by Ana Calin
By the time we reach the Altar of Worlds I’m almost mad with anxiety. But this is the point where I have to gather all my strength. I close my eyes as I take the final steps, thinking exactly of where I want to go, and I can already feel the portal picking up on that energy. It gives me the certainty that it’s also where it’ll take me, it knows exactly what it has to do. And I, in return, feel and understand the great portal’s energy, and awe rises inside of me. It’s ancient, it’s an essential beam that runs through all the realms, open to them all, and yet divine in such a way that no one could ever breach it, no powers could use it to invade others.
The moment I throw myself into the portal, I have a great revelation. I sense that the Altar of Worlds is made of the same fabric as the divine force that created the universe. It’s why it was able to sanctify the union between Xerxes and me. And for the split second that I’m inside it, I can feel that union still binding us. I become ultra aware of the wedding band around my finger, feeling that it will always belong there.
But just as I say goodbye to the Fire Realm and my big love, the King of Flames, something hard and strong wraps around my ankle. My eyes snap open, and for a moment I can see the clouds whirling around me, the portal’s energy humming in my ears. It squeezes me like a vortex, threatening to break my bones. One isn’t supposed to open their eyes while inside it, because the divine portal can turn deadly.
But the hand that grabbed me pulls me right out of the portal, throwing me onto the cold floor of the Hall of Ceremonies. I cough as if I’ve just been pulled out of water, my eyes barely re-adjusting to the darkness.
“Nazarean,” I whisper, my half-blind eyes darting around for him, but when my sight begins to clear what greets me is the self-satisfied grin of Kareim Velduros, the two-faced High Mage.
“You,” I hiss.
“Yes. Me.” He takes a few steps back, his High Mage tiara glistening on top of his head, the folds of his shiny robes flowing down his body like cascades of fabric. He rests a hand on his staff. “Queen Cerys Dark of the Fire Realm, you stand accused of high treason, and are under arrest.” He nods to the fire fae soldiers accompanying him, all of them tall, golden-skinned and brutal looking, black horns running along their skulls.
They step forward and grab me roughly by both arms, their gauntleted fingers sinking into my flesh. They drag me after them, and panic overtakes me as I understand what’s happening.
“Kareim, what in the high realms, are you crazy?” I call, bile in my mouth. “Let me go, or this entire realm is going down. You of all people should know this. Let me go, or the King dies!”
But he keeps grinning, watching as the soldiers take me away. His sister Marayke joins from the shadows, but at least she isn’t gloating, and her face expresses some doubt. She knows this isn’t fair. Besides, she loves the king. She can’t possibly let him die. Or can she? Is she after revenge, is she determined to let no one have him if she can’t? Please, high realms, help me, only my sacrifice can save Xerxes and his people.
The deeper the soldiers take me towards the dungeons, the more my stomach clenches with anxiety and desperation.
“You don’t understand, you have to let me go. It’s me that Samael wants. Give me over to him through the portal, and he’ll stop the attacks.”
“Oh, wouldn’t you like that,” one of the soldiers replies spitefully, and throws me inside a cell, the gates falling shut. The metallic sound scratches my eardrums. This feels foreign, absurd, things can’t be happening this way. I back up to the wall in the dungeon, my eyes darting all around as my mind fails to comprehend that I’m locked in here, while the realm is being bombarded by an army of creatures from Hell, endless portals opening up at the borders and flooding the realm.
Hopelessness courses all through my limbs. I slam myself against the bars, screaming at the top of my lungs until I hear footsteps coming down the dark corridor running along the row of cells on this level, where I seem to be the only prisoner.
I step back, narrowing my eyes, letting all the poison that I feel inside show on my face. I know who it is, I can tell by the shuffling steps, and the company he keeps. As soon as his face appears between the bars, rage replaces everything else I feel.
