The Ever Cruel Kingdom

by Rin Chupeco

  It screamed at our fresh assault. We guided our aim toward the shining blue jewels, and one by one, they exploded from the force of our will. At each shattering the void jerked back, again and again and again, until it had shriveled up into nothing. There weren’t even embers.

  And then the overwhelming presence was gone, and we were back at the seventh gate, blinking at each other against the sudden brightness.

  “Odessa? Haidee?” Lisette approached, her eyes wide and her voice awed. “Did you do it? Did we win?”

  We glanced at each other, and at our mothers. They had relaxed, with the smiles of those who had expected little and found much. “I think we did,” Latona said, her voice shaky. “I had no idea . . . I never . . .”

  “It’s done,” Asteria said. “And that’s all that matters. We’re free. Haidee, Odessa—we’re all finally free.”

  It was so simple. Inanna and Ereshkigal had entered the Cruel Kingdom without fully trusting each other. We had gone through so many trials together that the tests of the Cruel Kingdom were almost child’s play. This was why the Devoted had feared us together. They could not control us, and they knew it.

  And now, we had a second chance to rule Aeon the way we always should have.

  In a daze, we traced our route back toward the portal that opened on the Skeleton Coast, collecting allies along the way. Mother Salla, Imogen, and the rest of the Oryx clan were giddy with relief, the other clans thrilled at the chance of starting anew. Sonfei was laughing, his arm carelessly looped over Asteria’s, and she made no move to pull away.

  The celebration was already in full swing by the time we stepped back onto the dunes. The galla army was nowhere in sight. For the first time since the Breaking, the dark clouds pulled away from the sky above the Great Abyss and the miasma of fog was lifting—revealing, for the first time, rocky ground underneath a bright sun, overlooking flatlands that, with time and effort, could be induced to flourish again.

  Breathing hard, Lan surveyed the sands, blinking against the light. “I can’t believe it’s over,” she said, her voice hushed. “I can’t believe it.”

  There were no more galla. And in time, as the world continued to turn, Aeon would return to normal. Forests would grow, and seas would rise again.

  It was more than we could ever hope for.

  “Arjun,” we whispered. We were still so closely linked, our minds intertwined, and the grief that rushed through us at the reminder was enough to incapacitate us both. We sank down to the ground, our arms around each other, our weeping lost amid the celebration.

  It wasn’t fair, that life could begin anew on Aeon without him.

  He would have wanted this. He would have laughed, told us it was useless to dwell on the past, surrounded by the possibilities of the future.

  “Is it over?” we whispered to each other, a part of us unwilling to let go. “Is it really over?”

  It was. We had defeated Ereshkigal. Despite Odessa’s and my short time together as sisters, our closeness and mutual trust had been stronger than anything Ereshkigal could throw at us. We mourned both Ereshkigal and Inanna as well, for what they could have been together. For what they could have given Aeon that we could now provide in their stead, and for all our ancestors who had suffered after them.

  For the moment, any hostilities that still lingered among the different armies were forgotten. Many wept, and others shouted their joy. Clan members hugged Silverguards hugged the people of Aranth hugged the Liangzhu.

  A hush fell over the crowd as we stepped through the portal, the last to do so. Immediately the people fell on their knees—even the clans that had long fought against Latona, even the faction from Aranth that had conspired against Mother. Even proud Lisette succumbed, as did Noelle and Vanya, all looking like they’d never truly seen us before.

  “I have no intentions of ruling,” Asteria began.

  “Nor do I,” Latona added. “Neither of us are fit to lead.”

  “I propose instead that we let our daughters rule Aeon jointly, and in whatever capacity they wish.”

  Lan came to us then, and threw her arms wide enough to draw us both into her embrace. She held us tightly as we wept, laughed, wept again.

  But even as we celebrated, we could not shrug off the uneasy feeling that we had forgotten something important. What would happen next? Would Aeon return to how it had once been? Had we completely banished all the galla? Out here in the sun, everything seemed possible.

  Was it truly over?

