Garden of Spiders Volume 1: A Companion Book to The Fallocaust Series Book 3

by Quil Carter

  “You were not framed,” Silas said coldly. He walked to the door that held the man who’d spoken and stood in front of it with his arms crossed. I looked around the room and observed the other two prisoners. It was obvious why I’d gotten a bad vibe from this place.

  Then I made eye contact with a man I hadn’t seen previously. He was in one of the other cells and he looked clean-cut, different than the rest. I felt uncomfortable when he smiled at me sadly. “He’s certainly grown, Silas…” the man said. “Remember how happy you were when he opened his eyes for the first time? When you saw those purple gems…”

  Suddenly my shoulder was grabbed. I yelped from fright when I was yanked backwards and tripped over my own feet. I landed on my backside and Silas stepped in front of me. Even though I couldn’t see his face, I felt the anger seeping from Silas, it was dripping off of him like water, so apparent I was sure it had its own smell and texture.

  This made fear burrow itself inside of my body like little larva, then they laid eggs and hatched flooding me with even more apprehension. The mood had turned quickly and I didn’t understand why, but from the silence around me, I knew I wasn’t the only one who’d felt such a drastic shift in the atmosphere.

  “I’ll have Heron flogged for omitting your presence here,” Silas growled. “I have nothing to say to you. Sit down and remain silent while I instruct my heir.” He put a hand to his belt and I saw a gun holstered underneath his blazer jacket. I scrambled to my feet, my body becoming cold, and walked backwards until my back pressed against one of the metal doors.

  “Sit down and shut up so you can fucking kill me?” the man said, his tone barbed. “All I did was everything you fucking asked, Silas. How the hell do you plan on cloning Sky when you keep killing every scientist that has a setback?”

  My eyes became wide from fright when I saw the rapid change in Silas’s expression. What had been annoyance mere seconds ago, had twisted into an inhuman look of both contempt and audacious shock. The face on this man scared me. This wasn’t my master, a monster had taken over his body, there was no way my loving master could hold such an expression of wild hatred.

  “You wasted three fucking samples of his brain matter,” Silas said through teeth I could see were clenched, tightly locked together like a bear trap. “And all you fucking gave me was a dead fetus.” His back was to the scientist and his body stiff and hunched. I got the distinct feeling that he was mentally holding himself back, and an even bigger feeling, one that I suspected was drawn out of self-preservation, that I shouldn’t be in this room right now.

  “And I’ve been working my fucking ass off, missing the birth of three children and the death of one of them, to figure out why,” the man said, his voice rising with every word he said. “You know what, Silas? Since I’m dead anyway, I’ll tell you this: Get over him, you have your children, you can make a suitable replacement.” I froze when the man looked at me. “And it looks like you already have. Get over Sky, Silas, and let your scientists concentrate on making the lives better of the world you and Sky destroyed.”

  What? The world that Silas destroyed? And Sky? Who’s Sky?

  I didn’t have time to ask. Before the last word left the man’s mouth, Silas whirled around, his eyes glowing so brightly it was as if they’d been painted onto his face. “You dare speak to me like that?” he snarled. Silas walked to the door and the man backed away. “And in front of my fucking heir?”

  “I’m walking dead anyway, you god damn lunatic!” the man shouted back. I put both of my hands over my mouth. No one had ever spoken to Silas like that. “Your attachment to Sky Fallon and cloning him is affecting how you rule Skyfall and the greywastes. You know as well as we do, you’ll never be able to clone such complicated DNA, and killing me and any scientist who fails is fucking insane. Much like you.”

  What was he saying? Silas’s attachment to Sky Fallon? It was affecting how he was king? This prospect alarmed me. Silas was angry, which left no doubt in my mind that the scientist was telling the truth. Was Sky King Silas’s partner? His… was he a king once too?

