by Dahlia Lu
“I didn’t think you were afraid of anything…”
“I had thought so, too,” he said grimly.
“…What are you afraid of?”
A long pause came between them, so long that she thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then he spoke in a soft voice that could only be heard by the two of them, “I’m afraid that I could have done something about it. If I was there, I could have prevented it. I’m also afraid that it may not be accidental… afraid to learn how much you truly resent me. I’d rather run on speculation than to face the solid truth because then… I don’t know what I would do.”
“Do you really think that I’m capable of something like that?”
“You didn’t want the child.”
She couldn’t deny that she had said that. She also couldn’t deny that she had threatened him with his child’s life when she wasn’t even pregnant. “What… would you do if I’d told you that it’s true?”
He stopped.
“If,” she reminded him.
“I don’t know,” he said rigidly and then continued to walk.
“What would you do to me?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? Even if I had done something so despicable?”
“I was never in any delusion. I know I’m keeping you against your will and I haven’t treated you the way I should. Why should I punish you for the crimes that are mine? Even when I know this better than anyone, I’m too selfish to let you go. So I will continue to fulfill my duty as your husband. I will continue to protect you and provide for you. Our covenant is unbreakable.”
“…And if it was accidental?”
The muscles on his body didn’t feel any less tense. “… I would never allow myself to fail you again.”
Was that his pride speaking or was it his heart? He was such a proud man that it couldn’t be all heart. Whatever the case may have been, he had genuinely touched her. Why did she ever think of him as cold and unfeeling? Because at this very moment, he had more heart than any man she ever knew. Just a little broken, she thought sadly.
He just needed someone to mend him, piece by piece, and she wanted to be that woman. Three years ago, she would have mocked herself for even thinking of such an endeavor. But then again, things were no longer the way they were three years ago.
It was about time she admitted it. Denying something doesn’t make it nonexistent. She knew for some time that she was in love with him, but she didn’t want to trust him with something so fragile and so dear to her. Maybe she should give him a chance and pray he wouldn’t break it. Maybe she should give them both a chance.
“Hang on a little longer,” he said. “We’re almost home.”
Home, Amara smiled to herself. Suddenly a very intimate feeling was attached to that word. This feeling was what gave the word ‘home’ a whole new meaning. She wanted to go home.
They marched for hours across the frozen ascending terrain against the violent storm before they fell through the snow and onto a thick sheet of ice twenty meters down. Cold, weak, pained, and hungry, Amara lay still and wait for Noctis to come up with a solution. They were surrounded by ice and the only way was up. In another words, they were trapped in.
He tried to climb the walls but they were too slippery. He pinned the blade into the ice and tried to use it as a stepping tool so he could reach an area he could get a grip on. He pulled the blade from the ice, pinned it a little bit higher, and then pulled himself up. For some unknown reason, he abandoned his quest, retrieved the blade, and then leaped down. He returned to her side and sat beside her.
“It worked. Why didn’t you…?”
He glanced down at her and shook his head. Then she realized that even if he made it to the top by himself, she would be too weak to come with him. He had made it clear that he wouldn’t leave her behind.
Dead weight again.
“Amara!” he snapped at her. The volume of his voice startled her. “Keep your eyes open!” he commanded
She tried, but it was so damn hard keeping the heavy lids from closing over her eyes.
Her chattering teeth echoed back loudly. What she wouldn’t give for a cup of cocoa and a warm hot meal right now.
He got back up to his feet and began to stomp around. He listened carefully for the sound echoing back. The ice began to crack beneath the pressure of his stomp. He gathered her in his arms and pressed her head tightly against his chest. He stomped again and again until the sheet of ice shattered. They fell through once more, much deeper this time, and she landed on top of him.
At this point, Amara couldn’t tell the difference in temperature anymore. If she made it out of this alive, she might probably need to amputate her limbs because of frostbite. Amara didn’t like the sound of that one bit.
She felt gentle tapping on her face and opened her eyes. “Look,” he said to her, but she didn’t have the strength to open her eyes. His voice was echoing inside her head as it was fading, “There is a cave system inside this mountain. We’ll find our way out from here…”
“Amara!” he was calling her name again. The urgency in his voice snapped her awake. She was sitting on his lap, and they were surrounded by a circle of white flame. No wonder she felt much warmer than before. She immediately checked to see if she still had use of her fingers and then her toes. Each one wiggled according to her will. She exhaled her relief. No frostbite.
The last thing she remembered was falling through a sheet of ice and then another, but now she could see the vast night sky above them. There were no stars in the sky.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“We’re on the other side of the snowcap,” he said and then asked, “Do you feel warmer?”
She nodded. “I don’t feel frozen anymore.”
“Good because we have to keep moving.”
“Already?” She was just beginning to feel comfortable and there was nothing chasing after them. She wanted to stay like this a little longer. “Couldn’t we stay a little longer?”
“I know this is hard for you, but we have to keep moving.”
“Why?”
