Chapter Thirty-Seven Arion #2
“Yes,” Zephyra agrees, tears in her gaze and a smile wide on her beautiful face.
She points to a large mosaic mural on the wall.
“Look. Abysses wasn’t just a utopia for mermaids.
I knew it. He knew it.” Her voice breaks on a happy cry, and I follow her gaze to the intricately chiseled tiles of the mural.
Shattered glass merrow swim alongside gemstone humans.
They walk through a pastel-painted city hand in hand.
A mermaid kisses a human woman in front of a large colosseum, and a merman entangles his tail with a small human child.
They appear gleeful, every single person in the mural.
The city itself sparkles with immeasurable life.
“Zephyra,” Vesper says. “Vila.”
The silver siren stands in front of an ivory statue of a mermaid in a coral crown swimming through stone waves.
Interestingly enough, she too has seven tables arranged in a circle around her, but her offerings are different.
A handful of black pearls fill a silver jar, a timepiece ticking away beside it, while pure white roses bloom from a pink vase.
“It’s the goddess,” Zephyra tells me with sparkling turquoise eyes. She grabs my hand and forces me forward to examine the statue. “Arion, I told you she was real. We have proof now.”
I can’t argue with that. I don’t want to argue with her.
Zephyra has become childlike in this place, twirling around on her heels and yanking me into every corner of what must be Abysses’s central temple.
Her face radiates hope—so sharp and clear it almost hurts to look at her—but I can’t bring myself to tear my gaze away.
Not now. Not with so little time left to us.
And I—I think I feel it too. Hope. It’s a jolt in my stomach, a tingling in my limbs.
A sense of surrealism almost like floating.
Because we’re here. Together. A warlock and a mermaid, our hands entwined just like those in the murals, hidden away at the bottom of the sea.
They lived together too, and if Zephyra and I make it out of here alive—hope swells high, bright; so close, I can almost seize it—all those hypothetical futures could be ours.
That hope punctures slightly, however, as I stare up at Vila’s statue.
“If Mortem’s statue is beside Vila’s,” Vesper says, echoing my thoughts, “then man and merrow must have coexisted.” She glances at Gavriall in question. “Right?”
He straightens his shoulders at that, glancing back at her in surprise. “I would assume so, siren. With proof of Mortem next to—Vila, did you call her?—it’s irrefutable evidence.”
Vila.
Vesper rolls her eyes, but for once, the gesture is entirely without malice.
Even Amaya is smiling now. Though she doesn’t speak, her eyes flick over each inch of the room as if to memorize it.
She snaps open a burlap sack in the next second, stalking toward Vila’s feet.
With practiced, efficient movements, she sweeps the coins into her bag before plucking up the pearls too.
Vesper grimaces at the princess’s back. “The city is one thing, but now you’re ransacking a temple?”
“Do you think I am here to observe?” Amaya laughs, swiping the coins from Mortem’s table next. “I am here for treasure. Right now, I see loads of it just waiting to be claimed. It’s not as if anyone is going to miss it.”
I glance at Zephyra, expecting her to snap at Amaya, but she doesn’t seem to have heard her. Instead, she stares up at the mural behind Vila intently. Her eyes narrowed. “What is it?” I murmur at her ear. “What’s wrong?”
Her gaze lingers on the farthest tile to the right.
On two figures painted in light, pretty shades—a mermaid and a winged man.
They are both crowned with woven laurel and coral, leaning in for a kiss while crowds small as a pinprick gather around them, throwing petals at their feet.
The next tile shows the mermaid pulling away, but the winged man keeps hold of her waist. Purple bruises color her skin.
The third tile shows a slippery escape, and the fourth depicts the winged man flying after her, giving chase.
There are dozens of them—scores. Tile after tile highlighting the lengths the man went to—to find her, to hunt her, to keep her.
I swallow hard, unable to stand the sight.
Equally unable to look away. Zephyra rubs her wrists—right over her scars—without seeming to realize she’s doing it. Her face is pale. Drawn.
Eventually, the mermaid returns. The winged man joins her…
here. I glance around us, recognizing the scene.
In this very temple, the background illuminated with glowing silver light, while coins spill over the painted offering tables and rose petals drench the floor in a river of pink.
This time, she wears a veil, and he slides a ring onto her finger. They kiss.
Until she pulls out a knife. My stomach sinks.
Until she carves out his heart.
