by Kim Smejkal
Steadying herself, she turned around and stepped away from the door, trusting that the thread would lead her back.
The light wasn’t sunlight, but a dappled gray washed-out blurriness, more like a thick fog. It disguised most of the room, with only the space immediately around her having any substance.
In the distance, muted and soft, she heard singing, a haunting lullaby from someone with a voice like an angel. Instead of comforting her, the sound chilled her, and she had no desire to wander in that direction. But even as she made up her mind to keep away from the sound and the person making it, the song crept closer—although she hadn’t taken a step.
I’m Celia Sand, a former inkling of Profeta, she said to herself. I love Anya and starlight and drawing.
She took a step back. The direction the lullaby was coming from had switched places, now behind her. Closer.
I’m Celia Sand, former inkling of Profeta. I love Anya and starlight and drawing. Over and over, she said that simple refrain. She had no idea what else to do. Her mind was in full panic mode, yet without her body reacting as it was supposed to—no fluttering heartbeat, no labored breathing, no nervous sweating or swiveling eyes—there was a strange disconnect.
As if she were there but not there.
A stranger in her own existence.
I’m Celia Sand, a former inkling of Profeta—
As she repeated the refrain, she commanded the ink to form a cage around her. Strong silver bars on all sides, with room enough for her to move within them comfortably. This was different from the devil’s bell jar: instead of trapping her, it trapped everything else. It kept the outside out.
Immediately she felt better. She believed it to be protection, so it was. She took another step backwards, and the cage moved with her.
With the creation of the cage, the thrumming of the ink inside her had become fiercer. As if the ink itself were singing, echoing the haunting song of the faceless, bodiless singer in the fog.
This was no ordinary room. There was no altar to Martina, no candles, no personal treasures.
This place was a prison.
Everything about it felt like Halcyon’s illusions, but where he created beauty and light in Wisteria, this was the opposite.
Was it illusion to keep someone—like her—out?
Or was it intended to keep someone—like the singer—in?
Celia had asked Lyric if Martina’s body was in this room—if it was a crypt of a sort—only to be told hahaha, no. But perhaps Halcyon had created and trapped an illusion of his dead lover here. Or memories of her. Or . . . something. If Xinto had been there, he would have fainted from the idea.
It didn’t sound like a natural voice, but Celia had yet to try using hers, so maybe she’d sound as hollow as the singer.
“Martina?” Celia whispered. She pitched the word so quietly she could barely hear herself. With the cage around her as protection, she continued taking steps. No matter which direction she moved, the singing became louder.
As if they had no choice but to meet.
The fog began peeling away, as if a spotlight were shining down to illuminate the space as she moved. As she walked, more of the fog evaporated. She squinted into it, trying to strip it back farther, and slowly, the outline of a person materialized. The mental image of Martina from any one of the dozens of portraits rose up in Celia’s mind: brown hair, sharp expression, clever, calculating eyes.
So when the singer’s form finally became fully visible, Celia had to blink hard.
It was a child, but they had no tenor.
Squatting near the ground, the child had long, copper-colored hair which was trying viciously to escape their braids. The braids trailed along the dirt floor like paintbrushes. Swiping their hand in the dirt, they looked as if they’d lost something small, their tiny fingers flitting over the dusty ground and turning it over. The melody of their song continued, so whatever they’d lost, it wasn’t an emergency. Maybe they were just drawing in the dirt.
But she had no idea what to say to this child, because she had no idea what was going on. Between that and the humming inside her from the ink calling out in response to the song, the only rational thought she had was, Figure out all his secrets.
“Hello?” she whispered, moving to the back of her self-inflicted cell even though she was still a good distance away.
But the child didn’t answer, nor did they look up. Getting closer might startle them, but she needed the child’s attention.
The ink shouted to be let out, and Celia considered what might work in the situation. Halcyon’s voice echoed. The ink wants to belong, he’d said. To make any illusion more believable, make sure you disguise any inherent wrongness with something right. Believability came from giving people what they expected to see. Filling in the blanks.
