Chapter 66 Mark on History
Sapphire
I expect to see him the moment I open my eyes and recognize these stained ruddy cathedral walls and acrobatic beams across the vast ceiling.
But I am wedged between the stadium seating during a regale hour, watching inmates interact down below during their scheduled recovery time.
My hand fiddles with the hem of my dress nervously looking for any sign of him—hem of my dress. I’m wearing a dress in prison. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.
I crouch lower behind a rusted, sticky seat. I pull the silky rose-petal pink dress over my head, tossing it off the side. Heels off. Tights pulled free from my legs. Hair unwound from its tight bun. All that’s left is a lacy black slip as an undergarment.
It’s not the usual red, skimpy uniform, but better than a morning sunlight afternoon dress.
I study each inmate who shows me their face. None are Niklaus. I’m jittery with nerves to see him again, but there’s that daunting fear that he didn’t make it. That I’m too late. That I didn’t travel back far enough.
Three women converse a few rows below me. I pinpoint their lineage by the branded marks on their shoulders. The peak and stag of the East Vexello Mountains. Additionally, they are big-boned, hefty, husky, hewn from hardship.
I’ve learned about their people from Helga Bee and Gerta at our family dinners.
“Pssst!” I call to them.
They look around, finding me staring at them with one eye between the crack of the chairs. Their expressions contort into a confused laugh as they find humor in my hiding. Not at all threatened by my sudden appearance.
“What’re you hiding from, naked little dumpling?” the middle one asks.
I lift my eyes an inch over the seat.
“Get over here!” I whisper-shout.
The three women laugh. “Bossy dumpling!”
“…and I’m not naked. I’m wearing more clothes than you three are.”
They approach and begin inspecting my black silk slip, touching the fabric and lace.
“Oooooh, so soft!” one chimes.
“Mmm-hmm. Definitely naked.”
“Pretty, but naked.”
I roll my eyes. “I need help!”
They snicker. “Bossy must be snorting too much of the stage fumes! She’s on a paranoia ride!”
“I’m looking for a prisoner—he has black hair and intense blue eyes. Good fighter. A few inches taller than you three. I don’t see him in here!”
“Yum yum! Big blue eyes, don’t mind if I do, Mama!”
“Please. I just need to know if he’s alive. His name is Niklaus.” I’m shaking from head to toe, unable to sit still. What if he didn’t make it? What if I lost him for good?
The women stop laughing and go entirely still. Silent conversations are had between their eyes, once full of amusement, now undoubtedly curious and slightly timid.
“Niklaus,” the middle one repeats.
“Yes!” I blow out an anxious breath.
“He’s alive,” the woman on the left answers cautiously.
I fall back on my butt and laugh-cry into my hands.
“Did you know him on the outside?” they ask.
“Yeah,” I mumble into my hand.
“Oooof. How old are you? Eighteen? Nineteen? You must have been a child when you last saw him then!”
It takes me a few seconds.
One, two, three, four, five…
A child…
“I’ve always wanted to know what that gloomy knight was like before he got here!”
I rock back onto my knees in front of them, plastering my hands to my chest as I beg for my ears to be so wrong, so incorrect about that subtle hint.
“Go back…” I rasp, tears rimming my eyes. “What…what does that mean? I must have been a child…?”
Please, no. Please, God, tell me I’m wrong.
“That prisoner has been locked up for what?” The middle woman looks between the other two and shrugs. “A decade? You’re so young. You must have been just a little girl dumpling when you saw him last!”
My stomach drops and each vital organ threatens to stop working. I double over, gasping into my fist, grunting through the shock of it all.
“No! No! No! I don’t know if I can move again to a more specific date! I could end up finding him again years later! Oh god, what do I do?!” I’m hyperventilating, shivering, wrapping my arms around my waist and praying this is just a nightmare.
He’ll never forgive me!
The women adjust their feet, unsure how to comfort this breakdown.
But nothing they say would matter to me right now.
All I can hear is my own heartbeat. The sound of Niklaus’s screams when he used his body to shield me from the acid shower.
