Mask of Poison (Fall of Under Book 1)

by Kathryn Ann Kingsley

  “Immortal…you can’t die.”

  “Oh, we can. But one must remove the marks first. That is why some of us wear masks, as you likely noticed.” He shut his eyes as he talked. He looked even more like a statue. “Time was once that we were split evenly in two castes—those with masks and those without. The more marks one bore on one’s face, the more mask one was gifted to protect it. Kings and queens wore full masks.”

  “You said you were a king. You aren’t wearing a full mask.”

  “Indeed.” He smirked and opened his eyes to watch her again. “I never much cared for them, and it has become…more acceptable as of late to be seen without them. Many now choose to go without a mask as a sign of familiarity and openness to those around them.”

  “I…see.” No, she didn’t. But she put it on the list of things that didn’t make sense today. “More marks, more power…more mask. Got it. I think.”

  “The marks come in seven colors, as well. White, like mine. The House of Fate, who call the Great Hall their home, wear blue.”

  Seven colors. She tilted her head curiously. “White, black, green, red, blue, purple, turquoise?”

  “Indeed. How did you know?”

  “The statues in the cathedral. Those are…those are your gods? The Ancients?”

  He smiled, as if he were proud of her. Or impressed. She didn’t know what to make of either. “Yes. Indeed.”

  I don’t think I much like the look of your gods. “But you aren’t right. There are eight, aren’t there? Yellow, as well.”

  His expression fell. And she watched as his eyes flickered with something like uncertainty—or fear. “Yes…that is why we must go to the Great Hall. That statue was not there this morning. I fear it arrived precisely when you did.”

  She remembered that terrible statue with the rotted flesh. She might not recognize the face of the god, but she was worried she might recognize what it represented. She chugged the remainder of the tea, and more importantly, the honey and alcohol. “Let’s go.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I don’t like sitting around.” She stood and slung her spear over her shoulder with the leather strap that attached to the body of it. “If my arrival is connected to that statue, and where we’re going might have answers to that…then I want to know those answers, too.” I might not have fallen from one world to another alone.

  “Good. Come.” Lyon stood, and she fought the urge to shrink away from him. The man was so freakishly tall. Easily well over six and a half feet. He might be pushing seven. He strolled past her and, after opening the door, motioned for her to follow.

  But something was nagging her as she trailed him down the dark hallway.

  What could possibly make an immortal, inhuman man who is twenty-three hundred years old afraid?

  Why do I get the feeling I’m going to find out?

  Lyon could not help but glance behind him from time to time. Not only because he was utterly convinced the young woman would bolt from his side at any moment, but because he also found her confounding.

  She was so afraid, but she was the one who declared they would go to the Great Hall, and they would do so immediately. She was accustomed to working through terror. It was clear—painfully and personally so—that she was the kind of person to “shoot first, ask questions later.”

  But why? What had made her like that?

  Every unexpected sound sent her hand to her knife. Her gaze darted this way and that. She was a frightened deer, but she was not cowering. She was not weeping in the corner, or insisting that what had transpired was impossible, and could not be, and this was all a dream.

  The Ancients knew how many times he had heard that in his life. As the King of Blood, as the high priest of the Ancients, it was his duty to greet the new marked souls from Earth. He had met, and consoled, and convinced many a terrified mortal that Under was now their home.

  They reacted in every possible way a person could. Defiance, denial, anger, sorrow, violence…and all born from fear.

  But Ember seemed to take each new impossibility and throw it behind her in order to move on to the next, as though fear were an old friend.

  It is as if everything that does not mean to kill her is not important. “Miss Ember?”

  “Hm?” She was back to clinging to the leather strap of her spear. It was more of a metal rod, sharpened at both ends, than anything else. It looked crudely made, but well cared for.

  “Might I ask you a question?”

  “Sure. Don’t see why not.” As they walked past another intersection of hallways, she grabbed the handle of her knife upon seeing a few people gathered there, talking.

  “Was your world a dangerous one?” He slowed his steps to walk beside her. Oft, he forgot how long his legs were. Kamira was fond of complaining over that fact.

  For the first time, he saw an expression on the young woman’s face that was not fear. And it was sadness. But it was the kind of grief that had grown hard with time. She could not be barely more than twenty years old, but he saw in her the weight of many years or horror lived in that short time, like a soldier who had fought too long on the front lines.

  She nodded once, curtly.

  “Will you tell me about it?”

  She opened her mouth, as if she were going to say no, before shutting it. After a pause, she shrugged. Her hand left the handle of her knife to clutch at a series of necklaces she wore around her neck. “My world wasn’t just dangerous. It was being consumed.”

  There was such darkness in her words. “Consumed by what?”

  Dark eyes looked up to him. And he saw such weariness, his heart broke for her. Then she spoke words that added to his growing nervousness.

  “By the dead.”

  3

  Pain.

  That was what he knew.

  Only pain, and nothing else.

  Not his name…not what had happened…not where he was.

  Only suffering.

