Chapter Thirteen - Evie
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Evie
IT CAME HARD and violently, my whole body convulsing around it, as my stomach emptied itself. I had one hand braced on the marble, the other gripping the edge so tightly my knuckles burned, and my eyes watered.
My throat felt flayed raw by the time it stopped. I stayed there anyway, breathing through my mouth, my forehead nearly touching the cool stone.
I finally sat up and looked around. The room was pristine and perfect, as if I hadn’t just crawled back into it from the inside of some holy nightmare.
“Evie?” Mara’s voice came through the wall, thin with alarm.
I squeezed my eyes shut.
“Evie, what happened?”
I pushed myself up on shaking arms and fumbled for the towel draped nearby, wiping my mouth with hands that didn’t feel mine fully.
My stomach still rolled in ugly little aftershocks, and there was spit on my chin and tears in my eyes.
The taste of bile clung to my nose and the back of my throat like punishment.
“I’m fine,” I croaked. The lie came out ruined.
There was a pause. “No, you’re not.” Then, softer, “Are you okay?”
Something in that almost undid me.
I lowered myself to sit on the floor, my back against the wall, and my knees pulled halfway to my chest. Nothing in the room had changed, and that somehow made it worse. The marble still gleamed. The silken veil still lay smooth. But now it all felt even more rotten.
“Mara,” I said, then stopped.
How the hell was I supposed to explain that?
How was I supposed to say I found a hidden passage in the wall and used lightning that came out of my hand to spy on the god who imprisoned us, and He was sitting in a gold room surrounded by kneeling things built in the shapes of people He wanted to own?
My laugh came out weak and ugly.
“Evie?” she whispered.
I dragged a hand over my face and forced myself to breathe before I answered. “There’s… a secret passage.”
Silence. Then, “A what?”
“In the wall,” I said. “Or behind it. Between them. I don’t know.” My voice shook, and I hated that I couldn’t seem to stop it. “I opened something. I found a way to His private chambers.”
Mara was quiet for a beat too long. “I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I.”
That was the worst part.
I asked in a whisper, “Have you ever… been to His private chambers?”
“No. Never.”
“Has anyone?”
“I don’t know. You’re the only one I’ve ever…” She didn’t finish her thought.
I looked at my hands. They were steady now Whatever I saw in the passage had burned through the panic and left only exhaustion behind.
“I went in,” I said.
Another silence. Then, very small, “Why?”
I almost laughed again. “To find a way out. Mara. Don’t you want to leave this place?”
She made a soft sound, maybe a breath, maybe the ghost of a laugh that hadn’t survived all the way out.
I went quiet for a long moment because now came the impossible part. “I saw Him,” I said finally.
I swear I could feel Mara listening harder. “Did you see Him?” she asked.
I stared at the floor. “Yes.” My voice came out flat at first, “sitting on a throne.”
Mara didn’t say anything.
“He was… in this room,” I said, and swallowed hard. “This huge white-and-gold room with nothing in it but a throne and… And around Him…” I stopped and pressed my lips together. “There were these figures.”
“What? Like people?”
“I don’t know.” My hand shook once, and I curled it into a fist. “Not people. They looked like people at first, but wrong. They moved like… robots. It was too smooth, like dolls if dolls had been made by something ancient and deeply unwell.”
The bile rose again at the memory. I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth and kept going.
“They were kneeling around Him. In a circle. And when He sat on the throne, they…” My breath got stuck, and I had to swallow. “They started chanting.”
Mara’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Chanting what?”
I shut my eyes. “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come.”
It sounded even creepier in my voice.
Silence answered me from the other side.
I laughed once, sharp and sick. “Yeah.”
My hand found my stomach without me thinking about it, pressing there as another wave of nausea rippled through me.
“It was like…” I swallowed hard. “God, this is going to sound insane.”
“Evie,” Mara said softly, “I think we passed insane a while ago.”
I almost smiled.
“Have you ever been to an amusement park?”
“No.”
“Well, it reminded me of this stupid boat ride at this place where you go on rides for fun,” I said.
“Fun?”
“Uh, yeah. It’s got all these fake dolls singing in perfect little harmony while you float past trying not to think about how cursed the whole thing feels.”
Mara made a small confused noise.
“Except this was worse,” I said quickly. “So much worse. There was nothing harmless about it. Nothing playful. He was sitting there… reveling in it. Like He needed it. Like the worship was feeding something in Him.”
