by Rin Chupeco
You said you’d let me have it, Arjun, Jerbie said. I want it! You promised!
I couldn’t let them have it. I didn’t know if I was alive or dead, but if I let Jerbie have it, then I would absolutely be 100 percent dead. What was going to happen if any of them got their hands on the stone? Countless scenarios flitted through my mind, all of them horrific and involving me actually dying, and in all the worst ways.
I had two choices.
I took the only one I could make.
I threw myself off the cliff.
The wait to hit bottom was endless; it felt like I had fallen for a day and a half, and I was convinced that falling forever would truly be my punishment, until I finally saw the ground rushing up to meet me. I closed my eyes, prepared for the impact, prepared to die for real and take all doubt about my mortality away.
I hit, bounced, hit again, rolled.
Nothing hurt. I had expected shattered bones, my brains splattered on the ground.
Instead, I sat up. Got to my feet. Looked up to see none of those ghosts had followed my lead. Looked down at the stone.
It sparkled, winked at me.
At this point, nothing would have induced me to give it up.
I wanted this to be a dream. I wanted to wake up. I wanted to open my eyes and find my head on Haidee’s lap where it rightfully belonged, where she would tease me for snoring too loudly, that I’d slept too long but she couldn’t bring herself to . . .
“The hell,” I said, then sank back to my knees and threw up.
Once I’d gathered myself well enough to continue, I made my way down the solitary path leading into another narrow corridor. I would learn nothing, I decided, until I’d reached the end of this path, wherever it would lead. In the meantime, I took stock of what I did know. I’d fallen down the shrine and into this personal hell. I would have died if it hadn’t been for this stone. That there was another passage underneath the shrine wasn’t surprising to me, upon hindsight. If the cave walls and The Ages of Aeon were right, then the stone of immortality granted entry to the Cruel Kingdom, and it could be used to barter a return to Aeon.
Was this the Cruel Kingdom, then? Was it Inanna I was going to find at the end of this journey? Ereshkigal? And if I had the stone, what was Haidee doing right now?
I had to find my way out.
No; I had to find her. Haidee would go to the Cruel Kingdom regardless. If she thought I was lost—my heart twisted—then she’d be reckless enough to come here and face the demoness even without the stone.
I had to find her.
“I’m sorry, love,” I whispered. If I hadn’t let down my guard, Janella wouldn’t have gotten me. Haidee wouldn’t have had to try to save me. If I’d thought to throw the stone up to her, I would have gone to my death knowing she could save Aeon.
Apologize to her in person then, you ass.
The passage widened, opening up into another cavern.
“Arjun!” The cry was both unexpected and unexpectedly welcome; it sounded real, like it was just as terrified as I was, and like it was actually human.
“Faraji?”
The boy was shivering, his teeth chattering, and his face lit up with relief when he saw me. He was wearing the same clothes he’d had on during that fateful ride, but I couldn’t see any evidence of his wounds. “I’ve been wandering around here for days!” he babbled. “Is this what it feels like to be cold? How did you get here? Where are we?”
I stared at him.
“Arjun? You all right?”
This was a trick. It had to be some trick. Because the grief bubbling up in my chest felt almost too painful to bear. Of everything this hell had thrown at me so far, this was the most agonizing.
“You’re dead,” I said, rather stupidly.
“Am I? Are you? Are we both dead?”
“Maybe.” I gripped the stone tighter, comforted by its weight. Was that the reality of this place? Was I dead, and this rock the only thing keeping me from that final oblivion? But how did that explain Faraji?
He smiled nervously at me, just like the Faraji I remembered.
No. They couldn’t fool me into thinking he was real. I couldn’t take it.
Didn’t stop me from reaching out for him with shaking hands. He was solid and breathing and had a heartbeat, and I couldn’t help myself. Surely the dead couldn’t be this warm.