Zephyra steps closer as the winged man’s—Mortem’s, I realize with a sickening lurch—soul flees his body in a vague shadow, banished to the Fathoms, before the mermaid hurls his heart through a dark blue chasm in the floor.
She turns as if the job is finished. The deed is done.
But she doesn’t realize his body is still behind her; she doesn’t realize he’s not dead.
Tears weep from her turquoise eyes as he slits her throat.
The last tile is smeared with blood.
A crimson handprint. Beneath it, the same red spells out, FLEE WHILE YOU CAN. GOD IS EVIL, AND WE ARE DOOMED. VILA CANNOT SAVE US. NO ONE CAN.
Zephyra recoils as she too reads the words, blinking rapidly. And—
Fuck. Fuck.
Vila.
Vila, the merrow goddess. Vila, the heroine of Zephyra’s tale.
Not a mermaid nor a demon seductress. Especially not a no one as Elder Branche inferred.
Nausea churns to anger in my stomach. The warlocks were wrong.
Mortia is wrong. If these tiles are correct, Mortem murdered a fucking goddess.
I stumble back a step, knocking into one of the tables.
A gilded oyster falls to the floor. Clatters.
Zephyra whirls around at the noise. Her lips twist upward in a bitter smile.
“Told you so, warlock.”
What do I say to that? Everything—everything Mortia taught is a lie. Mortem was not tricked. Mortem was not a victim. Mortem had a counterpart, a goddess who severed his immortality, because—according to these tiles—he was mad with power.
What else don’t we understand about our history?
What else happened with the merrow?
“There is no recorded evidence of this. Anywhere,” Gavriall says quietly, tracing the tiled pictures with his finger. “There is no goddess of the sea.”
Vesper clears her throat. “Vila was the Goddess of Life, Love, and Sea.”
Zephyra nods, her bitter smile fading to sadness.
“What would they tell the citizens—‘our own god is evil, and we are doomed’? Not super inspiring at the best of times, least of all when the poor are starving and their roofs are caving in. Mortia needed something to believe in. They need to believe they’re on the winning side, fighting for a higher purpose, for goodness and justice, or else…
what has all the pain and suffering been about? ”
I swallow hard at that. Remember a hundred times, a thousand times, I listened to my father pray in his room long after night had fallen.
“Mortem, be kind. I beg you, have mercy on my child. Do not let my reflection cast the same sins upon him. Keep him safe. Keep him fed. Keep him from harm. Do not let me ruin him. Please. Have mercy, Mortem.”
The memory haunts me here as I gaze at the mural of an abandoned utopia and blood streaks its walls in an ominous finality of what unfolded here.
God is evil.
And we are doomed.
Bile stings my tongue. A sense of wrongness permeates the air, cold and unsettling as the waters that spat us here.
Standing this close to the mural, seeing evidence of the one thing I’ve been searching for, tasting its ancient magic on my tongue, I want nothing more than to turn away.
To leave this place and its legacy far behind me.
I want nothing to do with it. With Mortem.
Hunger still beats frantic wings in my chest, however, swirls white-hot through my veins.
I might not want that fucking heart, but I need it.
My gaze clashes with Zephyra’s as if she’s thinking the same. We need it.
More than anything, I can’t stop thinking about that stupid fucking poem.
Deep in a chamber
A heart doth lay
Torn from a god
A cold, wintry day
Life befalls Death
Death befalls Life
For true balance
Makes no sacrifice
Love, love, love blossomed here
In ruins of white and eyes wide and clear
The Fall was heard, the battles were waged
Mortals deceased, lands wept in rage
A perfect utopia crumbled to dust
Where Mortem did fall and a heart did lay
Love, love, love was slain
The price was too high
The cost was too much
The exchange of Eternity demanded just
Life demands Death
Death demands Life
For true balance
Makes no sacrifice.
The exchange of eternity—taking a god’s heart and, thus, his power and immortality—meant the goddess had to lose her life.
Dread lifts the hairs on my neck, and I glance at the silent skull on the table, startling as blue fire ignites in its eyes.
Its sparks light the incense around it until the room smells of sandalwood and roses. Like me, Zephyra watches it burn.
“If Mortem and Vila were in love, why did she take his heart?” Gavriall asks, studying the last of the tiles.
Vesper huffs and points to the bruises on Vila’s flesh. “Does that look like love?”
He cocks his head, thinking. “It—”