That sent the small group of prisoners into a panic. They screamed and fell back toward the Hounds, who had their work cut out for them, trying to keep the sudden mass of people in place.
“Enough!” the bird woman shouted, and her shrill voice echoed in the hall. The monster—the man who had just become a monster, rather—had walked up behind her. She seemed unafraid of it as it loomed over her. “Do not fear but rejoice! For he too has found his path.”
The lizard-bug-monster-thing stepped around the bird woman and off the platform in one easy step, long legs ticking against the polished stone surface and onto the dirt. It seemed uninterested in the rest of them. The prisoners scrambled to get out of its way as it headed for the exit. The Hounds did nothing to stop it, standing aside for the creature as it went down the darkness of the way they had come. It had a new life to pursue.
Shockingly, nobody volunteered after that.
Two men approached from the wings. They approached the first person they came across, grabbing them roughly by the arms and dragging them kicking and screaming up the stairs. The two men seemed freakishly strong. Even though the man they had seized was a full-grown adult, nothing that guy could do—kicking, shouting, yanking backward to try to pull them off balance—seemed to do anything.
They weren’t human, after all.
One by one, they were fed into the pond. One by one, people were grabbed from the pack and fed into the pool. One by one, they emerged as monsters—or as beasts pretending to be people. It didn’t matter.
Then, they came toward where Nick, Kaori, and Lydia had huddled in the crowd. The approach of the two men sent Kaori wailing into hysterics, and she ducked behind Nick once more, cowering behind her friend.
The men went to grab Nick. “Wait,” Lydia interrupted. The two men looked at her, seemingly surprised she’d stop them. It might be pointless—it was only going to save Nick and Kaori a few minutes of time as humans—but damn it all, it felt noble. “I…I’ll go.”
The two men in white stood aside and let Lydia make good on her pledge. Swallowing through her dry mouth, she glanced back at Nick, who was wild-eyed in fear. He mouthed something, trying to speak, but couldn’t find the words.
The man next to her cleared his throat and reminded her they were trying to keep to a schedule. Lydia took a deep breath, held it, and walked toward the steps. It was her turn now. She could do this. About a dozen people already had. Maybe she’d come out as a big weird bug monster. Maybe she’d have superpowers. Maybe a lot of things.
The polished stone steps in front of her felt immensely daunting as she stepped up to the top of the platform. The bird woman was watching her, expressionless behind the gaping black holes she had for eyes.
“Do not be afraid, my child,” she said to Lydia as she passed.
Lydia didn’t have the heart—or the ability—to explain to the woman exactly how little those words actually helped.
The platform around her felt massive and overwhelming. The six figures were watching her in various states. Some bored, like the nearly naked woman. Some curious, like the woman in the blue dress. Her arms were exposed, revealing long trails of the cryptic writing etched onto her skin in blue ink. Her eyes were pure white. The woman had worn an empty expression until this moment and seemed suddenly interested in Lydia’s presence.
Her mask had scrollwork upon it like that of a classic Venetian masquerade piece. Curling leaves and acanthus scrolls accented in silver tones wound into her hair and blended together. It almost looked like a crown, the way her mask wove into her stark white hair and back through the carefully arranged curls.
In a twist to deep blue lips, the woman smiled at her. But as soon as the expression was there, it was gone, fading back to an emptiness that made the woman look like a statue, somehow even more so than Lyon.
But her moment to stop and think was gone, and the nudge at her back from one of the men in white prompted her to keep walking. She went to the edge of the pool of glowing red liquid and couldn’t help but look at Lyon, hoping for some kind of shelter. Some sort of reprieve.
Lyon merely held his hand out to her—a gentleman, helping a woman down a flight of stairs.
Lydia was shaking again, and she felt short of breath. Oh, god. This was worse than if they had pushed them off a cliff into the pool of glowing, luminescent crimson liquid. Maybe she should have fought and struggled. Being dragged in like the others would have been easier.