I yanked him into an embrace, choking on my next words. “On the assumption that we’re not . . . I’m glad to see you again, brother.” My voice cracked. “Real glad to see you. But we have to get out of here.”
“I don’t know how!” Faraji burst out. “What do you think I’ve been trying to do all this time?”
“How did you get here?”
“I don’t know. All I remember is the pain, and then I must have lost consciousness. When I woke up, I was here.” He shuddered. “The things I’ve seen in this place . . . once we get back I’m finishing the whole bottle of whiskey Kad’s been keeping under his bed. Then I’m crawling into my cot and not getting up for at least three days.”
“I know you’re scared, but we need to keep moving, see what’s at the end.”
“I tried. I keep getting turned around or something, like I’ve been going in circles. What’s that you’re carrying?”
“Just . . .” I stepped back, my hand closing over it so he couldn’t see. “Just a stone.”
“Can I have a look?”
I hesitated.
Faraji blinked, confused. “Just asking. Just show me how to get out of here. How did you even get here?”
“Time enough for that later.” I wasn’t about to tell him he’d died. “Let’s follow the path and hope it leads to an exit.”
We walked as fast as we dared, Faraji keeping up a nervous commentary about his time here. “I’ve been chased by creatures I can’t even put a name to. There were—things—on the ceiling, trying to grab at me as I ran. I had to jump off a cliff.”
“You did?” I asked, impressed despite myself. Faraji hated heights.
“There were these shadows chasing after me, and they had teeth and fangs, you know? I figured jumping would be a better death than getting ripped to shreds by an army of those. Just like back in the desert, when I—” He cringed. “The fall knocked the wind out of me, but I didn’t die. What about you?”
“Fell.” I hefted the stone. As long as he couldn’t take it from me, I should be good. He sounded like Faraji, but I wasn’t sure if this was some new illusion. Good Mother, I hoped this really was Faraji. “We found this in some forgotten shrine of Inanna’s. Haidee thinks it will put an end to the rituals, stop the galla without a goddess having to die.”
Faraji looked away. “What about us?” he asked, obvious resentment in his voice. “The goddesses get to live, but we don’t? What about everyone who’s died over the years since the Breaking, huh? Why do the goddesses get all the second chances?”
“I know.” He was right. Assholes like me and him didn’t get the same opportunities as people above our stations. “Haidee and Odessa aren’t just doing this to save themselves. They want to stop the people from suffering, too.”
“Too late for us, though.” Couldn’t blame Faraji for sounding bitter. Maybe he was right. Maybe it was too late for us. Maybe we were just a couple of dead guys too moronic to know we were already dead.
My chest constricted. No. I was not dead.
“Maybe not. I think I see some light up ahead.”
Eager now, we pushed on. But as we stumbled out of the passageway, I saw that our optimism had been premature.
There were fires everywhere. They burned all around us, the flames rising to as high as twenty, twenty-five feet. I could feel the intense heat; even as accustomed as I was to the hot sun and the desert, this was incomparable.
“We can’t go through here!” Faraji gasped.
I turned, and swore. The entrance we had come through was gone, and I found myself staring at nothing but a smooth cave wall. It was like we
had stepped out from solid rock. I ran my hands across the surface, but could find no opening, no illusion.
“What are we gonna do now, Arjun?”
“This is another test,” I said tersely. “I’m sure of it. We need to get through to the other side without getting our skin burned off.”
Slowly, we inched our way past the flames. There was no clear path before us, and the loud, crackling roar soon drowned out any conversation we attempted to make. Faraji fell silent, following my lead as I used my incanta to prevent the fires from drawing too close.
I didn’t know how long we wandered through this forest of fire, but I was too busy forcing the heat back to notice the images in the flames at first. It was Faraji’s whimper that alerted me, and I turned to find him frozen in place, staring into one of the fires. “I’m sorry,” he sobbed, and raised his hand like he was trying to reach out to something within its center.