A cold shudder ran through me. “It was so weird, Mara. That was the part that made it worse. He was…” I searched for the word and hated the one that came. “Pathetic. Like some narcissistic child playing pretend with things He’d made to love Him.”
I heard Mara move on the other side of the wall. Fabric whispering. The shift of a body sitting down.
“What were they?” she asked quietly.
I looked back toward the sealed wall, toward where the passage had been.
“I think He made them,” I said. “They weren’t alive exactly. He got angry at two of them because they didn’t move when He wanted them to, and He broke another one in His anger.”
Mara sucked in a breath.
“I saw its insides,” I whispered. “There was a crystal in its chest with some kind of light inside it. His Light. I think that’s how they worked. They were just…” I looked down at my hands again. “Hollow things built to kneel for Him.”
Mara didn’t speak right away. Then, she asked, “How many were there?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe 10 or 12?”
“You said two of them didn’t move?”
I frowned. “Yeah.”
“Were they broken too?”
I let out a hollow laugh. “No idea. Maybe even His creepy worship dolls are getting tired of His shit.”
That got a breath from her that might have been the beginning of real laughter, fragile and startled and immediately swallowed back down.
But then the memory hit me again, the names He’d said, the way something in me had reacted. I pressed my palm harder into my stomach.
“There were two of them,” I said slowly, more to myself than to her. “I don’t know why, but…” I stopped.
“But what?” Mara asked.
I stared at the floor. “They felt wrong in a different way.”
The words came slowly now, dragged up from somewhere deeper than thought.
“Not just because they were there kneeling in front of Him. But because when I looked at them, something in me…” I shook my head. “I don’t know. It was weird, like I should know them. Or hate them. Or miss them. Something.”
Mara was quiet.
I laughed weakly and wiped at my mouth again. “The whole thing was just… so.. weird.”
“Did He see you?” she asked.
“No.”
At least I didn’t think so. No. There was no way because if He had, He would be here already.
I looked toward the wall again, toward the place where the passage had opened, and felt the memory of His syrup-thick warmth moving through it like blood through a vein.
“He was there,” I said quietly. “But somehow only I could see in, and He couldn’t see me.”
“Good,” Mara said.
I blinked. “What?”
Her voice was shaky, but steady underneath it. “Good.”
I leaned my head back against the vanity and stared at the ceiling. “Because now we know He’s truly a fucking weirdo?” I asked.
“Because He doesn’t know what you can do,” she said.
That shut me up. For a moment, the only sound was my breathing in this gilded nightmare.
Then Mara asked, very softly, “Do you think… you can do it again?”
I looked at my hands, and they looked perfectly normal. “I don’t know,” I admitted.
The truth of it settled between us. I didn’t feel hopeless, but I didn’t feel safe either. I just felt unfinished as I lowered my hand from my stomach and flexed my fingers once, watching nothing happen.
“But I plan to try it again,” I said. And this time, when I spoke, my voice didn’t shake.
Mara didn’t say anything after that, and I sat there on the marble floor for another few seconds with the taste of bile still sour in my throat. Nothing had changed, and that was the problem. This place still gleamed and everything was perfection.
But I needed to know if I could get back there. If I could call it again, just enough to prove I hadn’t imagined it.
I pushed myself to my feet, wiped my mouth one last time, and crossed slowly to the wall where I’d opened the passage.
My pulse was still too fast. I shivered when I thought too hard about that throne and the chanting, and that cracked-open thing on the floor with the crystal burning inside its chest.
Don’t think about it. Just breathe.
I laid my palm flat against the wall and closed my eyes. I just breathed. In. Out. Again.
The first time, nothing happened, and something caught in my throat as I forced my shoulders to loosen. I told myself not to beg because the power had never answered my panic.
“Come to me,” I whispered.
A flicker answered under my skin, and gold crept between my fingers in a fragile wavering thread. I stayed still, afraid even my relief might scare it off. The current moved down my wrist in a warm then spread over the wall in branching threads so delicate I almost thought I was imagining them.
The seam appeared again. It was just a seam this time, a narrow vertical line from floor to ceiling, glowing softly like the wall had remembered where to split.
“Mara,” I whispered.
“What?” she whispered back immediately. “What is it?”
“I—I did it. It’s there.”
The line brightened. Not enough to open. Not enough to breathe that cool dark air on my face again. But enough to prove it hadn’t been some one-time miracle born from panic and luck.