by Sara Wolf
“Gods bless this absolute mess,” I mutter, waiting for the next blade to swing down, and I jump between it and the wall slot. The impact knocks the wind out of my lungs, and the sharp edge of the blade knocks my lungs out of my body quite literally, honeycomb-gray peeking through my ribs and the wall behind me splattering red with my blood. But still the blade doesn’t lose momentum, grinding me against the wall with vicious fervor. It’s worse than being speared by any human, but not nearly as bad as being ripped apart by Evlorasin’s thousands of serrated teeth. I can manage—or at the very least, I can hold the blade back for a few seconds.
Faintly and through the pain, I see Malachite and the other mortals blur by, Lucien’s dark eyes razors of worry as he reaches out for me. The beneather shuffles him along, and I hear the screech of metal on metal again as he stops the next blade and lets them through. He’s close enough now to hear his yell.
“Your turn, Six-Eyes!”
This is the worse part—ripping free. I let my weight down, fall to my knees, the blade yanking up through my shoulder and cold air slicing through warm, screaming flesh. I duck along the wall, Lucien’s magic healing me only in slow trickles down here. Flesh knits in small increments, bones cracking back into place in slow motion. The slow healing hurts far worse than the blade’s impact. But eventually, there’s enough meat of me again to stop the next blade. My body’s ready, but my mind isn’t as prepared as I’d like—the next hit gets my spine through my stomach, bile and blood in my throat, and I black out.
But the magic won’t let me rest.
The Trees won’t let any of us rest.
…
I wake up again to Malachite’s shout, Lucien’s hand in my blood-drenched one. I can feel all of them helping me—Yorl’s paw on my back, Fione’s hand on my arm, pulling me out of the blade and into place for the next as Malachite stops the second-to-last one, his face pouring sweat and his veins glistening under paper skin.
“Last one!” Fione encourages, blood-flecked face determined. Her tender touch is so different from her fearful hyperventilating just a month ago. It gives me something to hold on to as I fling myself into the path of the last blade, marking the wall with my blood one last time.
We make it through, and they pull me out yet again. A handful of hands, helping me. I collapse on the ground, laughing blood. Lucien kneels at my side, cradling me, and I can feel him pouring all his concentration into the magic flooding into me and stitching closed my injuries.
“What’s so godsdamn funny?” he whispers down at me, the words hot but his tone cool.
“Thank you.” I smile up at him, touching his face and regretting the blood-finger marks it leaves on his golden cheekbones. “For letting me get hurt. For letting me do what I can to help.”
“Implying anyone could ever let you do anything, you stubborn wildcat.” He holds me close, my chest wounds closing against his own chest.
The pain was worth it this time, and it’s nice because that’s never a guarantee; pain isn’t often wrapped up in a neat bow of purpose. But the benefit of immortality is a second chance at everything. Now that we’ve sprung one trap, Fione and Yorl know what to look for—the mechanical triggers hidden in the stone and littering the tunnel moving forward. They steer us around every horsehair tripwire, every deadly gas vent, and soon the tunnel changes, morphs and widens and opens into a yawning chasm—darkness as far down and far as we can see. The tunnel continues as a thin stone pathway from one side of the gap to the other, barely room enough for two people to walk side by side.
“I’m no expert, but this room sort of screams ‘trap.’” The buzzing in my head chooses the exact moment I step into the cavern to intensify, crushing me with a flood of random thoughts and pressures. It’s like someone’s crashed cymbals in my head and turned it to mush: strings of jokes I can barely hold on to, one argument replaced with the next, one thought laced with another, and the hunger beneath it all, conducting it like the head of a dark, chaotic choir.
“Definitely a trap. Not for us, though.” Malachite points at the distant, faintly lit walls on either side of the chasm. They slope up to the infinite ceiling and down to the infinite drop, but Lucien’s flickering witchfire illuminates them enough to see the very deliberate carvings in the stone.
“Beneather runes.” Yorl squints, his catlike pupils dilated so large his eye color is just a faint ring of green around black. “This room is a hevstrata.”
