by Cebelius
As he worked, he said, "I don't even begin to understand how Asturial managed to create this place from just my memories, but it seems like while we're here, a lot of the normal rules just don't apply. This house used to belong to the man that killed me, and as it turns out, the dude liked to karaoke."
"Got no clue what that last word means. I've never heard it before," Laina said, though she leaned forward, watching as he pulled another object from his pack, fiddled with it, and then tapped the top. When he did, the sound came not from the object itself, but the first rectangular box, and it was unusually loud.
Terry seemed satisfied though as he grinned at her and said, "Karaoke means to embarrass oneself singing badly in front of an audience."
Laina let that sink in a moment, then she tilted her head and asked skeptically, "Terry, are you really going to sing for me?"
She was sure he was joking, but he only nodded and said, "This thing will handle the instruments, but if I just played a recording of the music, you wouldn't understand the words. So ... pretty much the only way to really share my music with you that I can think of is to sing it to you myself. I warned you that I suck at this, but there are a few songs I don't do too badly at."
His grin turned sheepish as he said, "Prada said she'd come by in a little to help me because with her help I can actually hit all the notes, but I wanted to sing you this first one myself. It won't be good ... but it'll be all me. That is, if you still want to hear."
Laina's eyebrows were up and she was grinning so widely that she knew she looked a bit silly, but she couldn't help herself.
"I would love to hear you sing something, Boss. Please do. Does the song have a name?"
He chuckled and ran a hand over the top of his head in a fit of self-consciousness as he said, "Yeah ... it does. I spent a lot of time thinking about what I could sing for you. Most of the music from my world that I like would probably sound really jarring from your perspective, but there is one song I think you'd like. I memorized it years ago, hoping someday I'd find someone like you. It's called Bless the Broken Road."
As Laina watched, he touched the light panel again, and without warning a beautiful flourish of music unlike any she'd ever heard sounded from the box behind him. She watched as he closed his eyes, his head dipping rhythmically. He seemed to be searching within himself. Then he opened his eyes, and began to sing.
He wasn't perfect, but as he sang to her his eyes never wavered from hers, and he made it clear that he was singing not just for her, but to her. He was making this her song. His eyes were shining as he looked at her, so full of love that she gasped at the raw emotion she saw there.
Tears spilled from her eyes as he came to kneel in front of her, and she felt her love for him swell into something boundless in that moment. Here was the man she adored. Here was everything she wanted out of this life. As the song swelled into a climax of sound, his voice rose and fell without a trace of self-consciousness. He had committed himself to it, and to her, and Laina never knew whether he did a good job or not. She didn't care. To her, it was perfect.
His voice settled into a gentle coo as the song trailed off, and his eyes held hers. She was covering her mouth, staring at him, so full of feeling that there were no words.
Into her amazed silence, he spoke.
"I can't give you everything you deserve, and I know this mess isn't what you wanted. I'm so far from perfect that it isn't even funny, but I need you. You make me a better man, and I can't do this without you. You give me hope, and if you'll have me, I want to make you my wife. Laina Lowe, I love you ... will you marry me?"
A tiny sound caught her attention and her eyes flicked toward the door. Shy, Prada, Asturial, the Kolenkos, Marcus ... even Ariadne. They'd all come. Shy and Mila were crying openly, and just like Laina had moments ago, Ariadne was covering her mouth, gazing wide-eyed at the scene.
She took in a sharp breath. Her gaze returned to him and she barely managed to squeak past the tightness in her throat, "Yes!"
He gasped and his shoulders sagged as though released from a great weight. His eyes closed for a moment, and when they opened and he smiled at her, she knew he was hers.
He stood up, bent to cup her face, and kissed her.
Laina's eyes slid blissfully shut, and she burned that moment into her fondest memories, forever.
33
Names
Terry slept amid silk sheets for literally the first time in his life. After proposing to Laina, she had been swamped with congratulations and well-wishes. Terry had eventually kissed his women, starting with Laina, goodnight. Not everyone was tired, seeing as how many of them still had the vague sense that they'd only just begun their day, but as for Terry, he needed sleep.
Prada had been the most difficult to convince, but he had done it, and at last he was in a room on his own and the bed in front of him had sung him a siren song he hadn't ever intended to resist.
Sleep came swiftly, but as always, he woke suddenly, covered in sweat and breathing hard, memories of dark corridors and winding passages only slowly fading from his terror-stricken mind.
