by Amanda Churi
“Haven’t you noticed?!” Virgil cried from behind me. “They’re all kids! Gannon’s abandoning his inventory to slow us down!”
I had definitely thought it was only getting more congested the closer we got to their most precious secret—and it made sense. But my ravaged body, one starved for breath and victory, had made me hallucinate, think that the fight was almost over. Damn well should have been. This fiasco ranked not far below the fight Satan had put up worlds ago, testing not just my endurance but my patience… And seeing a pod of pea-brained drones blocking our path sat far from well with me.
Flames that took the shapes of sickles burst through Mabel’s elbows, curving back in and around her as fortified, defensive rings. The Bots leaped like frogs, unskilled, flailing, but with brute power.
Mabel threw her arms open, exposing her chest and cutting the children down in a line. The ones who took a direct hit were down for good, but those who merely caught the edge of the strike bounced back up. Torsos were open, organs shoving forward and skin peeling back, but they sprang again on the same frequency, grinders whirring and fingers ready to nail.
There was no contest. Another crest of sunrise split them open, leaving a bloody pond at Mabel’s feet.
“Come on…!” The slight tug at her voice was the only sign of any confliction. Apart from that, her legs stayed strong, and her body continued burning—a torch in the darkness.
“You heard her! Go!” The shove Virgil threw into my spine was enough to where the thought of beheading him blinked through my head, but I crammed the temptation down and followed, eyes back on the box. Two more hallways we had to pass, then a right. No, maybe that was a ladder up—it could have just been the same passageway, actually… Urg! Would it have killed that mechanic to put some pictures in?! Castleview mode? Something other than a shitty little outline?
I looked back at our surroundings to try and capture a sense of where to go next, but all the tunnels and corridors present on the screen were gone. The outer walls of the palace were some of the few left, their god-like heights placing us at the bottom of a frozen gorge that ran on for so long that between the airborne smoke and carnage, I could not see the end.
But it’s so close…! We’ve gotten this far! It’s almost as if we’re right…
My brain made me stop, leaving me standing at the edge of an obstructed pit laden with the remains of walls and beings alike. I could have fallen and only hit ground; so much had piled in that Mabel and Virgil had run over it without suspecting a thing, but there was a curling tunnel… A shriveled route of a tube down to what I could only imagine was the X… The crystal…
The end.
“Mabel! Virgil!” I called out, both spinning back to look.
I beaconed them over with a hand while crouching, pulling away slates of glass, pallets of ice, and rafts of bone. They dropped next to me. The spinning, lashing wind never ceased around us. Bullets kept flying—creatures on both sides kept dying, hastening my pace.
What security measures were down there? It was the heart of the world’s entrapment—surely, it would be well guarded. Without it, Gannon had no reign—no true way to keep the people under his thumb. In a world without cold, things could’ve grown, people could’ve flourished, could’ve run… Something had to be down there. Something awful—and I had never even seen this man. I only knew what he was capable of through all the pieces I had managed to pile into my arms and shove into my brain throughout this pitiful journey.
And one crucial detail was still missing: I didn’t have a face to target.
“Eero.” Mabel crushed my hand beneath hers. “Stop. And focus.”
Focus? Easy for her to say. She didn’t have not one, not two, but three separate lives, three separate “me’s” grappling to understand this life… A life that I had lived since the beginning with only a period of hibernation between.
But she was right. I could feel it too… How unstable my form was becoming, hindering my mind and senses. To have ever argued on behalf of my sanity was a longshot, but I just had to function a bit longer… In hopefully a matter of hours, it would be over. And my to-do list had dwindled to three things:
Destroy Reeve. Kill Gannon. End Satan.
Simple.
My body kept working through my scribble of a mind, and with a heave, I overhauled the flattened mountain of frostbitten flesh—the last formidable barricade.
We stared down into the darkness, putting our heads together. I couldn’t see the bottom, but my skin… There was a current in my blood and a twitch to Coruscus’ cord. Even my stomach that had been exposed to so much carnage took a wallop and tried to shimmy up my throat. I couldn’t figure it out; the door to that memory was impassible, but my body knew.