Because the child looked as if they were searching for something small, Celia drew and cast a marble. She made it blue and bright, shiny and glossy, and placed it under a thin layer of dirt in front of the child.
The child squeaked, their song cutting off abruptly. They stood and looked around, as if knowing that someone had put it there but alarmed at the possibility.
“What’s your name?” Swallowing, Celia also asked, “And what are your pronouns?”
She wondered, with dread, whether she still had her tenor. Her heart didn’t beat and her lungs didn’t work, so was she soulless, like the ink-Anya Halcyon had created in the courtyard?
The only person Celia had ever known without a tenor was Diavala. Soulless, once-dead, body-stealing Diavala.
“I’m Terrin,” the child said. “She.” Her gaze finally swung around and landed on Celia. Terrin giggled as she approached.
Instead of being swallowed up by the fog, the sound of her giggle carried, echoed, and got louder as it surrounded them. Her clothing, from a fashion of hundreds of years ago, when all children wore dresses made of thick, homespun wool, was in tatters. Threads of wool hung from her skinny shoulders.
Celia gagged as Terrin moved closer. Like her clothing, Terrin’s skin was shredded underneath, large swaths of it hanging down, sticking to the thick wool.
Terrin swiped a hand across her forehead to push stray hair out of the way. Her face was relatively unmarred, but this movement smeared blood, gore, and dusty dirt just above her eyes. “Did you give me this?” she asked, holding up the marble, which was no longer bright blue, but the deep red of old blood. “It’s so lovely, thank you!”
Terrin clutched the marble to her chest and smiled, her face cracking nearly in two, her smile was so wide. But with the clumsiness of childhood, she bobbled and dropped the marble.
With a sickening squelch, the marble fell into her chest cavity.
Alarmed, Terrin rooted around, moving flaps of skin out of the way until, triumphant, she lifted it out of a small pocket of flesh, where something had carved more deeply into her.
Oh Dia. Dia, Dia, shit. With no heartbeat to give her away, Celia nodded and smiled through her horror.
Terrin had been flogged, and there was no way she could have survived those wounds.
Terrin had been flogged, and Celia knew of only one child who’d died this way.
Griffin had once talked about his experience in the afterlife, on a level that was so abstract it hadn’t made much sense to Celia at the time. “The afterlife is vast, but its pain feels intimate.” He’d said it like a warning. As if the intimacy was the worst part.
If this was the unnamed child from Profeta’s history, she’d been the first person Diavala had stolen after being cast out of the afterlife, and her death had created the idea of Diavala in the first place: the trickster, the evil, the wrong. This child had been an innocent victim, but her spectacular death had left a legacy in the living world.
For her to appear to Celia exactly as she might have looked when she died—that was definitely intimate. The thought nudged at Celia, sent her mind whirring. She didn’t know what she’d expected to find, but it certainly
wasn’t this vast nothingness. The only place where tenors didn’t exist was the afterlife: the land of the dead. Celia reached out and gripped the silver bars in front of her, feeling their substance against her skin. They grounded her, calmed her. She was still in Halcyon’s forbidden room, she reminded herself.
His forbidden room just happened to be the afterlife.
I’m not dead, though? Celia tried to think in facts, but her thought was tinged with doubt.
Would Diavala recognize this place? Would Griffin?
Celia checked her wrist to make sure the shining thread was still attached. It shone in the fog, a shimmering tether to the land of the living.
Steeling herself, Celia addressed Terrin again. “Is there something you want to show me?” If Griffin was right, there was a reason Terrin appeared for her.
Terrin held out her hand, dark red and flaking, and offered the marble. “This?”
“No. You can keep it.” Celia swallowed. “I made it for you.”
Why did the ink still work in the afterlife when nothing else did? Celia would have done anything to feel her heartbeat again.