“There he is, Lord Vengeful Jackass himself,” I grunt through my teeth, grateful that, busy with me, Kareim and the soldiers seem to have forgotten all about Nazarean. The way I know my familiar, he’s hiding in the shadows, waiting for the right time to sneak in here and help me out. I know he made it back out of the portal, I can feel it in my blood. He automatically travels wherever I go, we are bound to each other by a magical connection.
Kareim signals a soldier, and the latter opens the dungeon gate. Unlike the dungeons I know from the Flipside, this one doesn’t even screech. The bars are made of a metal much stronger than iron, even though they look like iron, and the place smells of fresh hay, more like a stall than a dungeon. It hits me that this might be a new level of the royal prison, set up to accommodate more prisoners since the other levels overflow with them. Which reminds me that my beloved husband is still a ruthless king.
“Look at you,” Kareim says as he steps inside. He reaches out to touch my face. I slap his hand away, but it doesn’t seem to faze him. “Your beautiful face is losing its glow. You’ve been having bad feelings, haven’t you? Frustration, regret, guilt.” He cocks his head to the side like a vulture inspecting its prey. “Hatred.”
“You can consider yourself special,” I bite. “You’re the only person I have ever hated. You taught me what it’s like.”
“Well, in that case, I deserve a medal, wouldn’t you say?”
I stare him up and down with all the contempt I feel. I jut out my chin. “I will tell Xerxes everything.”
“Everything?” he starts circling me, speaking in a relaxed manner. Makes me feel like I’ve got nothing on him, while he’s got multiple aces up his sleeve.
“I’ll tell him it all came from you,” I push. “I’ll tell him that you’ve been in contact with Samael, and that you forced me into doing what I did.”
He giggles. I can’t see his face, because he’s behind me now, but I’ll be damned if I’ll give him the satisfaction of seeing how vulnerable I feel.
“If you could do that,” he says, “you would have done it from the start. But you know all too well, dear Cerys that it won’t be any more possible now than it was the first time I delivered the message to you. If you tell Xerxes, and anything happens to me, Samael will take this to the Council of the Arcane. I don’t have to reiterate what that would mean for your lover, do I?”
My jaw clenches. He sure as hell doesn’t. Xerxes and I had no business entering the Cemetery of Doom and draining the dead who dwelt in it of their magical force, as hellish and dark as that magical force was. I channeled all of their power into Xerxes, thereby stealing from Samael. Now, the Archangel of Death has reason to bring the matter to the Council of the Arcane and, considering Xerxes’ history with the Council, there’s a good chance the Council would exert its influence on the other realms to determine them to becomes the allies of Hell and take down the Fire Realm.
Xerxes would have no allies left, not with Hell picking a side. In the war he waged against Lysander Hell had stayed neutral, which is why the powers were balanced. But now Xerxes would lose. The bastard Kareim thought this out well. My heart sinks. This is all happening because Xerxes fell in love with me; if his heart had stayed cold like cooled-off volcanic stone, this piece of shit would have never had anything on him.
“Look at you,” I rasp, desperate to hurt him somehow. “Scheming your way to power. Can’t say I don’t understand, though. With no magic skills or anything else to show for yourself, you’re nothing but a sneaky rat.”
That gets to him, I can tell by the shift of energy in the air, but he doesn’t say anything.
“High Mage my ass,” I press. “You’re just a dressed-up psycho.”
He’s still behind me, and I still can’t se
e his face, but I hear the sounds coming from his throat as he bares his teeth. The first blow seems to come out of nowhere, but it’s so hard that I fall to my knees. The second one sends me flat on my stomach.
I try to push myself off the ground, determined to do something, anything, to hurt the bastard, make him regret the day he was born, but he puts a foot on my back and presses me right back down. Pain rips through my back muscles and sends tears to my eyes. I can’t move. He’s probably broken something or, if not, he seriously injured me. Through the blur of tears I can see one of the soldiers jerk forward, wanting to help me, but Kareim stops him, the tone of his voice poisonous.
“Don’t you dare.”
