Elara squeezed her eyes shut, heard her name being roared by someone on the battlefield.
‘It was always supposed to be you,’ he croaked, and he reached for one of her shaking hands.
She prised it from the sword, and he pressed something into her palm.
She blinked through her tears, seeing a card in it.
‘Your present,’ Isra’s voice murmured between his lips, and Elara gripped it, the overwhelming sense of grief suffocating as she turned it over, the life in Ariete’s red eyes slowly leaving him.
‘The Devil’, the card read. The painting showed Ariete, curling ram horns growing from his temples, his eyes closed, a faint smile on his face, his arms raised in supplication.
Yet attached to those hands were two golden ropes and a prisoner on either side of him, kneeling, the ropes around their throats.
One was Elara, eyes empty as she stared up through the card.
And the other…Her heart called out, wailing, as she saw Enzo, face devoid of hope as he looked right at Elara.
The world spun once more, colours making way for purple and red as they blurred and swam, before Elara opened her eyes, gasping as she was thrown back into the fortune-teller’s tent.
Ariete was sitting across from her, not Isra. The god was turning the Devil card in his hands, a sharpened canine glinting as he grinned, watching her. But more than that, he wore a cord around his neck, golden and glowing. Enzo’s tether.
‘You,’ Elara snarled and launched herself across the table at him.
Ariete leaped back as he laughed, the Devil card still in his hand.
The table upended, and Elara was sent sprawling as a flurry of cards landed around her.
They spun, a swirl of them lifting into the air as she lost Ariete, trying to make her way through the maelstrom as he disappeared out of the tent.
Cards flickered past her.
‘The Lovers’—she and Enzo reaching out towards one another as shadowed hands pulled them back.
‘The Star’—a woman whom Elara didn’t recognize, with deep-red hair, holding a spellbook as she gave a knowing smile, pouring a cup of blood into a river.
‘The Wheel of Fortune’—a ship’s wheel that looked to be inscribed with symbols of the Stars upon it as it sank into a dark ocean.
She batted them all away, clawing herself out of the whirlwind that surrounded her as fury lanced her chest, but once the cards settled, she was no longer in the fortune-teller’s tent.
She looked in alarm to the wooden horse beneath her—as skeletal as the one in the Death card—and then searched around her, seeing that she was now outside the tent and on a spinning carousel.
As she whirled, the contraption moving up and down, she noticed that her surroundings were changing once again.
She gasped as she caught sight of herself, though she didn’t recognize where she was.
She wore old-fashioned clothes and seemed to be on a farm, milking a cow.
Elara had never milked a cow in her life.
Someone called her and the double turned, a sad resignation in her eyes as she picked up the pail and disappeared indoors.
Elara held the snakestone to her eye and she was back on the carousel, golden wisps leading to the next horse.
Elara hauled herself up and sprang on to it, this one indigo in colour.
Her surroundings changed again to show Elara wearing a full black leather suit and a mask.
She looked like an…assassin. True enough, she drew a wicked, curved blade, scaling the rooftops of a kingdom that looked like it belonged on a map of Asteria from hundreds of years before.
Elara gasped as her double jumped from a building, landing on top of a man relieving himself in an alley, and slit his throat.
Someone sprang down beside her, but with their back to Elara, she couldn’t see their face.
The snakestone led Elara around and around the horses.
As she jumped on to each, she saw a different reality, a different life, and it dawned on her that these were the lives she had led, the ones in which Merissa had told her she had searched for her Sun, reborn again and again, her soul never at peace.
She saw one where she died of a coughing disease—one she knew from her schooling had been cured around a century before.
A figure, turned away from Elara, dabbed at her double’s forehead.
In another, she lit sconces in clothes reminiscent of Piscea’s priestesses. She walked through obsidian pillars, crushed herbs and prayed to the deity of Asteria, another priestess kneeling beside her in the glossy black pews.
She followed the snakestone’s whims, dizzy and nauseous from watching herself in all these lifetimes—so despairing, so alone.
She could feel it: the longing for something more, something that she hadn’t known then was her Sun.
But she dared not jump off the carousel or defy the snakestone’s path, not when she risked getting stuck in those past worlds.
So she waited, going around and around, until finally the world shifted back into a fairground.
She jumped off hurriedly, falling on to the grass.
She took a deep breath through her nose, trying to centre herself as she stood and held the snakestone back up, a path forging its way to another tent ahead.
She ran towards it and stepped inside.
The fairground’s music drifted away from her as she realized the tent harboured a hall of mirrors. The corridor was dark, peaceful. She caught her reflection in the first mirror and jumped.
Her face was painted to resemble that of a sad clown.
Her mouth drooped dramatically, her eyebrows furrowed, a black diamond over each eye, and a red teardrop on her cheek.
She caught a glimmer of movement up ahead and hurried past the reflection, checking now and again that she was still on the correct path.
Finally, she arrived at the last mirror, frowning as she realized there was no escape—it was a dead end.
Her appearance had transformed, and now she saw a woman with white gleaming hair and skin looking back at her.
She reached a hand up to the mirror, and the Moon did the same.
A crown still rested atop her head, her silver eyes cold as Elara moved her head this way and that, and the Moon copied.
Finally, Elara touched the mirror, though rather than feeling cool, solid glass, her entire hand pushed through as if it were water.
She marvelled at how her arm had fully disappeared, readying herself to push the rest of her body through, when she felt a hand clamp over her own.
She screamed, trying to pull her arm back, but the hand wouldn’t let go. A second one reached out of the mirror, a ram tattooed on it, and gripped her by the throat, yanking her through the glass.