The blank look on his face when the slayer sword came down on his fingers.
How easily they were separated from his hand.
And he didn’t react. He stared at the dismemberment as his brain clearly fought to protect itself.
“…that’s what I heard, anyway. He could have escaped with those two teens, eight or nine years ago. What were their names? Soap and Jaspy?”
“Sophia and Jack?!” I blurt out.
“Sure. Whatever. He’s known to be a master escape artist here. But he always comes back. No one really knows why.”
I’m gripping the back of the stadium seat so hard, my nails are bending and breaking off.
“They haven’t killed him for trying to escape?” I ask.
“Pffft! No! He’s the main attraction on fighting nights. They just keep him locked up in solitary down at the hidden dungeons of the underground prison. Even make him wear a metal cage over his mouth and everything so he doesn’t try to outsmart the Guardians again.”
The right one snaps excitedly, tapping her head as she remembers another detail. “I hear sentinels aren’t even allowed down there too! A team of Guardians have to patrol his isolated confinement at all times.”
“And other than the fighting, Blue Eyes hasn’t had any real human contact, in what?” the curly-haired middle woman asks.
“A couple years, at least!”
“Oof, can you imagine?”
“Golly-giblets, no. My bits don’t do well in the dry months!”
“I’ll say! What do you—”
“Please.” I am a puddle of two emotions waging war against each other. “How do I get to him?”
One part of me is annihilated with grief over what I’ve done to this man, for he will never be the same again.
The Niklaus I’ve grown up with is gone. The man I left behind has been alone in the dark, suffering and manipulated.
Forced to fight other inmates as the sole purpose for his existence in this prison.
A puppet for them to bring out when they get bored.
The other part of me is the annihilator. Imagining everyone who has hurt Niklaus and savoring a particular fantasy of sticking pins in their limbs and dissecting them slowly, watching them struggle to stay sane through the unmedicated surgery.
That includes me.
I have hurt Niklaus more than anyone here.
Because I left.
And it took me ten years to find him again.
“Dellilian!” I whisper into the narrow, stone hall.
“Hi, Miss Sapphire!” Dellilian lies down beside me as I wait in a dark corner to enter the underground prison. Her damp snout prods my heel.
“I know you can’t interfere too much—but I need you by my side for what I’m about to do. You’ll look pretty terrifying behind me.”
“Dellilian scary?”
“Oh, yes. You are chilling, Dellilian.”
The onyx wolf chuffs, blowing a small cloud of dust up from the ground.
I’ve followed the instructions of the East Vexello Mountain women without getting caught. And now, I am at the entrance to the dungeon. The air down here is stale, and it tastes old. Like warm bodies have existed for centuries down here, unable to escape even through death.
“Very dark,” Dellilian comments nervously.
I nod, pulling my lips between my teeth.
And Niklaus has been locked down here for so many years.
The women told me that this dungeon is used sparingly. For the prisoners that are too aggressive to keep around the general public of the rest of the prison. Yet too valuable to kill as they are of a scrupulous interest to the Mazonist Brothers.
As the Guardian manning the entrance wanders off, I jog, light on my feet to enter the mouth of the place no one dares to go.
The archway is low with claw marks, and I can picture those who have been thrown down here against their will, fingernails cutting into the stone doorway as they try to save themselves.
Slipping into the pitch blackness, the atmosphere becomes unnaturally thick, breathing in the air of someone else’s lungs.
The walls were made with black bricks by someone who did not understand human proportions of architecture.
At moments, it’s unsettling as claustrophobia chokes me—the walkway narrows like an unpredictable cave.
I turn to the side, duck, and then suddenly have so much room around me, I’m not sure where the walls are.
“Mr. Niklaus won’t be without enemies,” Dellilian warns.
“I know,” I whisper over my shoulder. “I’m counting on that.”
As footsteps echo along with dripping water and long, ghostly moans—I break out into a sprint. The predictions of my sources theorize that Niklaus is in the very back. My instincts tell me that’s correct, like a magnet summoning me, I can feel it.
