Chapter 29
CORIN GASPED FOR air, limbs thrashing to hold on to the rocks at the river’s edge. She crawled a few steps onto solid ground before heaving water. Her throat burned, but as she wrapped her necklace around it, the pendant pressed against her chest and slowed her heartbeats.
She lay on the ground of rotting leaves and bumpy roots. There was a tree next to where she’d rolled over, so she pressed her face against the bark and let the ridges bite into her cheeks. She needed everything to slow down, to stop feeling the motions of the river carrying her to her own death. She needed, for a moment, to let it sink in that she was still alive. Even though she didn’t want to be.
All because Malicine had saved her.
The demon was nowhere to be seen. The tides had separated them after Malicine lost their staff, and Corin was stranded in some indiscernible part of the woods. She shouted for Malicine, only to be met with the howl of wind through the oaks.
Logically, she knew she was still trapped in Autumnland. Yet as snow poured from the sky and the air turned cold enough to bite into her bones, Corin felt like she had been transported somewhere else. She shivered in the moonlit dark, then forced her chattering teeth to stop when she heard whispers. A crowd of them, each one speaking over the other, but none whose words she could distinguish.
Then the sound of a woman wailing split the air.
Her moans sounded so pained that Corin moved instantly, following the source. She winded through trees, panic pushing her forward as the woman continued crying. No matter how quickly she ran, she couldn’t find the woman. The snow blinded her, a world of black and white. The sky only turned red when the woman let out a dying screech. Corin jumped as the crowd of whispers turned into a chorus of screams. Several winged creatures appeared through the trees and ran toward her. She tried jumping out of the way, but they flitted through her like ghosts. A baby wailed in the distance, the sound deep and guttural, teeth scraping against flesh. It struck fear in all the creatures. Part of Corin was scared, while another part of her recognized the familiarity.
She ran forward, calling for Malicine. Stars bled from the sky while snow turned to ash. Three figures appeared from the trees, and something wet struck her, burning her skin. She screamed and fell to the ground. Blisters formed over her arms and face as she writhed on a stone floor. The three women surrounded her like a cage. One of them held the bucket, dripping with bleach.
“Monster! Demon! Freak!”
Their voices drilled into Corin’s ears even as she clamped them shut. Her body drowned in a lake of acid, melting her atom by atom until nothing remained. A terrible feeling overcame her: She was alone, and always would be. A creature abandoned by their world since birth. They might as well listen to the voices and die too.
Where did this despair come from? Had it taken root in Corin’s heart, or had she intertwined with another? She could not tell. Whispers grew louder, urging her to follow death’s path, while she resisted by clinging to a different memory, another pattern, a sense of recognition.
Whenever Corin drowned, it was always Malicine who came after her.
Different voices clawed at Corin, reminding her the kind of person she was. She had once abandoned allies, fled toward safety while bridges burned behind her, leaving others for dead. Regret twisted in her stomach and lived in her bones every day since she lost Harlow, her friends, her Elly. She did not save them.
Maybe this time, she could save someone.
Her eyes burned as she forced them open. Bleeding stars painted the sky red, silhouettes of gnarled branches twisting around her vision. Some of their shapes looked like horns. In one of the branches, a warning signal came from a raven. Corin pulled herself from the ground, hand desperately reaching for the bird.
“Talon!” Her voice echoed Malicine’s. The raven flapped his wings, ready to take flight. Strangled noises came from his throat. Poison spewed from his beak. Talon fell from the branch and into an open cage, where the iron bars grew smaller until they crushed his bones. Corin cried out, but the tears weren’t only hers. She could feel Malicine somewhere. The demon’s nightmares had imprisoned them all, but these scenes, this anguish, were too detailed to exist in mere imagination.
Corin knew how Autumnland tortured people within. The island used the truth.
“You gave the creature a name. How quaint.” A deep, distorted voice echoed in the darkness. The island sucked away every tree until they turned to stone columns. Corin blinked at vaulted ceilings, a slab of a stone table, an overturned goblet where poison dripped from the rim. Talon lay limp in his cage.
“I was the one who created him. Yet someone like you gives him a simple little name, and he follows you around like a dog.”
Corin turned to the baritone voice that reverberated through her bones and hollowed out her body. A skulking shadow of long limbs and gnarled horns emerged. Scales of green skin, thin like paper, had cracks over protruding bones. Every nick and notch from centuries of treachery sank into his face. He was immortal, yet dead in every way, an emaciated corpse who refused to pass. Draped over his scaled chest was an amulet, one with a shape and hue just like the one embedded in Malicine’s staff.
“I’ve reigned over this world for as long as you can imagine. After a while, one grows tired. It doesn’t change the fact that the world you left behind is rotten, that the people who wronged you are still prosperous.”
He paced around, leaving ash in his footsteps. The circle of soot contained perpendicular lines, drawing a symmetrical pattern that looked too complex for Corin to discern. She heard the rattling sound of iron chains somewhere nearby.
“I realized it’s not enough that I go back to your world and cause destruction. That doesn’t make things even. I need to change the tides altogether.”
Corin realized he wasn’t talking to her. She looked around the darkness for Malicine as the sound of scraping chains grew louder. In her hazy vision, she finally made them out. A bruise had formed on the back of their head. Their limbs twitched with unnatural movements, like they were fighting to regain mobility. Even their attempt to lunge for him proved useless. Iron chains violently tugged their body back to the chair, their head knocking against the curved bones of the throne.