“No!” I grabbed his arm, jerked it away. “There’s no telling what it’s going to do to you if you touch it!”
“Don’t you see them?” The boy sobbed. “They’re in there. Mother Salla, Immie, Kad, Millie—all of them!”
Suddenly I did. I saw the shadows converging on our camp, overwhelming all within. I saw some of the clans valiantly standing ground, only to be overrun. I saw several of them being torn apart, the same way I had seen Faraji being torn apart, and I felt sick.
Was this still an illusion? A vision of the future? Or of the present?
“All the more reason for us to start moving faster, Faraji!”
But he wouldn’t budge. “There’s no point! If we make it out of here in one piece, then they’re going to come after us anyway! They’ll kill us all over again!”
Arjun!
I made the mistake of looking into the flames again, and saw Haidee.
She was on fire. Parts of her clothes had burned away, and the sudden smell of searing flesh filled my nostrils. She was dying. If I did nothing, she was going to die.
The Cave of Realities. Where the sinful were punished with neverending visions of their worst nightmares come to life.
Hell and sandrock. Please let this not be real.
“You need to save them, Arjun,” Faraji begged.
The stone. I could save her with the stone. If I could somehow reach out and give it to her, then she would be immune to the fires.
The conflagration raged all around me, but the stone had gone cold in my hand.
I took a step back, away from Haidee.
“What are you doing?” Faraji cried.
“This is a lie.” Vanya never said if those images in the fire were true. But I had to believe that the images were what people felt they deserved, as part of their punishment.
And this wasn’t my punishment, because I didn’t deserve to be here.
I backed away farther.
The expression on Haidee’s burning face changed—from desperate and pleading to calculated and cruel. She reached out to me, but something shifted in the space between me and those flames, and what stepped out of the fire was not Haidee.
It was a gray shapeless thing, writhing and so hideously contoured that I recoiled from looking at it. It could have almost passed for human, had it not kept forgetting itself, sliding into asymmetrical, gelatinous shapes.
Arjun, it said, in Haidee’s voice.
I grabbed Faraji by the arm and dragged him into a run, even as the fires around us began to die down, as more of those vile apparitions took their place. Faraji stumbled as we raced through another, smaller passageway—the only exit I could see—but I never lost my grip, forcing him along until we had nothing but darkness to see by again, the hideous moaning in that beloved voice fading until not even its echoes were left.
“What was that,” Faraji babbled. “What was—”
“Quiet, Faraji.” I packed Fire into my palm, fearing the light might attract those strange wraiths, but knowing I had no choice.
“I saw them. Mother Salla and Immie and everyone else. They were all burning. Is that what’s happening? Are they all—”
“They’re not. Keep going.”
He whimpered, but followed me without comment. I willed my blue flames brighter, higher, hotter, because if there was anything in this place that was gonna burn, it wasn’t going to be us.
The Gorge of Wrath. Before that, the Cave of Yearning. And now the Cave of Realities. What was the last one Vanya had mentioned?
We emerged from a corridor and spotted an exit, the bright glint of sunlight telling me we’d reached the end of the cave. Eagerly, we hurried forward.
Then we stopped, and stared. Sand greeted us for miles.
It was almost as if I was back in the desert. Above us was something resembling a sky rather than a ceiling, though to call it a sky was a poor description; its swarthy colors were stretched out like a thick layer of dust, like a frayed rag thrown over an uneven surface.
Then there was the moaning.
There were people here—if you could call anything here people—up to their waists in sand, struggling and crying for help. They were wrapped in death shrouds that obscured their faces, and they twisted and turned, fighting to escape the trap of their eternal fates. They numbered as infinite as the grains of sand, as far as the eye could see.
The Sands of Punishment. Right. I could only imagine what went on here.
And past this lay the palace of the Cruel Kingdom. There was no castle to see, nothing that even remotely resembled the ugly pile of bedrock Haidee called the Citadel. But there was a hole in the ground several hundred meters away. The sands surrounding it were slowly trickling down into its depths without making a sound.