“But High Mage,” the soldier insists. “She is still the Queen. If the King comes back, and it turns out this was all a mistake...”
“Turns out, you say? And how do you suppose that will turn out?”
I can see it coming before the soldier does. Kareim’s blade flies towards his throat. The soldier’s eyes shoot wider, and he takes a step back, dodging the killer blade with his armored forearm, but all it accomplishes is that the blade ricochets and slices the other soldier’s throat. The man takes a hand to his wound, dark, viscous blood snaking through his fingers.
You’d think it would be the wound that never leaves your mind after you witness something like this, the sheer violence and sudden arrival of death, but it’s not. It’s the look in the dying man’s eyes. The surprise. Like he can’t believe it, even as he hits the ground, his blood spilling over the dark stone floor. He can’t believe his story is over just like that.
The man is now face to face with me as I lay on my stomach on the floor. The dagger has fallen between us. Kareim throws another blade at the other soldier, using the man’s shock to take him by surprise. His back slams against the cell gate, the blade piercing his throat. He slides down the gate like jelly.
“No,” I scream, my face burning. “Nothing will save you now,” I cry at Kareim with all I have. “Xerxes will know. You killed these men! Just because they spoke up.”
“I killed them because of what they heard—that I played a part in your betrayal. You are bound to secrecy, because you understand the extent of the trouble you’d get your husband into, but they would have talked. Besides, I won’t have to explain these deaths. You will.”
“What in the cursed realms do you mean, you psychopath?”
“First of all, let me remind you we are already in one of the cursed realms. And you know what they say—once you’ve set foot in one of them, there’s no way out. You knew this when you agreed to marry Xerxes.”
I gag on my own frustration. I’m so sick that I could throw up on the floor, but I manage to keep it back. I have to keep my strength, who knows what novel ideas this madman would come up with to torment me. He removes his foot from my back only to replace it with his knee, bending down and speaking in my ear.
“You will tell Xerxes that you killed these men with your own hand. And you’ll make sure that he believes you. If he smells something foul he won’t stop until he figures things out, and you know that would be really bad for him.” His wiry hair touches my cheek, and I scrunch up my face. It disgusts me to the core to feel him so close.
He leans his weight on his knee, pushing into my back, and sending agony through my muscles. He licks my cheek, his tongue abrasive, like that of a beast tasting the smaller animal it’s about to kill.
“One day, I will fuck you. And trust me, it will hurt.” There are vibrations in the way he says it that tell me the idea just hit him. The bastard grew horny seeing me lying helpless on the ground, completely at his mercy. Surely because he knows that it adds to the agony, to my frustration, to my hatred. He wants to take the glow of white magic and positive energy away from me completely, he wants to fill me with the grime of the bad and ugly.
He pushes off my back, sending pain like a thousand stabs through my body, and getting back to his feet. I know he’s staring down at me, taking delight in what he sees, but I refuse to look up at him. I’ll die before I give him the satisfaction.
“Kareim, what’s taking you so—” The person stops mid-question. I manage to localize where the female voice is coming from. It’s his sister Marayke, staring at us from behind the bars. I might be mistaken, but it seems she didn’t expect this. Her eyes move from me to her brother, and when she finally understands what happened here, her angular cheeks catch fire.
“What have you done, you bastard?” She yanks the door open, and drops to her knees by my side.
“Giving our Queen the exact kind of royal treatment she deserves.”
“If Xerxes comes back and finds her like this you’ll be dead in a split second, you idiot.” She helps me up, and I let her do it. As I manage to find balance on my weak feet I spot two glowing dots in the dark corridor. Realms, it’s Nazarean! Hiding there, watching this whole thing happen. It must be torture for him to watch me getting hurt like this, and do nothing about it.
Marayke winds an arm around my waist, but I flinch and hiss.
“Does it hurt?”
“Like hell.”
She turns to her brother. “You bastard. Were you trying to kill her?”