“We’re running out of time. If we don’t get out of this forsaken place by sunrise, we’ll be stuck here forever.”
“…‘We’ as in us? You too?”
“That was the deal.”
She gaped up at him. “What deal?”
“The deal I made with him.”
“Wait! What?”
“How do you think I got here? I made a bet with Death. If I fail to take you back to the Realm of the Living by sunrise, we’ll be stuck here forever.”
“Why did you make a bet like that? Are you so arrogant that you think you can never fail?”
“I wasn’t being arrogant. I didn’t have a choice.”
“If you knew that you might fail then why did you do it? Why wager with him when the stakes are so high?”
“I would have come even if the stakes were higher. Be quiet and save your strength for the rest of the way. We are in the dark of what’s to come.” He leaned back and asked the night sky, “What is to come?”
Chapter Nine
Amara wished he hadn’t asked what was to come, because what came was loud ear-splitting, head-pounding screeching. She rose to her feet to take a better look at what was happening around her. They were camping out in front of an entrance to a tunnel that leads into the mountain. The other side was a steep vertical fall. She kicked a small rock off the edge, but she couldn’t hear it hit the bottom. She looked beyond the edge and saw the outline of small floating islands in the dark. Those islands were suspended in mid-air, similar to that of the floating castle in Hell.
“I heard shrieking. Did you hear shrieking?”
“Shhh,” he hushed her. He rose and gripped his blade tightly. He had heard it too. Her eyes cautiously surveyed the sky. She saw a flock of birds flying toward them from the horizon. When they came closer, Amara realized they weren’t birds at all. They were haggard looking women with long
hair, sharp talons, and eagle-like wings for arms. And they were very hostile, like every other creature they’d encountered.
Harpies?
“Just what in the world is this place…?” she murmured. If she hadn’t lived in the Realm of Hell for nine years of her life, this place would have boggled her mind and then some. She knew that these were only illusions that Death had dreamt up, but it still amazed her. The books said that the manifestation of Death gained his knowledge through the memories of the souls he reaped. They called all of these illusions because they had no permanence, but that wasn’t the right word for it. They couldn’t be illusions if they were real enough to kill. Altering reality was more like it.
Their shrieking was excruciatingly painful to hear. Amara ducked low and covered her ears. They were attacking one after the other. One of the harpies was gripping onto the blade with her sharp claws to stop Noctis from swinging. He caught a firm grip on her leg and burned her to ashes. Seeing this, the others wailed and then attacked more ferociously. He dodged many of them, but he couldn’t dodge them all. Their claws and beaks ripped into his flesh. He gritted and swung his blade at two of them. Fatally wounded, they fell from the sky. There were four of them left. They took to the sky where he could not get to them and dived down like eagles. Three of them targeted him while a lone harpy targeted Amara.
The harpy grabbed Amara by her shoulders and took to the sky. Angered, Noctis engulfed the three harpies attacking him in torrents of white flames. He leaped from one island to another to get to her.
Amara feared for her life. Desperate to save herself, she summoned the power of the lightning to her hands and then grabbed the harpy by her ankles. The current wasn’t strong enough to kill the harpy, but it pained her enough to drop Amara from the sky. She knew then that she was screwed because she didn’t know any spell that could help her defy gravity.
Noctis dived down after her and caught her hand mid-air. She braced herself for the landing.
“Amara!”
Amara opened her eyes when she heard Noctis calling her name. His blue eyes were staring down at her.
She licked her upper lip. “Am I dead yet?”
“Not quite.”
She looked down and saw only darkness. She looked up and saw that Noctis was holding her hand with one arm while the other was gripping onto the blade that he had pinned into a small floating island. She was dangling above a bottomless fall. Dare she summon a creature that she may or may not able to control and pray that it would save her life?
The situation seemed desperate enough.
Amara mumbled the summoning spell she had learned from the Necromancer. A summoning circle appeared in the air.
“No!” Noctis bellowed at her.
She continued with the rest of the spell despite his objection. A winged beast rose from the summoning circle just as the blade slipped from the slit it had created. The winged beast dived down and fetched her and Noctis onto its back. Noctis pinned her down against the back of winged beast so that the wind pressure wouldn’t blow her off.
“Are you hurt?”
“I’m hurting everywhere, but that’s a good thing. At least I’m not numb anymore.”
“You shouldn’t have done that,” he lectured.
“But it worked, didn’t it?”
He couldn’t deny that it had. “Do you still feel sleepy?”
“My heart is beating a million beats a minute. Here, feel.” She pressed the palm of his hand against her chest.
“Mortal. You always seduce me at the most inappropriate times.”
She smiled even though she knew it wasn’t his intention to be humorous.
The winged beast carried them on its back a short distant down the mountain. Amara knew that her powers couldn’t sustain the winged beast for long, so she commanded it to land at the foot of the mountain. She would rather walk the distance than fall out of the sky when the beast evaporated into thin air.
Noctis leaped off the beast first and caught her when it was her turn.
“How far?” she asked him.
