There was not even a hint of emotion in the queen’s voice; it was as though a numb, heartless soul had taken up residence in her once lively and passionate spirit.
Rustling, tinkling armor and heavy bootsteps echoed through the hall as soldiers moved in from either side. They were slow in the darkness, but there were many of them. This wasn’t a story in a fairytale. There was no cavalry coming for her. She’d never wanted to be a hero, just a passible enough person to save some of her people. She’d heard enough real-life stories from her father about what happened to true heroes. The heroes were the ones who didn’t come back home. Their friends did. Their leaders did. But the heroes were lost for the good of the cause. Alone. In the dark.
And here she was alone in the dark, too.
The dark.
Magic tingled between her fingers. Darkness was just one more element of this world, now that she thought about it. Remembering how Estes had gathered it up in the temple, Nariah twisted her hand and held it up by her face. She reached out to the darkness just as she had the sands the day the mob tried to burn her alive.
Slowly, she watched the blackness give way around her, shimmering and bending. The candles, she thought, a low chuckle escaping at the reminder of the parlor trick that had frightened the gate guard just a few days ago Taking a guess as to where the candles should be, and hoping they were actually there, Nariah flicked her fingers in what she hoped was their direction.
Sparks flew, and impossible heat for candles so small blew over the hall in a wave. Blood thrummed in Nariah’s veins at the terror in her sister’s now-visible eyes. Terror… Deborah’s wide eyes flickered between their normal magenta and a strangely familiar orange color. Her scarred face spoke of unknown horrors that drove an invisible knife through Nariah’s gut.
The queen’s once smooth, pale cheeks were now a raw pink, riddled with deep, purple veins and raised lumps of molten red. Her sister’s frame was so thin, so frail, that her wrists were barely more than a skeleton’s in a stretched covering of skin. Half of her flowing black hair was white, and the other half was missing, revealing a bald head which carried more scars and bulging veins.
Flames of anger roiled in Nariah’s chest. Who had scarred her once beautiful sister so? And what was inside her, changing her eyes and speaking so strangely?
Dropping her hand, Nariah only then realized that she was holding an orb of swirling darkness within it. The soldiers had frozen in place only steps from her, but she couldn’t say whether it was out of fear of her magic, or simply because they awaited Deborah’s command.
“Who did this to you?” Nariah whispered, reaching her empty hand out to her sister.
Deborah jumped back a step with a hiss. A literal hiss, with a forked tongue slithering between her teeth.
“Take her!” the young queen shouted, and before Nariah could react, all of the soldiers leapt at her at once. They pinned her to the floor in seconds, hands like vises allowing no room for even the slightest movement.
“Your sister is no longer human, Oracle,” Irony’s voice giggled in Nariah’s head. “And she wants you dead. I see her mind, you know.”
“Hold her!”
“Get me the bag!”
“Where are the chains?!”
“Don’t let go!”
“Get out of my head!” Nariah screamed in her mind, but the goddess only laughed harder.
“They won’t come for you, you know—your little lords. They’re glad you’re gone. All they needed was the prophecy; they have no need for you. This kingdom is doomed, anyway. You’ve seen it. Isn’t it time, Nariah, for someone to save you?”
Glancing up at the dais, Nariah finally noticed her father’s body. Everything around her froze. She struggled to breathe, to think. Her father’s skin, once as rich a mahogany as her own, was as black as an obsidian statue, and even from her position on the floor, glowing purple in his veins that hadn’t been there when he died now stood out like a vivid nightmare.
Deborah caught Nariah’s gaze from beside their father’s body. The queen’s lips curled back in a snarl, revealing two rows of jagged, yellowed fangs. How was it that none of the guards saw the monster on the dais? How could they not care?
“What are you?!” Nariah screamed. “What have you done with my sister?”
One of the guards shoved a small ball of rolled-up leather into her mouth, cutting her off. A black bag engulfed her head, and chains looped around her limbs. No amount of showy magic could get her out of this. Irony was right about one thing. Deborah—or whatever the thing was that was changing Deborah—wanted Nariah to die.
A few days ago, Nariah would have happily burned if it meant the rest of her people would live. There was no way she could leave them under the rule of a monster. Her sister needed her. Her people needed her.
