The very air around me feels charged, disturbed. Ivrilos and I face the gates of the dark city together, hands clasped. The walls, from the ramparts to the sky-piercing towers, are rippling like black water. It’s as if they’re having a hard time containing what’s inside. The city is like a thin layer of ice over turbulent depths, and it’s melting—literally dripping up into the air.
And we have to walk across it.
“Can you still shield yourself?” Ivrilos asks.
I answer by throwing up a shield. I cast it wide enough to include Ivrilos.
“Just don’t go too far from me,” I say, “or it will work against you, too.”
He nods. “Good. It should keep any shades from touching us. Or the city from swallowing us. I don’t know how long this place will remain standing, especially when we sever the other anchor point to the living world. It’s restless, unstable.”
It’s hard to imagine that the walls were once people.
“You don’t think Athanatos found her and took her in there, do you?” I ask, nearly breathless with pain at the thought.
Ivrilos is grim. “I hope not. But we’ll make him pay if he has.”
We walk up to the gates, our feet kicking up dark sand that whips away from us. At Ivrilos’s whispered urging, the massive doors part soundlessly.
The wide black street inside, dimly glinting under a stormy sky, is eerily quiet and empty, as are the towering gatehouses on either side. It’s the same as we make our way into the strange structures of the city, the architecture like glass, somehow both flowing and sharp at once. And black, always black. Our footsteps sound loud, echoing against the buildings. I see the faces of shades—men, of course—darker than shadows, from only a few of the unglazed windows that stare down at us like eye sockets. I don’t know if the multitude of the city’s occupants died their second deaths during the battle above, or if they’re staying away from us or from the tenuous stability of the walls. Wherever they are, either in the living world as guardians, out in the dark dunes taking their chances, or finally all the way dead, they don’t seem to be here.
Ivrilos keeps his hand in mine as we make our way through the barren, terrifying city alone. I still can’t shake feeling like we’re walking to the chopping block. Our final deaths.
We reach a massive square that terminates at another set of doors so tall they look stretched, and I recognize where we are from the earliest memory Ivrilos shared with me. The towers of the keep weren’t finished back then like they are now. But I remember seeing a throne through the doors.
They’re shut tight against us now, but I can feel Athanatos in there, just like I could feel Kadreus in his quarters. I can also feel the other anchor point. It seems to vibrate—the source of the city’s instability. And yet it’s also the thing still holding it together. Like Ivrilos, I have a feeling that, once cut, it’ll all come tumbling down—or up, rather.
Once we’re standing in front of the doors, I have to crane my neck to see to the top. The black surface seems to ripple away from me.
“Should we knock?”
Ivrilos smiles briefly, and mutters a few words of death magic under his breath. The doors don’t budge. “He’s holding them against us.”
Athanatos isn’t making the same mistake Kadreus did and arrogantly throwing them open.
“Let me try.”
I use the same words for opening that Ivrilos did, but also sigils, since at least some of them seem to work here. I also walk right into the door at the same time. My shield repels the magic holding it closed, and on top of that, the doors don’t seem to want to get near me—or at least my bloodline. They practically leap away, slamming open.
The floor rises to greet us. It ripples like a wave to lift and carry us out, but it breaks against my shield.
Then we feel the wind. Even though it parts around my shield somewhat, it creates a drag against us. Putting one foot in front of the other is difficult. I think of Lydea, Japha, my father, and my mother, and I keep moving forward, Ivrilos at my side.
Athanatos is inside, surrounded by darkness—the rotten heart of this place. His blue eyes flare in surprise and anger. He stands next to his throne, which is exactly as I remember it: both spiking and liquidy, black as ink. It’s practically humming.
Lydea isn’t here. I’m both relieved and heartbroken all over again.
“If you insist upon entering,” Athanatos says coldly, “I suppose I’ll just have to kill you.” He takes a step toward my shield and then hisses away from it. “What is this? How have you brought this here?”
“Magic,” I say. “We’re here for your throne.”