“You’re not real, Oleander,” they hissed. “And I’m not interested in revisiting this memory.”
Malicine was here. Not part of a mirage, like the other demon was, but here. Corin banged her fists against an invisible barrier and shouted for them, but Malicine was too far away, trapped inside their own nightmare.
“You said you’d help me rebuild this world. I’m simply accepting your offer,” Oleander said. “The problem is you won’t make it out alive.”
Chains rubbed against Malicine’s skin and tore open a wound. A drop of blood landed on the ground. The single splatter lit the ash in a tiny flame, and Oleander’s amulet glowed once more. Malicine stared at the glimmer of the light, how the gem hungered for a taste of them.
“You were only looking for me because you wanted my blood.” Corin felt the cracks in the stone of their voice, the resignation of their new reality. She grasped for a way to get through the barricade and reach them, but realized her hands had disappeared with the rest of her body. She had been dissolved, ceased to exist within Malicine’s memory from a time long ago.
“You should be flattered. I’ve sacrificed many demons to make my magic stronger, ended so many lives to tailor energy potent enough to create a new portal. None of them were right,” Oleander said. “Then I realized that energy could never come from any demon born in one time. The type of blood affects the type of portal created, after all. It must come from someone whose blood is so special, it comes from multiple places. A creature whose mother belongs in one time, and whose father in another. Someone who could never belong anywhere, in any time. Someone like you.”
His hand stroked Malicine’s cheek, the tip of his nails scraping their skin. They spat in his face. Dribble slicked down his chin, and he wiped it with the back of his hand. The corner of his lips twisted in disgust. It didn’t compare to the glare that Malicine bore into him.
“You killed them all.” Corin watched flashes of burnt bodies and blackened bones pass through Malicine’s memory and flicker into her own vision. “That fire wasn’t an accident.”
“I never said it was. They set it upon themselves, thinking it would be better to die than to aid my cause. Quite poor timing for them to think a mass suicide was the only solution, when I had just learned I no longer needed them.”
Corin stared at the floor beneath Malicine, where ash had scattered to form the shape of a circle. She imagined the lines turning from gray to red, their blood filling the gaps like spilled ink. This was no simple cut, not a trim of the skin like it had been whenever she heard about creating portals. The Demon King was preparing a bloodbath.
“Don’t be so petulant,” he chided. “Without me, you would have never existed. Neither would all the other demons that found recluse here. I have the right to do what I want with your lives, because I already owned it from the beginning.”
“Nobody has the right to own another life.”
“Are you certain about that? History would beg to differ. Faeries have served humans, and even humans themselves have owned each other. When people fear others, they seek differences and find ways to demonize them. Something as arbitrary as your skin, pedigree, the way you speak—all rules made up so that certain people can stay in power. A world cannot exist without such a system. But when I create a new world, there will be new rules. And then I will show them what true power looks like.”
Malicine tried to laugh, but the sound died on their lips.
“Does something amuse you?” he said.
“You don’t care about making things right. You just want to be in their place. The ruler instead of the ruled.”
For a moment, Oleander turned silent. Then he knelt and pressed a palm flat on the ground. An orange glow emanated from his fingers. The stones beneath melded into a blade. He pulled an obsidian knife from the floor and pressed it against Malicine’s neck. The edges brimmed with volcanic red. A trickle of blood flowed down their throat as half-moons burned into their skin. Oleander’s amulet gleamed in response, as if it knew the artery in their neck would feed it the most blood once cut.
Panic surged inside Corin. She needed to do something, even if she no longer existed in Malicine’s nightmare. She pressed figments of herself against the stone walls of the tower and tried to feel her way around the scene. Her non-body slipped through the cracks as Oleander spoke.
“Our skin may be the same, but don’t make the mistake of comparing yourself to me.”
A pained gasp. A trickle of blood from a blade piercing deep. His voice boomed again, a toneless sound that drilled inside their ears and infected their mind.
“I am more powerful than you will ever be.”
Malicine, Corin wanted to scream.
“You are only half of me and what I can do.”
I’m here, Malicine—
“You are too broken to be the whole of anything.”
—and I’m not going to leave you behind.
Corin felt the dagger crystallize in her palm as she plunged it in his back.
She didn’t know how it happened. She had materialized into something solid, a translucent force that moved with only one goal in mind. But she barely made a difference. The Demon King had hardly been wounded. Instead, he turned around, black eyes narrowing at Corin.
No, that wasn’t right. His eyes were looking through her.
A scream ripped out of Malicine’s throat. “Amelia—!”
Corin didn’t have time to react. Oleander’s arm swung at her, and the impact made her entire being shatter. Pain bloomed her whole body, then tore it into pieces. She broke apart until fragments of herself were left on the floor.
Darkness returned to the edges of her vision. A blinding, searing ache that made its way through her bones into tingling numbness. She felt herself losing shape and sensation. Then heat warmed her skin, reminding her the edges of her body. The room turned hot, and the walls around them shook like an earthquake. The scream that once echoed from Malicine transformed into something deep, guttural. Their presence shifted into a bigger force than the tower could contain. The roof split apart, and the ground caved in.
As Corin slid inside the rocky debris, flames trickled between the gaps, a wall of vermillion that shone through the darkness. For a moment, she forgot about the pain and cracked an impossible smile. She could see the dragon rising from the ashes. The creature tore through the sky, terrifying and magnificent at the same time. She knew the dragon would save her and get them out of this island. This was Malicine, after all, and they were more powerful than anything in this world.