19. A Curse Of Death #2
And I made myself watch. Someone had to.
The witch and the broken king and the terrible things she had released upon the world with the last of her breath.
Because that, I understood now, was the true cruelty of her.
Not the blade she had put in the Queen. The two slow poisons she left curdling behind her.
One in the Queen’s veins and one in her son’s soul, both of them set to bloom long after she was cold in the ground.
The darkness pulsed in to swallow the scene whole, and the very last thing I saw was Melanthe gone still upon the cold stone.
That and the King standing over her with the bloodied blade hanging useless at his side.
A grieving fool who didn’t yet know that he had just put a knife through the only cure his dying wife would ever have.
I prayed, then. Prayed to be ripped back up out of all of it, back to that warm and terrible little chamber beneath the castle. Back to where the worst thing in the world was a beating heart in a box.
But when the dark cleared, there were stars above me. A cold night sky, vast and indifferent. And I knew there was more. And honestly, I didn’t know how much more of this I could take. How much heartbreak and horror a person could be made to swallow in the space of a single stolen night.
A shadow shifted at the edge of my sight, and I turned toward it.
And once again, my breath stopped.
Demetrios.
He was younger, thinner, caught somewhere in that raw country between boy and man.
But it was unmistakably, undeniably him.
And as I stared, the last piece slid into place with a quiet, sickening click.
The child. The bastard son of Melanthe and Hyperion, the boy I had ached to save through every moment of that vision.
I had been right, he had been Demetrios all along.
He stood with a shovel braced in his hands, his breath misting in the freezing dark, staring down at the ground in front of him.
Grief and a raw, terrible determination warred across his face.
Every movement seemed to cost him, each shovelful of frozen earth wrenched up as though it took with it some piece of him, he would never get back.
His jaw was locked, his lips pressed white.
And beneath it all, I could feel the way I had felt everything in this nightmare, the bottomless, hollow ache in him that nothing would ever fill.
The shovel rang as it struck the frozen dirt, metal on stone, and I flinched, glancing around, certain the sound would bring someone running.
And that was when I truly saw where I stood.
My hand flew to my mouth.
I knew this place.
I had been here before. This blasted, barren ground, this exact stretch of frozen earth beneath an empty sky.
This was the Rift. This was where it had torn open. And his mother, I understood with dawning horror, had been buried here, in an unmarked grave, in the very place the worlds would one day split apart.
The shovel struck again and again, the sound ringing out across the silence, and the smell of damp turned soil rose up to mingle with the mist. I watched him work, relentless, his muscles straining, his hands tearing, and his breath ragged, until the hole had swallowed him to the chest and only his pale face caught the starlight above the rim.
The air around him thickened, darkening in a way no night ever should.
And then, beneath the scrape of earth and stone, I heard it.
A faint, rhythmic thudding.
A heartbeat.
For a second, he stilled before leaning down toward the sound, which grew, pulsing up out of the soil.
He cast the shovel aside, dropped to his hands and knees, clawing at the frozen ground with his bare fingers.
The heartbeat quickened. And I felt it answer in my own chest, that same impossible tether, as though his heart, her heart, and mine had all somehow become one.
I could feel the hope in it. The desperate, breaking hope that what he searched for had finally been found.
His fingers scraped against stretched skin and rotted cloth, and he reeled back with a wail that tore the night in two. Then he fell on the grave again, clawing faster, more frantic, dragging up the ruin of what was left of his mother.
Skin stretched thin and grey over the bones of her skull.
I turned away, gagging, but I couldn’t close my ears to the sound of him weeping into her matted hair as he lifted what remained of her.
The sickening sight of him cradling the broken half of her against his chest, rocking her the way she had once rocked him in a freezing barn while the snow came down.
And in her ruined chest, impossibly, something stirred.
A heart. Slick, and black, and beating.
Still beating, after all these years in the cold ground.
He laid her down again with a tenderness that broke something in me and reached up beneath the cage of her ribs.
He worked the heart free, and the instant his hands closed around it, the whole world seemed to shudder.
Darkness boiled up out of the grave, surging around him, around me, blotting out the stars.
And then her voice rolled out of it. Impossibly vast. Coming from everywhere and nowhere. Coming from the earth and the dark and the dead black heart in her son’s hands. As though the whole of creation had been made to listen.
‘When the Key overlooks one of her world’s greatest beauties,
Then comes the time to fulfil your duties.
Avenge me, my son, and stand at my grave,
When the wound between worlds grants passage its way.
Seek the Key, and bring her safely home,
For within her lies power unmatched and unknown.
Through her shall my vengeance awaken again,
And through her shall the worlds be brought to their end.
Then from the heart, a light tore free.
It lanced out in a single searing line, splitting the dark exactly as I had seen the Rift split the sky, and realization drove through me like a blade slid clean between my ribs.
It was never me.
It was never me who opened the Rift.
All this time. All the guilt I had carried like a stone sewn into my chest, every face I had grieved, every life I had counted as mine to answer for…
the whole of it built on a lie. I hadn’t torn the worlds apart.
I had been a girl on a hillside who happened to be the lock.
But the hand that turned the key, the will and the rage and the dead black heart that ripped the Rift wide and let the darkness pour through… it had always been his.
It had been Demetrios.
Atlas had been wrong. They had all been wrong. I wasn’t the one who had doomed two worlds.
I was only ever the thing he had been sent to come and collect.
The truth seared through me, white and merciless, as the vision finally began to dissolve, the darkness rushing back in to claim me. And as it took me, I became aware of one last thing, the only thing left in all that black.
My own heart, slamming against my ribs.
Pounding, frantic and afraid, in perfect time with another.
As I felt what was coming before I could stop it.
Before I could stop the darkness from consuming my life and before I could stop my own heart from being the very last thing of me…
…Left beating.