  ͠͠͠

  I wished that I was too young to understand just what this man was saying. But I wasn’t, I understood. Or at least the conclusion I’d come to seemed right. My mind had taken this new information and had applied it to what I’d already seen previously with my king. Suddenly his instability at times, his bouts of sadness, all made sense to me. It was happening because Silas had lost the other king. In the cartoons I watched, the same thing had happened many times. The king or queen meets his or her Prince Charming, and during the part of the movie when they’re apart, the main character is always sad, always brooding over their love. Silas hid his sadness from us, but there were times I would go downstairs in the middle of the night for some water, only to see Silas sitting on a chair in the kitchen with all the lights off but one. I remember specifically seeing him with that single light illuminating him, an undashed cigarette between his fingers and a distant look in his eyes.

  I looked and saw that same blank, distant look on Silas’s face. A look that had his green eyes focusing on something that was a million miles away and his thoughts not too far behind. This look alarmed me more than the one forged in anger, and I realized for the first time that I was terrified. My breathing was even fast and my hands were wrapped around my chest.

  Silas reached into his blazer and pulled out the handgun I’d seen previous, then he put a hand on the metal door and opened it. He kicked down the door stopper and left it open, the gun now held firmly.

  The man, with his back against the wall and his chest rapidly moving up and down, stared at the gun, his eyes bulging from fear. “How many of your new scientist chimeras are you going to shoot when they fail you too?” he whispered. “Bloodshed for Sky’s–”

  “DON’T SPEAK HIS FUCKING NAME!” Silas suddenly screamed. I myself let out a scream of fright, and I crouched down and wrapped my arms around my knees. My body was trembling now, small audible whimpers of fear coming from my lips. “You’re full of lies. If I can clone myself… they can clone him. They can and they fucking–” Silas swallowed and licked his lips, then bared his teeth at the ground as his eyes searched the floor. “They fucking will.”

  “Look at you, Silas,” the man snapped. “Even the mention of him throws you off-kilter. You’re night and day when it comes to Sky. Fucking abandon this, let me make you more chimeras instead of wasting our time on–”

  Silas whirled around to face the man. “IT’S NOT WASTED!” he screamed as he stalked into the cell. He raised his gun and smashed the butt of it over the man’s head. I cried out at this and hugged my knees. And when I saw the blood start to run down the man’s forehead, his eyes closed tight and his face contorted into an expression of agony, I started to shake.

  I’d seen Silas angry before, but never like this. There was nothing about this man that I recognized. Silas didn’t become unhinged like he was now; he wasn’t this out of control… this… into madness. The king that I’d known and had been around my entire life was a picture of calm control. Even when Prince had attacked Garrett, I hadn’t seen a single movement or decision made that wasn’t steady and collected. My world was being rocked right now. Who Silas was to me had been shattered in minutes, and it was terrifying.

  It was also about to get much worse.

  The man let out a scream that saturated my very bones, a scream that was shrill enough to make me look up and towards him.

  And what I saw, I’d never forget.

  The man had blood pouring out of his nose, and out of a mouth that was open in a continuous scream, and while I was watching, I saw a gush of red burst from his very eyeballs, dripping down his cheeks to his jawline like spilled paint.

  Then the man fell to his knees, and for a brief moment we made eye contact. My own violet eyes connecting with this man’s dark blue, and for what seemed like forever, we remained locked in our gazes.

  Finally, with a wheezed whimper, the m
an fell forward and landed on the white floor, a sickening sound echoing in the empty room. A seizure then took him as he lay there, a short but intense series of twitches and trembles.

  Then the man’s body relaxed, and all was quiet.

  Silas, with his back to me, stared at the dead body, his own tense and his shoulders shaking. Behind him I remained crouched down in my terror, unable to tear my own gaze away from the dead man. This was my first time seeing a dead human.

  What followed this horrible display was a silence that I’d never experienced before. It was as if the all-consuming silence of the universe had infiltrated the atmosphere to coat our world in a sound-muting blanket. It wasn’t just quiet… it was like sound had never existed in the first place. This quite terrified me, but by now my mind was such a hive of overwhelming fear that it was lost within the catacombs that I myself was drowning in.

