Chapter 49
Ahorn blast rips through the air. From hidden slats in the gorge walls, a colossal metal grate shoots out, slamming shut over the chasm. It seals the abyss’s bony inhabitants inside, the clicks and hisses of the reavers abruptly muffled.
The distant roar of the crowd crashes back into existence.
“Congratulations, champions!” Pellvorn’s voice booms down from the imperial caravan circling lazily overhead.
“You have completed the opening task and reached the Rootbound Temple. A commendable feat of survival.” His tone is laced with the condescending praise of a man watching insects navigate a maze.
“But that was merely the overture. Now, the First Round of the Emperor’s Tournament truly begins! ”
As he speaks, the great archway of the temple groans, ancient gates pulling apart to reveal a yawning, shadowed interior.
“The true test awaits within,” Pellvorn continues, his voice carrying across the clearing. “Enter. Show us your worth.”
The ten surviving champions exchange quick glances.
The alliance that carried us from the abyss has already fractured, replaced by the cold calculation of predators assessing each other's weaknesses. Blaise’s gaze lingers on Zeriel, his jaw tightening, the faintest curl of anticipation tugging at his mouth.
My hand clamps onto Zeriel’s arm, vise-tight. Game plan?
First through that arch, he fires back, taut beneath my grip. Whatever’s waiting, I’d rather face it before the others do.
Our eyes lock for a beat—enough. I release him, and together we break for the archway, moving as one.
Blaise chases us, the others close behind, no one willing to be left back.
As we pass under the stone arch, I feel a strange vibration, like crossing an invisible threshold.
The air inside tastes different. Older, charged with something that makes the hair on my arms rise.
The entrance hall unfolds before us, a cavernous space of weathered stone and towering pillars.
Ancient fae symbols are carved into almost every surface, their edges softened by centuries but still unmistakable.
Crowns threaded with runes, thrones flanked by wings, circles of stars locked in endless orbit.
Then I see the imperial banners hanging from the rafters, crimson and gold desecrating the ancient stone. Torches burn in brackets, their smoke staining ceilings that once probably glowed with fae light. The empire's stamp of ownership, crude and deliberate.
But the silence of the temple is a lie. Beneath the surface, it hums with a violated power, like a sacred song muted and twisted.
My gaze sweeps over the hall, landing on a series of crystalline spheres, each the size of a man’s head, hanging near the high, vaulted ceiling.
They’re dark, inert, but they weren’t carved by old fae hands. They reek of the empire.
As the last champion, Damiar Korren, clears the threshold, the great stone gates grind shut behind us with a boom that shakes the floor. We’re sealed in.
“Let the First Round begin!” Pellvorn’s voice spills through the cracks in the walls and ceiling.
The crystalline spheres ignite, pulsing with a brilliant white light that projects our images onto their multifaceted surfaces.
“Every moment, every choice, every drop of blood will be witnessed by the loyal subjects of Thalyris!
A lesson in courage, and a warning against weakness!
“This temple, a relic of a chaotic past, festers with a wild, untamed energy.” His voice drips with theatrical sanctimony.
“It is your duty to purge it. To cleanse the heart of this corruption. The first champion to strike the final blow upon the source will win this round and gain an advantage in the second. Good luck to you all.”
The words fade, but the weight of them settles. “Purge it.” “Cleanse the corruption.” The empire’s favorite words.
That’s all we are to them, too. Corruptions to be exploited, then purged.
Zeriel doesn’t answer immediately, but the cold certainty he sends across our link brushes sharp against my own. That’s all we’ve ever been.
And yet you entered their game, I can’t help but think. To play by their rules. The emperor’s rules.
Zeriel’s answer slices into my mind like ice. Not theirs. Never theirs. Mine.
Before I can process it, the fae symbols carved into the stone begin to glow with a strange, intense orange. The air feels suddenly thicker, and the patterns on the walls appear to shift, to writhe. The carved crowns seem to bleed shadow. The winged thrones seem to beat with a phantom pulse.
I’m not sure if I’m hallucinating or if it’s actually happening.
Zarah Teshal takes a hesitant step forward, and the stone beneath her feet erupts.
A spear of sharpened rock, obsidian-black and unnatural, punches through the floor with the force of a battering ram.
