Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
“Pain is the body’s way of reminding you that you are alive.”
Iwould never get used to the sickening feeling of being hurled through space at the incomprehensible speed of the metal tubes.
But at least this time when I was dropped unceremoniously onto the stone floor below, I landed on my feet.
One look to the side showed that Dante had done the same. He glanced at me and nodded.
We’d taken Myrine’s advice to heart and decided to begin our attempt at the fifth Trial the next day.
If there was no training to be done in preparation, there was no sense in delaying.
Though, if I was being honest, I was more affected by Myrine’s fatalistic approach to this trial than I openly admitted.
She’d hardly even looked at us the night before and had made a point of missing breakfast this morning.
Dante hadn’t said anything, but I feared that if he didn’t unclench his jaw soon, his teeth would shatter.
I imagined her lack of assistance had something to do with it being the one she herself failed so long ago.
But what that meant for us, facing a Trial that even Myrine so clearly still feared, I hadn’t the faintest idea.
So we were at it again, thrust into the next Trial.
The room was smaller than the others and much simpler.
There were no ancient statues like the fourth Trial, no complex arrangement of staggered rocks and boulders and lengths of rope like the third.
It wasn’t dark like the second or winding like the first. It was a simple room.
Perhaps fifteen feet wide and just as long across.
The ceilings were high, though, higher than they’d been in any other Trial. Perhaps fifty feet up.
It took us no time to find the rings. They were practically on display, hovering delicately above a small platform at the top of the opposite wall, which was a darker color than the others and made up of jagged, uneven edges, bumps which stuck out farther at hand and foot length.
Climbing, then.
"I wonder why your mother said we couldn’t train for this," I mused to Dante as we strode toward the wall. "Seems like climbing is something we could have added to our training routine."
"Adrian."
He’d reached the wall first and was sliding a finger over one of the jutted out edges. When he looked back up at me, his eyes were wide. As I stepped up beside him, I understood why.
This was no standard rock-climbing wall.
The edges we were meant to grab, to hold onto to pull ourselves up, to lean all of our bodyweight against, were blades.
Knives, daggers, swords, all of varying lengths and thicknesses, all with razor sharp edges, jutted out of the wall, our only hand and footholds for the climb.
I nearly shivered at the thought of the pain we were about to endure.
“This is sick,” I spat. “This is horrific, inhumane. This—”
“Is what it is,” Dante replied, already grabbing one of the blades and hoisting himself up.
“Dante!”
We still hadn’t discussed anything about the night before or the weeks prior.
We hadn’t talked about Dahlia or Cyrus or even Olympia.
I hadn’t said a word about how I hadn’t been able to keep the thoughts of his hands on my body from my mind since they had been.
But now, staring up at those jagged blades, it felt like an apt time to have the conversation.
Because we might not get another chance.
“Stop,” I said. “Just stop for a minute, okay?”
He paused and glanced down at me.
“Come down. Please.”
Dante blinked at me once, then dropped back to the ground. He wiped his already bloody fingers on his trousers and raised a brow in question.
“Your mother said the only way to get through this is to trust each other,” I reminded him. “I’m not sure how a wall of pain necessitates trust, but either way, I don’t want to start this with so much left unsaid between us.”
He frowned, his brow wrinkled in confusion as if he truly had no idea what I meant.
“Just, to clear the air, this thing with Olympia—“
Dante sighed. He ran a hand through his hair and stared up at the wall of knives.
“Is this really the best time to get into this?” he ground out.
Probably not. But I’d seen the look on his face when he’d told me she hadn’t passed the fourth Trial.
It had affected him. I wasn’t the sort of girl who needed reassurances or lost herself to jealousy, and I still wasn’t even sure what this thing between Dante and I was.
But Olympia already hated me enough and she didn’t even know what had happened between us.
I needed to know if I had to watch my back and, admittedly, we needed to be on the same page.
“I’m not going to slash the shit out of my hands and feet on that wall of torture unless I know we’re in this together, so yes. I’d say it’s the perfect time.”
Dante frowned again and turned away from me.
“Do you remember when I called you my responsibility?” he asked a moment later.
“How could I forget?”
