Chapter 24
101 YEARS AGO
AMELIA DID NOT know where she needed to go, but at some point, she felt the plunge. The descent was like hitting the first wave of an ocean, except it was a dark cloud, dense and barely breathable. The smell of blood had grown so thick that she felt like she had swallowed fistfuls of copper. Then dirt filled her mouth, and she lay face down on a hard surface. She spat out soil and let mud fill the chips of her nails as her fingers dug the ground. Amelia hoisted herself up and inhaled her first breath, one that felt nothing like life.
She’d landed on a dusty road, rocks digging into her ribs. The air was thick with smog, filling her lungs with coal. Deep orange blanketed the hazy sky, as if a wildfire had spread across the land, except there were no flames to be seen. She’d expected roiling flames, wails of agony, even molten lava. She thought she would see horned demons fly across the sky and had mentally prepared for the scratches and fangs of predators in a new, dangerous world.
The Otherworld was nothing like she expected. Not a wall of red, not even a secret hell living underground. Instead, it felt like she’d been encased inside a jar. A still moment in the aftermath of destruction. Unclear what is meant. Reds were merely dull sepia, while everything was eerily still.
Amelia looked down and saw her skin covered in a translucent sheen. Her body had turned to glass. Even her dress looked transparent, like water frozen in time, blue fabric melting to a river that swirled around her body. She stared at the lines of her palms like cracks in a mirror. Her hands pressed to her cheeks and felt the cool surface of glass. Her fingers fiddled with the hard crystals of her lashes. If she pressed too hard, the lashes would crack off. She wondered, if she fell over, how she might shatter entirely.
A voice called her name in the distance. A pair of horns emerged from the fog, followed by the shadow of a raven. Malicine cut through smoke and ash, then stopped when they saw her. “Why do you look like that?”
Amelia stared at her hands, not knowing how to respond. To her surprise, the raven did.
“The Otherworld is a different counterpart from the world you know. In here, your sin becomes part of your skin.”
Amelia gawked at him. “How can I understand what you’re saying?”
“Because this land is where I was born, little girl. You may call me Talon.”
Malicine held up their arms and tried rubbing the green off their skin. Still the shade remained. “Looks like my sin will never go away.”
“That’s because you were born in sin, Malicine. It is your whole existence.”
The demon swallowed a lump down their throat, their features twisting as if they had tasted something bitter, before they looked around. Amelia followed their gaze to the rust-colored sky where they had fallen from. Thick clouds rolled over the atmosphere, and between the folds, a circle glimmered in light. At first, she thought it might have been the sun. But the borders around the shape were dark like ink, and they began to crumble. Tiny flecks of gold rained from the sky like ash. She let a piece fall in her palm before the slightest movement made the scab crumble and disintegrate.
She looked up again, and the portal was gone.
“Blood opens the portal, and the portal is sealed once it dries.” Malicine’s eyes sharpened at Talon. “That’s why you weren’t able to return.”
They squinted at their surroundings, but the smoke was too thick. Wings sprouted from their back as the demon flew in the air to find a peripheral view. As they reached higher, Amelia heard them starting to cough. A large ash chunk hurtled through the air and struck the demon’s side, burning a hole in their cape. They crashed into the ground and heaved more soot from their lungs. Amelia rushed over, but Malicine put out the already put out the flames with their fist.
“What’s wrong with the air?” they snapped.
“I do not know. It has been too long. But I am starting to remember now, life before this.” Talon pecked at the crumbs littered on the ground until they dissolved in his beak. “There used to be trees that stretched for miles in the sky. The world was a barren terrain of ice and sleet, and demons roamed everywhere. Now there is nothing but red.”
Amelia blinked at the land of ash around them. Burnt tree trunks were left as headless stumps, rotten and decayed. Everything was covered in a coat of grime, so that wherever she touched, ash smudged her brittle fingers.
They wandered around the barren land, the oppressive heat fogging her glass skin. The air was heavy with the smell of burnt flesh, and she followed the stench of death to uncover a pile of debris, where corpses rotted in ash and dust. She recognized bent horns, broken wings, spikes and slimy black coils that had long been dried in charcoal.
“We’re too late,” Malicine murmured. Disappointment betrayed their face. Even if there were other creatures, perhaps ones that looked like Malicine, they were all dead.
“This can’t be it,” Amelia said. Denial fueled her to move. She raced to the shore, where waves of a dark sea creeped steadily toward them. Black water moved in a slow, rhythmic pulse. Layers of soot covered the surface in a muddy expanse. A weak gust of wind barely moved a canoe that had been stuck in the water. She tried pulling the stern, but the fixture refused to budge. Every time she pulled, the canoe groaned like it was dying, and new cracks etched her skin from straining too hard.