  “No,” Noelle said suddenly, in a voice not her own. “It’s not.”

  And then, in the blink of an eye, the world changed once again.

  The darkness returned. The air grew chilly, and the winds picked up. We could feel the heat of the sun and the cold lash of rain all at once.

  We were no longer at the Skeleton Coast. We were back at the edge of the Great Abyss as if we had never left, and the mist had returned with a vengeance, enveloping the gathered crowd until all but the barest outlines were obscured by fog, our people dressed like moving shadows until they resembled galla themselves.

  Our mothers were gone. Lan and Noelle and Sonfei were gone. What remained was us and the yawning pit before our eyes.

  We’d been wrong. There was always going to be a sacrifice, no matter how hard we fought against it. One of us was always going to have to die.

  Choose, we heard a voice intone. The void we thought we had defeated loomed again, triumph in its gaze, pleased by the illusion it had fooled us with, and hungry.

  It was the same test. They were always going to make us choose. The only decision we really had was deciding which of us was going to die.

  Choose.

  I stared helplessly back at my twin, only to find her mirroring my expression.

  Was it a choice at all? We would be perpetuating the cycle all over again. Our mothers’ attempts to free themselves had been futile, though they’d broken the world itself. Our journey to the Great Abyss to undo the mistakes our mothers had made—all had come naught. In the end, we faced the same decision. The same wrong choices.

  Our father had died, and still they hungered. Arjun had died, and still they demanded more. It wasn’t fair! He wasn’t supposed to die, Lan was—

  A part of us fractured, the old anger boiling back up to the surface. But the hate was brief, anguished, remorseful.

  No. It wasn’t fair for anyone to die.

  Bitterness slid away. Sorrow, contrition, forgiveness—they took its place.

  We heard Ereshkigal howl, displeased.

  This was how it had all begun. This was how Ereshkigal was sacrificed. Some past animosity between the two that had festered, was emboldened by the malice here, led one sister to do the unthinkable.

  This was how their Devoted justified their manipulation, their lies. How they had decided, in the generations to come, to make the choice for them. Both goddesses could have so easily been lost, Aeon destroyed.

  After all, if a sister could bring herself to give up her own twin, then why couldn’t they do the same thing on her behalf?

  One of us had to die.

  But even as the thought passed through our heads, a new kind of anger stirred inside us.

  No.

  This isn’t who we are.

  There is a choice.

  There is always another choice.

  Because if you weren’t given a choice that you could live with, then you had to decide on the choice they would never allow you to make.

  Vanya had said that the goddesses’ lives were tied to Aeon; kill both goddesses without a spare, and the world died with them. Death required life. Even the galla knew this. Only Ereshkigal cared nothing for the rules, shrouded as she was in her fury.

  They would never permit both of us to be destroyed. The Devoted had understood that well enough.

  I looked back at my twin sister again, and this time I saw the same resolve, the same acceptance. No regrets.

  Holding each other tightly, refusin
g to let go, we both stepped over the edge, and into the endless chasm below, together—

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The Twins and Ereshkigal

  WE WERE BACK AT THE throne. The malevolent shapeless void was gone. My first instinct was to scramble for Lan, and I saw that she looked no more worse for wear, though she appeared as dazed as I felt. “What happened?” she asked weakly.

  “An illusion,” I whispered, heart still beating madly. It was getting harder to breathe; the realization that this wasn’t over, that we had not yet beaten Ereshkigal’s demon, was finally setting in, and I wasn’t sure if my body could take any more of these shocks.

  Haidee refused to let me go. She clung to me, wild-eyed. “That was the test Inanna failed,” she gasped. “Did we pass it? If we did, then why does it feel like nothing’s changed?”

  Because Ereshkigal had upset the natural balance of the world, I realized. The Cruel Kingdom on its own would have accepted one goddess’s sacrifice and allowed the other to live, so the cycle could repeat into perpetuity. But we had solved its riddle. We should have been allowed to leave. But the way back to the seventh gate was still shrouded in darkness, the exit still barred to us. Because not even the Cruel Kingdom could contain Ereshkigal’s malice without being warped by it. And if she was to suffer, then the whole of Aeon was to suffer, even if that rage would wipe out every life.

