Chapter 5
Nyx
Thorian doesn't answer right away. Instead, he takes a few steps back from the cemetery's edge, one hand on my shoulder, guiding me with him, and I feel the difference immediately.
The pressure doesn't disappear entirely, but it eases, like a headache finally fading after you step out of a loud room. I breathe. It's easier here.
Glancing back, I see Talon is still safe and force myself to look back at Thorian and Fenric. This is what’s important. What I should be focusing on.
"The plan," he says, once we've put some distance between ourselves and the invisible line that marks the graveyard's edge, "depends entirely on what the gods have decided this place is meant to do to us."
Fenric crosses his arms. "So we have no plan?"
"We have several." Thorian's mouth curves slightly at the corner, though it doesn't reach his eyes. "We simply don't know which one applies yet."
We go through them. The cemetery might require something of us, a toll, a task, a sacrifice before it lets us pass.
It could feed on fear, forcing us to cross without giving in to panic.
There may be physical traps hidden between the graves, requiring us to test every step before committing our weight.
Or perhaps the spirits of the children will speak to us, demanding answers before they'll allow us to continue.
Every possibility we name feels wrong as soon as it's suggested, and I think we all know it. The gods don't make things that simple. Whatever waits in that graveyard, it isn't something we'll solve by guessing in advance.
“The other teams," I say. "We don't have to be first."
Thorian and Fenric both look at me.
"If we wait, we can watch. See what happens when someone else crosses. Learn something before we go in ourselves."
There’s a moment of silence.
"She's right," Fenric says.
Thorian nods, slow and deliberate, as though he'd been considering it already and was waiting to see if either of us would arrive there on our own. "We wait. We watch. We let the braver teams earn us the information."
I watch Fenric and Thorian talk through the details, how far back to position ourselves, what to look for, whether we risk being noticed by the other teams while we observe.
Thorian speaks in short, certain sentences.
He doesn't hedge. He doesn't ask whether Fenric agrees before committing to a course of action, but there's nothing dismissive about it either.
It's simply how a man behaves after spending his life making decisions and learning to trust them.
And Fenric, for his part, doesn't bristle at any of it.
He follows easily, and that ease carries its own quiet confidence, the security of a man who knows his own value well enough not to need to prove it at every turn.
He pushes back when he has something worth pushing back on.
Otherwise, he's content to let someone else lead.
Somehow, it makes them all the more attractive. As weird as that sounds.
Both of them look terrible, if I'm being honest. Travel-worn and slightly sunburned, wearing clothes that carry the memory of the swamp, their hair and skin bearing the evidence of days in the wild. Yet, both of them are still so handsome it's almost unfair.
I feel a sudden and specific gratitude. For Thorian's steadiness.
For Fenric's sharp instincts. For the strange luck that put the three of us together when it could have gone so differently.
The other contestants chose their teams by alliance or strategy or convenience.
I don't know how we became what we are, exactly, but I know I wouldn't trade it.
And Fenric. With Fenric, I find myself thinking for the first time that we might actually win this.
“Let’s head back to the cemetery and watch the other teams,” Thorian says.
I nod.
He reaches out and touches my arm lightly. “You’re good?”
“Yes.”
I hate how being near the cemetery makes me feel. Like I’m drowning in someone else’s grief and all I want to do is crawl away from it, because it’s too much to bear. Just the idea of going back turns my stomach, but I know it must be done.
“The grief is just… overwhelming.”
“You can sense it?” Thorian asks, looking surprised.
I nod again.
Fenric gives me a funny look, his green eyes full of curiosity. “Humans aren’t usually as sensitive to cursed places as we are.”
Except, I’m not human. Only, he didn’t see the shield of my magic I used to protect us. My secret was still relatively safe. “Strange,” is all I comment.
Thorian glances at me and away. “If it really gets to be too much to bear, take a few steps back until you feel like you can breathe.”
“Okay,” I say, and then I ask, “does it feel as overwhelming to you guys?”
