Chapter 21
Elric wasn’t certain this was the right path, but it was the path he had been bid to follow.
A spell like what they needed to drain Jessamine of her magic would be complicated, difficult, certainly far more than what any of the coven members had ever done before.
Which meant he needed them to make more sacrifices.
To gather as many magical objects as they could and destroy them.
Then it would be a twofold gift for him.
One in the form of their sacrifice, and another in the form of the magic they released from the object.
Many of them headed off to other districts, as they were now safe to traverse without a single person awake in this kingdom. What the infected and the dead didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.
Stealing felt easier in times like these. Though he had never minded it.
While they did that, he watched the core coven do their best to keep Jessamine alive.
She was exhausted at the best of times. Sometimes the seizures struck her again, although he knew now it was just the gravesingers reaching out to her, trying their best to give her more information, which they believed she needed.
But something still didn’t sit right with him, and he would not let this continue without getting answers for himself.
Elric took his time finding the right place to hide himself while all the witches were preparing for the spell.
Though he knew they would follow whatever orders Jessamine said, he still didn’t trust them with his vacant body while his mind returned to his realm.
He needed to speak to the gravesingers themselves, if they were capable of it.
He knew what they would say. The god his coven had chosen to worship wasn’t strong enough to stop the God King, and there had once been a coven capable of doing so. Why should they not follow in the footsteps of those who had come before them and make something truly miraculous happen?
The coven was susceptible to such influence.
Their home was now a kingdom of the dead.
He’d walked the streets with them, listening to the moaning sounds of all the infected who had finally awoken and broken free from his spell.
He would never forget the sound of their fingernails scratching the doors and the way their palms had slapped against reinforced windowpanes.
Elric could do very little to save those who were already affected by Ajax’s spell. Now, he wanted to make sure that this path would actually save them all, before he put all of his faith in those who were already dead.
The castle had a small area deep in its belly where those who worshipped the gods could go. He had expected that many of those old rooms would have been destroyed long ago. Especially something that had once been dedicated to him.
But someone in this castle had worshipped the Deathless One until only months ago, it seemed.
He had to slip through quite a few servants’ quarters, and even then, the room was so far into the depths of the castle, down so many winding stairwells, he thought anyone trying to find him would likely get lost in the process.
The room was the size of a coat closet. But someone had taken the time to carve into the stone and create a divot large enough to hide an effigy of him.
It was little more than a carved wooden stick, but he could see his likeness in it.
The artist had taken great care to ensure his features were accurate, and they’d even burned the hair to give the definition of darkness.
Melted candles surrounded the figure, speaking of someone who had sent many prayers in his direction.
Prayers that would always go unanswered while he was dead.
And since he’d been alive, he had a lot more to do than answer to those who did not serve him.
“Curious,” he muttered, picking up the figure that was stuck to the stone with wax. “This is years of time and energy. Years of someone here, in the heart of all those who hated my people.”
There were surprises everywhere, he supposed. Although this one was a little more surprising than most.
He curled himself on the floor, with his back against the hole someone had spent hours upon hours carving. And then he tilted his head against the stone, ensuring his legs were pressed against the door so that anyone trying to enter the room would have a hard time getting in.
Then he drifted. Elric let his conscious mind return to the realm he had escaped not that long ago. The darkness swallowed him up almost immediately, but he allowed it this time.
The realm beyond held secrets for him, too. He had plans to ensure he knew every single one of them before he left again.
He conjured clothing for his body. Pants that were comfortably loose around his legs, a button-down shirt that was opened at his chest. Simple clothing.
Clothing he would have worn outside of this realm, and perhaps would convince the gravesinger spirits that he wasn’t as much of a threat as they thought he was.
But the moment he arrived where he had them chained, he knew that was a losing battle.
Of course they would question his reason for being there.
He’d chained them up, cut them multiple times, forced them to remain here when they could have moved on to wherever human souls went. He was the demon in their stories.
Just seeing them like this hurt. It was the first time he’d looked at them and felt guilt.
They had always been the reason he didn’t trust witches.
A symbol for all the things he had done wrong and all the ways he could have been better.
But now, looking at those smudges of spirits who were barely the women they once were, he wondered if he had maybe been too harsh on them.
Crouching just out of their reach, he looked for those who had freed themselves. A few of them had loose limbs, but none of them were entirely without bindings.
Elric lifted a hand. “I took your voices many years ago. How you are speaking to her, I have no clue. But I give you your voices back for a few moments to answer my questions.”
He flicked his fingers and a small box emerged from the dark water surrounding them. The gravesingers all froze, each of their featureless faces turning toward the object that would give them the smallest amount of humanity back.
He opened the box and stared down at the tongues within it. These were the first things he had removed from these spirits. Their hissing was nothing that he wished to hear. They had always spat insults at him in some form, and there had been no conversing with them.
Until now.
The tongues disappeared from the box, free to return to their owners, and one by one, the gravesingers started to speak.
“You fucking monster!”
“What did you do to us?”
“Two hundred years, Deathless One! You cursed us for two hundred years!”
“What cruelty did we ever do to you that was worthy of this? You, with all your infinite knowledge, could have simply let us go!”
On and on it went. He had expected the complaints, of course. Perhaps he even slightly believed that he deserved to hear them. He hadn’t been kind to any of these women.
But they hadn’t deserved his kindness either.
Finally, he lifted his hand and shouted, “If you do not quiet, I will take them from you again!”
It took a few minutes for the last ones to finish their grumbling, but finally he was able to hear nothing but blissful, wonderful silence.