  No. Wait. If Haidee and I had sacrificed ourselves, that still left our mothers. They were both young enough to produce more offspring. Even if we’d both chosen to die, the Cruel Kingdom would have turned its attention to them—

  Would have forced them into the same dilemma.

  Panic set in. The last time they’d been put in this situation, they’d broken Aeon. The Cruel Kingdom had tried to divide us by placing Arjun’s death between us—and for a few moments, we had fallen for it. If they had tried to use Father once again . . .

  We spun, searching frantically for them, wondering if we would find only one of our mothers present, the other gone forever.

  We needn’t have worried.

  Mother’s head was in her hands, and Latona had thrown her arms around her sister, rocking her gently back and forth.

  “I couldn’t save him. I failed him—I failed you—again.” The words came out through gritted teeth, because Mother never cried. “I’m sorry. I tried to reach for him. But the ground gave way. I knew it was coming. I knew what was going to happen. I should have reached out quicker, moved faster. Why didn’t I? Why couldn’t I—”

  “It’s not your fault,” Latona said softly. “It took me seventeen years to understand all the ways you were not at fault.”

  “Why did you come back to Brighthenge, Latona?” It was very nearly a wail. “You could have stayed at Farthengrove with Aranth. You both would have been safe there.” She turned, as if searching for something, and then finding it when Sonfei’s large hands settled on her waist. She leaned back into him.

  “That’s not true, and you know it.” Latona had never sounded so raw. “You had to accept the final galla’s gift, didn’t you? And you loved Aranth, too. You refused to sacrifice him. That meant the ritual would have failed anyway.”

  Asteria stared at the ground. “No,” she whispered. “Aranth was not who I refused to sacrifice.”

  “I don’t know what’s supposed to happen now,” Noelle said, sounding harried, and this time she sounded exactly like the Noelle I knew. My relief was immense. “But we need to get out of here.”

  A low moan met our ears.

  Without the camouflage of the void, Ereshkigal’s true form was a horrific sight. There was nothing left of her but a rotting skeleton, a dozen feet tall with arms that spanned nearly half the width of the cavern. Black hair hung from the skull in clumps, and the pale skin was stretched over ruined muscle, revealing bone in all the wrong places. Parts of a jaw swiveled loosely from where throat and chin met. Worst of all were its lidless eyes, pecked and maggoted in places, its gaze never leaving ours.

  And then its features warped further. Skin formed, knitted against muscle; more hair grew from the top of its skull; sentience brought a glimmer of awareness back into its eyes. Its face shapeshifted into something more familiar.

  Someone more familiar.

  Asteria made a quick, shocked sound.

  You left me. It was Janella, and it wasn’t. Unseen things moved beneath her stretched flesh, her mouth opening and closing like a dying fish. Something dark and heavy settled against the hollows of her chest, and I could see more people swirling within. Some were unfamiliar to me, but in others I could see a trace of color-changing hair, a flash of pale eyes. Goddesses sacrificed to the Cruel Kingdom over the years; not even their privilege had saved them from Ereshkigal’s torment.

  “It’s mocking us,” Latona hissed. “It’s trying to frighten us.”

  “It’s working,” Lan muttered.

  A hole gathered above Janella’s heart, empty and gaping and black. My hand clutched at my own chest, remembering the darkness I’d kept there, too.

  Janella’s shade made a loud, keening cry, its fingers reaching eagerly for both Haidee and me.

  Asteria and Latona channeled blue flames that took out a part of its arm, but it cared nothing for the injury, reaching out for us again. Though it was still shrouded in shadow, Lan was angling toward the gateway we’d come from, shouting instructions at us to do the same.

  “We passed the trials,” I heard Haidee cry out, frustrated and fearful. “It should have let us go.”