Fenric shrugs. “I feel it, but, no, it’s not overwhelming.”
I guess my other side just must be sensitive to it.
“Stick together. Stay alert,” Thorian orders.
We make our way back to the edge, close enough to feel the deep grief of the place once more.
The sadness hits me before we've fully stopped moving.
It doesn't announce itself as grief usually does, as a sharp thing, sudden and painful.
It seeps. Like cold water rising through floorboards, slow and inevitable.
The wrongness of this place settles into my chest and doesn't leave, and by the time I've drawn a full breath, it's already inside me.
Thorian has been quiet since we moved back to the threshold. He looks out over the landscape now, and a shadow moves across his eyes.
I don't know what the others feel standing here. I wonder, not for the first time, whether the weight of this place lands differently on all of us, whether our losses have made us porous in different ways, cracked open in shapes that allow different kinds of grief to get in.
The death of my parents was the worst thing that ever happened to me.
Grief is a monster that eats you alive, gnawing slowly and carefully to maximize the pain.
The more you struggle against it, the harder it bites.
Even now, remembering them doesn't bring warmth first. It brings their absence.
The torture of reaching for a memory and finding that joy has been replaced with the echo of losing them.
If I felt such pain at losing my parents, I can't begin to fathom how the parents of these children felt.
Many of them were plucked from their beds in the middle of the night, taken from the physical world to function as fodder for something they never asked to be part of.
How would it feel, to anguish and search for your child, only to learn through some diviner that they were gone?
That Aqualis or Valtor had deemed their life inconsequential enough to end without hesitation?
The girls and boys who lost siblings that day.
Mothers and fathers, sons and daughters.
Families left with a gaping black hole. Loss is a sinking, sucking thing, pulling at everything around it.
Losing a child like that surely ended even the happiest of marriages, turned family members against one another.
And if the graves are here, it means those families, already torn and suffering, didn't even get the closure of a funeral.
They didn't get to wash the body, or speak over it, or lower it into ground they could visit.
They were simply gone. A child there one night and not the next, and nowhere in this world to mourn them properly.
Being witness to suffering like this, to true innocence held in purgatory for nothing more than a god's vanity, feels like it shifts the foundation of who I am.
It makes it impossible to simply exist in this space.
To breathe. To remember that I am here with a purpose of my own, that I have a sister waiting for me, that I am meant to cross through this place rather than kneel at its edge and weep.
Fenric paces back and forth just beyond the threshold, his boots toeing at the edge but not crossing. It's as though we can all feel it. An invisible pressure pulses just beneath the soil, a clear delineation between where we stand and where the cemetery begins.
A shout rings across the field.
We turn to look, watching as one of the warlocks breaks free from his group, shrugging off their grasping hands and strutting out among the gravestones.
My breath catches in my lungs, my heart starting to beat faster and harder. Thorian’s arm tightens around me.
As much as I hate the warlocks for how they behave, and how they’ve leveraged their magic against us, I’m still suspended in a state of captive apprehension and concern for him.
I despise them for ambushing us at the swamp, for nearly incinerating Fenric and me, but that doesn’t mean I want them to die in some horrible way before my very eyes.
In fact, I’m not sure I’m capable of wishing that fate on anyone.
As the warlock walks, a dim white magic sparks in his palms, like tiny little lightning strikes in the rising fog.
The man walking through the stones is Ulric.
He wears deep green silk robes and walks with his head high, his bald head gleaming in the moonlight.
As he goes, his boots dig into the soil with abandon.
It gets harder to see him, harder to make him out, and I realize that the fog that I barely noticed before is getting denser, rising up from the earth, as though summoned by the gods.
And, likely, knowing their flair for the dramatic, it was them.
Setting the scene for whatever is going to happen next.
Like a production. A concert for us to enjoy.
The nausea in my stomach gets worse at the idea of them sitting somewhere above us, drinking and making merry over the resting place of these children.
I let out a breath, and Thorian’s hand shifts to my waist, holding me still, offering a comfort that moves through my shaking, confused body.