Reeve was definitely there. But I couldn’t see any footholds… No ladders, ropes, steps. Just a straight drop into the void.
“Not like I haven’t taken a fall before,” Mabel joked with a frown. “Just don’t let me go this time.”
I raised my gaze to her. A shimmering lake, a white rose, a sizzling tap to the cheek.
Oh. That. What a flirt of a human I had.
“Hey, kiss later, would you?” Virgil hissed. “Get moving!”
“R-right!” Mabel exclaimed. She hopped onto my back so quickly that I hardly had the chance to prepare. I was so large in comparison to her that she could only latch onto my back like a sloth. I checked to make sure her arms and legs were properly interlocked before I gave the hole another glance. I could only think of one way to go about this…
“I’ll go first with Mabel. Do you think you can manage a way down, Virgil?”
He scowled. “Do I look fragile to you? Of course, I can.”
“If you say so.” I gave Mabel a little bounce as a final check, clenching tight, and then I jumped. The darkness immediately bit down with crushing force—dunked upon my head and washed us under so fast that my eyes dragged entrails of surface light with them. For a moment, there was only the rush of air and nausea flying up my veins. Coruscus urgently flashed, granting me a smidge of a second to catch what was coming up.
A floor of ice and stone. I threw my hips forward and bent my knees, hitting the ground with such intensity that bullets of ice shot up and through my feet. Of course, nothing broke; what hurt more was Mabel’s death-clutch that nearly juiced the soul out of my chest.
“Thanks,” she breathed with a shiver, unhooking herself and coming to my side as a standing puddle.
I nodded, quickly scanning the box of night that squared us in, but there was nothing to be found—which I guess was both good and bad.
I retracted Justus’ compressed cube from within my breastplate, springing the map back into existence. The trail was magnified now—the X was wider, surely closer, but had now moved off to the middle of what looked like a cavern.
“Stay close,” I ordered, taking the lead as we entered the tunnel. That much Mabel obliged by, slinking off behind me. If this was supposedly an ice vault for the ancient spirit, I definitely believed it; every step seemed to push the temperature lower and lower. Coruscus wound its way before me as my torch, but its sphere of influence felt oddly constrained the farther we ventured. Coruscus’ light only reached the glazed, pinching walls; if it tried to reach more than a few feet into the darkness, the abyss would swallow it up.
My ears rotated as radars. No noise. So close below the surface, crawling beneath so much rushing blood that it could have built a sea, and even my satellites fell deaf to the security of the room.
But could I really say secure? That hole… Our entrance… We slipped right in. Perhaps they didn’t know what we were targeting? They did discard all their twisted efforts, freed and abandoned years of back-breaking work, but would they do the same to the queen that was the source of all they had?
A blue glare peeked around Coruscus’ sphere of light, making me halt. My weapon growled, reaching farther, but I curiously retracted it, my eyes meeting the sight in time with Mabel’s gasp. She spun out fro
m behind me and scrambled forward with such fervor that I chased her, catching her before she touched the atrocity. “DON’T!”
“But…!” She didn’t battle with my arms, settling into my hold and staring—mute and scrambled by the sight.
I didn’t move—neither did she. In a chamber so desolate, an inkblot that we were trapped in, the heart of terror proudly displayed itself in the form of a gigantic stalagmite of ice, stretching so high that even its peak was eventually captured by the night. Wisps of sea green and midnight blue chased each other within the block of glowing ice as the crystal radiated a mist so paralyzing that frost began to gather on my skin. Frozen within the crystal was someone I didn’t recognize—a scrawny mutt of a female. Her eyes were iced over and shut, but her heart was strung high—yanked out of her chest and still attached by veins and arteries the width of strings.
And although the body was still, caught in winter’s clutch, I could see the pulse that had been lodged in those bloody threads… A beat that had never finished its course.
Reeve was still there. Within her. Trapped and exploited for however many years it had been all because the pulse did not leave the body in time.
