Chapter One #2
I narrowed my eyes and backed even further away.
“You know my name,” I hissed.
“Why shouldn’t I?” he asked. “Would it not be prudent for the gods you've spent your entire life worshipping to know your name?”
I blinked, shocked. Gods?
“You—you’re—" I tried.
“A Geist, yes,” he informed me. “One held in high esteem in all of your ancient stories but fallen quite from favor in the here and now, to be sure. But not to worry. I won’t take your lack of knowledge regarding my story to heart.
Though, I cannot say the same for others here.
If I were you, Dante, I would remember as much as you can about the Geist, who they are and what they’ve done, and fast.”
He looked back down at the object in his hands again, tapping along once more. I watched him for a moment, wracking my brain for the name Kleio.
“You’re one of the Eleven,” I said when I remembered.
“Was,” he replied without looking up. “Not anymore.”
“Not anymore?”
“That was a long time ago.”
“How long?”
“Five hundred years.”
I just stared at him, processing everything he'd told me. He still didn't glance up from his strange device. Instead, he continued to tap on it until the sound grew so irritating I had to break the silence once more.
“Where are we?” I asked, impatience leaking into my tone.
Finally, he looked up. He cleared his throat and set the device on the bed before taking a step toward me.
I glanced down long enough to see the glowing tablet flickering.
Some numbers and letters in a language I didn’t recognize scrolled across it at a rapid rate.
Peeling my eyes away from the strange item, I turned back to face him.
I held my chin high as he approached and did my best not to allow the fear I was feeling deep in my bones to show.
I wasn’t sure exactly how one was supposed to go about meeting a god for the first time.
I didn’t know if I should bow or start blubbering.
Maybe I was supposed to fall to my knees in reverent worship.
Maybe I was supposed to start praying and wringing my hands or praise his holiness.
I was certainly supposed to remember much more about the legendary god in front of me and all he'd done throughout the extensive history of his divinity.
Bria would have done all of that and more.
She would've known exactly how to confront this deity and would have been humbled to do so.
But I wasn't the blubbering type and I sure as shit had never prayed to his kind before.
Kleio was right. I'd never been the most devout of my House.
I'd never found piety at all and I wasn't going to now.
So, I fell into my old ways. I put up the walls that allowed me to become the cold, calloused son of the First Ring, the ones that allowed me to distance myself from anyone around me without fear of their betrayal.
The ones that had begun to crack for the first time with Adrian.
Pushing the thought of her aside and steeling myself, I decided on a show of strength.
It seemed to be the more rational course anyway.
Until I figured out where I was and what this forgotten deity wanted from me.
He was a god, yes, but he was also my captor.
I had to play this right. I tried not to think too hard about the fact that it was what Cosmo would've done as well.
So, instead, I leaned back against the wall behind me and crossed my arms, narrowing my gaze in his direction.
"Where are we?" I repeated again, slower to be sure he understood.
“That,” he began, “is precisely what I'm here to talk to you about, Dante.”
I allowed my brow to furrow but made no move to meet him as he approached.
“What’s the last thing you remember?” he asked.
I didn't miss the way his eyes shone as they raked over my expression. I grimaced before I could contain the reaction.
“Ah, yes,” he said. “I don’t imagine the memory is pleasant. Betrayal, most often, is not.”
My gaze snapped to his. Betrayal. How had he known to use that word?
How had he known the depths of my thoughts, the word that haunted me even now, spoken by the ghost of my former partner, whispered through our broken connection every moment I was still alive, still breathing?
How could he know what I'd done and how it tormented me?
“What were you told would happen if you beat the Trials, Dante?” he asked, seeming to change the subject.
He turned away and paced, hands in his pockets as if we were merely discussing something as casual as the weather. I eyed him warily even as he did not so much as look in my direction.
“That I…that I would join the Geist,” I repeated the old belief, suddenly looking around at my surroundings in a new light. “Am I—"
“Welcome to Pavos, Dante of House Viper,” Kleio said formally, turning to me with a wicked grin on his lips. “City of Light, City of Awe, City of the Geist.”
I blinked at the god before me, speechless.
I'd known, hadn't I? The moment he'd revealed his identity to me, I should've understood where I was.
It explained everything. The strange room I was in, the glowing magical tablet sitting on the corner of the bed, the deity pacing before me.
But I'd never truly believed it before, that I would join them in the end, so I still found it difficult to do so now, despite the proof existing right in front of me.
I glanced down at my arms, at the tenth band solidified there. I'd done it. I'd won. We'd won.
My stomach lurched as a wave of nausea rolled through me.
Kleio cast a knowing glance in my direction.
“You've earned your spot here in the most coveted service of the gods,” he continued.
Then, with a frown, he turned away from me and returned to the bed where he plucked the object back into his hands and began tapping away once again.
“You will learn more about your place in this most holy city very soon.