Lydia squeezed her eyes shut for a brief second and felt the tears that she had been holding back escape. They ran down her cheeks, uninterrupted. She didn’t bother to wipe them away. What was the point?
Lydia placed her hand in Lyon’s. She was glad to feel him close his grasp around her and squeeze her hand gently. Trying, once more, to console her. This time, it wasn’t effective.
She put her foot into the water. It seeped into her shoe, around her ankle, and into her socks. It wasn’t cold or warm; it wasn’t anything. Just wet. She stepped her other foot in and felt it start to soak up the edge of her pants. Next, step down, and it was up to her calves. Lyon released her hand so she could move past him.
“I will see you on the other side,” he said to her, and she was surprised at how humane he was trying to be, at how compassionate he seemed toward her. It must be hard, to treat people with kindness after living as long as he had. To spend two thousand years like this and still be able to be charitable. The stray thought drifted through her mind, briefly interrupting the fear.
Another step, and the water was up past her knees now. “Thanks, Lyon…” she said back to him. “Thanks for caring.”
Another step and she was up to her waist. And, just like the others, something grabbed her. It wasn’t so much of a hand, or a claw, as it was the liquid itself. Like a current of water, suddenly pulling her out and down, dragging her under the red liquid without any chance to let her wonder.
The crimson liquid filled her mouth before she could even try to close it to hold her breath. It pushed into her like trying to drink from a hose, forcing itself down her throat and filling her stomach. It forced the air from her in one moment, as it seeped into every part of her. Without warning and in one terrible moment, it filled her lungs, and nothing even left her as bubbles of air as it consumed her.
Lydia’s eyes were wide open, her sight overtaken with the crimson glow from the liquid. There was nothing to see but the crimson light.
Lydia thrashed, heard her heart pounding in her ears violently as she tried to struggle and push against the liquid all around her. It was thick, viscous, and the harder she moved, the harder it became to do so.
It didn’t take long, though, for her body to begin to go numb. For her mind to quietly give in to the fact that she was drowning. That she was going to die. The liquid had pervaded every part of her, and the heartbeat in her ears was slowly fading.
It was peaceful, in a weird way. Just a pure encroaching nothingness. It was easy. It was binary. One moment, alive…the next, not.
At that moment, her mind conjured up one final memory.
Her mind conjured up that thought in a fruitless and desperate attempt to cling to whatever shard of life remained as it was being taken away. And since she was drowning, she had so very much time to ponder the gravity and meaning of that singular thought as she was now sinking deeper beneath the waves. No bother reaching. No bother breathing. Only thinking.
For her, it was a time she went fishing with her father’s friend and his kids, standing on the beach, casting lures off into the pond. She must have been twelve, standing on the shore of a lake up in Vermont, trying to catch pickerel or trout. Her? All she could find were sunfish if she was lucky.
Lydia had been absolute crap at fishing. Couldn’t cast right, couldn’t reel in right, but they had put up with her patiently. It wasn’t a particularly happy or unhappy memory. She hadn’t thought about that day in Vermont since it had happened. Why, of all the last moments, would it have been that?
/> Maybe it was standing on the shore of this red lake that brought back that memory of fishing, standing on dirt shores in a sunny, Vermont wood. Maybe it was the vaguely violent act of fishing. Maybe it was the lake itself.
Her consciousness was starting to fade, hanging on that memory of the sun on the shore on that muggy summer day, with the buzz of mosquitos in the air.
Hadn’t this gone on too long?
Wasn’t she meant to come back up by now?
A fish had no business being on the shore.
She had no business being underwater.
That was the last thought she had as her world faded to darkness.
Chapter Ten
Lyon could only pray to the Ancients that he was not a moment too late.
The impetuous young girl who had wandered from the caverns in search of answers had not risen from the pool. All had been as intended until he perceived that a single heart’s beat of time had stretched too long forward.
