Chapter Forty-one
THEA
D awn spilt like blood across the vast and ancient glassy surface. Thea had been here before. It was the Great Lake of Aveum, or another of its likeness, situated amid the desolate expanse of an endless winter.
Thea stood at its edge, her heart trapped in her throat, her body and mind at the precipice of all they could endure.
And yet the final trial awaited her, here on the frost-kissed shores, across the unfathomable sheet of ice before her.
It groaned under the weight of an eternal frozen wilderness, and beneath it, blue hues shimmered like the spirits of broken souls.
‘A game of fate? Or a game of choice?’ came a quiet voice beside her.
Thea startled, spinning on her heel to see a familiar figure.
Anya, as a child, exactly as she had been on the night darkness had descended upon Thezmarr. A shiver raked down Thea’s spine.
‘What…?’ she murmured, dazed to find the girl not in some strange ethereal form, but living and breathing beside her, solid beneath her touch as she gripped Anya’s small shoulder.
‘A game of fate, or a game of choice,’ Anya replied, the foreboding words eerie in her child’s voice. ‘That is the trial at play. Will you decide your own hand?’
It was a strange turn of phrase, but not so strange as the scene unfolding before Thea.
‘So many choices,’ Anya continued, in almost a singsong voice. ‘Or have you already made them? Alchemist. Althea Nine Lives. Althea Zoltaire. Althea Embervale. Wraith Slayer. Guardian of Thezmarr. Shadow of Death.’
‘What is this place?’ Thea breathed as thick mist roiled on the perimeter of the lake and figures on the other side began to take form. She squinted, trying to make out their shapes – their faces – amid the fog, beyond the glare of the ice beneath the rising sun.
A garbled sound escaped her when she saw who stood there.
‘No,’ she whispered.
‘The Furies will it so,’ Anya told her, following her gaze across the glassy surface. ‘And so it is.’
Kipp. Cal. Malik. Wren. Wilder…
‘How the fuck did we get here?’ Cal stammered, squirming against the shadows binding him. ‘What the fuck is happening?’
He twisted in the otherworldly restraints, imploring the others.
But they were all equally shocked.
And all of them in the clutches of rheguld reapers .
A reaper for each person Thea loved, the monsters’ talons poised over each of their hearts, shadows swirling around them, dancing at their mouths as though they meant to invade.
Even from a distance, Thea could see the fear etched on each of their faces.
Fear and defiance and love. As though they had already seen the horrors about to happen come to pass.
As though they had seen themselves, and her, lying broken on the ice; as though their fate was to join the souls beneath it.
Five reapers. An endless expanse of frozen lake before her.
‘I can’t save them all,’ she murmured, her gaze flitting from one loved one to the next, panic, like the cold, latching deep into her bones.
‘No,’ Anya agreed, her voice so mild it was cruel. ‘The real question is… Can you save any of them?’
Thea gaped, her heart stuttering, her knees buckling as she opened her mouth to protest, to scream, to curse the Furies themselves. ‘How —’
But younger Anya raised a small finger, pointing to three chasms of darkness that spanned the width of the great lake, punctuating the path to Thea’s family. ‘Those craters there are portals.’
Thea shifted from foot to foot as the mist seemed to encroach onto the lake’s would-be shallows. Across the sheet of ice, the shadows around her friends, her family, her everything, were multiplying. ‘Portals to what?’
Little Anya shrugged. ‘They’re created for those who oppose the Great Rite, so that they might enter whenever they wish and challenge warriors who seek their Warsword totems and Naarvian steel.’
‘They let monsters in?’
‘And others out,’ Anya told her. ‘They can take you elsewhere. Out of the Great Rite. To Death’s doorstep, to another plane, to nowhere. Only one way to find out.’
‘I don’t want to find out.’
‘So don’t cross the threshold.’
Flinching at an echoing faraway cry from Wren, Thea unsheathed her sword and Malik’s dagger, before placing one foot on the creaking stretch of ice before her and addressing her sister once more.
‘How? How can this be?’ she asked, unable to keep the tremor from her voice.
The maze of mirrors had frayed her mind with its illusions webbed together with truth.
The Glacier’s Embrace had battered her body.
But what of the people she loved in the clutches of the reapers?
It couldn’t be real… Could it? Wilder was waiting for her at the foot of this gods-forsaken mountain of terrors.
The others were back at the Singing Hare. Weren’t they?
But Anya smiled, the expression far too old, far too knowing for her young features.
‘After everything you have seen, did you think the Furies wouldn’t test you to the full extent of their abilities?
’ She eyed the wound clotting at Thea’s shoulder, the slight lean in her gait as she favoured her injured ankle.
‘Do you doubt the danger of the Great Rite? Those reapers have been summoned through the portals of darkness to test your mettle, your sacrifice. They are as real as the blood you taste on your tongue, as real as the frostbite you can no longer feel at your blackened fingertips…’
Another shiver scraped down Thea’s spine like the tip of a reaper’s talon. She swallowed the lump in her throat.