“You will not approach,” Athanatos says though gritted teeth. Under his anger there’s a note of frustration, and it’s music to my ears.
Ivrilos must hear it, too. “You first brought me here to watch as you destroyed everything dear to me,” he says. “Now, no matter how powerful you are, you get to feel just as helpless. You don’t get to fight, not even to lose. You just get to watch.”
For a king who has been taking what he wants by force for hundreds of years, in life and in death, I can’t imagine anything more humiliating.
I take that as my cue and head for the throne, the glassy black floor rippling under my feet like I’m walking on water.
“Are you too cowardly to end this properly?” Athanatos snarls, waving at Ivrilos. “Don’t you want to try to best me, take my essence for your own?”
Ivrilos sticks close behind me. “I don’t want you to be any more a part of me than you already are. They can have you.” He nods at the walls, which are now quivering like jelly the closer we get to the throne. “They’re probably hungry, after so long.”
I realize, with some joy, that Athanatos can’t flee. We’re blocking the way out, and he has no bond of his own to follow to the living world, without Kadreus. There’s only the three of us and the throne.
It hates me; I can feel it. If its connection to the living world is anything like a guardian’s bond to their ward, then only the destruction of what’s bound can break it. I pierced the skull with the stake, but the throne is made of pneuma, like a shade. How exactly does one break that? Its essence looks too concentrated, too dangerously unstable for Ivrilos to try to consume.
And then I remember that once-living substance can interrupt death, just like the skull or a revenant’s heart. And I’ve brought something like that with me: my bloodline. It’s the stake that I’m going to ram into the heart of the dark city—into Athanatos, his throne, and everything he has built with it.
I’m the stake.
Athanatos howls as I reach the throne. The hum grows to a whine of straining tension—a stringed instrument plucked to the point of breaking. The noise pierces my brain, makes my ears want to bleed, but it’s nothing to the pain I’ve already felt.
I sit on the throne.
The screeching vibration abruptly stops. The throne falls still, though a shock wave blasts out from it, rippling through everything—the snapping tension of the link to the living world felt throughout the entire city. Then everything falls quiet.
Too quiet. Like a held breath.
I face Athanatos. His expression is scorched, empty. I merely cross my legs, as if getting more comfortable. “It’s done.”
As I say it, the walls begin to run. Down, not up, pooling on the floor like thick paint. It must have too much weight, the essence too condensed, to just float away.
“Rovan…,” Ivrilos says, eyeing it. “We should go.”
Athanatos has been too busy staring hatred and murder at me to notice it puddling at his feet. By the time he glances down, it’s too late. He tries to lift his leg, but it’s stuck fast to the floor, and the blackness only rises, beginning to crawl up his leg like shapeless fingers.
Like hundreds, thousands of the nameless, starving dead. So ravenous and held here unnaturally for so long that they caused the blight, their hunger so toxic and mindless that it can make bloodfien
ds out of bloodmages and drain the entire living world dry.
I stand and head for the doors with Ivrilos.
“Wait!” Athanatos’s blue eyes are now wild with fear as he flails, almost losing his balance. “You can’t just turn your backs on me.” His voice grows more desperate. “You can’t leave me like this! It’s a disgrace.”
“Enjoy your mausoleum,” Ivrilos says. “You built it, and in it you’ll lie.” He looks around, his dark eyes suddenly soft. Sad. “Farewell, Mother. Aeona.” His sister, I remember through our bond, though I never knew her name before. “Embrace this man like he embraced you, and then rest in peace.” He touches his fingers to his lips.
I turn to the city, blinking away sudden tears as Athanatos’s screams rise behind us.
Everything is melting around us. The entire city.
“We might want to run,” Ivrilos says, and a whole building comes down, suddenly liquid and thrashing and containing what look like hundreds of submerged, amorphous limbs, reaching blindly toward anything and everything. The walls of Athanatos’s keep begin to sag behind us.
Athanatos’s screams abruptly cut off.
