44. THE LAND OF PEACE
Teraeth’s story
The Chasm in the Afterlife
Early morning
Teraeth stared down the people with weapons drawn on him. He didn’t recognize them, but that meant little. People came and went from the Chasm defenses, retreating back to the Land of Peace when they were too injured, being replaced as new people volunteered. He’d never been expected to know their names, and he’d never tried. It had always been enough to know that his mother knew their names.
And that was the problem, wasn’t it?
“Who told you that I killed her?” He’d have preferred to ask the question quietly, to have this conversation under more private circumstances, but such was not to be. He was left shouting his response while standing next to a howling morass of magical moving rock, the shield Ompher had created to keep anyone approaching too close to the Wound while also keeping the demons in the Afterlife from entering the Land of Peace.
“You killed her!” one of the soldiers shouted. “How could you!”
Seriously, how did they know what had happened? But he answered himself immediately: thousands had died on that battlefield. It was hardly outside the realm of the permissible that one of those souls had arrived here with the knowledge of those events.
Except … they shouldn’t have remembered. Whoever had told them had remembered everything. And that would have been a far smaller number.
“She’s here, isn’t she?” Teraeth asked. “My mother’s here.”
“She doesn’t want to talk to you!” A Quuros man with the bright green eyes of a D’Aramarin Ogenra shook a spear at him as he shouted.
“Did she tell you that she was forcing me to kill myself?” Teraeth continued. “Forcing me to dance until I completed a ritual that would have taken a million lives? If I betrayed my mother, it is only because she betrayed herself first.” He growled as he step forward, pulling his daggers from his belt. “I don’t care if she doesn’t want to see me. She owes me this. Now give me a path or I will make one.”
There was a moment of stillness where Teraeth honestly didn’t know how the conversation would go. If they would make him fight people who were in no way his enemy.
They stepped aside.
Teraeth ran across the narrow bridge, which he logically knew was safe. It still always felt like it was seconds from dropping him into the Chasm. This time, it felt even more fragile than normal.
Maybe that was his imagination. Maybe it wasn’t.
Teraeth hoped Kihrin was right about him being able to return on his own. He wasn’t certain Kihrin could enter the place, and Xivan had no idea he was here. If Teraeth couldn’t get out by himself, he had no reason to think he was ever getting out at all.
He threw open the doors to the Death Goddess’s palace and walked inside.
Compared to the last time Teraeth was there, the Land of Peace was practically deserted. The reason why was as obvious as it was horrifying: because every soul willing to fight was out at the Chasm, and every soul killed by a demon never made it any further.
So in theory, finding his mother should have been easy.
He’d already finished searching a dozen rooms before it occurred to him that she might well be out at the Chasm fighting too. She’d clearly spoken to the people out there.
But no, he told himself. If she’d been there, she’d have said something. She wouldn’t have just let him run off.
The palace was unlike earlier structures built in the first days of the wars with the demons. It wasn’t a place of war but as a promise and a goal for souls that might otherwise have wandered through the Afterlife until demons succeeded in hunting them down. A thing that happened far too often at the start.
At least, that’s what his mother had always told him.
Had Thaena built the palace herself, or had Ompher helped? Probably the latter. His mother had always grumbled, if quietly, about the Font of Souls being located on land. She’d cordoned it off, fenced it in within a wide garden that meant one couldn’t stumble upon it purely by chance. People went to the Font of Souls when they meant to—when they wanted to be reborn.1 He started to second-guess himself. Teraeth had assumed his mother would look like her voramer self, not the old woman he’d grown up knowing, but maybe he was wrong. Maybe she’d chosen to look like the disguise. Or maybe she hadn’t come here at all.
He searched through the garden. He looked through the pools.
Then he realized there was one room he hadn’t searched. He’d just assumed it would be empty—in hindsight, that had been naïve. Teraeth looked down at himself, concentrated, and changed into something more appropriate for formal occasions.
Then he went to the ballroom.
He had no business mocking the people who were here and not at the Chasm, considering how much time he’d spent here himself in between his first life and this one. Sure, he could claim it was for a good cause—S’arric had needed someone to help him out until Elana had gotten around to dying of old age—but he wouldn’t have been fooling anyone, least of all himself. If he’d avoided the place since, it was because it no longer contained the only two souls that had ever made it worth visiting.
Khaemezra had never called it a throne room, but surely the name applied. It was a lavish space of cold marble and glittering beauty. A single bright light source toward the ceiling refracted downward through a chandelier of crystals and created what, Teraeth realized in hindsight, was a pattern of light along the floor very much like being underwater.
And there were indeed people here. Far more than he would have expected under the circumstances. Before the demons were freed, this place would have been packed, a constant dance in motion to rival anything the vané might have hosted. But now? This seemed like hiding. Like cowardice.
Then Teraeth spotted someone he recognized and had to revise all his theories of what was going on.
His father was in the center of the room, dancing.