‘So be it,’ she said, and stepped out onto the ice.
The surface of the lake creaked beneath her weight, and the thin layer of frost across it seemed to shiver in anticipation.
She focused on placing one foot in front of the other, mindful of any fractures, any hidden crevices…
She had learnt that lesson from the glacier.
In the distance, she could see Kipp, Cal, Malik, Wren and Wilder…
Each bound in chains and struggling in the clutches of a reaper whose razor-sharp talons teased the flesh above their heart, whose shadows wrapped tighter around them with each passing moment.
‘I’m coming,’ Thea murmured.
Kipp’s shout was cut off by a whip of shadow across his mouth. His eyes bulged in terror.
‘I’m coming,’ Thea vowed, her heart seizing for him, for all of them.
The ice groaned as she approached the first chasm, but instead of water, she found a moving form of darkness – the strange glimmering crater that young Anya had called a portal. If she ran, she might be able to leap over it, depending on the slip factor, but…
But Thea didn’t need to come up with an alternative, because from the eerie portal, a wraith emerged, hissing and spitting, the scent of burnt hair suddenly overwhelming her senses.
She turned her sword and palmed her dagger. The wraith was every bit as hideous and grotesque as the countless others she had slain. She’d carve out the heart of this one as she had all the rest. The screams and shouts from the other side of the lake spurred her on.
Thea lunged, not accounting for the slip of melting ice beneath her boots. Her arms flailed as she fought to remain upright and away from the edge of the rippling chasm.
Heart pounding, she steadied herself and eyed the monster.
I’ll have to make this fast, then , she told herself.
A blur of silver followed as Thea flung her throwing stars with needlepoint precision, hitting the wraith in its clouded blue eyes, sending it staggering along the ice, on the precipice of the portal.
With a slice of her sword, she opened its throat, black gore oozing from its wound, a screech filling the air loud enough to shake the surrounding mountains.
She leapt upon its body, setting her dagger to its chest and sawing into the rotten flesh, sinew and bone, until she reached its heart.
A final scream left the monster’s mouth as she carved out the organ in a matter of expert slices, sending the still-pulsing mass flying back into the shadow from which it came.
It was only after she’d discarded its heart that she realised the corpse was sliding back into the strange substance, into the portal of unknown fates – and that its dead hand was still clamped around her ankle in a vice-like grip.
With a shout, Thea slid across the ice, dragged along with the wraith body as its lower half slowly disappeared into the shadow chasm. In a single, powerful slice, she cleaved through the monster’s arm, severing it entirely from its body, just as the rest of it vanished into the darkness.
Panting, Thea scrambled back from the portal, prising the dead talon-tipped hand off her ankle and pitching it back into the shimmering substance with a ragged gasp.
‘Fuck,’ she muttered, her heart nearly leaping out of her chest in the aftermath of the close call. Blood trickled from her ankle where the wraith had clawed her, but she wiped it away and got to her feet at once, eyeing up the breadth of the shadow fissure she would have to leap across —
‘Thea!’ Cal screamed.
She looked up in time to see a cord of shadow forcing its way into Malik’s mouth, his huge figure thrashing against the onyx bonds wrapped around him, the reaper hissing at her in invitation.
Thea tasted bile. She looked around desperately for a way to cross the chasm of darkness.
For the briefest of seconds, she was brought back to her shieldbearer initiation test, where she, Cal and Kipp had made it to the Chained Islands from the mainland using nothing but sticks to launch themselves across…
But there were no sticks to be found here, and time was running out.
‘Hold on, Malik,’ she called. Though from his fitting body, her words were lost to him. Panic tried to latch onto her; she could feel it in the air around her, fuelled by the malice of the reapers at the other end. They would take her family one by one, in the most agonising way.
She wasn’t going to let that happen. She would save them all. And Furies help those reapers when she got there, because she was going to tear them apart with her bare fucking hands for all the pain they’d inflicted.
Thea took a deep breath and sheathed her weapons for the run-up. She didn’t need them throwing her off balance. Taking several steps back, she measured the distance as best she could… and then she threw herself into a sprint.
Thea charged towards the pit at full pelt, ignoring the slip of her boots across the ice, allowing it to add to her momentum.
And then she was airborne, shooting across the dark void, legs kicking beneath her as the other side of the portal came into view.
She landed hard, slipping on the wet surface, twisting her knee and rolling across the ice with a cry.
Despite the pain and jarring of her body, she loosed a shaky sigh of relief. She hadn’t slipped across the breadth of the safe zone at least. She was on solid enough ground, and she could hold her own here.
Squaring her shoulders, Thea faced what came next.
There were still two more gates to cross, and five reapers to face at the end.
If she could free Wilder and Cal first, then they could help her with the reapers, she reasoned, trying to block out the sounds of their screams and the violent lash of onyx power she could see in the distance.
There was no sign of more Naarvian steel, but she had her dagger. Her dagger would have to do.
But Thea’s breath was stolen from her as someone emerged from the shadow portal before her.
Wilder.