We run. The liquid darkness parts around us, though it strains against my shield like nothing I’ve felt before, not even Athanatos’s attacks. Such is the force, the sheer mass behind this unfathomable amount of essence, now unleashed. We pass other shades, flailing in the black muck, crying out, and we ignore them. They helped build this. Now they’re reaping what they sowed.
And what they sowed is reaping them.
It’s when the street beneath us begins to soften, slurping at our feet like mud, slowing our progress despite my shield, that I really begin to worry.
“Almost … there,” Ivrilos pants, his hand at my lower back, propelling me forward.
The city gates practically burp us out in a shower of slippery darkness, though thankfully it only sluices off my shield. We scramble our way up the side of the first wave of dunes, not stopping until we’ve reached a safe height. And then we turn to watch the city walls and towers collapse into churning, clawing, slithering waves.
Eventually, everything falls quiet. And Ivrilos and I are looking out over a black lake where a city once stood.
Even now the lake isn’t entirely still. It ripples like there are gargantuan creatures swimming beneath the surface. Horrors. But they’re just the shapeless remains of people, finally finding their rest. As we watch, the lake begins evaporating, just like the dunes are dissolving. The strange drips that once fell upward into the sky now lift off from the lake like reverse rain.
My knees give out, and I sit none too gracefully in the sand along the dune’s side. Ivrilos drops down next to me. We stay that way for a long time, watching the weight of all those souls finally relax and drift, eventually rising to find some measure of peace.
* * *
Hours, or maybe days later, Ivrilos looks at me sitting next to him, and he smiles.
He’s strangely bright, even all dressed in black. Maybe it’s that the landscape is somehow darker. Maybe it’s that he almost looks … happy.
I take his hand. “You look young, Ivril.”
Ivril. His childhood nickname. A look so wistful crosses his face that I touch his cheek.
“Sorry,” he says. “You … all of this … I don’t know quite what I feel. I don’t know if I want to sprint or lie down or…”
“You did it,” I say. “Finally.”
He sighs. “And yet I’m more aware than ever of everything I’ve lost.”
It’s hard not to be, sitting at the side of a lake at what looks like the end of the world. It’s certainly the end of life. And lives. Maybe ours, and so many others.
My father. My mother. Lydea. Japha. I’ve also lost so much. My grief feels as deep and dark as that lake, with things swimming in it that I don’t want to think about.
So I won’t think about it, because this might be one of the last moments I have in any realm, the living or the dead.
“You haven’t lost everything.” I grin and nudge his shoulder. I even give him a suggestive wink. If anything, it might distract us both.
But he looks at me in a strange way. One that isn’t awkward or startled, but open and … new. “No, I haven’t.”
I can’t take the intensity of his look. I suddenly feel awkward. But as I try to turn, he catches my cheek and gently guides my face back toward his. His eyes pore over me, and his expression is one of wonder.
“You are so beautiful,” he breathes. “Body, mind, and spirit. And sometimes I can’t believe my blessed fortune that I’ve met you after so long. That I’ve found one bright, glorious thing toward the end of this long bleak existence that makes it worth continuing.”
He presses his lips to mine, and I forget everything else. I might as well be drifting away with the rest of our surroundings.
“End?” I murmur, when I can breathe. “Who wants this to end?”
“It must,” he says, leaning his temple against mine and exhaling, long and slow. “Probably sooner rather than later.”
“Let’s not rush toward that.” Never mind that we haven’t left ourselves many alternatives. “Let’s enjoy the moment. Besides, I’m pretty sure we have unfinished business.”
He opens his eyes. Holds mine. “All right.”
And then he kisses me again, for a long, long time.
* * *
It’s sometime later, as we’re lying back against the dune, arms wrapped around each other, staring at the dissolving sky, that I feel a strange hollowness in my chest.
I sit upright abruptly, dragging myself out of Ivrilos’s embrace, hand at my breast.
“What is it?” he demands, startled, reaching toward his bare hip where armor and a sword suddenly reappear.