Somehow, she was going to get herself out of these chains.
A cold cuff of metal snapped into place around her neck so tightly that the bag over her face was nearly pulled taut. As air was stifled, she panicked, trying to fling the chains from her arms and grab her blinded face.
“Rowan!” she cried as the darkness crushed in on her. Never had she so desperately fought for her life. She couldn’t die here, alone in the dark.
“To the labyrinth!” Deborah shouted above the chaos ensuing among the guards.
Nariah’s legs gave out beneath her as they lifted her to her feet. Her ears popped from lack of air, but she wiggled and slid away from as many of the guards as she could while both sightless and chained. Two guards replaced each one she escaped, until eventually they hoisted her above their heads, carrying her suspended in the air.
No! Not the labyrinth!
Below the deepest sanctum in the Ellonian temple, the ever-growing catacombs were no mere tomb. Stretching down deep into the mountains and almost as wide as the fields, new tunnels were dug in the labyrinth every year to accommodate that year’s deceased. Grave keepers went half-blind from countless days in near darkness with only holy torches for light. The unfortunate souls were seldom allowed above ground, and were said to go mad before their deaths. Sometimes grave keepers got lost in the labyrinth toward the end, left to prey on rats or other unfortunate creatures who got lost in the depths.
If someone was declared to be afflicted by an untreatable pestilence, they were often tossed down into the newest wing of the labyrinth to meet an early death. The presiding priests turned blind eyes in the name of Mercy, who would not wish for Ellonai to suffer a plague.
Illness and insanity were the least of Nariah’s worries in the grand scheme of things, she realized. But a chained royal left to rot in the labyrinth could easily fall prey to any of them. Cannibalism among the nearly-dead was a well-known horror story parents cautioned their children with. Parents whispered charges to young ears, that it would be better to die a good death at one’s own hand and send their soul to the goddesses, should they ever find themselves in the depths of the irredeemable labyrinth.
They passed through an area that was hot and humid and smelled of burnt incense and tobacco. The temple’s House of Passage to the labyrinth doors, perhaps?
All at once, the heat vanished without a trace. Inhuman wails drifted to her ears, and even through the bag she could smell the stale, mildew-ridden air thinly veiled by the dying flowers that always lined the first hall of the labyrinth.
“To the inner sanctum!” Deborah shouted from far away.
Only the priests, the Royal family, and the guards who served them knew their way in and out of the centermost chamber of the labyrinth, where the royal pyre stood. On the third day following a royal’s passing, the remaining family members bore the body of their dearly departed to an onyx pyre on the centermost pedestal within the maze.
Besides the grave keepers, the diseased, and an occasional rat, it was the wraiths that Nariah feared the most—the restless spirits of her ancestors who dwelt within the inner sanctum. The souls of their ancestors literally gathered around the pyre to pick the bones of their newest member clean, absorbing their powers and releasing the aura once tied to their spirit.
I’m not going to die here! Nariah wanted to scream, wriggling with renewed vigor in their grasp.
As years turned into centuries, the wraiths became more and more embittered, only permitting the living royals to leave because of the wards the priests had them wear. Wards Nariah would not have protecting her if she was left alone there.
Bloodthirsty and vengeful, the wraiths were always released to hunt the inner sanctum for interlopers once the royals left. The deadly spirits could leave a pile of bones in a corpse’s place in minutes. Left alone with them, she stood no chance.
“It’s a better honor than you deserve, Doomsayer!” one of the guards called, the implication behind his words churning her stomach.
The thought that being consumed—skin and soul—by angry wraiths while she still lived was an actual honor, as opposed to being allowed some semblance of a quick and painless death, brought her blood to boiling.
When did such cruelty take hold of her peoples’ hearts? Burning and murdering dozens of fieldhands for merely associating with an exile? Casting their ill and weak down here to die in the first place?
She wondered for a moment if her father was right—if any of her people would pass through the druantia’s forest, or if the taint of their sins ran too deep to cure. Was she throwing away her life for nothing?
Someone jabbed the tip of his sword up painfully against her stomach with a chuckle, but not hard enough to cut deep.
“Fool!” a different guard hissed, and the sword was gone. Metal clanged on stone nearby; someone must have sent the blade flying. “Don’t spill her blood here! You’ll doom us all!”