  He pressed his palm against the stone. Then his other palm. Then his knees met the hard surface, biting into the sensitive flesh that was already past the point of being abused. He would have made a sound if he believed he could have. But he was drowning. Drowning and climbing. He needed to get away from what surrounded him. This agony, this terrible burning that filled his mind.

  There had been only nothing. A beautiful, blissful, simple nothing. He had not cared for what he was or what had happened, for he did not exist. But now he was in this something, and this something was unkind.

  He wanted it to stop.

  No.

  He wanted those who had made this happen to suffer with him.

  Because he knew those people had names.

  A shame he couldn’t remember them. He’d get there eventually.

  Oh. I’m a man. That’s nice to know. That’s lovely.

  He’d take anything at this point. Because anything was better than the something that made him burn with such total pain that it threatened to wipe everything else out of his soul. But he knew the bite of stone stairs underneath his palms and knees. He crawled.

  Crawled like a beast. Like a worm. Like a slave.

  I am a king.

  But how had he come to be so low?

  So broken?

  I am broken…

  His head broke the level of liquid that he had not known was there. It was pervasive. It had filled every part of his body, every pore. He tried to breathe air—that was what it was called, wasn’t it?—and had nowhere to put it. He retched. He knelt on stone and emptied his lungs and his stomach—or what was left of it. He pressed a hand to his side and felt liquid emptying out of his body in places there shouldn’t have been holes to do so.

  But there were.

  That might be why he hurt so badly.

  He fell onto his side, feeling the stone against his arms and his ribs. Not his flesh—but his bones. Everything was raw. Everything hurt. It was just a matter of flavors. One thing stung where the other burned, where another
felt like lightning, and the fourth felt like stabbing. But it was all agony.

  He had to move. He had to get away.

  Away from what? From where? Where was he escaping from? He had been nothing, and then he was suddenly something, and that something was terrible. But where could he go from the something? He couldn’t go back to nothing; he knew that much. So maybe he could go farther away from the something and into something else?

  Wouldn’t that be lovely.

  He laughed. Or he tried. It was a rasping, empty thing. It made no sound other than a scratch. He might not have had lungs to laugh with. Or a tongue. Do I need a tongue to laugh? I’m not sure. I don’t think so. It’s an open-throated thing. Didn’t he know a man once who had no tongue? He thought he did. He wasn’t born that way but made that way by a monster.

  Aon.

  He knew that name. He didn’t know his own name…but he knew that one. One that filled him with hate. With rage. That inspired him to crawl from the terrible liquid. Where he had been. And there was only one reason he had been in that place.

  I was dead.

  Dead.

  And now I am not.

  I was nothing, and now I am something.

  Why?

  Hands touched him. He would have screamed in agony if he could. Yes, I have no lungs. That is the issue here. He pressed a hand inside his ribcage to find out. It was easy, seeing as he was missing most of the flesh on his chest. Sure enough, he could feel his spine and nothing else. All his organs were gone. Just…emptiness.

  “Sir? Oh, by the Ancients…”

  The Ancients.

  This is their fault!

  Someone was speaking to him. Ears. Cute. I still have ears. I suppose that’s nice. It was a woman. She was trying to help him. Cute.

  He opened an eye. Oh! I do have eyes. At least one, anyway. The woman over him wore a half-mask of white porcelain. It reminded him of something. The woman took a look at his own face, and her visible eye flew open wide in fear.

  She tried to run.

  Now, we can’t have that…

  He grabbed her by the ankle and dragged her down to the ground. He yanked her under him and caged her in. He held her to the ground. She struggled, but it was so easy to pin her there beneath him. He lowered himself close to her. She smelled so sweet, so fresh, so full of muscle and sinew and meat.

  She smelled tasty.

  He bent his head to tear into her flesh, but something stopped him. Something was over his face. He reached up and pulled a mask from his face. It was white and porcelain—or it should have been. But now it was stained, yellowed and cracked. It was as decayed and broken as he was. He put it aside. It was in his way. He would remember why it was important another time.

  He looked down at the girl who was staring up at him in fear. She was making such a racket. Screaming so very loudly with that juicy tongue of hers.

  I think I’d like to taste it.

  He bent down and dug his teeth into her face. She screamed harder and harder. He didn’t care. He tore her jaw from its hinges and dug in deeper, seeking the tongue that he had seen waggling around all red and juicy inside her mouth.

  Wriggling and fresh and savory.

  He ate it. Swallowed it whole. She had stopped screaming. Good. It was so noisy. Now she was twitching beneath him. She was in shock. It meant she might not feel it as he began to peel the skin from her face with his teeth and eat it, bit by bit.

  This is profane.

  This is a sin.

  But, oh, it is so good.

  Because with every piece he swallowed, a little bit of the pain began to go away.

  If this was what it took to send it away…he’d eat every ounce of living flesh he could find.

  It was when he had dug his fingers deep into her ribcage and ripped it apart, cracking it open like a sea crustacean, that he began to be able to think clearly.

  Clearer.

  Ish.

  Give or take.

  He had buried his head into that beautiful flesh of hers, tearing out her heart and eating it like a ravenous animal. He was swallowing her very lifeforce. Everything she had grown hung off a branch like a ripe peach, and it was his to devour. And the juices of her fruit flowed down his face and his neck and his chest.

