Chapter 7
Nyx
I walk toward the graveyard.
"Nyx." Thorian's voice is careful. Controlled. The voice he uses when he's trying not to alarm me.
I keep walking.
"Nyx." It’s less controlled this time. I hear him move, and then his hand closes around my elbow, pulling me to a stop just at the edge of the cursed ground.
His eyes dart to the cemetery, then to my face, interpreting every expression with the ease he's gained over these past few days.
Whatever he finds there tightens his expression. "What are you doing?"
"There's something I need to do," I say.
"You're not going back in there." Fenric has appeared at my other side, and his tone has none of its usual lightness. "Whatever you're thinking—"
"I have to—"
"Nyx—"
"Listen to me, there are children in there who—"
"Look." Thorian's grip on my elbow tightens, and his gaze has moved past me, past the graveyard, fixing on a point in the distance. His voice drops. "Look."
I turn.
The other teams have started across.
The shifters are already more than halfway across, their eyes bound in their wolf forms. They stop and sniff, navigating easily in that form.
On the other side, the Knights are making slow but steady progress, with Sir Willem blindfolded, his last remaining teammate, Sir Beric, wide-eyed and leading the way.
A second after we turn to look, the Vultures stride into the graveyard, once again wielding magic when the Ashen turn their way.
“Did they learn nothing?” Fenric mutters, shaking his head. At least this time, the Ashen are divided between the various teams, splitting their attention. Ulric faced the weight of them all.
As, I suppose, I did.
The shifters make it to the other side and shift back, their naked bodies glowing in the moonlight as they remove their blindfolds and disappear into the woods. The Knights are further, but Beric seems to be struggling, moving faster and faster. He’s started to yell, but I can’t make out the words.
Then, he stops, snapping to attention and screaming at the top of his lungs, “Meritha!”
Willem drops his teammate’s hand and starts to blindly sprint forward, and he’s close enough that he might make it. He hits a gravestone, flips over it, rights himself, and keeps going.
But Beric doesn’t. Instead, he drops to his knees, sliding them along the ground until he’s before a gravestone, as though he’s praying.
Weeping, he repeats what sounds like, “Meritha, Meritha,” again and again.
At first, he just sets his head against the stone.
Then, he taps it, rolling his forehead back and forth.
“Meritha, Meritha—” Each blow lands harder than the last, punctuated with the sound of the woman’s name.
I cringe at the first blow that seems to crack through bone, then cover my mouth with my hand when he lifts his face, revealing one eye socket sunken in from the impact.
I have to look away as the thuds turn to wet smacks, the top of the stone smeared with his blood and gray matter until all goes quiet.
Beric, like Ulric, falls to the side and slips below the thick, swirling fog.
In the center of the burial grounds are the Vultures, their magic creating a vibrant light show amidst the fog. It reminds me of the traveling performers, warlocks of a lesser magic, who would come to our town, and occasionally our manor, to put on a show.
Except these aren’t performers. They’re our competitors, and the Ashen continue to close in on them, mostly undeterred by the magic.
Finally, the vampires move, Talon and Behanta hitting the perimeter of the graveyard at a dead sprint, clearly trying to use their speed to their advantage. And, at first, it looks like it’s going to work. They make it nearly three-quarters of the way before the Ashen close in on them.
Talon claps a hand over his eyes, high-stepping through the rest of the grounds, somehow avoiding the head stones.
Behanta is not so lucky. He goes still, staring at one of the figures, before starting to laugh. One hand goes to his belly, the other to his mouth. He laughs and laughs, the see-saw sound of it shifting from mirth into a forced, wretched gasp.
Then, without hesitation, he opens his mouth and bites clean through one of his fingers, before spitting it out onto the ground.
“Oh, gods,” I hiss, turning my face away. While my stomach has grown stronger, I’m still not cut out for seeing this kind of grotesque display. I’m not able to avoid watching for long, as a streak of violet cuts through the field, and I have to look.
It connects with Behanta just as Talon makes it out of the grounds, stumbling and turning, looking behind him for his teammate.
But Behanta is on fire.
Anyone would suffer under flames like that, except maybe Thorian and other strong demi-gods, but Behanta is not that powerful. He shrieks, then turns and starts to run. This time, when he bites off the next finger, he chokes on it, falling to his knees and puking it up as the flames eat at him.
Seconds later, he’s ash, but I imagine the finger and bile remain beneath the fog.
The warlocks are surrounded by the Ashen, and I cover my mouth with both hands, trying to prepare for whatever horror is about to befall them, but then they vanish, leaving behind nothing but the trailing, lingering smoke from their magic.
“Look,” Thorian says, pointing, and we make them out crawling on their hands and knees, appearing on the other side of the cemetery. They collapse, clearly exhausted from using magic.
“Decoys,” Fenric says, a note of admiration in his voice. “They used their magic to create decoys, then crawled through.”
“Great,” Thorian says, and I sense a hint of the anger from just after the swamp, when he was wailing on them. “Let’s kill them while they don’t have their little spells to protect them.”
“We don’t know where the others have gone,” Fenric points out, his eyes darting to the woods around us. “The shifters could be waiting for us. And you said it yourself: the night is the worst time to be out. We should find somewhere to shelter.”