“Speaking of doom…” Irony’s voice cut through the thoughts of death and damnation running through Nariah’s mind. “You know, I happen to already be in your vicinity. It’s a couple days early, but if you’ve seen enough to know your people are not redeemable, I can go ahead and spare you any more discomfort.”
Nariah wanted to dismiss the thought. To ignore the offer as she always had. But the hands that’d been holding her were changing the deeper they went into the labyrinth. At first she thought it was her mind playing tricks on her, but then a claw emerged from one man’s fingers, nearly going straight into her arm as they sprouted. Feathers tickled her ankle, where a different man stood. And a man at her side held her shoulder with what felt like slime-covered scales. They were changing more and more with every step. Some did not even breathe like humans by the time they paused in the middle of the hall.
Her father had warned her. Irony had offered to stop all of this before it ever even started rolling. Even Mercy would rather die than save the Ellonians from whatever curse had truly been cast upon them.
But Nariah was not a goddess. Nor was she a lord. She was a Seer, and she set her teeth tight. She clung to the promise of the vision of the lords, that some of her people were still redeemable. She clung to her deal with the druantia. Her journey could not end here; she just needed to think.
Stone grinded on stone, sending lightning bolts of pain down Nariah’s spine. Chanting rose up all around her as the priests warded the guards. A gust of icy wind sliced through her thin robes, bringing a subtle ache to the overworked joints in her wrists and knees. Years of field work had not been kind to her, and winters were always difficult as a result. But this icy breath came and left, exhales from other-worldly specters thirsting for far more than just her blood.
She could hear the wraiths’ wheezing breaths as she was carried between what must have been a mass of them. Spectral fingers passed through her skin when they touched her. Was it the warding that kept the wraiths from finding purchase? Would she be fair game when the guards left her behind?
“T-t-tie her t-t-t-to the p-p-pyre!” Deborah ordered, her guttural words tumbling unnaturally from her mouth, almost as though the teeth Nariah had seen blocked the sound itself from coming out clearly. Was Deborah changing more, even now? “If th-th-the wr-wr-wraiths-s-s d-d-don’t t-t-take h-h-her, m-m-my f-f-father’s-s-s f-f-f-ire w-w-will.”
Four times in her life she’d ascended these stairs, each time bearing the body of a loved one. She’d always known her own end would bring her here, too. It was an inevitable trial of worthiness and service to the goddesses that would determine whether her soul would rest in heaven’s embrace or be cast into these same depths with the other wraiths. She’d just never imagined coming here while she was still so young.
The cuff was removed from her neck, but her other chains remained. Instead of being laid upon the stone like the bodies of the deceased, they strapped her wrists together behind her back and forced her to kneel. Chains looped under her shoulders tugged her upright and held her in place, while others secured her knees and ankles to the freezing slab beneath her. Nariah could not hear the wheezing of the wraiths anymore, but even with her eyes covered she could feel the hollow pits of their eyes staring through her mortal form to her soul.
“R-r-remove th-th-the h-h-hood,” Deborah said, her voice now much closer.
“With all due respect, my queen,” a voice far too old to be a guard whispered loudly, “she could incinerate us with a single glance…”
Skirts shuffled, and the bag was ripped from Nariah’s head, taking stands of her hair with it. Oversized reptilian eyes, yellow with slits of black, bulged from Deborah’s face, as she stood tall atop the pedestal. Film blinked across her eye, then retracted, like a second transparent eyelid.
Deborah’s forked tongue flicked out between two massive fangs which protruded painfully from her gums. The fangs hadn’t been there in the throne room. Blood dripped from the queen’s gums, though, and Nariah could hear her sister’s jawbone popping.
“Deborah,” Nariah tried to whisper, except that all that was intelligible around the leather ball in her mouth was ‘Eh-hoo-uh.’
Cursing her consistently rotten luck, Nariah shot her sister the most desperate plea her eyes could convey. Not for herself, but for their entire nation. Even as they stood there, the wraiths converged on falling guards all around the room, restrained only by the magical warding established in the chants. The priests, while unaffected physically, chanted with wavering, cracking voices, their words barely holding the required tune to keep the wraiths at bay.
