KAIN
KAIN COUGHED UP the last of the water as he clung to the river’s edge, mud and gravel squishing between his fingers, pressing up under his nails.
He panted and stayed lying on his belly for a long time, waiting for the icy rage to subside to a dull roar. It was odd, this feeling of such intense hate, yet a niggling thought at the back of his mind had him suspecting that it wasn’t entirely real. It didn’t feel like the person he knew he was in life.
But what was real anyway? In this place it seemed as if nothing and everything was real. An impossible mix.
Kain rolled over and blinked into the cloudy sky above him as the gray swallowed up everything. The patter of soft, steady rain started, each fat, little drop splattering on the rocky shore creating a song he strained to hear. The clouds took on eerie and unnatural shapes, shapes of faces that made them look as if they were crying.
He sat up and gripped his head. He was… he was…? Kain looked at the rivers on either side of him. He shook his head attempting to rattle away the fluff coating his brain, but his thoughts remained fuzzy.
Panic. He’d panicked. But why?
He’d been drowning… Because of her.
Kain jumped to his feet. His face contorted into a painful sneer. He wanted to yell—no—he needed to yell at someone or something. He spun in a circle, but there was no one around. Only the rivers on either side of him and the thin strip of land beneath his feet.
The rivers.
He had to keep going. The sooner this was all over, the better. And once he was done with this personal hell Hades had seen fit to curse him with, he would confront the Reaper.
Her name thrummed in his thoughts with every step he took. Nivian. Nivian. Nivian. Nivian. Nivian.
Kain stormed into the river Cocytus, the ever-growing anger fueling his need to continue.
Sloshing water swirled around him, thick and inky dark. The silt under his feet sucked at the bottoms of his boots and slowed his progress. The river’s current varied in strength, occasionally bumping and pushing him, making it more than a challenge to stay upright.
By the time he made it halfway in, his momentum had slowed to a snail’s pace. Inch by inch, he pushed forward, sloshing through the waves he created.
Something bumped against his right leg, then the left. Kain froze. It was more than the current crashing against him. His heart squeezed and he looked down.
Faces floated beneath the surface, hands snagging on his pants. Their boney fingers reached out, calling for his attention, their mouths open in silent, mournful lament. The river sang of sorrow with those souls trapped within begging, pleading for the smallest ray of hope.
Kain bent and reached down toward the hand stretching toward him. He could pull them free so they might continue their journey. If time was infinite here, then he could spare a short while for them.
His hand hovered over the water when he paused, remembering the words Karon spoke. “There is no going back, so do not linger more than necessary, or all will be lost.”
Kain jerked his hand away. Instantly, the air filled with wailing, growing louder and louder with despair, so sharp it cleaved the sky.
The souls swam with increasing speed, their mouths widened to expose rows of jagged teeth. The cries were so mournful, he could hear the heartbreak in them. He wanted to help end their pain, to help them continue their journey, but attempting it would mean the end of his own.
He stepped around the souls, careful to avoid them as he moved deeper. Rain fell heavier still, each globule reminding him of the souls he was leaving behind.
He deserved no better than to suffer the same fate.
Warm drops fell into his eyes and rolled down his face, leaving behind salty trails in their wake.
He continued to slosh through the choppy water, deeper and deeper, as it crawled its way up his body. Kain cursed the Phlegethon, his body was now almost impossible to use because of it as he struggled through the syrupy Cocytus river. Each step hard won as the fingers of the damned tried to drag him back, beseeching him.
Kain let out a shuddering sigh. A heavy weight settled on his heart, thick like molten lead slowly filling the valves and chambers.
He’d had a good life, but there was so much he would miss out on. He wasn’t that old for a human, and certainly not for the long lived standards of the Hunters.
Kain’s throat tightened with regret. He’d never love someone who truly loved him back, who wasn’t hellbent on killing him, never have a family, never see his parents again or get to know the new friends he’d found in the other Hunters.
The rain fell harder, drenching him with drops like hot tears.
Lifting his hand, he reached for his face but his arm was jerked violently downward. Skeletal hands held his wrist in a vice-like grip, forcing him to stop where he stood.
Below the surface, a beautiful face looked up at him, tears shining in her eyes.
She was so sad.
Her misery flowed off her and crashed into him.
His eyes prickled.
Kain lurched forward as another hand snaked up his side and took hold of his other arm. The wretchedness of the second soul’s grief was too much. Tears poured from his eyes, mixing with the rain and accompanying a cracking in his chest, like the sound of the earth splitting open.
The world tilted from under his feet with the sheer strength of the heartbreak. His body tilted, and he leaned closer to the souls holding onto him, offering to hold him, to grieve with him over his lost life.
Water splashed as he fell toward the beautiful faces, the salty taste of the river filling his mouth. More hands of shades joined the first two, pulling on his arms, his legs, his shirt… down into the impossibly deep void.
It should have been impossible to sink so far down when, moments ago, he’d been walking in waist deep water. Kain couldn’t wrap his mind around the logistics of it. He wanted to see reason, but even that seemed to have been taken away.
Under the surface, the beautiful faces had changed, twisting into hideous corpses, howling and crying and sobbing. The sound of their lament reached his ears even under the water, muffled into something infinitely more sorrowful.
His frantic heartbeat slowed to a steady rhythm.
Razor like claws tore at him, ripping into his flesh as they pulled him toward the vicious undertow of the river. More joined in, turning frenzied. With each scratch, each slice and cut, the more sorrowful his heart became. Blood clouded the water and he waited for the pain to mask the suffocating sadness invading him.
But it never came.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Where the wraiths held fast, a gray tinge stained his skin, leaching the color from his world. His arms thinned and elongated as his flesh started to wrinkle from their touch. Every second they had him, he could feel his will fade under the weight of sadness and desolation.
He would become one of them.
Thump… Thump… Thump…
But he couldn’t let them after he’d come so far, the end of the rivers was within his reach. Though so little of him remained anymore. The memory of who he was, how he’d felt, and what he’d wanted was still there, even if he felt nothing but the crumbling of his own soul.
Kain lurched back, jerking his limbs free and pushing off the ghouls at his feet, projecting him toward the surface. He swam through the murk, pushing against the eddies shoving him back toward the lost souls and their never ending suffering.
Thump… thump…
The shades chased him, gaining fast. Breaking away from them had only given him a small advantage.
Dim light glistened, showing him the way as more and more joined the hunt.
Thump…
Thump…
He was inches from the surface but was jerked down by a freakishly strong hand. The thing crawled up the front of his body, slithering in a far too intimate way, until they were nose to nose. It opened its mouth, the cheeks splitting to show the razor sharp teeth inside as it screamed.
Kain floated, frozen by the ear splitting sound as it lowered its mouth and pressed its cracked lips to his.
The lost soul gripped a hand against the back of his neck, pulling Kain closer, sucking what felt like the air from his lungs.
But… it was different. It was taking something else… everything else. Numbing his heart to everything except the horrific melancholy that threatened to trap him.
Thump…
His heart beat once more against its bone cage. Kain waited for another to follow, but there was nothing.
He struggled, but the sprit tangled its fingers in his hair. Still, he pushed them up, up, up. With every kick of his legs, the thing grew leaden, struggling to pull him back down. Its hold on him slipped until he managed to wiggle free.
Kain’s head broke the surface, and he gasped in a choking sob and crawled the last few feet out of the river. He could have been a thousand pounds for all the strength it took to get his entire body away from the water and onto the backed, cracked, and dusty shore.
He clung to the ground of the riverbank and dragged himself as far as he could before he collapsed and sobbed.