“I am only here because of her. You know of whom I speak.” Crouched before them as he was, he could have stared into their eyes if they had any. “I want to keep her safe, but I don’t believe any of you are actually doing that as well. So tell me now, what is your endgame?”
“To see a gravesinger leading the coven. As she should have done all those years ago,” one of them said.
“We want to help her, to ensure that she will not fall behind like all the others. The witches these days do not respect the old ways. They have not seen what will happen if we do not respect the ways that came before.”
“She needs our help. Without us, she will fail.”
But then he heard the quietest voice among them, a timid sound of someone who had not spoken in a long time and who was unsure if she should ever speak again. “She’s going to get hurt if we don’t help her. Someone has to try.”
He stood and waded through the spirits. “Who said that?”
None of the gravesingers moved. They remained crouched as they were, some of them glaring up at him. He could feel their hatred, even without eyes.
But one spirit didn’t look at him at all. Her face remained turned toward the ground, as though she didn’t want him to see her.
He knelt in front of her, watching carefully as she became more and more uncomfortable with his scrutiny. “You are the one who said someone has to try. Well? Go ahead. Try, gravesinger.”
“She doesn’t know what the God King started, and without us telling her what has happened, she won’t be able to…” The gravesinger swallowed. “Someone has to stop it.”
“Stop what?”
“What the God King put into motion. The world either needs several gods or no gods at all. There cannot be a single god, Deathless One. You should know that. It is too much power for one person, and even with so many of you as you were, there wasn’t enough attention given to almost any of you.
Too many people worshipped him.” She spat the last word like a curse.
“Now he wishes to re-create that again. He needs to be put in his place. He needs someone to show him that there are others who can rule.”
“And you know how to do that? You think she can do that?”
His mind whirled. What were they up to? Surely they understood how dangerous it was for them to meddle in the affairs of gods. But perhaps they didn’t care, after all these years of death.
Another gravesinger chuckled behind him. “We think we can help her do that. Or you can, Deathless One. A god can always rise up against another god.”
“We already tried that,” he grumbled under his breath. “The coven will never be stronger than him.”
“That is a lie. You are their god. All the sacrifices are yours, no matter how much you give them back. You can use what they give you, and you take back what you have given them.”
He shook his head. “No. It has never been that way. The only situation in which I would be stronger than the God King is if I keep all the magic for myself. That is how the other gods were so powerful. They were selective in who they gave their gifts to, and even then, they rarely gave it at all. The magic was a gift, rather than a right.”
“Exactly,” one of the gravesingers said. Her hands were pinned to the ground, but somehow she had slid one of her feet free. It left her crouched with an extended leg in a strange way that made his skin crawl. “All we’re asking you to do is keep your magic so that you can fight him. As you should.”
“The coven would not stand for it.”
Another whispered in his ear, “No, they wouldn’t. They would sacrifice you all the sooner for your magic.”
“So that is your endgame. You want to see me dead. Why?”
A long pause followed his question before the whispers started up. He wasn’t sure what they were saying, but he knew without question that he did not like the intent behind the words.
Finally, one of the gravesingers spoke up. “It’s you or her. She is not what she once was. In case you haven’t noticed, she’s not one of us anymore.”
Every part of him ached at that truth. He’d known it. Somewhere deep in his mind, he suspected that there was something irreparably broken after Ajax’s spell, but he hadn’t ever allowed himself to fear what was happening in front of him.
“She is no longer a gravesinger?” he asked. He had to be certain.
“No.” One of the souls uncoiled herself. Her feet were still bound to the ground, but her hands were free to reach for his face and scoop his jaw in both of her ink-covered hands. “So the next time they kill you, you will be trapped here again. Just like you have trapped us.”
He felt his heart thud hard against his ribs. “There will be another. There is always another.”
“But how many long years will you be stuck, Deathless One? Another two hundred? Perhaps three hundred this time?” The gravesinger cackled out a bitter laugh. “Would you even survive that long now that you’ve tasted freedom?”
No. He wouldn’t.
Elric lunged away from them, wading through the laughing witches until he was finally free of them. Their words remained, however.
If the witches sacrificed him, he would be trapped here again.
This time, he wouldn’t be able to survive it.
He had no questions about that. Knowing what it was like to live would not sustain him any longer.
There would be no dreaming of the beauty of the world in this place.
The only thought consuming him would be that he might someday see her again.
But if he didn’t do this, then she would die.
At least here, he might be able to find her soul when she inevitably passed on.
At some point, she would die. It would be maybe a hundred years, maybe much more than that if she was becoming a witch and no longer a gravesinger.
But there was always a chance that they would be reunited.
If he remained in the living realm, he wouldn’t be able to bring her back. Her soul would pass on to that place where he could not follow. There would be no reincarnation to find her in the next life. Only the knowledge that he was stuck here, and she was beyond his reach.
Elric didn’t know how long he walked in that forgotten realm of darkness. Only that he did so until his legs quaked and his lungs burned. Even then, it wasn’t enough. He couldn’t think about the possibility of losing her. He couldn’t entertain the thought of her dying and being gone forever.
But he didn’t want to die either.
He walked until he saw Jessamine, her hair melding into the darkness and her pale skin radiating moonlight in this realm of never-ending misery.
She smiled at him, that soft expression melting the ice around his heart. “I wondered if I would find you here.”
Color bloomed at the sound of her voice.
Vivid reds and violets that dropped from her very figure and turned his black-and-white world to color.
Emerald green spread from her feet, beds of flowers blooming.
Sunlight speared through the shadows of his realm, and he knew without question what he had to do.
He held out his hand, knowing that this could be the last time they would touch. “We will always find each other here, nightmare.”