For now, I'm required to run some tests on our new Victor before you meet our ruler and his council.”
“Deimos,” I whispered, in awe despite my best efforts. “You mean Deimos, the leader of the Geist, and his Council of Eleven. Will Callidora be there as well?”
Kleio smiled briefly up at me, though the expression was strained in a way.
“Very good,” he commented, voice far more emotionless than before. “That knowledge will serve you well here. As will the false reverence.”
My awed expression faltered and failed. Kleio's tone was approving but, as he looked back down to the item in his hands, I didn't believe I imagined the brief glimpse of sadness in his eyes.
“Before we get started, Dante, what can you tell me about the ninth Trial?”
He asked the question innocently enough, affecting an air of casual curiosity that might have fooled someone else.
But I'd grown up wary of emotions, learning to read the signs of my grandfather’s fury before I was caught up in it.
I could see the keen interest in his eyes, the way he leaned slightly forward to better hear my answer, his fingers poised over the object in his hand that had so occupied his attention before, now forgotten. I took a breath.
“The ninth Trial…” I replied, searching my memory. “That was the avalanche?”
He nodded.
“What about it?” I asked. “One minute, Adrian and I were screaming at each other on top of a mountain. The next, the mountain was falling down on top of us.”
“You were buried,” he said, “under twenty feet of snow. By all accounts, you should have suffocated. But you didn't. How?”
“You want to know how I got out?”
He nodded again.
“I…” I began, brow furrowed. I could still remember the feeling of being crushed by the weight of the mountain.
The freezing cold death that strained my body and filled my lungs until I couldn't breathe.
The girl who'd held my hand until the very end, until the force of the snow ripped us apart. Jaw clenched, I continued. “I don’t know. I was laying there, suffocating, dying. I tried to melt the snow and breathe it in to stay alive but it wasn't working. Then there was this big dark cloud over me and the snow was gone and I passed out. I…I don’t remember anything else.”
He nodded slowly. I watched his expression for any hint of what my story had meant to him. I had a feeling this was some sort of test. I couldn't tell whether or not I'd passed.
“That’s what you should tell them too, when they ask,” he told me after a moment, his voice much lower than before.
I stared at him.
“Them?” I asked.
“Deimos, Callidora, the Eleven,” he clarified. “They will ask you about the ninth Trial as well. That's what you should tell them, everything you just told me. Nothing more, nothing less.”
“But why—"
“This is important, Dante,” he snapped. My eyes narrowed at his tone but a moment later he cleared his throat and took a breath to calm himself. “Just…don't lie to them. Don't pretend you know any more than you do. They'll know if you're lying. They saw it too.”
He gathered up his device, tucking it under an arm once more, and turned toward the wall that had opened for him before.
I wasn't done with this conversation. I had so many questions I couldn't grasp onto any of them long enough to formulate the words aloud.
“They saw it?” I called out from behind. “What do you mean they saw it?”
Kleio turned back to me with a frown.
“The Trials are an open spectacle for any of the Geist to watch at their leisure. Your tunnels lead you here, just outside of Pavos, where nine arenas have been constructed for our people to view each one as spectators. You cannot see us but we can see you. In fact, you and your partner’s journey through the gauntlet managed to draw a bigger crowd than any event Pavos has held in millennia.
So believe me, Dante, when I say that Deimos, Callidora, and each of the Eleven watched your ninth Trial. Do not lie.”
I just stared at him, lips parted in shock.
They'd been watching. That whole time, our gods had been watching us pass through each and every one of their torturous Trials.
What had they thought when they'd seen what we were capable of?
Had they placed bets on our success the moment we'd been connected in the first?
Did they watch indifferently while we were haunted by the voices of our past inadequacies in the second?
Did they cheer when we stumbled to victory in the third?
Or hold their breath with us in the fourth? Gasp at my severed arm in the fifth?
Had they seen Cyrus sink beneath the waves and Dahlia pull his limp form out of the pool, wailing as she dragged him out? Did they watch Olympia fail, see Milo give in? How many of us had they watched try and fail to pass their ancient tests?
“If you have no further questions, we really should begin our assessment,” Kleio said then, interrupting my thoughts.
At a single tap on his device, the wall directly in front of us slid open.
He stepped through to the other side without a word of instruction for me to follow.
I did anyway. “Deimos is not known for his patience and he's been waiting some time to meet you, Dante of House Viper.”
I turned to look back at the pristine white room behind us.
I stared at where he'd been a moment before, where he’d stood in front of me as I took up a defensive position against the wall.
This god, the legendary Kleio, who’d come bearing the news that I had, in fact, joined the Geist. And now I was to meet Deimos himself and his Council of Eleven.
Shaking my head at the wondrous absurdity of it all, I stumbled forward into a walk and followed him out of that strange room and into Pavos, the City of the Gods.