She leaps back with a curse, but her ward isn’t as fast. The spear impales the young man through the chest, lifting him a foot into the air before retracting back into the stone, leaving only a spreading pool of blood.
The temple is hunting us. Zeriel’s thought pierces me.
It’s not even ancient fae magic. At least, not the natural kind. It’s been twisted... weaponized.
A display for the crowd, I think.
Propaganda for the crowd, he replies.
Zeriel’s response is a shard of glass in my mind.
The symbols, the stone… it’s like they’re being forced, controlled, corrupted by some external power source.
And the emperor and all who support him want us to believe this corruption is ours.
That this is what our nature truly is—or leads to. Destruction. Chaos.
The champions scatter, pressing themselves against pillars. The floor becomes a death trap, spears of black rock stabbing upward in a random, vicious pattern.
Stairs, Zeriel sends. Up.
He points with his blade toward a grand, sweeping staircase at the far end of the hall.
It’s our only way forward. We break from cover, sprinting across the treacherous floor.
A spear erupts just behind my heel, the wind of its passage whipping my hair.
Zeriel shoves me forward, his body shielding mine as we race for the stairs.
Blaise is a step ahead of us, moving with liquid grace. He seems to almost know where the spears will strike, flowing around the danger as if it’s a dance partner.
We reach the staircase, a spiral of gray stone that winds up into shadows. As we take the first steps, the air grows heavier, thick with… an almost mental pressure that makes my skull ache.
The carvings on the walls here are different too—depicting scenes of life in a world I only know through stolen fragments and old bedtime stories.
There’s a fruit market in a bustling fae city, children chasing each other through the roots of a colossal tree, lovers twining their fingers in midair as they float on some invisible current.
The faces are round and open, mouths frozen in joy, eyes reflecting a kind of belonging I can barely imagine.
But as we pass, the images blur… twisting into nightmares.
A carving of a mother holding her child melts, the stone morphing until it depicts a figure in imperial armor tearing the child from her arms. The lovers are torn apart, the male in iron shackles.
The market becomes a riot, the fruit trodden into the dirt as soldiers march through the crowd.
A scene of a festival, of dancers and musicians, warps into a public execution, the dancers now hanging from gibbets.
It’s like… a psychological assault. Every step forcing us to witness the perversion of our own history.
And I can’t help wonder—
is this the temple itself fighting back? Its true nature straining against the story being forced upon it, against the empire’s lies?
The place feels almost alive enough to be sentient. Steeped in millennia of ritual and power.
The pressure intensifies, and a wave of nausea hits me. The world tilts, the stone steps seeming to dissolve beneath my feet.
And then it’s something different. A sharper kind of assault. The walls, heavy with memory, begin dredging up my own.
“You lied to me,” my father’s voice hisses, taut with betrayal. The image sharpens: sunlight spilling through tall windows, turning dust motes into tiny drifting stars. My father stands rigid, his shadow falling long across the floor.
My mother’s reply trembles, but her chin is lifted: “I lied to protect her. To protect us. You don’t understand—”
The scene snaps abruptly, swimming into another. A female fae with hair like spun moonlight stands with her back to a window. Celisse, I somehow know immediately. She is luminous, ethereal, but her face is pale with a desperate sorrow. “It was to protect you,” she whispers, her voice trembling.
“Protect me?” A younger Zeriel—rawer, less broken, but no less angry in this moment—paces before her, shirtless, the muscles in his back rippling beneath the sweep of dark, formidable wings half-spread in agitation. “By meeting with him? By listening to his poison?”
“Blaise promised he could secure your family’s name,” she pleads, taking a step toward him. “He said he had proof. That he could expose his own father if I helped him.”
“He used you!” Zeriel shouts. “He fed you lies, Celisse, and you swallowed them whole because you refuse to see the viper he is!”
The scene fractures, the bond between us a conduit for his agony. I feel every shard of it. His fury, his terror for her, and the crushing weight of his… love. A desperate, drowning thing.
Another memory slices into me. The same room, but now it’s drowned in shadow, wreckage scattered across the floor.
Zeriel is on his knees, arms wrapped around Celisse’s body as if he could will her back.
Her flowing hair is matted dark with blood, her glassy eyes staring past him into nothing.
An ornate dagger glints beside her, obscene in its stillness.