  He pulled in a shuddering breath. He had lungs now. That was a distinct improvement.

  The woman beneath him was dead, but she had so much more to give him.

  He was a king.

  He would take it all.

  With two eyes, he gazed up at the heads that stood poised over the great pool of blood that he had worshiped for so long. He knew them, even though he did not know himself. They were mocking him with their terrible, twisted grins. Blood poured from their maws, just as it oozed from his. He was as they were.

  Swiping up some of the blood, he licked it from his fingers and stuck them deep into his mouth to savor every drop. This woman beneath him would give him everything she had.

  For he was her king.

  The marks of white upon her flesh said so.

  His fingers grazed a tongue in his mouth, and he wriggled it against his digits, testing it out. Oh, yes, that was his tongue. Oh, and it was glorious.

  Like a rabid wolf, he tore into the flesh of the woman again, carelessly ripping sinew and tendon away from the bone. But before long, he had devoured her. Everything worth taking was gone. He had even snapped some of her bones to suck the marrow out from the centers. But now she was only gristle and cartilage.

  He leaned back against a stone dais that stood in the center of a circular platform and gazed up at the stony visages of the Ancients. The ones that mocked him.

  They had mocked him his whole life. Everything he had known had been a lie. One atop another, atop another. He had believed himself to be their chosen son. Their protector—their keeper—the one who held the chains that kept them safe inside their prisons.

  But when it had all come to blows…he had been abandoned. Left to sink into the nothingness that awaited them all.

  You abandoned me.

  You abandoned me!

  It wasn’t until he had screamed it a third time that he heard it with his own ears. That was his voice. His voice! He could speak! He was not like poor mute Edu. He cackled and stuck his fingers in his own mouth to feel his tongue once more. It was there—wriggling, hot, and his.

  He fell over on his side, looking at the decimated remains of the woman he had devoured. He reached out and stroked the carcass lovingly. The poor girl had given him everything.

  He reached out for her, and her head detached from her neck. Oh, well. He cuddled it close to his chest. He had taken everything from her, so he could hold her for a little. Her jaw had fallen away somewhere. No matter.

  He looked up at the Ancients from where he lay in the puddle of blood and ichor that he had made.

  Distracted by the smell, he turned his head and licked a trail of the blood up from the stone. It was already going cold. Cold blood is terrible.

  He had drunk blood before. Frequently. He pressed his fingers into his mouth again and found the sharp fangs that he had for canines. Good! They had not taken his favorite weapons from him, at least.

  But what about the rest?

  Slowly, piece by piece, it was coming back to him. But what was it? It was still a shattered, broken mess. Pushing to his knees, he dropped the woman’s head. It landed with a wet thump against the stone, forgotten and abandoned as she was.

  I could fly.

  He pressed his hands to his shoulders. There were holes in them. Deep trenches in his flesh. He could watch his own muscles move and bend where there was no skin. He could see bone pushing through, flashes of white in a sea of sticky red.

  He shoved a finger into one of the wounds and howled in pain.

  Well, that was stupid, wasn’t it? What did you think was going to happen?

  Flying. Wings! I had wings!

  He tried to summon them, but he fell onto his face with ho
w much it burned. He screamed and sobbed, slamming his palm into the stone, likely breaking one of his fingers. It didn’t matter. Anything but that feeling at his back! It went away as he willed it to stop, and he crawled back to the remains of the woman. She had been wearing a white gown. It would serve him. He began to rip it to shreds, tearing off long strips of fabric. He began wrapping it around himself. Wherever he could see a gaping wound where his body was missing, he bound it in fabric.

  Soon he was covered in more strips of cloth than not. It was already seeping through with crimson.

  Wavering, he pushed up to his feet. He fell flat to the ground. He tried again and fell again. A third, fourth, and fifth time he tried, before he managed to stay upright. His feet were bare. When he looked down at them, they were mostly bone. A few of his toes were missing.

  Everything still hurt.

  But maybe just a little bit less.

  And maybe, just a bit of his mind had come back to clarity.

  He looked up at the faces of those creatures he had dedicated his soul to, and he cackled. He fell back, leaning against the dais to keep himself standing. He left bloody smears wherever he touched. He didn’t care.

  He laughed at them. Laughed at their malice and their cruelty and their stupid grins. He laughed at them.

  Because he would destroy them all.

  He pointed a finger at them, thin and empty and frail. And for the first time in a very long time, he spoke.

  “I am Rxa…and I will destroy you.”

  4

  Stepping out of the cathedral, Ember gasped.

  She had never seen anything like the city that stretched out before her.

  Clutching the necklaces that hung around her neck, she could do nothing except gape. And stare. By all the old gods, living and dead, what is this place?

  The stone steps of the cathedral were massive, like everything else about the building. Turning, she looked up—and up—and up—and nearly fell over. The cathedral loomed over them. And it was covered in carvings and statues. Some of humans, and some of creatures. Spires stretched up from the roof, jagged outlines barely visible against the night sky. A night sky filled with stars that weren’t hers.