Fallyn
Chapter sixty-seven
It took two whole days to reach Moonfall, which I have dubbed the ghost city based solely on the fact that no birds chirped, no breeze moved the foliage, and the thick, oppressive silence made every crunch of our boots on the gravel path dipping towards it sound all the more damning.
Ominous. In those two days, I wasn’t sure which hurt more, my feet or the accumulating guilt over leaving Dess and Rowena.
I would just have to survive the curse to beg their forgiveness.
Despite the light of the midafternoon, it was dim outside the city, as if an early dusk had settled.
Hazy fog had rolled in, diffusing the light and chilling the city in a way that reminded me of a much darker version of my own with its stark black and grey gothic architecture.
A monolithic castle kissed the sky with massive turrets, inviting us with knobby fingers and devious whispers I couldn’t quite understand.
It was filled with longing, old unkept promises and the scent of death lingered over everything, making me recoil entirely.
But one look at the ink spreading, now nearly kissing my elbow, was enough to propel me to take a step towards ancient stone pillars marking the entrance to the bridge and the gate to the eerily silent city beyond.
“Are you ready?” Ash asked softly, staring at the massive moss-and-mildew covered stone bridge that waited for us.
Here and Moonfall felt like two different dimensions, like floating between perception and reality.
“Once we go in, all that dwells beyond those gates will know we’re here and come looking for us, so I need you to be certain. ”
Ash had taken great care to inform me as to what lay ahead within the dormant city.
Those who violated the temple, desecrated the city, those who Hecate deemed unworthy were all trapped there, unable to fully die.
The city they disrespected they were now bound to for eternity, mindless in their urge to protect it now.
I swallowed thickly looking between Ash and the castle, praying that we wouldn’t share a similar fate.
But another glance at my arm sobered me up, lending me courage, even if it were a facade.
Straightening my shoulders, I drew my dagger with a nod.
I wasn’t sure if a dagger would do anything against the spirits that lay ahead, but the cool steel bolstered me, giving me something to do with my worrying hands.
“If this is the way to end the curse, I’m ready,” I replied, stepping forward with Ash at my side.
The first step on the cobblestone made the air thick, making me work to draw breath, it vibrated around us as if pleading for us to turn around.
The stones we prodded down whispered their warning to us, drenched in dread and the fear of those who came before us as Ash, and I silently pressed on.
Ash’s hand entwined with mine, a gentle squeeze that may as well had been my heart.
I glanced up, but nothing could have prepared me for the sight of Ash pressing my hand to his chest, face solemn as any vow.
“Whatever happens, you’re safe,” he murmured. “Your life belongs to me. I won’t let anything hurt you.”
The only response I could give was a numb nod as my pulse thundered away in my ears.
The moment we crossed under the black iron canopy interconnecting the stone columns all noise stopped.
Even the fog stood on ceremony for the deep tolling of a lone bell somewhere in the depths of the city.
A warning if I’ve ever heard one. A howl much too deep to be a dog pitched, several more monstrous sounds beckoning to me.
“So, it begins.” Ash’s calm murmur directly opposed to pounding in my chest. My eyes whipped around, tracing every nook and cranny, every deep shadow searching for something.
Anything. I couldn’t tell if it were a blessing or a curse that I found nothing.
Ash grabbed my hand, tugging me into step with him. “Run.”
We sprinted down a street to the left, veering away from the baying howls, and a right, veering back towards the castle that remained stubbornly out of reach.
Why weren’t we any closer?
And why were the howls closer? Howls now accompanied by roars and groans, all much too close for my liking. Ash’s head moved, analyzing every nuanced path, every dip in the stone, every shadow that threatened us with every step.
“It’s a maze.” Ash’s realization solidified the growing sense of dread that had been building in my gut.
“What is it with immortals and labyrinths?” I scoffed even as I tried to calm my exertion.
So many tales of labyrinths I’d heard over my lifetime, but not one of them had a pleasant ending.
We moved forward again just as the sound of drumming footfalls reached us.
Ash pulled me into the shadows as we jogged on, a gamble if I’d ever seen one.
I wondered if whatever he was could see better in the dark than I could.
Softening our steps as much as possible, trading speed for stealth, we took another left at the dead end.
Ash was marking each change of direction with an arrow.
His shadows left scratched claw marks indicating the way we went, which was foreboding in and of itself.
A sputtering clicking sound echoed off the walls.
A strange chittering I suspected would feature in my nightmares moving forward that pierced the heavy tension.
I turned to find the source directly behind us, but it was too far away and enshrouded in shadow to discern much, aside from the fact that it was vaguely humanoid.
I couldn’t tell if it carried something, or if one of its hands were outfitted with long claws that nearly dragged the ground.
I raised my hand to throw my dagger, hoping my aim would hold true.
Ash grabbed my arm before I could.
“Don’t waste your weapons. That shell of a soul can’t die.” Ash grimaced before pulling me into a run again, the thing screaming in its pursuit.
I dared a look back and nearly tripped at the sight of a woman with black ink bleeding out of her eyes, and a body that appeared to have been stretched.
She was like an undead version of a harpy, and so much more terrifying.
Her neck, her limbs, all stretched and contorted at macabre angles, and I only got a fast glance, but I was certain her lower leg was broken as she ran after us.
We burst through a gate into an eerie, perfectly round garden; I fell splaying out onto the stone below.
Ash cursed as the woman rushed us, the blue white of her dead eyes filling my vision—
—before it all went black.