Down in the graveyard, the last remaining human on the Stone Serpents team, Garrow, tries to cover his eyes and sprint through, as the vampires did.
But he’s no vampire. He’s only a human, and a clumsy one at that. He trips less than a quarter of the way through and the Ashen, with nothing else to focus on, descend on him like a flock of hungry magpies.
I look away as he begins to scream.
“We can get ahead while they’re weakened,” Fenric says, and Thorian counters, “Yes, or we could kill them and remedy the problem at its source.”
But I can hardly hear them.
With Garrow’s soul gone, the Ashen spread out again. From here, they are just shapeless forms, drifting throughout the space. Once more, the guilt and anger and anguish push through me.
I was waiting for the last of them to cross. And now, I have to do what I know is right.
After my parents died, I couldn't sleep.
I would lie in the dark and think about where they were, whether they were anywhere at all, whether the people who had filled every corner of my life had simply stopped existing.
It was Hilda who finally sat with me and explained it.
Not the way adults usually explain death to children, carefully and briefly, as though the subject might shatter you.
She sat with me for a long time and talked about the difference between souls at rest and souls that weren't. Those that had passed gently into whatever comes next, and those that hadn't.
Those that were trapped—by unfinished grief, by violence, by the refusal of the world to release them—hovered in a place that was neither living nor gone.
She told me my parents were at rest. That she was certain of it.
I had believed her then. I believed her still.
But looking out at the small shapes moving between the headstones, I know with the same certainty that these children are not.
They are trapped here, in the cold and the wrongness of this place, neither living nor dead nor free, never allowed to pass into whatever warmth might be waiting for them.
They died frightened and alone and were never released from that state
My feet move before I've made the decision, crossing back into the graveyard.
Behind me, suddenly I can hear Thorian and Fenric calling my name. I can feel Talon's gaze on my back, and the stillness of the other teams, as if they’re holding their breath, confused and watchful, unsure what I'm doing. I'm not sure I can even explain it.
I only know I can't leave them here.
“Hi, sweetheart,” I say to the first Ashen I come across. Holding my hand out and swallowing my fear, I try to run my hand over his hair, but I can’t feel him. He doesn’t move, doesn’t acknowledge the attempt, just stares at me with wide, sorrowful eyes.
I stand still, and they crowd around me, their shapeless forms giving way to details. Plaid pajamas. A stuffed teddy hanging by a thread. Scars and wounds and horrors that no child should be subjected to.
"I'm sorry for what you've been through," I tell them softly, when I have their attention. The children stretch out for what feels like eternity, and I keep going.
"You've been here a long time. Longer than you should have been. You died before I was born, before even my parents were born. You've been holding on for so long, and you must be so tired."
The shapes are still around me, that terrible wanting radiating off them in waves, and I breathe through it and keep going.
"Your families missed you every single day.
I want you to know that. There was not a morning they woke up and didn't think of you.
Not a meal, not a season, not a quiet moment that didn't carry the shape of you in it.
That kind of love doesn't stop. It never stopped.
" I have to pause, pressing my nails into my palms to keep my voice steady.
"But they wouldn’t want this for you. I know that as certainly as I know anything.
If they could see you here, trapped and frightened and unable to rest, it would break their hearts all over again.
What they want, what they have always wanted, is for you to be free of this.
To pass onto the afterlife. To be with them.
The only way you'll find them again, in whatever comes after, is if you let go of this place. "
I turn, trying to meet as many of their dark hollow eyes as I can. They’re eyes that hold so much wanting it makes my chest ache.
"You have permission to let go. Of the fear.
Of the pain. Of the loneliness of being here, stuck in this inbetween place.
" My voice breaks on the last word and I don't try to stop it. "You’re allowed to leave. Take whatever love I have to give and go find your afterlife. Go find your rest. You’ve been here long enough. You have suffered long enough."
The wind stills. The night darkens.
"It's time to go home."
For a moment, nothing happens. Then, the dark forms in the distance turn light. They morph from injured, bleeding children into bright smiling children. The versions of themselves before the gods used them as fodder.
One by one, they disappear. Lights melt into the ground, leaving flowers across the graveyard in their wake.
The last little girl raises a repaired stuffed teddy to her chest, cuddling it before she fades, and mouths, “Thank you.”
When they’re gone, the field returns to how it was before. The fog still swirls, and the headstones still dot the landscape, but there are no longer souls trapped here. And bright flowers illuminate the ground in every direction. That distinct weight of grief, of distress, is gone.
“Nyx!” I hear Thorian yell, but the sound is distant, like it’s coming from a different world.
Instead of turning back to my team, I drop my head into my hands and cry with a bittersweet happiness. Those poor babies lost their lives, but at least now they can finally rest.
The thunder that was only in the distance before sounds right above me, and when I lift my head to look, there are angry gray clouds hanging heavy in the sky.
“Nyx!” This time it’s Fenric, and I’m present enough to hear it.
Time to go.
I turn back to them, running and meeting Thorian and Fenric on the edge of the cemetery just as the sky rips open and a torrential downpour comes flooding down.
But my heart feels too full to even care. Their souls are finally free.