I started toward it.
There was very little space to maneuver my way around the wraiths but they ignored me, so I tried my best to blot out their screams. I strained not to accidentally glimpse what lay behind their shrouds. I feared that the sand would trap me like the rest of these people, but I lifted my foot with little difficulty, placed it in front of the other, and continued to move.
“Arjun. Don’t do it.”
“We have to get out of here. We have to save Haidee.” Return Ereshkigal’s immortality, right? The passages never said that a goddess had to be the one presenting this stupid stone.
“Arjun.”
The sand was smooth, almost like powder. My boots sank down an inch or so with every step; I looked back and saw it reclaiming the footsteps I had left behind, pouring into the imprints until there was no trace left.
“Arjun!”
But Faraji was struggling, sinking down. Tendrils of dust were winding around him, imprisoning him as they took root around his ankles and calves, keeping him immobile.
I swore and ran back toward him. “You need to go back to the passageway!” I tried to shove him back out of the sands, tried to direct blue fire at the sentient creepers pulling at his feet. “You have to—”
Faraji’s hand closed around mine, and he attempted to pry the stone from me. The winding cords of sand around him retreated; at the same time, I felt something hook around my leg. The sand-vines had attached to me instead.
“I’m sorry,” Faraji sobbed, trying to force my hand open. “They brought me here so I can take it. They want it. You understand, right? I have to bring this back, or they’ll keep me forever.”
“Faraji,” I whispered, horrified. The sand climbed up my thighs. I felt it tighten around my torso. The shrouded dead turned toward us. I could hear their moans; those who were close enough grabbed for the stone as well, frantic and hungry.
“Please, Arjun!”
I ripped myself free from my friend’s grasp, and he stumbled back with a screech as blue fire enveloped his arms. The dust-vines receded, and I ran.
“Don’t leave me, Arjun!” I could hear him screaming after me. “Don’t leave me don’t leave me don’t—” The words cut off in a gurgle.
That wasn’t Faraji. It couldn’t be Faraji. Nothing, nothing would ever convince
me that that had been Faraji. That ass was in paradise right now, chilling with all the pretty girls. He would never have wound up in hell like this, crying and begging for—
Bony limbs snatched at my shirt and pants, and it was my turn to trip. The stone fell out of my hand and onto the ground a few feet away.
The vines returned, and I lunged desperately, only to miss the rock by a couple of inches. I tried to burn them away, but it felt like my strength was sapped, and I could muster no more than a flicker before I was overwhelmed. More hands dragged me back, and I fought not to scream, even as they closed in around me, obscuring my view. It couldn’t end like this, I thought frantically. I had to return to Haidee. I had to give her back the stone. I couldn’t die here, and be another nameless shroud. I wouldn’t—
A hand plucked the stone from the sand.
And placed it back on my outstretched palm. At the same time, streams of blue fire enveloped the revenants, and they reared back.
The vines slithered away. The other dead continued to paw at me, but I pulled away and fled. I tore through the rest of the faux desert, ducking and swerving and dodging until I’d reached the hole. Only then did I turn around.
My mother didn’t wear the death shroud the other sufferers did; she wore something more familiar—a dark cloak, a star brooch pinned against her shoulder. The blue fires around her died away.
She said nothing to me despite saving my life, only bowed her head and turned, walking until she was lost among the writhing dead, until I could no longer see where she had gone.
There was nothing left for me here. Nothing but another leap of faith to take.
I gazed at the stone, reassuring myself that I still had it. Beyond the hole was the entrance to the Cruel Kingdom. I had no idea what I was going to find there.
But I’d find Haidee.
My sweet, stubborn, exasperating Haidee would have found a way. I knew she was here in this godforsaken kingdom somewhere.
And I was going to find her, so I could yell at her for being a bonehead.