Chapter Thirty-nine
THEA
T hea had danced with death her whole life, believing that the piece of jade around her neck somehow held her ultimate demise at bay. But as she craned her neck, staring up at what was now in front of her, she wondered if she’d been wrong all along.
Perhaps this would be the moment death claimed her after all.
She was on the outside of the mountain again, a wall of utterly vertical ice before her, reaching up into the swirling mist, so high she couldn’t see the top, so high that looking up at it was dizzying.
Its surface shimmered in the pale moonlight, and Thea abstractly noted that night had fallen.
What night, she had no idea; she had no concept of how long she’d taken trekking up the mountainside, no idea how long she’d been trapped in the maze of mirrors.
She felt the faint pang of hunger low in her gut, and the distant craving for water, but neither meant anything.
The sensations, the light… There was no telling what was real and what had been manufactured by the gods themselves.
Thea took a breath and studied the frozen titan before her, the way it seemed to defy gravity and any semblance of mortal courage. It was a testament to the unforgiving nature of the Furies, a vertical deathtrap that shot skyward, an endless barrier, stretching out of sight on either side.
Towards the top, there was a shadow beneath the ice as well… It looked like a great chain trapped beneath the freeze, its presence stark against the pristine surface.
Everything else was white and glasslike, except for a small pile of items at the foot of the wall. With the frigid air biting at her skin, Thea crouched to examine what had been left for her.
Ice axes. Spikes.
The challenge was clear.
They meant for her to climb the wall.
Heart slamming against her ribs, Thea picked up the spikes, hardly feeling their weight in her already numb hands. How was she meant to scale a wall if she couldn’t feel her limbs at the base?
Gods, it hardly ever snowed in Thezmarr…
Now here she was, facing the most perilous wintry ascent imaginable.
As she fitted the spikes over her boots, she cursed herself for not training harder throughout her travels.
She had always known there would be some test of her bodily strength during the Great Rite – how had she not prepared herself better?
It didn’t matter how many monsters she had slayed if she couldn’t lift her own fucking body weight.
Monsters… The thought roiled through Thea suddenly, and her attention went back to the line of shadow that cut through the white.
She had fought reapers, wraiths, reef dwellers, arachnes and howlers, but this was deep beneath the ice…
and there were human-made contraptions just as terrifying as monsters.
She had heard of a device employed around the walls of Aveum that, when released, shaved an entire layer from the facade, raining chaos and carnage down on anyone who might be bold enough to attempt the climb.
Dread curdled in Thea’s gut. Whatever it was, it didn’t matter. There was only one way through this trial and it was up the icy obstruction before her.
She finished lacing the spikes to her boots, testing their sturdiness with a few kicks to the snow. They felt clumsy on her feet, but there was no doubt she’d be glad for them soon enough. Next, she took the ice axes in her hands. Small and simple, the blades gleamed sharp in the pale moonlight.
Trying to shake the nervousness from her body, Thea went to the foot of the cliff face and looked up, her breath whistling between her teeth as she did.
The Glacier’s Embrace… The words came to her as though she’d spoken them aloud, but she knew she hadn’t opened her mouth. It was a whisper from the Furies, along with the icy gust of wind that swept along the wall’s face. A warning.
Though every instinct within her screamed to run away, to not swing that first blade into the ice, there was nothing for it.
This was the Great Rite.
There was no going back.
Thea swung her axe above her head. The first sound of steel piercing ice echoed across the strange, desolate space like a battle cry.
She kicked her spiked toe into the wall, testing her purchase there before allowing the tools to bear her whole weight.
‘Here goes nothing,’ she muttered to herself, swinging her second axe into the ice.
With several more pitches of her blades and kicks of her spikes, Thea was suspended several feet above the ground, the bitter cold of the wall pressing into her front, soaking through the layers of her clothing.
She would have to move fast if she wanted to avoid the heart-stopping effect exposure to such conditions could have.
Steeling herself against the increasing drop below, and the stiffening of her joints in the face of the freeze, Thea threw her blade upward, pulling herself up while digging her spikes into the vertical surface, again and again.