Human features vanished altogether in some of the guards. Robes split to make room for the furry hides of two dire wolves. Another guard’s back split open, splattering blood in all directions. Skeletal webbing spread from his back to his wrists, like some manner of fleshy wings. Another shrunk in on himself, then emerged from his clothes in a flash as an orange finta cat. Its claws scraped the floor with each ear-splintering stride.
With every change, the priests retreated back further and further to the door. And with each soldier’s loss of humanity, Nariah wondered more and more whether she had made the right decision by asking the druantia to spare the lives of people who were tainted.
A jagged-toothed grin literally widened across Deborah’s face as the queen’s nose flattened into nothing more than slits between her eyes. Reaching out her hand, the queen placed a talon-tipped finger against the crystal hanging around Nariah’s neck.
“What… d-d-do… you w-w-wish?” Deborah said, though Nariah wasn’t sure how they words had come out so clearly.
Nariah blanched. How could her sister know about Rowan’s wish? Not even the lords had been present to see what happened between her and Life in the forest. Deborah blinked, cocking her head in what appeared to be genuine curiosity. It was hard to be certain, with pink and white scales breaking through the queen’s skin and concealing her human facial features.
Pulling back her lips, Nariah tried to shove the ball of leather out of her mouth with her tongue, but it was too big. Thankfully, Deborah’s eyes traveled to her sister’s mouth. Reptilian claws at the end of the queen’s now-webbed fingers made quick work of removing the gag. There was no awkwardness of movement from any of the transforming people, Nariah realized. They all moved as though they’d always been their new form.
After the gag, Deborah made short work of the chains which held her sister in place atop the pyre. The queen used no key; the chains instead melted beneath her touch. As soon as Nariah’s hands were free, one flew to Rowan’s necklace.
Clutching the gem tightly against her chest, Nariah wondered for a second if she could just wish this all away. Could she wish the kingdom back to its former glory? Her father back to life? Or even the goddesses who pursued Rowan and the other lords to have never come at all?
Deep down, though, she doubted any of those wishes would bring about lasting change. Changing the past would only delay it. Irony and her sisters had found this world once. They would eventually find it again, just in another time. A time when Nariah wouldn’t be here to stop them.
The decaying faith of Ellonai would destroy them again sometime, with or without the goddesses’ intervention. All around her, cracks pocked the inner sanctum walls. The priests were no longer faithful to their former truths, if their hearts would allow them to be party to this unholy travesty. How long would it be before the wraiths escaped their crumbling prison and came for the vengeance they so desperately sought?
And her father, her dear, sweet father, had already lost his power, if the whims of the people dictated him so much that he would cast out his own heiress. Returning him to life would prolong the illusion of power in Ellonai, of a monarch ruling supreme, but not the actual strength her people needed, nor the freedom they craved.
As bright as the sunrise that had illuminated Nariah’s body in the clearing that morning, her role in the world—and among her people—brightened and sharpened until it was crystal clear. Her fingers traced the gem at her neck, and she thought of Rowan’s deepest wish—the one he was not sure how to bring about.
These people were not hers to lead. They never had been hers. Nor were they Deborah’s, or even Irony’s or her power-hungry sisters’.
These people were hers to serve. To lend her talents to, as well as her strengths. With a new fire in her heart, Nariah met her sister’s new eyes.
“If I could wish this all away, and it genuinely fix our world, I would,” Nariah said at last, fixing her sister with a grim but determined smile. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here for you when this started. When father became ill, or when the castle became the façade of power hiding what was truly your prison. I’m sorry I can’t save you. I can’t even save myself.”
Clasping her hand around the crystal, Nariah whispered, “We cannot wish away the past. The consequences of centuries have brought us to this moment, but we are no purer than our ancestors, are we?”
The wraiths stopped at the mention of ancestors, turning their attention to Nariah. The last priest in the room suddenly stopped chanting, rolling a stone over the door, but leaving the holy torches in their sconces. Deborah grabbed Nariah’s arm, her scales singeing her sister’s skin.
Wrenching her arm away, Nariah shoved her younger sister behind her, realizing too late that a circular pedestal in a room built for audiences on all sides left Deborah at risk no matter where Nariah put her. A wraith lunged at Nariah, and she called the flames from one of the sconces to her fingers.