“Tah…” The name came from Mabel’s lips as a whimper. She tried to step closer, but I flexed my arms to keep her in place.
“Don’t. If you touch it, the crystal might break.”
She eyed me up, dumbfounded. “Yeaaah, and isn’t that the whole reason we’re here?”
I hesitated. Yes, theoretically, but I hadn’t considered that destroying it also meant setting Reeve free. I couldn’t even begin to imagine how starved and angry the spirit must have been after all this time… “We need to think of a safe way to break it,” I cautiously replied. “If we just bust it open, Reeve is liable to run loose and do Satan knows what.”
“Oh, dear Eero, she’s far past having the strength to do that.”
I spun so fast that Mabel’s body cracked and popped with the force I used to shove her into my chest.
I had never seen him, but there was no one else that could have looked like him in this world of malnourished shadows. The look in his brimming white eyes… It was the most human I had seen yet, even amongst my entire army.
“GANNON!” The temperature spiked exponentially and made me yank my arms back, freeing the heated flame. The roots of her hair burst into an orange and red bleed, her armor glowing as heat threatened to melt it. But even with her anger, her flighty, never-think-before-you-act-self, did not charge.
She wasn’t one to hesitate… Had she never seen him either?
Our stalling bodies egged on his smirk, one alight in the flushed room by the flickering enamel of his teeth. “It’s a bit rude to stare, no? I would have thought there were far stranger things you would have seen by now. After all, none of this existed in the Middle Ages, right? Certainly not back when Jericho stood either.” He flicked his single road of bleached, static-flooded hair aside so that both bulbs shined upon us with full clairvoyance. “Eero. Mabel. It is a pleasure to meet you both.”
The Earth almost fell off its axis when he bowed, the static cloaking his body digging under my skin. Mabel was frozen as well; I could both see and feel the trembling of her calves as energy and fury pushed apart her muscles, but the oddness of the situation held her back from action. The Lord of this world—the tyrant, dictator, mass-murderer—his mellowness and cordial tone, his respectful actions, they didn’t make sense. “Surprise” was nowhere near the right word to accurately convey what I felt. He should have jumped us—killed us—the biggest threats, immediately, but he was holding himself down, being submissive…
No. It had to be a ploy. The spell-reflective, Eyla-infused armor adorning his chiseled figure was proof that he had come for a fight.
“I know you’ve come for my sweetest Reeve,” he started, lifting his torso and holding himself erect. “To ignorant rebels, it is the sensible option.”
Mabel broke the roots that kept her chained. She moved a step closer, a stomp of the foot throwing up a storm of embers. “Ignorant?! You’re one to talk! Can’t put yourself in the place of all you’ve experimented on, can you? All the people you’ve killed… All that you’ve taken from not just us but everyone…” She winced—had to scrunch her face to shove back the looming rivers. “You unempathetic piece of crap… You’re the one who is ignorant!”
His head nearly hit a right angle, brows up and eyes pleading. “Sometimes, a purge is the only way. We’ve been on a path to destruction for centuries. I am the first Revere to try and reverse that, but ah… Of course, you wouldn’t know that. Why would Pinion tell you when all she wants is my crown?”
“Clearly! Your ancestors stole it from her! The throne was hers!”
“Oh, look at you… Never having lived outside a monarchial world that runs on the concept of ‘blood.’ Leaders aren’t born, they’re made, and that woman would usurp everything that I have tried to accomplish for the good of this world.” He pushed his hand to his nonexistent heart, zapping feathers of white and blue encircling his fingers. “The moment I ascended to the throne, I was hated because of what I inherited. A leader rarely enacts their own policies; most always, we’re just cleaning up the mess of our predecessors. Pinion has been and always was an enemy to the Revere Clan. I tried—”
“I DON’T CARE WHAT YOUR GOALS WERE! There is no excuse for all that you have done! You can’t possibly call yourself a hero if you’ve slaughtered without restraint!”
He straightened up. “And you’re different how?”
She stuttered. Candle flames were spurting from her fists, but they could not stay fueled. “I just am.”