Her breath clouded before her face, and for once she was grateful, as it distracted her from looking at the distance yawning between her and the unforgiving ground below.
At what felt like an agonisingly slow pace, Thea climbed.
Her teeth chattered, enough to rattle her brain inside her skull, but she pressed skyward, losing herself in the rhythm of her axes and spikes, testing her purchase with each push up into the mist. Her muscles ached and then burned in protest with each movement, but she held fast, knowing that a single misstep could send her plummeting to what now looked like an abyss below.
With every ounce of momentum, her heart raced, and she didn’t dare to look down at how much of the wall she’d covered. She breathed in through her nose, the frigid air hitting her lungs hard enough to make her gasp, her grip faltering on her axe.
She pressed herself to the wall with all her strength, screwing her eyes shut in a moment of panic.
‘I will regret nothing. Not the lies I’ve told, nor the lives I’ve claimed or the rivers of blood I’ve spilt. I do not regret a single moment, because every one of them led me to you.’
Wilder’s words came back to her like a flicker of flame in a long, dark night, and Thea gritted her teeth, spearing her axe into the unbroken surface of ice above her, hauling her body along with it.
She clung to those words as she clung to her axes: for dear life. She let them hold her together as Wilder himself had held her through many nights before.
The pale light of the moon was fading, darkness kissing the ice, the temperature around Thea dropping even more. The wall groaned. The heart-stopping sound of cracking filled the air as the ancient ice shifted in the gale that picked up at Thea’s back.
Hours passed. Thea’s limbs burned with every movement. On the horizon, the first golden rays of dawn had started to spill into the world. She clutched her axes hard enough that her knuckles split beneath her gloves and the warm trickle of blood graced her chilled skin.
Thea didn’t know how far up the wall she’d managed to get, only that the howling wind now threatened to rip her clean off its surface.
As though it had claws, the blast tugged painfully at her cloak, her braid, and Thea’s whole body trembled with the effort it took to cling to the vertical face of the glacier.
Althea Nine Lives , she reminded herself. That was who she was. Those lives would see her through this ordeal, they would —
The ice groaned again.
And jagged crevices split its surface into a treacherous web of frozen veins. It was another labyrinth – an echo of the maze of mirrors over which she’d just triumphed.
With a cry, Thea flung her axe into the ice above, only for it to crumble – too close to a fault she could not see.
A scream of terror ripped from her throat.
Her loose hand went flying out into mid-air, and for a split second, she thought she was falling.
But all those countless hours of training snapped into place, and she managed to maintain her grip on her axe and swing it with all her might back into another patch of ice.
Panting, she tested it with her weight.
It held.
A half-sob of relief escaped Thea as she resumed her climb, a drop of sweat sliding down between her shoulder blades despite the frigid conditions.
It was a fierce reminder not to become complacent, not to lose herself too deeply in the rhythm of the ascent, for the icy facade was getting more treacherous, offering only fleeting holds.
Perilous crevasses lurked beneath its exterior, hungry for the slightest of missteps or an ill-placed axe.
Ignoring the tremor in her muscles and the ache in her hands and feet, Thea kept climbing.
She had known that the Furies meant to test her in every way they knew how, and she had been more than willing to fling herself at their feet, at their mercy.
She tightened her grip on her axe, wincing as her aching toes found purchase in the glasslike exterior.
Scaling the monolith was meant to test her strength, her endurance, and by the gods, she’d show them everything she had.
One swing of an axe and then the next, one foothold and then the next, she worked her way up the sheer vertical wall, somehow sensing the presence of those who had come before, their fear, their triumphs and their failures all etched into the ice itself.
Pure will fuelled her where her physical energy was flagging, and she panted through every motion, every near-miss of a fault in the surface or a deceiving crevasse that nearly claimed her.
She was completely surrounded by dancing mist now, unable to see the abyss below even if she wished. It meant she was getting close to the top. She had to be.
But it was as this thought dared to enter her wrung-out mind that the wall shuddered beneath her.
A ripple of movement further down, out of sight, but enough to dislodge one of her boots from the facade, her foot slipping —