Chapter 55
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
First, the pain.
And then the thought:
That was a huge mistake. I broke myself.
{Only partially,} Zefiah said. {And I expect profuse thanks for that. But later, because you must get up, Kyrene. You must get up right now.}
My eyes opened.
Something hard wedged against my lower back. My left arm—thank the gods it was my left—hurt fiercely. My right ankle was twisted in what seemed like not at all the right direction, and I prayed Zefiah had enough power left to help me use it again.
I could no longer see the sky. The opening in the earth was a tiny little white speck above, largely obscured by fallen beams and jagged slabs of broken stone.
I felt like I was miles under the surface of the earth, much farther than the ground had seemed from above.
I couldn’t even hear the shouts of our group or the soulless’s screams unless I strained for it, and even then, they sounded a world away.
I forced myself to sit up, though my head spun. I kept seeing movement out of the corner of my eye. But in the darkness, I couldn’t see Thastias. Not Septimus, either. My heart twisted with worry.
“Septimus?” I called out.
“I thought I already witnessed you die.”
The voice made my heart stop. I thought I must be hallucinating. I prayed I was hallucinating.
But then again, what good had praying ever done me?
Nyaxia’s voice came again, venomously amused. “Mortals. Stubborn like cockroaches. Your bones and flesh are so fragile, and yet, you can be so deceptively difficult to kill.”
I forced myself to my feet, swaying. The floor tilted sharply beneath me.
Shapes and movements in the darkness smeared together.
There was so little light down here, and my eyes were so frustratingly human.
My heart beat faster, faster, without my permission.
I thrust Zefiah out in front of me. Her divine light provided a little illumination, casting gold over the rubble.
It reflected off the mirrored mosaic moon on the ground, sending little flecks of light bouncing over the ruins like taunting, ghostly fireflies.
I could see now that the carvings on the floor were intricate, far more detailed than we could see from above.
And yet, for all their painstaking detail, they also struck me as viscerally ugly.
Like the scar tissue left behind after a drawn-out torture.
Like the bones pulverized into dirt after Vostis.
{Many suffered for this indeed,} Zefiah whispered. And right then, I saw it. Sorcerers bleeding over this floor. Humans tethered to the walls to be used as food and energy sources. Vampires, too, dismembered and buried beneath the stone.
I let out a shuddering breath.
“Does it disgust you, Vindica Ultis?” Nyaxia’s voice slithered through the shadows. I spun around, looking for her. Nothing but darkness. “Pain begets pain. Look at how many souls he tortured, all just for the chance of torturing me.”
I lifted Zefiah, her light dancing over the walls. The carvings continued up them, too—tightening into smaller patterns, great swoops running up the wall, crafted of interlinked circles. Chillingly reminiscent of chains.
My stomach turned. I had expected to come to this place and find some great immortal magic. Something so ancient and powerful that it was wholly alien.
But the mundanity of the truth was so much more horrifying.
This place was nothing but a fancy cage.
Its makers could dress it up as much as they wanted with divine magic and mosaics and scriptures; they could hide it behind gold and marble.
But it was every bit as ugly as a rusty cage in a cannibal’s basement.
A cycle that went on and on and on. In this world, you were either the one with the open throat or the one with the full stomach.
But all those full stomachs once had teeth at their throat, too.
“Septimus!” I called again.
Septimus-mus-mus . . .
My voice echoed. Nyaxia’s laugh dripped down the walls.
And with that sound came another one. A low, agonized hiss, like water rising to steam.
I whirled around, Zefiah raised, unwelcome fear spiking.
Thastias crawled down the ruins, those glowing red eyes fixed directly upon me.
He descended like nightfall, inevitable and inescapable.
He scaled the broken walls with spiderlike grace, limbs moving independently the way only a being with no functional skeleton could.
And his blood—his blood was everywhere. Slithering down from the ceiling and up from the floor.
Countless fingers reached for me, infested into every corner of this wretched place, like a fungus.
And I couldn’t even deny it to myself anymore. I was so terrified.
This was the monster, I was certain, in every child’s mind when they awoke from their nightmares.
It seemed like such an inevitability that I would end up here, facing this thing.
Like this was always the darkness that I was catching out of the corner of my eye my entire life, only now revealing itself.
