Chapter 53 #2
Septimus shook away his own unease and approached the door.
It was dark inside, and hazy in a way that reminded me of the fog that clung to the surface of a pond in summertime.
It was impossible to see much of what was within.
The next sheet of snow was so thick it encased the entire world in white.
From behind me, someone shouted, “Get in!” just as a flash of lightning, tinted eerie green lit up the sky.
Septimus ushered us through the door.
In the span of a single step, everything was dark and silent and warm. Like stepping from one world into another. I couldn’t hold back a whispered curse of amazement.
We had stepped onto a smooth marble floor, perfectly preserved, as if it had been sealed away.
But several feet ahead, it was cracked, falling off into nothingness.
I peered over the ledge to see a deep pit, rock and earth melded with remnants of the temple—sheets of mosaic floor sticking out like balconies, several levels deep, all fractured and broken.
Gold pillars protruded from clifflike walls, as if they had been consumed by nature itself.
I looked up to see an ancient statue of Nyaxia, rendered in real silver to mimic the metallic shade of her body, looming over us, crookedly emerging from the edge of an overhang.
And above us, was an open tear in the earth, and the swirling blizzard—the blizzard we had just escaped from—beyond.
It was as if someone had destroyed the temple by pulverizing it into the earth itself, and then sealing over whatever was visible from the mortal realm.
And gods, the smell. At my first inhale, my nose wrinkled in disgust, stomach turning. A thick, sweetly putrid scent permeated the air.
“This was quite something, once,” Sylina murmured, blindfolded gaze running over the ruins.
I wondered how she saw this place—did the Threads reveal it to her as it had been two thousand years ago?
I had no doubt that she was right. After all, it was a special kind of temple that had once literally housed the goddess it honored.
But now, something terrible had seeped into this place. As if the pain of the betrayals that had happened here, and the pain of all the innocent people who suffered for it afterward, had all pooled like infected runoff from a shallow grave.
I drew Zefiah from my belt. Her glow was weak, and her blade a literal fraction of what it had been, but it still felt good to have her in my grasp. I heard feet scuffling behind me, and I glanced over my shoulder to see Ilia taking a step toward me, only to blink and look away when I met her gaze.
“Look down there,” Sylina said. She gestured over the edge of the hole in the floor, down into the deep gouge. My human eyesight, near useless in this much darkness, had to squint for a few long seconds before I could make it out:
The ground, perhaps six levels down. The floor was miraculously preserved, as if it had been pushed straight down into the earth by a massive palm.
The intricate mosaics were still intact, albeit marked with some brutal cracks, like bloody roots.
They depicted a full moon made of mirrored glass, representing Nyaxia.
It was framed by a red rim, countless crimson circles spiraling away from it, which appeared to be, from what I could tell, cut directly into the floor.
Two different designs superimposed over each other.
A great piece of artwork once meant to honor Nyaxia, later leveraged to become a weapon to destroy her.
“The spell to render the shackles,” Sylina said. “We’ll need to get down there.”
“How conveniently placed,” Septimus said wryly. “Can’t we just jump?”
“I’m sure you’ll be very intimidating to Nyaxia as a squashed bug, with your brains smeared across the floor,” I said, and his mouth quirked in a grimace.
I looked around, searching for a way down. There were no stairs in this literal hole, and sadly, we all lacked Nightborn wings.
{There are paths along the walls,} Zefiah said. {Imperfect ones, but perhaps passable.}
I squinted into the darkness. She was right—there were some doors and halls still standing, pushed up against the wall, narrow paths before the floor fell out to the sheer drop.
I cursed inwardly at the sight. We’d have to climb down like mountain goats.
Slower than any of us wanted to be when we had so little time.
When I pointed this out to Septimus, he winced, visibly frustrated by the same thought. But he said to the soldiers behind us, “We use what remains of the halls. Quietly. Quickly. And absolutely no magic. We cannot risk attracting Nyaxia’s—”
A mournful wail rang out in the distance, echoing through the ruins.
Septimus stopped mid-sentence. We all turned, weapons drawn.
Silence.
And then, it came again: pained, feral screams, faint, but moving closer.
I looked up, to the swirling snow visible at the mouth of the pit. The outside world, simultaneously so close and yet an entire realm away from us.
I knew those sounds. I’d ground them into my bones.
“Soulless,” I whispered. “Those are soulless.”
“They’re far away,” Sylina said. “Out there, not in the temple.”
But her voice was grave. This was no comfort. Because soulless meant Shadowborn. It meant that Nyaxia had sent her loyal children to go corral her disloyal ones.
And if she had done that, then that meant perhaps she wasn’t all that distracted by Acaeja’s attacks, after all.
“Could those things follow us in here?” one of the soldiers said, looking at the open door, and the flecks of sky visible through the open, broken ceiling. The question was heavy. Could someone else leverage the passage Sylina had opened?
We all looked at Sylina, who was silent. Even she didn’t know.
Another wave of screams rang out. A muscle feathered in Septimus’s jaw, and then he turned back to the ruins.
“It won’t matter,” he said. “We’ll finish this before they have time to catch us. Go.”
I felt death coating my hair, my skin. The air was thick and increasingly hot.
Our steps were quick and frantic and clumsy over broken stone and cracked stairs and slabs of destroyed tile.
Soon, we were leaving a trail of discarded hoods and cloaks.
Behind us, the soulless screamed, and screamed, and screamed.
Faster, we urged ourselves. Move faster.
It was impossible to tell how close the soulless were. We couldn’t even tell whether they’d breached the opening of the temple. The pit bent reality in a way that made little sense; sometimes they sounded as if they were right behind us, and other times, like they were miles away.