Chapter 54
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
Chaos crashed down around us. I swung Zefiah, who let out an admirable burst of godlight. I hit something, though I couldn’t see well enough to know what it was, only that the flesh gave way far too easily, as if rotten.
Pain shot through my left arm as something grabbed it and shook, like a dog with a piece of meat.
I let out a curse and thrashed against it, while Septimus dove for me, blade raised, slicing through a limb that flopped to the ground with a wet THUMP.
He stared down at it. Even he was not sure what we were facing. “What the hell is—”
A wave of paralyzing fear struck me in a wall.
Soulless screams echoed in the halls. And they were no longer in the realm above. They were on top of us.
“Shadowborn mutts!” one of the warriors cried, and that was all the warning we had before those voices devolved into grunts and shouts.
I spun around, attempting to stare into the darkness, but the hall was narrow and dark. I saw Sylina whirl, saw her disappear and then reappear several strides away, blade raised.
How many? I demanded of Zefiah.
But she didn’t answer me. Her godlight sputtered in erratic flashes. We struck something—I wasn’t sure what. Whatever it was let out a scream of agony.
It was so dark that my human eyesight failed me.
In the past, this was when I would be most reliant upon Zefiah—her instruction and her godlight.
But now, her voice was so weak that I strained to hear her over the chaos of battle, and her light barely cut through the depths of this darkness, merely illuminating flashes of writhing flesh and spatters of blood.
There was no time to stop. No time to calculate.
We scattered, struggling to keep our balance on the slippery, uneven stone, as monsters surrounded us.
Through the fighting, I pieced together that we were being attacked by two different adversaries—the soulless, pouring in from above, and something else, whatever I had awakened in the walls.
Something Bloodborn, surely. By now, I recognized blood magic when I saw it.
But unlike even the most deteriorated cursed Bloodborn I’d seen, they did not resemble people.
Indeed, they seemed to have no bodies at all.
The soldiers in the back, with Sylina’s help, held off the soulless. But whatever was coming up from the depths of the temple—that frightened me more. Septimus and I fought and fought and fought, but they just kept coming from every direction, unfazed by our strikes.
Zef, what are these things? I hacked something wet and squishy, rancid blood spewing over me. Something cursed, right? Something Bloodborn?
A long pause before she said, {I have never felt anything like this. I do not know.}
I felt how much she loathed to say those words. Almost as much as I did to hear them.
I barely dodged another reaching tentacle. Zefiah’s blade passed right through it. I glimpsed a silhouetted figure appear briefly in the dark and then melt back against the wall, though it was so dark I wasn’t sure if it was a trick of my weak human eyes.
Still, I whirled to it. But as I stepped backward, my heel struck something hard.
I realized too late—Ilia’s body, lying in exactly the wrong fucking spot.
My heart fell through my stomach. I was falling.
I looked over my shoulder just in time to see the edge of the broken floor right behind me, and a sheer drop.
Fuck.
Just as I was about to fall, Septimus caught my wrist, sword raised, tendrils of his blood circling it.
“Kyrene!” Sylina’s voice screamed a warning. “Move!”
Time slowed. Septimus’s grip dug into my wrist, but my balance was still off, boots slipping against the crumbling floor.
My eyes frantically searched the darkness, all of it moving, all of it so difficult to pull apart.
Septimus’s gaze was turned back to the hall, where our soldiers were tangled in a hopeless battle against the onslaught of soulless.
But, I understood, that was not Sylina’s warning.
I stared over Septimus’s shoulder, to the depths of the ruins, where the shadows writhed and dripped and lurched.
And I realized, at last, what I was witnessing.
My first instincts had been right. We were fighting something Bloodborn; something cursed.
But Zefiah couldn’t count how many creatures were rising from the temple because there was only one.
I had once thought I would never see anything more horrifying than what Septimus’s father looked like after decades languishing in the end stages of his curse.
I had been wrong. Because many times more horrifying than a creature who had suffered for ten years was one who had suffered for two thousand.
The thing before us had, indeed, once been a vampire. But he certainly wasn’t anymore.
He barely looked mortal. His face was elongated, distorted, as if every tendon and piece of cartilage had long ago rotted away, leaving behind only broken bones suspended in decaying skin and muscle.
His teeth were so long that whatever remained of his lower jaw had completely receded beneath them.
His cheekbones were sharp, glimpses of white peeking through masses of red-black.
It was impossible to tell where his original limbs had been, because his body was now just a writhing mass of them—blood slithering up the walls, across the floors, around us like snakes getting ready to constrict.
But he still had eyes. Dark, bottomless pits, with a single glowing ring of red.
And an ancient crown, broken and rusted, fused into what remained of his skull.
I knew exactly who this was.
King Thastias, locked here to rot alongside the weapon he had intended to use against his goddess. The first Bloodborn to succumb to the curse, destined to suffer it for the next two millennia.
I could practically taste Nyaxia’s spiteful satisfaction. What a fitting punishment. What a useful guard.
My heart sank. My eyes lifted to the glimpses of bleached white sky visible through the hole above. To the flecks of light that I had dismissed as lightning.
We’d been fucked from the start. We were never going to avoid Nyaxia’s wrath.
King Thastias’s blood circled us. The shrieks of the soulless and the cries of our warriors blended into a terrible din. I still clung to Septimus’s grip, right at the edge of the pit.
The certainty locked into place. We were cornered. There was only one place left to go.
Septimus began to pull me up, but I didn’t move.
“Ready to fly, dove?” I said.
His face barely had time to shift into confusion.
Thastias pounced.
I stepped backward.
Together, we plummeted over the edge.