Something about the child was changing, but Celia couldn’t quite put her finger on what. Was she growing? Getting closer? Alarm bells began ringing in her head. The silver bars dug into her back as she pushed farther away.
“You made it?” the child asked, confused. She looked down at her ripped-apart chest again.
“There’s a special ink,” Celia continued. “I can control it and make things, like your marble.”
And then Celia recognized what was changing: Terrin was getting angry. Or frustrated, perhaps. Either way, it was aimed in Celia’s direction.
Terrin locked eyes with Celia as Celia quickly conjured a toy bear.
It was almost a feverish response. She had only one way to protect herself: ink.
What would an eight-year-old, maybe ten-year-old, like? She couldn’t tell how old Terrin was—not with her features obscured by blood and any hints of body shape ripped into tatters—and that detail, like her name, had long been lost to history.
Terrin had the bear in her hand for only a moment before she tossed it to the ground, stomped on it, and marched toward Celia, eyes blazing and nostrils flaring. Was Terrin’s heart beating? Celia didn’t think so, but it sure looked like it should be. Beating so hard, in that tattered chest of hers, that it might fall right out and be trampled underfoot.
“Where did you come from?” Terrin demanded. She wore no trace of innocence anymore. If Celia didn’t know better, she would have thought it was a different child altogether.
“I—” Celia stopped, then backed up a few steps. The smell of the child was overwhelming. The smell of death. Her cage didn’t work against it, which felt like a cruel taunt after all her struggles to control the sense of smell in her illusions.
She registered more voices approaching in the distance. More than one conversation, back and forth, getting louder. Lured by the noise Celia and this child were making with their conversation.
Terrin grabbed the bars and pushed her face close. She tilted her head as she assessed Celia from top to bottom. “There’s something different about you.” She pierced Celia with a narrow gaze. “And don’t lie to me.”
Celia put her hands up. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I only thought you might be able to help me.” She licked her lips, tried to reason whether this was a very stupid idea or just a stupid idea. “You might know someone who comes here, someone who feels different, like me, who uses the same special ink—”
Turned out, that was a very stupid idea.
A primal scream tore out of Terrin’s mouth and she lunged toward Celia. Fingers tearing, teeth gnashing, her short arms still somehow managed to reach through the bars, and she hit Celia with everything she had left in her to hit with. Celia had no time to think of an escape plan, too busy trying to keep the child from tearing her limbs off.
“It’s ours!” Terrin screamed. “Martina says the ink is supposed to be ours, but you have it!”
With a mighty shove, Celia pushed her back and shuffled away with her cage, panting without taking in any air. The approaching voices were almost near, louder and closer. The fog would reveal them soon.
I’m alive-ish, alive-ish, Celia thought, putting her hand on her chest, trying to remember what a heartbeat felt like.
“I was good, I remember,” the shredded child said. “It shouldn’t be like this for me. I deserve heaven, but all I get is nothing.” She’d fallen over on her backside, the marble still clutched tight in her hand, and she stared up at Celia with nothing but hate in her eyes. “Your friend brought the fog for everyone. Your friend makes all of this nothing. It’s not fair!”
“Martina said this?” Celia had a hundred clues but couldn’t fit them together. Was Anya there? Surrounded by wasteland, knowing you’re dead or different in some way, miserable without quite knowing why. Was this where Celia had sent her best friend for all of eternity?
This was far worse than anything Celia could have imagined of the afterlife.
Anya was too beautiful to be there, amid all that nothing.
“Anya?” Celia screamed.
Those approaching souls, so many of them, were illuminated all at once. Standing in a semicircle, they stopped their conversations. They stared and glared.
They were all Profetan mistico, with long robes and throats slashed open. High Mistico Benedict was front and center, his ice-cold eyes boring into Celia just as they’d done in life.