“Hev-what now?” Fione frowns.
“Beneather runes are the only things that can affect valkerax—hold them in place or keep them out of a place—”
“I know that,” Fione interrupts, but Yorl presses on.
“They become unreliable against large masses of valkerax. Which is why these hevstrata were made in the early days of the War of White: choke points full of beneather runes meant to disorient groups of them.”
“It messes with their brains,” Malachite clarifies. “If a hunting party’s being chased by a bunch, they come here to throw ’em off. It works. Most of the time.”
“Well, good news—it’s working right now.” I wince, holding my scalp. “Bad news—it’s working right now.”
“Are you all right?” Lucien asks.
“Oh, I’m fine. I just can’t—” I pause, gulping air and trying to remember what I was going to say next. The noise is like a cloth over wood, sweeping away the crumbs of the sentence cake I was trying to build. “I—I can’t think straight.”
“Then think crooked,” Malachite snipes. “We just need to get across the gap, and it’ll get better.”
“Maybe,” Yorl adds.
Malachite sends a withering look at him. “Maybe move your arse.”
“I’m just being factual,” the celeon hisses back, beginning to mince down the thin pathway with an effortless ease. His tail swishes, no doubt giving him a balance advantage. Fione stares warily at the thin pathway and then her cane.
Malachite sees it and offers his pale hand to her. “C’mon, Your Grace. I’ll carry you on my back.”
“I can walk just fine,” she sniffs.
“I know you can,” the beneather sighs. “It’s just to be safe. C’mon.”
She studies the impossibly long drop for a second more and then slings her cane beneath her pack, climbing on Malachite’s kneeling back. He straightens, holding her like it’s nothing, and looks back at Lucien and me.
“I’ll leave you two slobbering lovebirds to figure out who goes first.”
“Eternally thankful,” Lucien drawls and tips an imaginary hat. He turns back to me with a smirk. “Jealous, you think?”
“Irascibly so,” I agree and motion for him to go first.
“Don’t fall,” he advises.
“If I do, I’ll shout up and let you know how deep it is.” I smile. I’m making jokes, but the second I take two steps onto the precarious line of stone, I feel my stomach drop out. A cold wind whispers up from the abyss on either side of my feet, and I finally get it. It wasn’t the traps or the suffocating darkness and closeness of the tunnel. It’s this yawning nothingness that crystallizes my understanding of the Dark Below—it goes on forever.
It’s not a place but a feeling, the deep and unsettling feeling of eternity. I’ve felt it before in my darkest moments of hunger—the hopelessness of my situation. The hopelessness of immortality. No change. No end. Only pain like dark, without rest.
I look up from the fall and to Lucien’s back. Because of him, I found rest. Because of them all, I found change. But other Heartless aren’t so lucky. And the valkerax aren’t lucky at all—dying in scores for a Tree they can’t disobey.
We make it to the other side of the fall, the cavern narrowing again, and I look back once at the runes all over the walls. Runes that tell me to forget, to think, to run chaos in my own mind. Runes that presume I’m like the other valkerax, like every ot
her Heartless, like everyone else who can’t disobey.
Like everyone else who wants to continue the cycle.
A single blood tear falls off my cheek, and my soft laugh is swallowed up by the abyss.
…
Finally, through the bones and the traps and the shadow, we come to a door.
The complete lack of sound in the Dark Below started to break apart long ago, interrupted by faint hissing, bangs echoing, the sounds of footsteps. Civilization. Even the smell changes—moss and sterile stone replaced by cooking oil and metal and tobacco smoke. The door is made of stone like the tunnel is, like everything in the Dark Below is.
Malachite turns to us, knitting his fingers in his broadsword handle. “If they ask you questions, don’t say shit. Let me handle it.”
“I thought you’ve been disowned?” Fione lilts.
“I can speak to them,” Yorl asserts. “My grandfather was a prominent figure here—”
“If I hear you say ‘my grandfather’ one more time, I’m gonna make you meet him,” Malachite snaps.