“Well, I still feel that way about her too. We trained together our whole lives. In the end, it didn’t turn out the way we thought.
We aren’t partners, we aren’t linked. But that doesn’t mean everything I shared with her before means nothing.
It doesn’t mean I want to see her fail. This meant everything to us, to her.
I don’t regret that I’m here and she’s not, but I still feel like I let her down, and I don’t—I can’t let anyone else down. I can’t let you down, Adrian.”
His voice had grown in intensity as he spoke.
What had begun as an annoyed explanation had turned into a ferocious proclamation.
I blinked at him in stunned surprise. This wasn’t, at all, what I’d been expecting.
I’d expected to find myself in the midst of a spat between exes, not faced with a man nearly broken by the pressures he put upon himself.
“You aren’t going to let me down, Dante,” I assured him but my voice came out as a mere whisper, and it was clear that he wasn’t sold.
“Can we just do this?” He turned away from me and back to the wall. “Please?”
Without waiting for my reply, he reached up and began to climb again, blood dripping off his fingers as he pried them from blade after blade on his ascent.
I watched him for a moment, jaw dropped in awe at how easily he’d accepted this fate, this torture designed by his so-called gods.
Zealot, I hissed through our link.
He didn’t look back at me, choosing to remain focused on his task.
My stomach tightened at the bloody fingerprints on the dagger he left behind as he reached for a sword’s edge above his head. With a sigh, I took a deep breath and began to climb beside him.
The first inch was agony. The moment I gripped the rusted edges of the first serrated blade, I hissed and pulled back out of instinct. Dante didn’t even glance my way. I took a few breaths and tried again, steeling myself against the fear as I reached for the first blade again.
Searing pain shot through my fingers each time I climbed just a little bit higher.
We didn’t speak, too distracted by the pain, too afraid to stumble even a bit and have to do any section of the wall over again.
I gritted my teeth and fought my hisses as I pulled myself, inch by excruciating inch, up the razor wall.
We left a trail of blood behind us. It dripped onto the floor, rivulets running off the blades we’d used and onto the ones below.
There would be no going back, no starting over.
The blades at the bottom were covered in our blood.
They would be too slippery to find purchase again.
The only way forward was up. Dante seemed to sense that without even glancing down at the aftermath of our climb as I was.
At least two feet above me, red lines streaked down his forearms to his shoulders, his ruined fingers a mess of bloody pulp. It was enough to turn my stomach.
I reached up to grab a dagger and missed somewhat, the blade slicing against my palm.
I hissed and was blinded by a shot of white light across my vision which swam and whirled.
I blinked, and my other grip went slack.
Was I blacking out? I couldn’t! Wildly, I swung my free arm back to the wall and the bite of another blade buried itself in my palm.
I bit down on my lip so hard, it too turned bloody. But at least I wouldn’t fall.
Dante finally glanced down. “Are you alright?”
I only had the strength to nod.
That was all the assurance he needed. He kept climbing and didn’t look down again.
It was the worst pain I’d ever experienced. The slow, agonizing crush of the third Trial had nothing on this sharp, slicing torment. Every inch up was bought by suffering, sacrificed for with blood. Then the numbness came, and a new fear emerged.
Three quarters of the way up, I couldn’t feel my fingers anymore.
I had to rely on eyesight alone to ensure I had a good enough grip to raise myself up another inch.
And, with Dante bleeding freely above me, the blades I was reaching for were already slick.
I closed my eyes more than once, clinging to the wall, resisting the urge to purge my breakfast all over the blades below. But eventually, we made it.
When we finally reached the top, both of us a bleeding, agonized mess, we crawled onto the platform, leaving streaks of red blood upon the white marble. Without hesitation, we stood and plunged our arms through the glowing blue rings.
But nothing happened.
I watched as the confusion registered on Dante’s face that I could only imagine was duplicated on my own. We pulled our arms out and thrust them back in. Nothing. Then Dante screamed.
My gaze shot to his arm. The blue ring had collapsed and closed like a vice around his bicep, just above his elbow. Wide eyed, I looked to my own, but it was still open, hovering and glowing as it always did before we’d reached it. But it wasn’t branding me.