  Then the king turned around and I gasped. Silas’s eyes were black; they were pitch black. They were usually green, green like the forests that surrounded my old home. But now two slabs of the blackest coal were looking out from dampened strands of golden hair, and I knew then that the king was no human, but a demon that wore a mask to hide his true nature.

  I screamed, and as soon as I did, the demon’s eyes fell on me. I witnessed his eyes swiftly change, the emerald consuming the black like fire eating through gasoline-soaked paper. They softened too as they fell upon me, but I knew the demon was inside of him now.

  Silas came towards me, concern heavy on his face, but in my fear I screamed and started to cry. I put my hands over my head and when he touched me I shrieked and tried to scramble to my feet.

  “Elish. Hunny, it’s okay,” Silas said hurriedly. He put his hands on my shoulder and tried to draw me to him but I was too scared. The screams kept coming and I began struggling to free myself from him. “Lovely, it’s okay. Calm down.”

  Silas forced me into his arms and picked me up. He held me tightly to him and shushed me, reminding me of how he’d held Nero after his punishment. The constricting hold confused my brain. It was comforting to be held by my guardian, but since he was the one I was scared of I also was terrified of being confined in such a way. It was a conflicting feeling, but once he began to rub my back soothingly, my mind had decided to accept being held.

  “Shhhhh,” Silas whispered. I saw the man lying face down on the floor when Silas turned around and began walking out of the room of prison cells. Dressed in a white jumpsuit in a white room, the only colour that surrounded him was the blood pooling beneath his still body. I caught the scent of his blood as Silas walked away from him; it mixed in with the heavy terror that had descended on this room like a lowered glass dome.

  “Love, don’t cry,” Silas whispered. “You must be strong, my little prince. You’re going to see a lot of people die, you must get used to it.” He said these words quickly, as if the words themselves were running away from the real truth. Silas knew as much as I did that I wasn’t crying because I’d seen a man get killed; I was crying because my image of who my guardian was had been shattered.

  He knew it, and I knew it.

  ͠

  It seems so strange writing this at ninety-one years old. Truthfully, even though this incident happened almost a century ago, it wasn’t difficult to remember. One of my most vivid memories is the day my image of King Silas was destroyed. We were sheltered children until we turned five. Silas was the king in Skyfall, and he was our guardian in our childhood home. To me, Silas was calm and collected, and though he did have his moments of rage and anger, the malice itself was indicative to the personality we’d all become used to. A cold anger that was also sly and biting, verbal lacerations that came without warning but would bring you to your knees with both respect and fear. Silas could make you wish for death if you crossed him, or worse, if you hurt his chimeras, and I saw this at a young age when one of the sengils evoked his anger, or Perish.

  But this… this was entirely different. This was madness in its purest form, an undiluted concoction made from obsessive love and unimaginable loss. It created inside of this king a substance that was poisoning him from the inside out, a substance that had been aging in this king for decades, and now in current time, well over a century.

  It was my first taste of who King Silas Sebastian Dekker was – but it would not be the last.

  I wouldn’t take this shock well. It rattled me, shook my very existence and my opinion of my much loved king. A life that had been predictable and joyous had now taken a turn that would change how I viewed my own future.

  And not only that… it changed me.

  ͠

  Silas stalked down the hallway, his shoes clicking against the hard floor and filling the hallway with its repetitive noise. The door we’d just walked out of got farther and farther away, and we began passing people. These people bowed to Silas, but once his back was to them they exchanged looks of terror and quickly fled from the king’s line of sight.

  Then I felt King Silas’s body tense, and the hand that was rubbing my back clenched it.

  “You’re lucky I’m holding my child or I would cut off your fingers one by one,” Silas growled.

  “My king… what did I do wrong?” the man who’d briefed us stammered. “I–”

  Then he screamed, the same horrific shriek I’d just heard come from the man in the cell. I screamed too and began to sob from fear. I heard Silas shush me and his speed picked up as he walked through the lobby.