I slide in and put a hand over Malachite’s mouth, smiling at Yorl. “I’ll go first. I’m a great talker.”
“A greab horbseshitter,” Malachite grumbles through my fingers. But when I release him he plays mild and leans on the stone door to crack it open for us. I blink away the light, everything so bright and sudden, and walk over the threshold.
The feeling of a blade at my throat is almost immediate, but I can’t see them through the eye-searing light. Sound works a little better.
“Who are you? Identify yourself immediately or face death!”
The voice means business, so ragged and furious, the joke in my throat dies. The clink of bone armor and the feel of cold steel against my neck. I adjust slowly to the sight of a beneather holding a fanged dagger to me, the same dagger design I’ve seen on Malachite’s hip. The room is well-lit by clusters of brightmoss in clay jars, the kind I grew used to in the underground arena where Yorl and I trained Evlorasin. But this moss is much brighter and all in the same golden-orange color, nearly simulating the hue of fire torches. Incredibly intricate and rich tapestries line the walls in the hundreds, made of what looks like white valkerax hair stained in differing shades of green and rust. Remarkably, they’ve gotten the persistent valkerax-y smell of blood out of it; the whole room thick with the saccharine smell of incense and oiled metal.
“My name is Zera Y’shennria,” I say slowly. “And I have some information for the ancestral council about the valkerax horde.”
The eyes of the guard holding the dagger to me widen, the ruby a darker wine-red than Malachite’s but their skin the same paper-bloodless-white, if a little grayer. Their eyes dart to the door behind me, and the guard barks, “The rest of you come out. Now.”
Lucien, Fione, and Yorl ooze around the door, but when Malachite comes out, the guard’s eyes narrow.
“Olt’reya,” they say with a full snake’s worth of venom.
Malachite’s eyes widen, his grin lopsided and more nervous than I’ve ever seen. “Lysulli,” he murmurs. “You… Look at you. Full ancestral regalia. Since when did you get good?”
“Shut your mouth!” Lysulli demands. “What are you doing here? How did you get through the Fog Gate?”
Malachite looks over at me and grins. “I had a little help.”
Lysulli makes a furious exhaling noise, grumbling. “What are those idiots thinking? Has the crowd made them lose their mind? Sending a group down into the Fog Gate. P’eqeq.”
“Madness,” Malachite translates under his breath, then speaks up. “Listen, this’ll sound p’eqeq, too, but you gotta let us talk to the council.”
“And why in the afterlife would I do that?” Lysulli snarls. “You’re a disgraced Malachite who didn’t even stick around to make an appeal. You just left. You abandoned us.”
“Abandoned you, you mean,” Malachite says softly. Lucien and I look at each other, and Fione’s brow furrows. Malachite being genuine? The world’s ending. Lysulli and Mal clearly know each other, but Lysulli plays the tough card.
“The council has no interest in unloyalists like you.” They sniff.
“You should let the council decide that,” Lucien says. “Considering you’re a guard, and not one of them.”
“Who is this human?” Lysulli’s fury rivets to the prince. “And why does he talk like he’s above it all?”
“Oh, that’s just Luc. You’ll get used to it.” Mal laughs.
“No, I won’t,” they snarl. “Because I’m throwing all of you in the cells.” Their hand moves for a whistle around their neck, but Malachite’s hand suddenly shoots out and encompasses Lysulli’s on the whistle gently.
“Lys, please,” he murmurs. “You gotta trust me.”
Lysulli’s wine-colored glare pierces up into his for a tense, drawn-out moment. And then they smack Malachite’s hand away, reaching up to take off their helmet. Their long white hair waterfalls out, revealing a fine, vulpine face with a high nose and thin lips with rouge on them. A sharp face, like a honed blade.
“What do you have?”they demand, but it’s less harsh this time.
“We’ve got a way to control the horde,” I say. “And it’s not the Bone Tree.”
Lysulli’s eyes slice over at me, suddenly rapt with interest. “Truly?”
“I don’t lie to gorgeous people.” I smile.