I blinked. Ash tugged me upwards to my feet and I realized what he’d done. He’d sealed us inside this part of the garden with a wall of shadow so thick you couldn’t even try to fathom the other side.
“Let’s go. It won’t hold for long,” Ash urged.
The place we found ourselves in was as much a garden as I was a goddess. Gardens were beautiful, filled with flowers, unfurling petals, sweet scents, and pristine wild beauty.
This was the opposite of that. Instead, it was like it was growing corpses in the soil.
Skulls laughing at me in various stages of desiccation, plants spiking and curving from the dirt in such a way they resembled a mortal’s spine, jagged leaves sprouting from stems like decaying fingers, blood puddled underneath.
Death leered at me in its many forms as my eyes darted around, begging for an escape.
I choked on a scream, my throat frozen halfway between a sob.
“It’s an illusion, Fallyn!” Ash’s hands gripped my chin to force me to look at him, his hands cupping my face.
“Your fear is taking over, and it gives power to this place. We can’t leave until you see through it.
Look at me.” My blurry gaze looked to him, for solace, for guidance, for connection.
For anything as long as it wasn’t that garden straight from the depths of the worst part of the Underworld.
“That’s it. Keep looking at me. I won’t let anything hurt you.
The garden is an illusion, a glamour, but only you can dispel it.
Believe in me, in my words, not what your eyes see.
See through it, like looking below the surface of water.
” Reluctantly, I looked back to the evil garden, holding to Ash’s words like a lifeline. “Unfocus your eyes. See the magic.”
I followed his direction with extreme hesitation.
I tried not to stare at the empty eye sockets and toothless grins, or worse, the ones with half-rotted flesh.
Instead, I tried to look strategically, looking for the magic, the glamour that Ash pressed for me to see.
It took a few seconds, but as Ash whispered his support that this garden wasn’t real, as I leaned into my belief in him, is when I saw the first spark that shoved my heart into my throat.
It was like the glare of the sun on a windowpane, bright and glittering, burning away the illusion where it hit.
I could still see the macabre garden, but like an oil painting over a canvas, I could mentally wipe it away, watching reality and glamour blur together before revealing a perfectly normal space.
No garden, no corpses, and more importantly, a door.
“I knew you could do it, Fallyn,” he said, grabbing my hand. I looked to Ash in triumph, but our moment was cut short by the screaming and clicking on the other side of his wall of shadow. “It’s weakening. Get through that door. Now!”
I bolted faster than I’d thought possible. The ornate black and grey door opened easier than anticipated on silent hinges, the woman chasing us through. Ash blasted her back with a call of his shadows before slamming the door.
If I ever saw anything like that again, it would be too soon.
I wasn’t foolish enough to think we were out of danger. Far from it. I hoped that the danger was something I was already equipped to handle, like urging the petals of a rose to unfurl, or driving a knife into a monster that could actually die.
We found ourselves in a perfectly round room outfitted with black quartz, moon sigils, a bowl of aged, yellowed skulls, and a thick curtain of cobwebs draping over it all. It was unused, the air as stale as any long-buried crypt. The moon lit from above through filthy windows in the domed ceiling.
“How long have we been here?” I asked. Not long enough for the moon to be that high, surely. It had been dimming before, but not the dead of night.
Ash grit his teeth before responding. “We’re at the epicenter of Hecate’s connection to the mortal plain.
A doorway realm, if you would. A threshold.
Time moves differently here, but it’s also perpetual night.
” That made a strange sort of sense. Hecate was the goddess of night and magic, and hopefully the magic of curses dwelled in her realm of jurisdiction as well.
Keys of various sizes and materials hung from the walls and on the air as if by invisible thread.
An ornate, silver-framed mirror shone from the center of the wall opposite me, the only thing not covered in dust or debris, but even its beauty wasn’t able to ward off the thievery of aging.
It glinted in the moonlight beneath the tarnish, ominous against the backdrop of those spirits still shrieking, as if letting Hecate know that they were committed to finding us.
The heaviness of the moment hit me as I watched Ash ready the mirror for Hecate’s arrival, murmuring incantations in a long dead language.
As if beckoned by the ancient tongue, the room began to hum, alive in its own right.
I half expected movement from the walls.
But instead, the skulls in the silver bowl lit with a pillar of flame, drenching the room in a harsh glow.
“Get ready, Fallyn.” I’d never heard him sound so dire. So nervous. Ash whispered the final word, “Hecate.”
The flames turned black, banishing the light and raising shadows into supremacy.
White and black light flickered along the floors, the walls like a dark current.
My entire being froze when my gaze returned to the mirror to see a woman with feral eyes staring back at me with extreme interest. A woman whose beauty rivalled even Aphrodite herself, with tumbling black waves of hair.
Every time she moved her head, her face shifted, revealing her goddess form.
Sometimes it was fully skeletal, like when Ash’s true form slipped through his mask; sometimes glimpses of her other two faces shimmered in and out of reality.
One thankfully with skin and features intact, one spectral entirely.
We’d summoned the goddess of night and magic. Of thresholds and crossroads.
I almost couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Hecate was real. There had always been a small part of me that hadn’t truly believed in the gods, but here she was staring at me.
Ash didn’t bow. Didn’t speak. Didn’t move as I pressed closer to him, a movement the goddess in the mirror tracked with a knowing expression that left me frozen in place.
“Hades.” Her voiced wasn’t loud yet boomed with command, with influence, with the self-assuredness of a goddess of her standing. It echoed about the room, but my attention zeroed in on the male at my side. “It’s been too long by far, my lord.”
Hades. She’d called him Hades.