“You’re not going anywhere,” Malicine said flatly.
Amelia jammed the shards of her fingers into the rotting boat, but it refused to budge. She would never move forward. The water was too still, too solid, a semi-stagnant pool of death and decay. Frustrated, she gave up and sat inside.
A long moment of silence passed as she sat in her failure. How quickly her hopes had disintegrated, like dreams that would never be remembered after the cruelty of waking up. She’d wanted to stay in those dreams, even for a moment, to see if she really could live somewhere.
In the thick smoke, she turned to Malicine.
“Why did you curse me?”
Malicine blinked, taken aback by the sudden question. Perhaps it was the hard press of Amelia’s lips that made the demon answer in earnest.
“The curse wasn’t for you. It was revenge on my sisters, who were your godmothers. I wanted to humiliate them.”
The simplicity of the truth struck Amelia. She was surprised, at first, to find out her godmothers were related to Malicine. Then something else burrowed beneath the initial shock. A hint of a tear crackled her cheekbone, the glass crumbling.
The curse had nothing to do with her after all.
For so long, she’d wanted to sleep forever. Her mind was stuck in fog of perpetual apathy for life. She thought an answer would dissipate the mist and bring clarity. There had always been a shadow following her, whispering wishes for her life to end. Now she knew where these shadows came from.
“It was never you.”
Her words died into a whisper as she caught a glass tear in her palm. The teardrop burst into shards so small they disappeared into her hand, becoming part of her once more, a never-ending cycle.
“There is no reason for the darkness,” she murmured. “It is just who I am.”
Her gaze fixed into the distance where the fog showed no future ahead of them. She was an empty glass with no reflection. Perhaps that was why she was made of it.
She hadn’t wanted to cross to the Otherworld because she was brave. It was not adventure she desired, but escape. Her tears continued to fall, collecting into broken shards around her feet.
Without saying a word, Malicine climbed into the boat with her, Talon joining their side. The demon sat in the back and placed a palm on the water’s surface. Ash swirled under their skin, thick like tar. Then a white substance bubbled from the water, a sliver of air. Their fingers twirled in a circle over the water to build momentum. They extended their arm and let the energy release itself.
A gust of wind struck the boat and propelled them forward. The jet of solid wind made the ancient wood creak, nearly tipping over. Talon landed in Amelia’s lap while she gripped onto the ledge. When she readjusted her balance, she turned back to the demon. “Thank you.”
“It was only to stop your crying.”
Malicine left trails in the boat’s wake, a rippling chop shooting across the black sea and swelling the waves behind them. Their power was like a streak of moonlight that ripped across a dark sky. Amelia could only hope the journey wasn’t aimless. That it could still lead to something on the other side. Somehow, she knew Malicine felt the same way.
She dipped her hand in the water. The murky surface broke apart under her touch. Her fingers created a trail as the boat drifted forward, the smallest ripples radiating from the tips of her skin. Ash clung onto her hand in wet layers, yet she didn’t recoil back in disgust. Instead, her eyes drifted over the patterns in the water, the expanding ring over the black sea.
“Maybe you’ve granted me a favor with this curse,” she mused. “If I live any longer, I would waste a perfectly good life.”
She let out a half-hearted laugh, but Malicine didn’t join her. The demon’s lips turned downward into a scowl, wrinkles deepening between their brows. She had said something wrong.
The demon stood up abruptly. The boat shook under the sudden imbalance of weight and , causing Amelia had to cling onto the ledge again. Malicine towered over her, and the weight of their glare was enough to make her sink lower in her seat. Their eyes flashed poisonous green, and she realized this was something deeper than annoyance. For the first time, she felt hatred radiating from Malicine.
“We are not friends, princess. Do not expect me to feel sorry when you were born in a world that already bows to your feet. You are nothing more than a tool to me. Once I find the Demon King, you would be so lucky if I choose to abandon you rather than kill you.”
Amelia fell silent as Malicine’s wrath simmered beneath their skin. She couldn’t help but notice it was the same energy that thrummed between them at their first meeting. Surely, that was the fuel that propelled them to join her in this strange place. Behind Malicine’s barbed words and hardened expressions, she sensed something deeper, sadder. She thought of Malicine being born in their world, neither human nor fae, ostracized by a society that made no shape for them to fit inside. How utterly, irrevocably alone they must have felt to live in such a place.
Talon cut the tense silence with a shrill croak. A warning for the crash that came next.
The waves turned vicious and knocked the boat against a jagged rock. Mist cloaked an unfamiliar shore as they crashed into a boulder. Amelia’s weight lifted off the boat and fell into the sea stack. She hit something hard and, in the next moment, felt her body shatter.