Hold on, Niklaus. I’m coming…
I stop in front of five Guardians, members of the Blood family. And I know I’ve made it. Relaxed in their seats, they stand abruptly, caught unprepared and disheveled to see a woman out of uniform without any chains show up here of all places.
They guard a dome of bars without so much as a small candlelight to show anyone inside. I attempt to look around them to sneak even a glimpse of Niklaus in there.
I recognize Glinorious and Tycraniz Blood right away. The years have been kind to them. They remain god-like, ancient and majestically tall.
“I’m here for my husband.” The protective love that unravels into the palms of my hands links me to the Nightlung with ease. I will die to free him, and that truth alone gives me great power. Dominion over these demons.
Tycraniz does a double take. A quick scan of my upper body, and that flicker of identification spreads a grin over his face. “You are the wife?”
“She disappeared,” Glinorious Blood scoffs.
“Wasn’t she a witch?” another asks.
I measure the room with my eyes to make sure there is no additional threats. There are claw marks on the rocky ceiling. There are words probably carved by fingernails in the wall next to me. ‘They don’t let you die here.’
“If you let me leave with him, I will not come back,” I say. Even though the tunnel is ice cold, my skin is set ablaze with a fueling desire to eliminate everyone in my path to get to him.
The Bloods laugh, collectively making threatening steps in my direction.
Dellilian steps out from behind my shadow, growling, snarling, and snapping to warn them about getting any closer.
They stop to silently assess the danger of this animal being in close quarters of this prison. A few words are passed around in Old Alkadonian. I only recognize Meat Carnival.
“You only have a few seconds to decide,” I add calmly.
There’s a vehement charge of an otherworldly frequency buzzing into my bones, spearing into my hands. It’s a living, breathing beast that waits restlessly for me to release it.
“No,” Glinorious announces firmly. “We will cut off your limbs and hang you next to his confinement so he may watch you bleed out.”
“Final answer?” I move forward, holding my arms open to show I bear no weapon. “Because I heard you mate with your brothers and sisters to maintain a pure bloodline. Do you have any idea what that kind of incest does to your offspring over the generations?”
Glinorious is the first to attack me.
“It deforms them.”
The Nightlung possesses my senses and erupts me at sheer will. Claws are sunk into their minds, their genetics, each individual strand of DNA. And I fuse into the fibers of their souls. Within the radiating darkness of the Nightlung, I speak to the Bloods like a god commanding from worlds away.
“For every harm you have caused him, I will speed up your generational incest.”
The clock is spun and pushed forward in their anatomies.
Years and decades leave them. But they do not age.
No, that is not what I’m adjusting. I am speeding up the birth defects that will one day come to their children and their children’s children.
I manipulate each era within their foul mating system.
Their skin, once bronze by war, turns waxy and of decaying leather, pocketed with boils and warts that weep a yellow ichor.
Foreheads bulge unnaturally, like second skulls are emerging.
They lose or acquire more fingers and toes.
Teeth rot, growing in disturbing shapes.
Armor groans and cuts into their skin, too tight from new bone formations.
And those glamorous, noble headdresses—they melt and harden into small cages around their heads.
Drool hangs from their gaping mouths, a milky goo that flutters from each labored breath. Their human likeness has been buried by an incest-derived monstrous instinct. They move like hypnotized mammoths, disoriented and blind.
I strike while the disfiguration continues to warp their brain chemistry.
Stealing a sickle from Tycraniz’s belt, I bring two Blood Mammoths to their knees, slicing into their Achilles heels and kicking them to the ground.
They crawl away from me in a daze, and the others follow only after attempting to fight back in a drunk, sluggish form—my sickle cuts into their oddly developed muscles and tendons.
A blizzard of iced blood and frigid arteries hit me at every angle internally. But as I see his cage is abandoned, left without a guard…I straighten my back and set down the sickle.
The only sign of life from beyond the bars and within the cocoon of nightfall is leveled breaths.
We are finally alone.