4. Aldrin #2
There! Triumph fills her voice. A staircase cut into the rock! Approach it slowly. Oh, Aldrin, you are almost at the top of the mountain.
The stairs move, elongating then shrinking.
It’s not real, I throw back, rubbing my hands across my face. Nothing here is fucking real.
Toss a rock at the staircase, she urges.
It takes the longest time to pick up a rock, because the infernal things keep sprouting legs and skittering away.
When I finally toss one at the steps, they burst into hundreds of iceflies.
I frown as all those creatures stutter in their trajectory, pause, then take the exact same path in reverse, sucked back to the staircase.
The steps are formed once more without a flaw.
My stone remains, half hanging over the edge of one step.
Well, what the fuck does that mean? I grumble.
They are real. Climb the staircase, Keira whispers back.
It leads me up and up. I trip multiple times as the steps seem to move around my feet.
The flight takes me between immense carnivorous plants as large as I am, with gaping mouths and barbed teeth.
I try to sneak past them but my boots set off the tiniest rockfall and all those huge blooms turn toward me.
Two things happen at once: they spit thick, black poison at me and send out vines to capture me and drag me back.
My eyes and skin burn from the acidity of the spray, half blinding me, but I slice my way out of their domain.
A shallow creek trickles over river rocks by the top of the staircase and I fall to a crouch before it, scrubbing my flesh until the agony lessens.
I cup my hands, collecting that cool, crystal-clear water, ready to taste it on my cracked lips and swollen tongue.
A desperate thirst plagues me, alongside an unstoppable need to quench it.
Then I let all that liquid fall through my fingers. It is poisoned. An oily sheen curls on its surface and pollen floats within it. Everything is cursed on this damned mountain.
I rise and scan the plain before me. The sight of the temple greets me, with a single figure standing guard. It is not far above me, just beyond an incline with sheets of jagged slate piled upon each other, creating an obstacle course of their own, thick mist billowing across it.
The Haven of Death keeps changing. It has at least one tower with three rectangular roofs stacked up its height, each corner ending in pointed tips that curl upward.
Sometimes the tiles are green and other times they are red.
One heartbeat there is a single tower, and the next there are three.
Crisscrossing beams that change pattern and color decorate the entire outside of the building, while the main bulk of the structure elongates, shrinks, then doubles.
I shake my head as the ever-flickering image nauseates me.
The mist picks up around me, churning violently, curling between my legs. Clouds of it channel out of small caves dotted across the landscape. I shudder as a low growl hits my ears. The very air vibrates with a chorus of them. Then a huge Cú Sídhe leaps out of its hidden den.
Except the creature is all wrong.
It is severely corrupted.Its massive body stretches through the air, as large as a horse, leaping straight for my throat with an open maw filled with broken brown teeth.
The exposed bones of its skull, skeletal feet and ribcage are yellow and cracked, and its mossy fur has the dark tones of rotting leaves.
The stench of decay rolling off the beast is enough to turn my stomach.
I raise my sword in time to slash right through the Cú Sídhe, stumbling as I do from the lack of resistance, despite cutting through flesh and bone. The snarling hound immediately bursts into streams of viscous black muck, pooling among the rocks.
Another snarl has me turning on my heel.
I slice in fast succession at two beasts that charge me at the same time.
They too immediately dissolve into a shower of sludge and I leap back from it.
I have never seen any low fae do such a thing, corrupted or not.
Usually only the affected flesh turns to ash.
Channels of black slime run in a rapid stream beneath my feet, moving through the gaps between rocks, to where they form the body of a Cú Sídhe. My stomach bottoms out as it slowly takes shape until there is a whole creature before me. Then it attacks.
We fall into a dance. Multiple corrupted beasts charge at me. My sword slices and swings through the air while I grunt and yell curses at them. The fae disintegrate at the slightest contact with my blade, but the damned creatures keep reforming, no matter what I do.
Distant laughter reaches my ears.
Am I laughing?
I have to think long and hard on the question, thanks to all the drugs and poisons addling my brain, but no, I don’t think the sound is coming from me.
It is not manic or filled with bloodlust. It is far too amused for my liking.
Full-bellied and jolly. Somehow, I feel like I am the source of that mockery.
Another huge jaw filled with long razor-sharp teeth flies at my face. I no longer have the time to ponder as my sword sings in a wide arc, spilling more foul blood.
Aldrin. Aldrin, listen to me, please.
That voice cuts across my mind, and I realize she has been speaking, but I haven’t heard her over the rush of my thoughts.
They aren’t real. The Cú Sídhe—it’s another hallucination. It must be the mist. Just walk through them, my love.
Just walk through them.
As easy as that.
How can I, when there are very real-looking fangs and claws trying to rip my throat out?
Just walk through them, when they could disembowel me in a single swipe.
I almost wet myself when I lower my sword as the next one pounces right at me. Its huge jaw is wide enough to take my entire head in its mouth. I trust Keira more than I trust myself at this moment. My fingers tighten around the hilt of my sword, but I drag its tip across the ground.
The entire Cú Sídhe passes right through me, just like smoke.
More attack and I jolt violently each time, but I keep walking. My heart pounds painfully against my ribs, but I force my vision to tunnel to the Haven of Death at the peak of this rise. There lies the end of the first trial.
One foot in front of the other, until wooden steps materialize under my boots. I collapse onto the paneled floor of the deck, right at the sentry’s feet.
I made it—to the front door at least.
My guide stands over me, the one who called me a dead man. Maybe that is what I am, because when I look at him, my vision doubles and blackens at the edges.
What was his name?
Dante, Keira whispers to me.
He squats down to examine me, grabbing my chin with a gloved hand and turning my head from side to side, opening my lips to inspect my gums. Dante tsks as he places a chalice on the floor then pulls multiple vials out of the lining of his robes and tips their contents into it.
Some liquids hiss as they meet whatever is in the cup. Herbs dance across the surface.
“You have absorbed almost every poison and drug we have out there. What did you do, roll about in the fields?” He laughs at the scowl I give him.
“At least I fucking made it up here,” I growl, trying and failing to get up.
“Hmmm.” Dante tips my head back, handling me as easily as a newborn babe, and forces the acrid liquid down. “This will neutralize the intensity of the toxins.”
I splutter and choke the bitter potion down.
Liquid fire burns through my body, right to the tips of my extremities.
The fog lifts from my mind and energy returns to me.
I still feel like I have been tossed from this gods-forsaken mountain and hit every rock on the way down, but as the scratches and boils on my exposed flesh slowly knit and heal, I think I will survive.
The assassin holds out a hand and I take it, allowing him to help me to my feet.
“Congratulations, King Aldrin. Few make it past the first trial.” Dante gives me a wide smirk that crinkles the indigo runes inked across his face. “Of course, no one would have stopped you from taking the lift.”
My hands ball into fists so tight that my fingernails cut into my skin. It doesn’t help that my claws partially form. “There is a lift? You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
“Do you think we deal with that mess every time we come home?” Laughter rings out of him. It is the same one that mocked me when I was fighting imaginary Cú Sídhe.
Embarrassment douses my anger like a bucket of icy water has been tipped over my head. I visualize how ridiculous I must have looked, swinging my sword at nothing and fighting invisible foes.
Dante walks off. “Are you coming? Or did you enjoy that trial so much you want a repeat?”
He disappears through the double-door entrance of the Haven of Death, and I hurry after him.