“And that’s the answer that emotions rather than logic provide.”
“Enough.” Coruscus was at my side; the skin that ringed my mouth was cracking, beginning to fall to my primal instincts. I was tired of games, of chit-chat, of stalling. Of whatever he was trying to do. “Tell me what you want before I crush this crystal myself.”
A glaze coated his eyes. “Even though I know you would never do that, of course, I will tell you. I’m a civilized ruler, after all.” His extending, opening hand was so inviting that the Earth shifted again. “Join me. Both of you. Rebuild these runes alongside me as gods.”
“You’re crazy!” Mabel snapped. “Gods? More like devils!”
“One’s god is always another’s devil. I’m your god, and Pinion’s your devil—you just don’t see it.”
Mabel started screaming again: how he didn’t know anything, that she would turn him into a volcano, but I found myself watching his face with the utmost curiosity. His pulse that I could hear with my tilted ears had not fluctuated in beat; his tone remained even, composed, unthreatened as he further explained how he had tried to form numerous ceasefires with Pinion, to reach out and reconcile centuries of malice, all in vain.
And I was listening. Because there was always something odd about Pinion and the way she conducted herself—something strange about her role in the war that I had suspected the moment we met on that inferno.
Both Pinion and I were in limbo with one another. We were both beings who had a taste of all three worlds, and we knew how to deceive—certainly manipulate. I had seen her all along, just as she had seen me.
Which meant that she knew I was never going to let her rule me. I was a mark on her hitlist—just one farther down.
“He’s right.”
Mabel whirled around like a top, staring at me with cross eyes. “What?!”
“Gannon’s not lying,” I repeated, waiting for fire to burst from her eyes and harpoon me, but she was oddly stoic, listening. “Pinion isn’t who she appears to be. Sure, there are good intents woven within her plan, but ultimately, she doesn’t want us to be any part of it. Maybe you, Mabel, but definitely not me.”
“Exactly,” Gannon agreed. “The two of you abandoning her in the past sealed your envelopes. Once you kill me, you’ll be next. Besides…” He bent his head in the direction o
f the crystal. “Do you even know what will happen if you release her? Release this eternal spell? No good will come of it, and that I promise you. You don’t know all that I’m protecting this world from. But if you join me… You will see all. You will rise to immortality.” He prompted for our allegiance by giving his open palm another bounce. “Bluntly, Calla’s Eyla isn’t enough to repair all the damage done. I need fire, and I certainly need a demon who holds all demons that ever were.”
Mabel was growling, a distressed cat, but she didn’t take a step in either direction. I tried to shatter Gannon’s skin and peer deeper. His heart was still in rhythm; his eyes and mouth were still open to discussion.
I slowed my world and focused, breathed deeply, listened to the spewing chaos in my head and body. I could only hear my fledglings as they naturally grappled toward the buffet of energy within reach; the Eyla were silent, offering no input. The fact that they weren’t chewing my ears off and calling me stupid baffled me—their absence, if anything, made me wonder if they agreed.
Bubbles of lava popped against my chest. The Mark—I wouldn’t dare to expose my vulnerable chest, to glance at the tattoo of flesh, but the reaction was undeniable. Gannon definitely didn’t look like much on the outside, a gentleman, if anything, but my body knew—that was why it wouldn’t accept.
If I didn’t kill this Lord, I would live as his servant. I would never be free.
Satan was already anxious; He was brewing in my chest, testing the bondage, preparing His grand reveal, and He would only do so in front of that bastard… And only when He was out could I turn on Him myself.
The road in front of me was blocked with bodies. There was no detour; I had to plow them down if I wanted to reach the other side.
Kill Reeve… Kill Gannon… Kill Satan… Live.
“Sorry,” I said simply, watching the wires in Gannon’s eyes go dark. “But I can’t become a god unless I kill you.”
A puff of resentment tore his nostrils. His hand retreated, and he straightened his form, finally empty, finally bearing the blackness that was his soul. “I see… Unfortunate, but I understand.”