He took out the white chess piece in his pocket and looked down at it.
“Is it… talking to you?” she asked curiously as she followed him.
“No. The Oracle gave this to me as a guide, but it’s not doing anything now.”
“Seeing how Death has absolute control over his domain, couldn’t he simply move the exit elsewhere and forever out of our reach?”
He was thinking into it. “At this point, we have no choice but to have faith in the Oracle. If she is indeed who she claimed she is, she wouldn’t steer us wrong. For now, we just have to go where Death is leading us.”
“Since we’re touching on the subject of escaping… how did you…? You know…” She was referring to how he escaped his own time trap.
“Haven’t you noticed how strange the weather has been lately?”
She didn’t understand why he was asking about the weather all of a sudden. “The weatherman said it was due to the solar storm. Something about clouds of plasma slamming into the Earth’s electromagnetic field… Lizzie was watching television. I wasn’t really paying attention. What about it?”
“Something weakened the barrier of time significantly enough for me to break free.” His expression dropped when he said, “In addition, I had help.”
“Who?”
He didn’t say, but she could have guessed who it was. She couldn’t imagine him being too happy to receive help from the one person that he was determined to seek revenge from not so long ago. She knew he wouldn’t want to talk about it, so she didn’t ask any more questions.
Chapter Ten
The hours grew later as they continued to move forward. When she could walk, she walked. When she couldn’t walk anymore, he carried her. They didn’t stop to rest and he wouldn’t let her eat the ripe fruit in the orchard they were passing through. There were so many fruits and she was so hungry. She was also very thirsty. Her lips were so dry; they felt like sand paper against one another. She wished she could just reach out for one and sink her teeth into it.
When she couldn’t stand the temptation any longer, she plucked a bright red apple from its branch. Noctis swung around and heatedly slapped the fruit out of her hand.
“Don’t eat anything until we get home!”
She was a bit confused about why he was so cross, but then she remembered that some of the books she read mentioned that if one tasted the food from the Realm of The Dead, one is bound to the Realm of The Dead. Even in widespread folklore, this was known.
“What’s happening?” she asked him an hour later when he suddenly stopped.
“This is…” he furrowed his brows. “This can’t be…”
Amara looked up at him when she heard sadness in his voice. She then followed his gaze to the remains of an architecture wonder. The limestone structure was so massive in width and in height; it could have only been built by giants. But then again, those who did not know better would have said the same about the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty. Even in the state of disrepair, it still could not hide the glory it once held in its completion. Massive slabs of white limestone like those from the pyramid of Giza were used to lay the floor. Most of the columns still maintained their structural integrity. For some strange reason, the inside of the ruins felt like the inside of a baking oven.
“What is this place?” she asked.
“He’s playing with my head. This place…” he said and then chuckled like a madman. “This is my kingdom. My home.”
“Didn’t you say that your kingdom turned to rubble?”
“It did,” he confirmed.
“Apparently, it hasn’t here.”
“Illusions! All illusions!” Noctis ground his teeth angrily and then glared at the sky. “Why have you brought me here? Is this some kind of sick joke?! Do you think that you can use this place to deter me? Do you think this place can affect me? This place no longer means a thing to me! You hear?
Not a thing!”
If it really didn’t mean a thing to him then he wouldn’t have been this angry to be back here.
A group of soldiers came toward them. Noctis assumed they had hostile intensions so he stepped in front of Amara and readied his blade. The soldiers stopped and got down on their knees. The soldier in front greeted him in a strange language. He was speaking fast and she couldn’t understand a word of it.
“Where have you been? We’ve been looking for you everywhere. His majesty is requesting your presence.”
“His majesty?” Noctis inquired.
“Your father, the King,” the soldier clarified.
“My father is still…?” Noctis shook his head and muttered, “Illusions!”
“We cannot keep his majesty waiting, your highness.”
“Noctis?” Amara looked up at him, clueless about what was happening.
“You want to play this game? Fine! Take me to my father!”
The soldiers escorted Amara and Noctis to the inner palace by chariot. Amara had never ridden on anything like it before, so that was a first. She clung on to Noctis for dear life the duration of the ride. When they arrived to the palace fortified by very tall walls, Noctis was greeted with the highest level of respect. Some bowed their heads while others were on their knees. Coming from a democratic society, Amara was intrigued by the demands and protocols in this world. She had seen this kind of behavior in Hollywood movies and such, but witnessing this in real life was a new kind of experience.
There was simplicity in the structure of the palace buildings, but the complexity of the decor, the people, even the atmosphere was incomparable to anything she had ever encountered. And she had encountered a lot despite her twenty-three years. She was not part of the supernatural world, but neither was she apart from it.
Correction, Amara said to herself. You are now a part of the supernatural.
“Wait here,” Noctis said to her and then entered an important looking chamber by himself. She couldn’t come in with him, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t take a peek. There was an old man inside the chamber. From the fashion in which he dressed, Amara could only assume that he was a very important person in this society.