  “She’s been here too long,” I whispered. “She’s spent an eternity waiting, yearning, hating. The rules here be damned. She’s not going to leave until she has her hands on Inanna. We have to find a way to put her at peace, too.”

  “That’s not good to hear, considering Inanna has been dead for thousands of years at this point. The stone was our only hope of appeasing her, and it’s gone!”

  The black void was gone, but Ereshkigal remained. We had passed all the trials and earned the right to return to the surface with our lives intact. But the demoness was a different story. Her whims were separate from the laws of the underworld. The void had retreated because it had given us a reprieve, but Ereshkigal had not. And what Ereshkigal wanted was to see us all dead.

  The air whirred, Latona setting up a barrier in between us and that horrific shadow. Grimly, I added all my strength to hers, could feel both Haidee and Mother following suit. It clawed against the barrier, screaming. But in time we would be exhausted, and it would find a way through.

  “There’s no way out,” Lan said heavily. “Odessa, there’s no other way.”

  I threw myself at her before she could move, refusing to let go. “If you even think about knocking me unconscious,” I hissed, “I’ll knock you out first.”

  “Odessa, we knew going in here that I might have to do this.”

  I knew, but I had bet everything that she wouldn’t have to. Even here, with the threat of death hanging over all of us, I couldn’t let her go.

  “You know those romance books I said I hated, the ones that didn’t have any happy endings? I still hate them, but I understand it now, why some people die for love that way. I will follow you whether you like it or not, Lan.”

  “We won’t let you,” Haidee swore, eyes blazing. The Air barrier thickened, became harder than even steel.

  “What do we do, Asteria?” Latona panted. “What do we do?”

  “I . . .” Mother faltered. “I—”

  A sudden streak of blue fire blazed out of nowhere, striking the Ereshkigal-Janella hybrid dead in the chest. The monster reared back, as if stunned that anything could hurt her.

  The attack had not come from any of us.

  “Lady Odessa is right,” a voice drawled out, painstakingly, achingly familiar. “Dying for love isn’t all it’s cut out to be. It’s been a huge pain in my ass so far.”

  I lost the ability to think. As more flames tore into Ereshkigal I tore through the barrier
and started running, not stopping until I threw myself into his arms.

  “Hi, Haidee,” Arjun said, grinning down at me. He looked like crap, but somehow still gorgeous. His clothes had been ripped and torn, and his eyes seemed a little haunted despite his glib tone, but he was in one piece. A part of me was terrified, wondering if he was another illusion sent to taunt me, because I knew I would shatter from that. But I was desperate to believe he was really here, that he’d somehow fought his way through everything to find me.

  Then his mouth swooped down, planting a firm kiss against my lips. “I literally went through hell just to see you again,” he rasped, and I knew then he was real, and I couldn’t stop my tears. “Damn hands crawling out of the ground. Pitching myself off even more cliffs. I’ve got sand everywhere. Remind me to punch Vanya the next time I see him.”

  “How?”

  He held up his hand, and I saw the stone, now gleaming with a strange, unearthly light. “Had the presence of mind to keep it with me when I fell. Saved me every step of the way.”

  Inanna’s stone of immortality.

  A piece of Inanna that we could offer to her sister.

  Ereshkigal knew; already it was turning toward us, a keening sound splitting the air, its whole presence focused on the shining rock.

  “Arjun! Keep shooting at it!”

  “Right.” His flames were more powerful than ours had been, and the shadow flinched back from them. Was it because of the stone?

  I placed my hand over it, fearing what my touch might do—last time, it had given me painful visions of Inanna and the rites, and I didn’t want to experience that again.

  But nothing happened, save that the rock turned warm underneath my palm. At the same time, I felt newfound strength pouring into me. It felt the way Lan’s healing often did. I responded with blue fires of my own and this time, Ereshkigal staggered.

  “She’s frightened,” Noelle said, stunned.

  “Arjun . . . ,” I began, but he’d already anticipated my question. He swallowed hard, steeled himself, then dropped the stone into my hand. I braced myself for visions likes the ones that had overwhelmed me at Inanna’s small temple, but nothing happened.