“You just flatter them thinking they’ll like you for it,” Lysulli scoffs. They remind me so much of Malachite when I first met him in Vetris; as thorny as a burr stuck in a tunic. Their eyes find Yorl. “You, that pelt color—Farspear-Ashwalker?”
Yorl makes a bow. “His grandson, Yorl.”
I watch Lysulli put something together in their head, and they look back at me, clearly ignoring Malachite.
“Fine. I’ll bring you to the council. But if they execute you, don’t come for me in the afterlife.”
“No promises,” I chime. Lysulli scoffs again and turns on their heel, the sound of their bone boots clicking sharp against the stone floor. We all scrabble to catch up. Without even looking at him, Lysulli’s sure to keep a careful distance from us, and Mal most of all.
Lucien and Fione march determinedly, but Yorl’s head is on a constant swivel, taking in every tapestry and door and piece of stone-cut furniture lined with scaled cushions.
“Never been down here?” I ask.
“Not in the ancestral council building,” he says, green eyes gleaming with the reflections of a gem-encrusted wall that forms a mosaic of the beneathers fighting the valkerax. “It’s where they keep the majority of their historical records and artifacts. Only the ascendants of the beneathers are allowed here.”
“Ascendants?” I tilt my head.
“Beneather culture is based on a merit system.” Yorl touches a tapestry lightly with his paws. “If you contribute greatly to the culture by some measure, whether in trade or an invention or by battle, you’re granted the title of ascendant, and given privileges not allowed to others. The Olt’reya family, for example, are a family that’s had many ascendants, so they’re known as an ascendant family, and kept in high regard.”
“So, it’s the beneather version of high society,” I muse. “Like Vetris and their nobles, except based in practicality, not the luck of being born into a bloodline.”
“Precisely,” Yorl agrees. “Though such a system puts passive strain on the culture as a whole to contribute, and creates much negative bias against those who can’t, or don’t.”
“Like Malachite,” I say. “Who just left upworld to be a bodyguard for a human prince.”
Yorl doesn’t say anything to that, whiskers twitching, and that’s all the confirmation I need. Lysulli leads us past a long line of guards dressed in the same armor as them, and it’s then I realize that, unlike the beneather guards upworld, these gua
rds have beneather runes carved into their armor. Something deep in my gut recoils at the sight of them, and I realize my body starts making space between me and them as I pass, an instinct, a tic I disturbingly can’t control. It’s like a goose following true north—I must avoid them. I have to avoid them.
“Valkerax repelling runes.” Yorl watches me move as the guards do, though the guards’ gazes are filled with far more suspicion. “Try not to be so obvious about it.”
“Big words,” I mutter, sidestepping another guard, “from the guy who made me like this.”
“By accident,” he insists.
“Well then. I accidentally forgive you,” I tease, only really half listening at this point. Between the runes on the armor and the strange architecture, I can barely pay attention—the stone here is carved butter-smooth and elegantly, shaped into incredible helixes and spirals that wind down the hallways. The helix shape seems to be popular—stitched into banners and made into fountains. Occasionally, the hallways open up to underground courtyards deprived of sun, but they’re no less beautiful in their vegetation; swathes of moss like rich quilts, spidery mushrooms curlicuing down from the ceilings, and pitch-black ferns gently bleeding great globules of iridescent purple liquid. There’s even one of those sapphire, gemlike mushrooms growing that Fione and Malachite lost their minds over in Windonhigh, but this one is far tinier.
Lysulli leads us through one of the garden courtyards and up a staircase to a massive steel door. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Malachite looking at all the plants, and for the first time I see a drop of wistfulness in his eyes. This is home for him, isn’t it? He’s been gone so long.
“We’re here.” Lysulli stops in front of it. “I’ll do the talking until one of the council acknowledges you.”
“Much obliged.” Lucien nods with no hint of sarcasm, but they glare at him as if he dripped with it. They turn to the guards on either side of the door.
“Adjudicator Lysulli, reporting. I’ve got upworlders here who claim they have a contribution to the spiral.”