He waded in after her, and it was not long before he found her, lifeless and still just beneath the surface. Lyon pulled her effortlessly from the pool and into his arms. Carrying her to the platform, he placed her down upon the stone and knelt at her side.
The Priest looked on in pure and unqualified astonishment at what he beheld. There was no ink nor mask on her face. No scrawling, spiraling letters detailing, indecipherable as they may be, who she was to become or what role she may play in this world.
Nor was she corrupted, body twisted into one of the many species of creatures who called this place home. She was human. Mortal.
This was impossible.
He grasped her wrist and lifted her arm, rolling up the wet fabric of her thin coat to view the mark upon her forearm—the one labeling her as a chosen of the Ancients. It too, inconceivably, was absent from her skin. His watchful and anxious thoughts were broken as she suddenly twitched, her body wracking with unexpected motion.
The young girl convulsed violently with an unseen force, even as she was not awake to suffer through the pain. The blood of the Ancients would not be contained in any vessel, not even within a body. Unconscious as she was, the liquid forced its way out of her lungs and her stomach. He could but roll her onto her side to aid the forcible exit of the ichor. It poured onto the polished stone, coursing from her lips and her nostrils indelicately before oozing back toward the pool to rejoin the whole.
When her body was free of the substance, he put his hand to her neck and felt for a pulse. But he had no time to register whether the poor thing was alive. As the last ounce of blood left her body, she gasped, her back arching and eyes shooting wide. At least for the moment, she lived.
“Be still,” Lyon urged the young girl. She was wild in a panic, and her hands grasped at him. She focused on him but for a moment before bright blue eyes rolled back into her head as she slipped again into unconsciousness, slumping to the stone.
“What happened?” Maverick asked as he approached. Lyon could merely shake his head at the doctor. There was no explanation he could provide for what had just transpired.
“Lyon, you idiot, what have you done?” Otoi snarled at him. The corpulent little man in white looked down his literal beak at where he knelt upon the stones. The insult did not trouble him, nor was he concerned that any of those who heard the invective might pay it any mind. Otoi was the elder of Lyon’s own house, but none assembled upon the platform held the obese man in any esteem, and for tremendous and rightful reasons.
Never was Otoi found without beads of sweat upon his waxen forehead, and this occasion was no different, his corpulent face scrunched in disgust as he glared down at where Lyon knelt.
“Otoi, begone,” Elder Kamira snapped fiercely. The wild woman in the forest-green loincloth bore markings more than just those which the Pool of the Ancients had given her so long ago. She had seen fit to decorate herself of her own will, procuring some new piece of art each time she returned to Earth. Her braided hair jingled as she moved, the many beads and adornments tinkling together.
The little man flinched as she spoke, then recoiled as she made a brief and stilted lunge in his direction, just enough to make Otoi leap back in fear. Otoi snarled as Kamira laughed at his terror, huffed another insult under his breath, and turned to waddle back to the stairs leading to the crowd and the dozen of the chosen who still were to endure their Fall.
“Lydia!” someone screamed from the group of those being led from the room. A young man was trying to push his way forward, attempting desperately to reach the platform. Ah, yes—the other troublemaker, the one he had rather inelegantly thrown through the gateway from Earth. “Lydia!” the man shouted again but was quickly shoved out of the room with the other chosen.
Lyon was given a brief moment to reflect on his poor manners, that he had never asked the girl her name in his previous dealings with her. So quick was he to dismiss the mortals in their brief lingering state between their world and Under.
Lyon had ceased to listen to Otoi’s speech or the murmur from the crowd as he addressed those who came to watch. Lyon turned his attention back to the woman on the ground before him.
“Lyon,” Kamira said quietly and reached out to place a hand on his shoulder. It was a familiar gesture, and he did not shy away from the touch. He knew it well. “Is this…even possible? She bears no mark.”
“I do not know,” Lyon responded honestly. “Nowhere in the lore does it speak of anything such as this.”
