Chapter 53 #3
We descended into what felt like a living nightmare. As we moved deeper, dark vines crawled over the ceiling, the walls, weaving through the cracks between mosaic shards and winding around marble columns. Moisture dripped somewhere in the darkness.
This place felt bad. There was no other way to describe it.
A deep rot of wrongness in every way, from the way it looked to the way it smelled to the animal way my body reacted to it, like a fox being coaxed into a trap.
The hallways that remained still held remnants of the temple’s former greatness—detailed gold craftsmanship wedged into the cliff face, beautiful doorways etched with intricate prayers.
Mosaics depicting Nyaxia’s rise to power still adorned the walls, warped by the bulges of stone buckling beneath them.
Nyaxia, standing in a poppy field with Alarus, whose face had been lost to a giant crack; Nyaxia, desperately running to his rescue; Nyaxia, chained up by the White Pantheon, a growth from the rock bursting from her chest, giving the eerie impression of a stake through her heart.
She glared at us, haughty, hateful, as we rushed by.
Never fast enough.
Somewhere after the second level, a whine rang out in the darkness.
Immediately, we froze. The sound was unmistakably here, in the temple, unlike the cries of the soulless above. Septimus’s chin snapped up as he stared into the ruins. Sweat glistened on his cheekbones, plastering his hair to his temple. He held up a fist in a silent command.
Another sound, this one a low whimper. A groaning exhale.
Much closer. Right on top of us.
I whirled around to see Ilia leaning over, her hands on her knees. She gritted out something between her teeth, something I couldn’t understand.
“Ilia,” Septimus said, the concern palpable in his voice.
Her head snapped up. But it was not to Septimus that she looked. Her eyes instead tracked to me. And I saw that they were now entirely red, the blood consuming her irises, her pupils, and all white.
She made the sound again, and I understood it now:
“Stop me.”
And then her palm shot up, blood springing from it, and she lunged for me.
Ilia was only a few feet away. She moved so swiftly that before I could react, I was slamming against a broken column.
Her face was inches from mine, teeth snarling and bared.
Something hurt, but I wasn’t sure where, or from what.
My muscles shook with the effort of fighting against her magic, which called to my blood itself.
Delicate tendrils of red-black rose behind her, sliding from every wound on her body, from her mouth, from the tear ducts of her eyes.
Septimus lurched forward, his hands raised, blood surging, rules discarded.
But I was the one who got her, driving Zefiah into her heart.
Black spattered over me as her magic collapsed.
She let out a strangled cry as Septimus yanked her off me and drove his blade through her chest again, for good measure.
A pained lucidity crashed back over her face, for just a moment, before he pulled his sword free. She slumped to the ground.
Silence, as it all slowly dawned on us what had just happened.
The soulless wails echoed. Closer now, certainly.
Shit.
Shit.
Ilia had used magic. Septimus had, too. Would it be enough to catch Nyaxia’s attention?
{It could be,} Zefiah said. {Even if she is distracted, we will never be far from her mind.}
My knuckles were white around her hilt. Blessed sword or no, she suddenly felt woefully inadequate against a goddess.
But then another low whine came from the darkness, a slithering echo that bounced from the walls.
We whirled around. No one spoke, but no one had to. We were all thinking the same thing:
We had thought the sound we’d heard minutes ago had come from Ilia. But Ilia’s corpse was now at our feet. So what the hell was—
“Kyrene!” Sylina gasped.
Septimus’s face snapped toward me. I glimpsed a split second of horror.
Zefiah let out a sudden flare of warning. {You are bleeding!}
My neck. Where Ilia had broken skin. Fuck.
I clapped my hand to my throat, just as something wet moved behind me.
I whirled around, Zefiah raised.
The vines on the walls slithered through the cracks like snakes. So many of them that it looked as if the entire wall was alive, moving, reaching for me.
And then I realized:
The vines were not vines at all.
They were blood. Blood so old, so vampiric, it was now black as ink.
Blood wielded by some—some creatures so powerful, so inhuman, that they were barely alive at all.
At first, I thought that they had to be cursed Bloodborn.
But this looked so different than what I’d seen of them before, devoid of any humanoid form at all, and so many more.
A morass of movement slinked from every corner.
Stalked from the hallway. Slid down from the broken floor above.
Reached up from the staircase below. Twisted limbs and tentacles of dripping black blood. So many I couldn’t count them.
And with a guttural scream, they were charging straight for me.