“I think I feel somethi—”
And then I’m gone.
36
When I open my eyes, it’s onto a ceiling lined with skulls. Of all my waking views—from the veil on top of the gazebo with Bethea, to my body on a stone slab when I was bound to Ivrilos, to sunlight spearing my hungover eyes, to a canopy of roses masking the smell of my dead body—it’s probably the least appealing.
Until I turn my head and I see who’s standing nearby, looking down at me with anxious faces. And then it’s the most beautiful view I’ve ever seen.
Lydea and Japha. Even Ivrilos appears next to them.
I fly off the hard surface I’m lying on—another stone slab, as it turns out—and I throw myself at Lydea. I crash into her so solidly I almost bring us both to the ground. That doesn’t stop me from smothering her face in kisses. Neither do her red eyes, nor their tears of blood.
It doesn’t hurt that she starts kissing me back just as fiercely, never mind my own red tears.
Someone clears their throat. And that someone is Japha. I don’t care if I’ll get blood on them; I spin away from Lydea to throw my arms around them.
… And I fall right through them.
“Yeah, that,” says Japha. “I’m dead, if you recall.”
I pull away, staring at them. Unlike any shade I’ve ever seen, they’re wearing a bright orange peplos patterned in blooming white lilies. Japha never did like black. And they’re no longer wearing their bloodline. Good thing—it would have clashed horribly.
“But y-you’re here,” I stammer. “How—?”
They jerk a thumb at Lydea. “I’m bound to her. I’m … her guardian? And she’s … um … you’re not really my ward, are you? My revenant?”
Lydea smiles at me, her eyes almost entirely red now, with the blood. “I guess I’m dead, too, just not as thoroughly. Like you, Rovan.”
Except I was thoroughly dead, just a moment ago. I paw at my chest. There’s no wound there. Lydea lifts the stake between two fingers as if it’s disgusting, wood and bone bound in steel.
“How?” I gasp again. I’m having a hard time finding words.
“Well, we pulled the stake out—”
“No, I mea
n, how are you here?”
Lydea’s lips twist. “I didn’t exactly have time to tell you before I ended up with a broken neck, but Crisea and Bethea, with the help of one of those creepy Skyllean bloodmages, trapped Japha’s shade before they could wander too far, and then bound them to me. I offered, and Japha didn’t resist, so…”
Japha throws up their hands. “Why would I resist? Have you seen the underworld? Who wants to stay there?”
“Indeed,” Lydea says. “That’s why I left the battle to find you, Rovan. I fulfilled my promise to keep Japha safe. At that point we were still a normal ward and guardian, but then I tore that bastard Kadreus’s heart out and made him angry, to say the least. As he was strangling me, Japha tried to help.”
Japha cringes sheepishly. “I guess I helped too much, even if it didn’t amount to much at all. Still, I gave her everything I had. And here we are. She died—mostly—and we both came back.”
I stare at them, agape. Japha waves in greeting at Ivrilos. Ivrilos slowly lifts a hand in return, nearly as shocked as I am.
Lydea smiles at him—of course, she can see him now, too, as a revenant—but then drops her red eyes and stares down at her twining fingers. “I know this is weird, but we woke up here in the necropolis next to your staked body—”
She might be shy about her eyes, or about how she looks otherwise, but to me she’s more gorgeous than ever.
“It’s amazing,” I interrupt, choking, my throat almost too tight to speak. I take in all of them slowly, standing awkwardly together. My family. “It’s the most beautiful, wonderful thing anyone could come back to.” I glance at the black walls, which remind me uncomfortably of the dark city. “Despite the decor.”
“You think we’re beautiful?” Lydea takes my shoulders and steers me over to a narrow window. “Look at this.” I try to focus on what she’s showing me instead of the feel of her hands on me. We’re high up in the necropolis, peering out from its vulturelike perch on the edge of the plateau that holds Thanopolis. We have an unobstructed view of the blight.
In the Ravenous Dark Page 36