“It has never happened,” came another voice, as still as ice. Elder Ziza needn’t speak loudly for her voice to carry, nor did she need to place much emphasis upon her words for them to be accepted as a pure and simple fact. “Not once, in all eras.”
Lyon looked up and saw the other elders and even King Edu had approached him and the young girl on the floor. Ziza, in her long blue dress and stark white hair, was gazing sightlessly with her empty, glasslike expression. Often, he was accused of being barren of all emotion. If that were so, Ziza was the void given flesh.
Edu moved forward and tilted his head to one side as if attempting to discern the girl’s mystery by that method alone. Whatever the king was thinking, he could not share. Ylena, his empath, was not welcome upon the platform for the ceremony.
“This is nonsense,” came the short, gruff voice of Navaa. The large man in the full black suit was standing toward the back of the small group, arms crossed over his expansive chest. His bald head and sharply carved mask gave him the appearance of a skull, one Lyon knew the other man delighted in quite adamantly. “Simply cast her in and try again.”
Lyon held up the woman’s arm, with the sleeve rolled up for him to see. “The mark of the chosen is gone from her. She is untethered to this world. Should we cast her in again, she will die.”
“So be it,” Navaa said with a shrug. “The Ancients made a mistake, and they’re rectifying it now by taking her life.”
“Do not blaspheme so,” Ziza scolded. It seemed the only emotion that woman could still conjure was the vexation of a schoolteacher. “The Ancients saw fit to bring her here, and their priest saw fit to save her. I remind you, Navaa, you serve the will of your sleeping master. Lyon serves the will of our originators.”
Maverick crouched down alongside Lyon, his hand now hovering at Lydia’s neck. “Her pulse is faint. There is little I may do for a victim of drowning, but if we are to attempt to salvage her life, I will assist.”
Lyon found the man’s offer perplexing. Maverick was one to keep to himself and actively desired to tarry as little as possible in the affairs and events of Under. Perhaps the knowledge that what had just occurred before him was a singular event was enough to draw him from the reclusive shadows of solitude.
Ziza moved to stand beside Edu and did not bother to look up at him when she spoke. The woman was blind, after all. The two of them yet found a means to communicate, despite their respective limitations. “What is your order, our king?”
Would he command her death? Or attempt to save
the poor thing, to understand the meaning behind this new mystery?
Edu let out a heavy breath, his massive shoulders lifting and falling with the exhale. He pointed one finger at the girl then jerked it away from the pool and toward the entrance hall. The command was clear. Take her away.
There was a surprising amount of relief in his heart. Lyon leaned down, gently scooped the unconscious Lydia into his arms, and rose from his knees. She was limp in his grasp, her head lolling against his shoulder like a child.
He struggled to grasp in its enormity the whole of what had just transpired or of what it may foretell for their future. For thousands of years and since time immemorial, the blood of the Ancients had marked the souls of Earth and gathered them unto their own. For thousands of years, they collected the mortals here, to cut them from their same cloth.
What meant it, then, to steal a human from the Earth and do this? What were their intentions, that they should take a mortal child…only to cast her away?
The Ancients had refused her.
***
“You insist on continuing to become more interesting, don’t you, my darling?”
Where was she…what was happening? Lydia was lying on her back. The last thing she knew, she went into that glowing pool of blood. And then…this? She felt like she was lost on a raft at sea in a storm. Everything was moving and still at the same time. “Wh…”
The voice shushed her then spoke again, dark and sharp like a knife in velvet. “You are unwell. You are dreaming again. Do not be afraid.” She knew that voice now. Aon.
Lydia couldn’t muster the strength to panic. She could barely muster the strength to open her eyes. Even if this was a dream, she felt feverish and weak. Like the dreams you would have suffering from the flu, even here, the world whirled around her. When she did manage to open her eyes, she realized she was now lying in Aon’s obsidian coffin. And she was not alone. Aon was lying next to her, the space large enough for the two of them only because he was on his side, an arm underneath her head. He was propped up on his elbow, his gloved hand gently stroking her hair.
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