God DAMMIT. Is one night of sleep too much to ask? Just one fucking night?
Movement caught his eye.
His room wasn't truly dark, because the skies outside his window had neither sun nor moon. Only the same ever-present high-flying clouds and the light that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. Even with the drapes pulled it was not truly dark in the room.
The movement was on the floor, and when he shifted and looked, he saw row upon row of spiders. They were arranged in two groups that both faced him, and each other.
Vivid memories of a different dream came to him, and he wiped his face with a hand as he shifted his feet to the floor and folded his elbows over his knees.
"I suppose this means you guys are almost done making corpses out of each other?"
Nothing moved. His eyes flickered over the two groups, and each seemed comprised of twenty members. The smallest of these was bigger than his head. The largest was the size of a doberman. Black eyes glimmered at him, and he looked around and spotted a shallow but wide bowl on one of the dressers.
He got up, and the spiders shifted to let him pass.
Terry picked up the bowl, then rooted around in his pack for a bottle of Laina's milk and his dagger. He then turned and sat Indian style at the foot of the bed. The spiders shifted to flank him in two groups.
As he used the dagger to lay open the meat of his palm and watched the blood begin filling the bowl, he shook his head in bemusement. He thought about what he was doing, and who he was doing it for.
He wondered what he might have thought, had he been able to glimpse his future self from the perspective of his old life. He was surrounded by spiders bigger than anything on earth, and not only was he not bothered, they were his progeny. His children by a monstrous hybrid creature.
They were about to kill each other for the privilege of drinking his blood, and he was about to watch it happen, and name the victors.
As the first two combatants came together in front of him, Terry wondered at himself. At some point he couldn't quite put his finger on, this world's bizarre cruelty had ceased to amaze him. Its casual treatment of death no longer bothered him. Its incredible danger no longer daunted him, and its fantastic denizens no longer terrified him.
In the end, the only thing that still bothered him was that he wasn't certain he knew where all of this would lead. He didn't know what it was he would become, and he wasn't certain he should continue down the path he now walked. How much power did he need to face Thomas? How many lives would he have to ruin or destroy to get that power?
Something the behemoth had said stuck with him, even now. It had said to him that every time he bound a new woman to him, he was trading away a piece of his soul.
In the end it turned out that creature had been lying about being able to send him home, but that didn't mean it had lied about everything. Cecaelia had so
ught to comfort him, that he could share his soul but not give it away. Even if that was true, what he was doing on Celestine was turning into something other than human. What he had done with Prada, the fact that if he now accepted all his gifts he would be an actual, honest-to-God giant, and even what he did now, watching his literal children fight to the death in front of him. This world was changing him, turning him into something ... else.
As the first of the victors came to drink from the blood he had spilled into the bowl, he wondered if there was any way to keep this world from poisoning him, from skewing his sense of right and wrong until he couldn't tell one from the other or worse, stopped caring.
And he wondered what he would name the five spiders who would emerge triumphant from the death game playing out in front of him.
They were his kids, after all, and names held power.
The first victor lifted itself away from the bowl and seemed to be looking up into Terry's eyes. It was smaller, in fact it was the smallest spider of those nine that remained, and he noticed that the spider dead beyond it was significantly larger.
As he glanced around, he noticed that this was the only male. He did not know how he knew — sexing monstrous spiders wasn't exactly something they taught in high school — but Terry knew this one was male.
Once he realized this, and that it was the last male remaining, he knew what he should call this one.
"Your name," he said to the spider, "is Will. Will was my brother's name. Wear it proudly."
The spider made a crouching bow to him, and clicked its mandibles together in a sound Terry couldn't help but interpret as pleasure. Part of him wanted to lock up at the horror of what he was doing, but he refused to let those emotions overcome him. This was what Arachne had wanted, and what Ephe would therefore certainly want. It seemed to be what the spiders in front of him wanted as well, and he was not about to stop it now.
I will change what I can, accept what I can't, and learn to know the difference.
As the next pair of spiders — his children — clashed in mortal combat, Terry settled down to watch.
Afterword
As always, thank you so much for reading!
I do hope you’ve enjoyed this, my third book in the Celestine Chronicles. If you did, please consider leaving me a review on Amazon. Reviews are quite literally how a book lives or dies, and if you were entertained I do hope you’ll help me read more people. Whether you choose to do that or not though, again I thank you whole-heartedly for reading my work.
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Take care, have fun, and I hope to continue to entertain you in the future!