Chapter 18
Chapter eighteen
Demetri
The Sky Fall
Though one of my eyes had swollen to the size of a fucking apple, and the other was clouded with blood, I knew it was her.
It wasn’t just the river of slate hair that cascaded down her back, but the defiant set of her shoulders, the way she shrugged the acolytes’ vile little hands off her arms, wanting to climb the roots to Druid Falstaff on her own terms. At her own pace.
Surprisingly, they let her.
All men—if you could even call the acolytes such, balls shrivelled and rotten as the rest of them—knew when to leave a woman be, it would seem.
And fuck me if we weren’t witnessing the birth of a goddess.
Not one borne of blood, creation, or death, but something far more dangerous…
A woman with no more fucks left to give.
The Blood God had, predictably, shunned my last, desperate prayer.
Ignoring the throb in my back, shredded and bruised from where they’d dragged me across stone, grit, and dirt, I beheld her reach the Blood Tree’s dais. Nothing mattered now, nothing but her.
If Ashara was dignity made flesh, then I was humility.
She faced Falstaff without a cower or wince. A difficult thing, to stand toe to toe with a spider wearing the skin of a man. The spindly bastard was but an inch or so taller, just those pricks of his helm giving him any real height over her frame.
Pain throbbed through my temples. Propped up by two acolytes, my mouth was gagged and my wrists bound.
But for all my many bindings, everything on the inside felt all out of place: heart in my stomach, lungs knotted in my throat, kidneys and liver lodged somewhere in the pit of my arse.
I writhed as Falstaff grasped the needle, only to drop it back onto the cushion a moment later, his veil honed on Ashara.
She was speaking to him. Gloved fingers curled around her shoulders, his knuckles peaked.
Jeering forward, Falstaff’s helm brushed her right ear, the chain of his veil settling in heavy folds upon the gap of her exposed skin between shoulder and neck.
An acolyte tightened my muzzle, trapping the get your fucking hands off her, you old cunt on my tongue.
He spoke to her, muttering too softly for the pitiful dregs of what was left of us to hear. I craned my collared neck to listen, the searing heat of a few broken ribs and pulled muscles not enough of a deterrent.
His absolving hand crested her temple, and she reared back, lifting her chin as if to…
Fuck. I huffed a breath, the linen ball near thrust down my throat absorbing its heat.
She…she’d spat in his face. Not his true face, masked by mesh, but squarely in the centre of where his forehead would be, wetting the metal.
A smile cracked despite it all, the slash on my cheek spilling fresh with hot blood.
It fell when the acolytes raised their belts, abandoning their posts at Falstaff’s side to swarm her.
I took a step forward before clammy, strong hands yanked me back.
“Enough!” Falstaff’s command halted their advance, his voice no longer frail and brittle, but cutting and clean. “This one needs to be letted. Such a foul, filthy little heathen, undeserving of absolution and sanctification both.” The sneer in his voice was palpable.
So high and mighty up there. So powerful. Give me a sword, or a godsdamned butter knife, and he’d last not a breath on the ground.
“A plague upon you.” Her voice, the usual soft swell like knitted wool, turned as crisp as flax, perking my ears. “A plague upon you all,” she repeated, louder, jabbing a slender finger towards his veil of chain. “To the fucking pits with you all…the Blood God as well.”
In the beyond, I would have her sing that to me nightly.
A lullaby to soothe our tortured souls to rest once we’d rendered our due.
Falstaff flinched—I saw it, his acolytes saw it.
We all saw it. Another stroke of fate that the tower had been so thinned of bodies, for it was fit for a bard’s song, her final act of defiance. She’d done it for us all.
“Blood Demands Blood, laurel.” His hand shot to her palm, forgoing her thumb to score the needle from the base of her fingers to the bridge of her wrist, unseaming her flesh in one jagged swipe.
Unlike her, I thrashed. She stood still as stone, a fast-flowing line of blood spilling from her ruined hand to the roots below, soaking their feet.
I braced for the plague to take her, knowing I would sprint up those cursed roots when it was over, willing to follow her into whatever pit awaited us both, now she was damned alongside me.
I kept bracing, the knot of muscles in my abdomen tightening with every breath that passed. The moment stood suspended, and no one dared to move. Nothing, nothing, more nothing.
Still, the blood plague didn’t rise to claim her.
The acolytes shuffled, one descending to his knees to inspect the ground, the tip of his nose disturbing the blood.
Falstaff grabbed her mutilated hand, turning it this way and that, hoisting it up to his veil so he could examine it further.
Dissatisfied, he threw it to the side in child-like frustration.
“Bring me a blade!” he rasped. “One sharp enough for the throat. The Blood God demands that she ble—” His words were swallowed by the unmistakable sound of splintering wood, the great groan of a trunk felled by an axe.
He spun, helm fixed on the Blood Tree, its weeping trunk trembling, shaking leaves raining blood upon him and Ashara.
It ruptured, a chasm tearing through its twisted mother-bark, a gaping crack widening as if the hands of a titan were attempting to split it in two.
A breath later, something throbbed from its blackened core, hammering through the ground, shuddering the walls in one mighty swell, turning the air viscous.
I sank to my knees beneath its force, the others following: Dendralis, laurellians, heathens.
Clutching our ears, we succumbed to its power with all the inevitability of pebbles sinking in water.
The force of it ground my kneecaps into the dirt, as the weight of a lake pressed upon me.
Ears popping, each pulse sent another shockwave of unspeakable pressure through my skull.
Just when I thought the throbbing would mulch my bones to marrow, it ebbed, and three things happened at once.
First, the ground trembled, great chasms like that of the bark splitting the earth, soil sifting into each crevice.
Second, the Blood Tree disintegrated—bark, branch, and leaf scorching to ash on the wind—some unspeakable, strange transformation upon it that I couldn’t quite comprehend.
And then…then, the sky fell on our heads.