Holy fire set the incorporeal specter ablaze. The flames caught the other wraiths who pressed by the first for their chance at living royal flesh. After only eating corpses for years, Nariah wondered if fresh blood was somehow more appealing to the souls of the damned. Either way, the wraiths swarmed the center of the sanctum, leaving the soldiers to beat at the cracking stone door.
Deborah hissed, dropping her waist so she was eye-level with the specters approaching. They started back, then dove around her for Nariah.
So, they want nothing to do with tainted blood, do they? Nariah thought.
The more wraiths that came at once, the more they burned. Their fingers still passed through her, to the surprise of both sisters and wraiths. After several quick seconds, the flames extinguished, and milky blue pools of ash were all that remained in their place.
Nariah gulped, her world whirling around her. Every soul in this room had been a member of her family, stretching back as far as the very first appointed king. In less than a minute, Nariah had single-handedly destroyed her entire lineage. She’d personally carried her grandparents to this room, as well as her uncle Castain, the king’s younger brother.
Allowing one’s body to be entombed here was a privileged gamble. Once the spirit was released, a pure life would bring a goddess to the tomb, where she would grant the deceased a place in her heaven as one of her champions. Eternal bliss was said to await the faithful royals, on streets of opal and bathed in an unending daylight.
Now that Nariah had met a couple goddesses, she was unsure such a place existed. How anyone had even known to start this belief, Nariah was uncertain, as none obviously ever returned from their ‘heavenly’ experience to speak to its worth. For all they knew, the goddesses could have a world of eternal servitude lined up for them, the way they did the lords. Rowan had mentioned other worlds constantly being built, after all.
Heaven waiting for them or not, Nariah had personally witnessed both of her grandparents’ souls received from a bright fissure of light in the ceiling. The same had not proved to be the case for her unfortunate uncle, whose spirit waited but a moment in darkness before a wraith devoured it whole and split off into two beings—the original, and a new being of darkness made of the evil which manifested within her uncle’s soul.
Overlooked beings, doomed to only doom others, the wraiths were finally at their journey’s long end. Like the very people they once lorded over, their souls would have to find solace in the soil beneath the land they once ruled.
A soft, quick pat on the arm followed by a nod from the queen brought Nariah’s attention to the door. The guards were only inches away from breaking out of the inner sanctum. This tomb’s time as a prison of lost souls was finished. There was nothing left to contain.
Opening her mouth, Deborah pointed at her throat, then shrugged, her elbows so knobby that the bones protruded through the thin cotton covering them.
“You can’t speak, can you?” Nariah asked, though she already knew the answer. Deborah shook her head, her neck disappearing into a fleshy roll.
Was it the goddesses who cursed them like this, Nariah wondered? Or something they’d truly brought upon themselves with their own hands?
Delicately opening a pocket in the side of her dress, Deborah plucked a thin golden feather out and offered it to Nariah. The tip was stained with ink, having been used at Deborah’s writing desk, most likely. But Nariah had only seen this kind of golden sheen on a feather one other time. Almost liquid in appearance, the feather was dusty when touched. Her world spun.
Keet.
“Did this do this to you?” Nariah demanded, a tinge of red creeping into her vision. Her sister nodded.
Pointing at the sharp quill, Deborah mimed poking her finger with it, even sticking her finger in her mouth.
“You stuck your finger while writing with it?”
Deborah nodded.
“But what about the others? Surely they didn’t all get stabbed with it?”
Deborah vigorously shook her head. Stepping back, she pointed out the shape of the pyre, then mimed as though she was pulling a rope. Finally, she dipped her hands into an invisible bucket, pretending to wash them.
Nariah’s mind raced to keep up, to make sense of it all.
“You drew water from the well?”
Deborah nodded.
“Then you washed your hands?”
Another nod.
“Then what?”
She didn’t want to hear the answer, but she already knew. The door cracked open behind them, and the remnants of the royal guard spilled out into the hall. Making no move to follow, Deborah picked up her imaginary bucket and walked to the center of the pyre. A tear trickled down the newt princess’s face as she acted out a slip, and the bucket dropping. Dropping… right back into what would have been the well.