  I saw the man on his knees, grasping his head and trembling. He was alive though; Silas hadn’t killed him.

  When Silas got into the black car he began to rock me. “Elish, that’s enough,” he said patiently. “You’re going to make King Silas go deaf. You know by now we have the power to kill any one we please. There is no need to cry.”

  No, no, don’t lie to both of us. It’s not that. How can I explain that it’s not that? I hadn’t even had time to organise my thoughts, or what had happened.

  Who was Sky? Why did Silas want to clone him so badly? It was Sky’s fault this had happened. I hated him. I hated him for making Silas act crazy, for making him destroy my perfect image of my king and my caretaker.

  I put all of my anger into that man and made him the sole reason for Silas’s outburst. If it wasn’t for him, none of this would’ve happened. He was to blame, not just for what he’d done to Silas, but for making me scared. Who did he think he was making me feel so disenchanted with my king? That asshole didn’t have the right; he wasn’t important.

  Anger burned away my fear. Why would Silas want to clone someone who made him lose control like that? Losing control in such a way should be the first thing that King Silas eliminated. How can you be a good king if you couldn’t have complete control over yourself at all times?

  Knowing King Silas had a trigger like this alarmed me. Silas wasn’t perfect, at least not when it came to Sky, and it was all because he’d gotten attached to him. The man, the scientist himself had told Silas that he didn’t act himself when it came to Sky and he was completely right. He’d said… it was affecting how he ruled Skyfall and the greywastes.

  “There’s a boy,” Silas whispered. We’d been in the car for a while now, it was driving around but where our destination was, I didn’t know. “Blow your nose, little love. It’ll make you feel better.”

  I’d been laying my head on Silas’s chest as I cried, and when he handed me a tissue I used it and sniffed. Before I could stop myself, I said to him: “I hate Sky.”

  Silas’s muscles tensed underneath me. He petted my hair back gently. “You shouldn’t make assumptions about things you don’t understand, love.”

  I sniffed again and shook my head. I decided to not keep my feelings to myself. If I wanted to be a good king, I had to learn more about this flaw in Silas’s personality so I could avoid it. It was the only way for me to learn.

  “He makes you not act like you,” I said, my voice breaking from the strain of my crying. “I don’t li
ke black-eyed Silas. I don’t want him to come ever again. He’s scary.”

  Silas’s shifting told me that he wanted to say a lot back to me, but something stopped him. He continued to stroke back my hair, then after more than a minute of being silent, he spoke. “One day you’ll fall in love, and when that man rips your heart out of your chest and leaves you with the world on your shoulders… you’ll understand the pain I feel so strongly inside of me.” Then a sigh. “You’re too young for such discussions, Elish.”

  Is that what triggers it? Falling in love? Like how the characters on my cartoons fall in love and get married? This was valuable information and it further hammered in my earlier assumption: I couldn’t get attached to things, or else I myself would fall into this same state. Just like how I was devastated and sad when Nero shot Prince, it was because I loved that dog.

  I lifted my head and looked at Silas dead in the eyes. I was serious about this, and he had to know it. “I’m never going to fall in love,” I said to him. “I’m not going to become attached to anything, so I can be a good king.”

  But all I got for my earnest conclusion was a light chuckle and a kiss on the forehead. “Your intelligence baffles me, and your emotional maturity worries me. I can only imagine what I’m in store for as you grow up, and I fear your teen years.” He rested his hand on the side of my cheek and his touch became warm and soothing. “You’ll fall in love one day, my dear Elish; all your brothers will, and your sister. It’s not a bad thing, it’s exhilarating and exciting.” The sad smile on his face grew, and I saw his eyes sparkle, like he was watching a memory play out in front of him. “It’s… something you’ll never forget. It’s wonderful…”

  “It makes you act scary and weird,” I said, with an air of finality. “I’m never going to, ever, and I’m not going to become attached to anything ever either.”