He motions leisurely to the dead soldiers, one of them slumped by the gates, the other lying on his side on the floor, dark blood pooling under him from the gash in his throat. “She killed these two people. She threw daggers at them.”
“Kareim, this isn’t what we talked about.” She looks at the two soldiers, and I can tell from her expression that she, with her warrior skills and senses, can reconstruct exactly what happened here. “Nobody was supposed to get killed, especially not our people. And Xerxes will know it wasn’t her.”
“No, he won’t.” He pulls out another blade, and cuts his own throat. I scream, Marayke curses under her breath, and Nazarean hisses from the dark corridor but, luckily, only I can hear him.
Kareim falls to his knees but, of course, he didn’t hurt himself badly, he merely cut his skin. It’s enough for him to bleed like a pig, though.
“What the fuck,” Marayke grunts, but he just grins at her, one hand on his throat, thin streams of blood trickling between his fingers.
“See?” Kareim says, still grinning. “She hurt me, too. After she tried to seduce me. She tried to seduce all of us.”
“The King will never believe you,” Marayke says. “You’re going too far. In fact, any further, and I’ll jump ship, brother.”
“Really?” He counters, though it’s increasingly hard for him to speak. His eyes lose focus, too, I think he’s about to faint. “I’d be careful if I were you, big sister. You’re too deep in this to say things like that. If I go down, you go down even deeper. He trusted you more than he ever did me.”
With that, Kareim slouches back against the wall. Marayke looks from me to him, obviously not sure who to help first.
“Are you bleeding anywhere?” she asks, inspecting me.
I shake my head no. At least, I don’t think so.
She helps me gently into a sitting position on the floor, then she hurries over to her brother. She swings one of his arms around her shoulders and helps him stand, though he’s hardly still conscious. She looks at me one last time.
“I’m sorry,” she murmurs, and leaves the dungeon with Kareim.
The gate falls shut behind her, and the last thing I see is a side-glance from the two-faced High Mage. He might not be gifted with magic, but he sure is one of the most cunning and evil bastards I’ve ever encountered. That glance goes straight to the back of my head, and pain runs through my back, where he injured me. It reiterates everything he told and did to me. If I dare tell Xerxes the truth, he would unleash the entire Council of the Arcane against him and, along with it, all the realms at once.
The armies of the worlds would come after him, with Hell leading them. I have no choice. I have to save the man I love.
Xerxes
I PUSH THE GRAND DOORS of the castle o
pen, facing the crowd already gathered in the main hall. The guards drum with their weapons against their armor, and almost in tears that we’ve won, while the civilians take a step back. I must be quite a sight, covered in black demon blood. My royal armor is broken in places, my throat is sore from the flames I’ve spat, and my voice will surely sound like a devil’s when I use it.
The crowd moves to the side to let me walk to the Throne Hall, where my courts have already gathered, waiting to discuss the emergency situation. But now that adrenaline and fire are growing colder in my veins, another priority takes over—Cerys’ betrayal.
I walk into the Throne Hall and take the throne as I am, still dressed in my royal armor, and covered in blood. Some of the courts look outraged, but to be honest I don’t give a fuck about my appearance. Duke Draven takes his rightful place standing by my throne. Dressed in black, the blood is harder to see on him, but it’s there. Despite his pretty face, Draven Ferox is just what the name suggests—feral.
“It’s not Samael’s attack that surprised us,” one of the courts says once we’re deep in the discussion. “In the end, you took something away from him. What interests us is what the Queen had to do with it? Why did she run away when the attack started?”
Of course they’re hungry for information on her betrayal more than on what happened with Samael.
“She killed two soldiers, and injured the High Mage almost to death,” another one says. The muscles in my jaw tighten, and my bloody hands grip the arms of my throne so hard that the metal begins to bend, and my heart threatens to shred inside my chest. Fuck, when did I get this weak on the inside?
“Do we know for a fact that’s what happened?” Draven asks in my place. He has been my brother in arms for such a long time that he can sense when I need support. He’s the only one who knows me well enough.