Fate of the Gods (Dance of the Shadow Walkers #4)

Prologue

Their Voices Console Me

Ihave had the same reoccurring dream for the past two weeks.

I am asleep on the couch in our dorm room, wrapped up in a thick, green blanket that Sebastian usually keeps at the foot of his bed.

The blanket cradles me as my eyes open to the sound of a coffee maker, and someone spooning sugar into a glass mug.

When my vision clears, I find Odysseus to be standing at the kitchen counter, rapidly mixing his morning brew.

His shoulder length waves are loose around eyes, which have deep bags around them, as if he hasn’t slept in months.

He brings the cup to his lips and takes a long sip, only for his nose to wrinkle, and he to set it down to add more sugar.

I move my lips to say his name, but no sound echoes across the room.

Instead, the walls began to melt, like a crayon under a hair dryer. The paint and concrete drip in glops all over the tile floor of our dormitory, morphing into grey piles all around me. I try to pull myself up from the couch but find my struggling pointless; I am cocooned inside the blanket.

Odysseus turns to where I am lying and stares at me with two eyes completely black, soulless, as if he were another spirit.

His face pales dramatically before his bronze skin melts as well, spilling in sticky, gooey falls down his chest. His cheekbones peek through the melting flesh, and his eyes roll from his face before hitting the floor with a solid, tink, sound.

I want to throw up, to gag, to hide my face in the pillows and pray this will all end soon, but the blanket wraps tighter around my neck and forces me to watch my fiancé melt.

His hair falls from his scalp and piles at his feet, and before long, the mug he was fixing crashes against the tile.

The glass sprays everywhere; some even hits my cheeks as I wriggle and writhe.

I scream his name over and over, desperate to save him from this agonizing end, but my voice is empty.

Odysseus smiles from ear to ear as he melts, as if he enjoys this, as if he enjoys me watching this.

The dream ends as the couch I am on collapses into a dark, black void. The blanket releases me so that I can freefall, and as I do, I scream emptily into the never-ending darkness. My voice radiates to fill the space, but the falling seems to never conclude.

I am one with the space around me, frozen in a loop of Gehenna as I wait to hit a bottom that never comes. The dorm room above closes on me, sucking out the light and leaving me in the empty black surrounding me, like I was back in the pits in Icheiris’s Layer.

I wait for hands to claw at me, and eventually, they do. They rise from the pit and swallow me in their grasp as their screams echo through my ears.

I bleed from the intense noise and scream with them until my lungs collapse.

And then… I wake up.