“You are such an arrogant fool,” Nyaxia’s voice hissed. “Death would have been such a mercy. There are so many worse fates. Which of my cousins intervened to save you? Which of them sent you here? It does not matter. I will leave your soul here forever as a reminder to them.”
I stepped backward, moving Zefiah over the walls, desperately attempting to take in our surroundings while also keeping one eye firmly fixed on Thastias, who continued his slow prowl down to me.
Something wet trickled down the back of my neck, and I prayed it was sweat, but it was almost certainly blood.
Where are you, Septimus? Godlight flickered over fallen statues and cracked mosaics and enraged painted faces peering through broken marble. But the light was only more disorienting, with each reflection off the mirrored glass floor making every shadow leap.
Do you sense him? I asked Zefiah. Septimus?
{I cannot. There are too many sensations.}
She sounded as if this was painful for her to admit. Perhaps Zefiah, too, was having a hard time adjusting to her diminished abilities.
I shrank into the darkness, wedging myself beneath the crumbling plaster and stone, moving swiftly from shadow to shadow. But even I knew that this was a shit strategy. I couldn’t exactly hide in the darkness from a creature who had been trapped in it for two thousand years.
Thastias let out a low growl. With a graceful leap, he lowered himself to the ledge above me. His eyes were two glowing circles, throbbing slightly, like a heartbeat.
“A fitting punishment for him,” Nyaxia’s voice echoed.
“Do you know what he intended to do to me here? Cage me for his own purposes. Carve away pieces of me for power or keepsakes. Rape me, so that I might bear him demigod heirs. Spare me your disgust, false savior. I swore once that the next time someone attempted to do such things to me, I would punish them for it. And even now, I believe his punishment has been too light.”
I looked at this twisted beast before me, this thing that had been suffering for two thousand years, and I thought:
I agree.
But I wasn’t here to debate who was supposed to suffer the most. We were all fucking monsters.
I held my breath, shrinking backward until my back touched the wall. His eyes slowly scanned the ruin, and—
Drip.
I looked down.
A single drop of red—my blood—splashed to the floor.
Shit.
I braced myself.
You think you can stab that thing to death, Zef? I asked.
Pointed silence. I wished she could lie. It might have been nice to have a little reassurance in my final breaths.
Thastias’s red eyes snapped to me. He coiled. I let out a roar through my teeth and drove from my hiding place, Zefiah drawn, my gaze fixed to his chest. It was only a mess of blood and a few glimpses of white bone, but there had to be—had to be—a heart in there somewhere.
A wave of black-red crashed over me.
Our clash was brutal and breathless and frantic.
There was no strategy to this. Whatever pieces of one I might have started with disintegrated as those tendrils of blood wrapped around me, and the terror, icy and paralyzing, plunged through my veins.
I felt Thastias’s exhaustion, and his pain, and gods, his hunger—fervid, desperate.
My own blood burned inside me. Everything hurt, so I could not tell whether he struck me, or where.
I plunged Zefiah into something. Some flesh—something soft and hard at once.
A blast of godlight shook me.
Thastias let out a feral shriek. Pain tore through me.
My back hit the ground. I rolled, recovering, only to learn the hard way that my left arm was nearly useless.
I lifted Zefiah to see a tangled mass of red-black and silver bouncing from wall to wall—a cataclysm of blood and snarls and shrieks. Not one figure, I realized, but two. They were moving so fast, obscured by the darkness, that it took me a moment to recognize him:
Septimus.
His sword was out, but he was barely using it.
Ropes of black-red instead surged from his every strike.
They were tangled together in a writhing mass of it—and it would have been beautiful, in a morbid sort of way, if it hadn’t also been so terrifying.
It was so fluid, so graceful, like ribbons dancing in gusts of an ocean wind.
Only with the two of them together could I see how starkly different Septimus’s blood was from that of his ancestor.
Isolated, a vampire’s blood looked to be nearly black.
But in comparison to Thastias’s, which was deep as ink, Septimus’s held countless ruby shades that glinted beneath Zefiah’s light.
If I looked hard enough, I could glimpse silver light, too, beneath the fabric of his shirt—the magic he’d hoarded, welded into his body, no doubt the only reason why he’d even made it this far.
He was remarkable. And yet, as I watched them careen from one wall to another, a terrifying certainty clicked into place:
He wouldn’t win.
Not by strength alone. Not even enhanced as he was.