Celia closed her eyes against the sight of them and began backing away quickly, hoping her steps took her away instead of right into the middle of the throng. “I’m alive, I don’t belong here,” she chanted. Her panic was a wild thing, untamable. Dia, why couldn’t she hyperventilate like she wanted to? Her body wasn’t her body, wasn’t reacting as it was supposed to. Maybe she was dead after all . . .
She thought of the door and tried to pull herself toward it. The thread around her wrist tightened like a mini-noose and yanked her back. Her eyes snapped open, but she wasn’t close enough to the door. It hadn’t worked.
The crowd of people, all gruesome, macabre victims of Diavala, paused in their approach, each one creating a puddle of blood under their feet, the drip, drip from the wounds in their necks the only sound.
The door! Celia thought again, concentrating on the thread around her wrist, willing it to work. Another yank, more powerful this time, and Celia crashed against the bars of her cell, crying out in alarm. She dissolved her only protection to avoid being torn in two, and the thread continued to tighten and pull, reeling her in with impossible speed until her shoulder slammed into the door with a sharp crack.
Chapter 18
A lurch, as if someone had grabbed a handful of Celia’s skin and yanked her through a narrow tube, and the nothingness of that terrible place disappeared.
Celia shouted as the door slammed behind her. She was in the hallway, collapsed on the parquet floor, and a cold chill had settled deep under her skin, making her shiver uncontrollably. Her breathing—monstrous inhales and exhales—and her heartbeat—mad thumps that pounded behind her ribs—felt strange after that hollow emptiness of moments before.
Xinto flew overhead in zigzags, his buzzing as loud as high-pitched thunder.
“They were so angry,” Celia said aloud, putting her face in her hands, trying to erase the memory of the shattered dead child and the vicious way the mistico had stared at her, far more threatening than they’d ever been in the mortal world. Before, they’d treated her as an inconvenience. Now they would have torn her apart and left her a husk. “How?” Celia said. “How is there a doorway?”
With one turn of a doorknob, everything had changed.
Celia couldn’t wrap her mind around it: a gateway where one could freely go from the realm of the living to that of the dead. Halcyon’s forbidden door with the sunflower doorknob led to the afterlife. How had he done such a thing? His pining for the dead Mar
tina made so much sense suddenly. One day I’ll find her. One day I’ll have her back. Halcyon wasn’t wandering through Illinia looking for Martina’s body. He was searching for her soul in the afterlife. He wanted the real thing.
If Celia wandered through that gloomy fog, could she peel it back far enough to find Anya, Vincent, even her long-dead friend Salome?
Her mind flew around wildly, trying to put everything together. Panting hard, she had to gulp air in. Her mind bees were so scattered—confused about what was truth and who to believe and where to go next. When Celia thought back to everything that had happened behind that door, another blast of panic overwhelmed her. Her eyes blurred, as if she wanted to cry, but her chest was hot, like she wanted to scream. With everything in working order again, her body wanted to do it all.
She tried to convince herself for many long moments that it was a hallucination of some kind, delirium, another nightmare, or even the most complex of all of Halcyon’s illusions.
But that made even less sense.
It didn’t feel real, but more than that, it didn’t feel right. She felt the wrongness deep in her bones. The souls she’d seen—full of desperation, with hunger in their eyes—they were all starving.
Celia took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Anya? What would you tell me right now?
And she pictured it in her mind’s eye as clearly as if Anya were standing across from her.
Anya narrowed her eyes and squared her shoulders as she assessed the new information. She didn’t waste time on shock, diving straight into logic. We were told that the Divine’s ink fell from heaven, Cece, Anya said. And most rumors have a seed of truth, don’t they? Think about it: the ink might not have fallen from heaven and into Diavala’s lap, but it did come from somewhere Other.
Celia nodded.
Diavala had even lied about Profeta’s origin story, crafting a sympathetic tale about an innocent child to make her mystical messages appear more wholesome and pure. And that original lie, delivered via thousands of tattoos, had manipulated an entire nation.