“Then live. Help me. Helpus.If he is a thing, he can be destroyed, and this hell will be gone.”
“He can’t be destroyed.”
I blinked at the way her brows furrowed at her own words.
“You don’t believe that, do you?” I whispered. “What do you know? You know something.”
Slapping my hands away, she said, “I don’t know anything. All I know is this,” she gestured to the stifling darkness.
“This,” a deep, rumbling voice thundered around us. “Is all there is.”
I reached for Lyla again only for her to disintegrate in my hands. She turned to black smoke that seeped through my fingers and drifted away on a nonexistent breeze. I looked up to see the ocean flood with red light around me. The water came crashing in like a tidal wave, burying me in its cold weight. I was ripped from side to side while water filled my lungs. But it was a dream. Nothing was real. I opened my eyes and was surrounded by a black, endless ocean where only faint light glowed from a great distance like tiny beacons or candles flickering in the abyss.
“Iam all there is,” the voice spoke.
I snapped my head from side to side, searching, though I’d never found a source before. He was simplythere, everywhere and nowhere at once. Then, far off in the dim, glowing haze, a shadow stirred. At first, it was nothing. A fragment adrift, a scrap of wandering light. But as it drifted nearer, I saw the gentle pulse of fins, trembling like wings, carrying it toward me through the quiet vastness.
A gray fish, eyes red as drops of blood, hovered in front of me, watching me with an empty gaze.
“So like your mother,” he said, his voice echoing off absent walls. “Her defiance. Her rage. And what a masterpiece I molded from the broken pieces of her. Deadly.” I wanted to deny him, but I could not feel my tongue in my mouth anymore to speak.
I was silenced, a prisoner within his grasp, bound by the weight of his will. Around me, the red-eyed fish began to circle, its glassy gaze a mirror of my own despair. With every turn, a shadow bled from its scales; a mist that coiled and thickened, thread by thread, until the creature transformed. And there before me drifted a great, spectral shark, gliding slow and solemn through the dark waters of my confinement.
“So beautiful,” he chuckled. “I shall enjoy breaking you. Lyla? She was so disappointing. She did not even fight.”
She was a baby.
I thought the words, yet they withered before they could leave my lips. The rage he inspired writhed within me, a serpent of fire coiling deep in my belly. I clenched my hands until my knuckles blanched, longing for the bite of nails against skin, for the proof of pain, but the sting never came.
The shark continued to circle me, its mouth full of endless rows of teeth.
“I know you have questions, but there is one answer to all,” he continued. “I hunger for disorder. For the exquisite savor of blood diffused in darkened waters, and the sweet delirium that seeps into the dreams of mortal sleepers. A world undone is a symphony divine, far more rapturous than any realm in harmony. And you, frail Kroans, are but playthings in the hands of chaos, pliant, yearning, desperate for meaning in the void. You will come to me, Dahlia. You cannot help but do so. For when the tide of your will at last breaks, I shall take what remains—your body, cold and yielding—for your mind has long since been devoured.”
The inky mist enveloped the shark and from the blackness came tentacles, long and thick. I struggled to move away from them, but they were around me in seconds, coiling like ropes until I was unable to move. They squeezed, twisting me in their unbreakable grip until I felt my ribs cracking. I opened my mouth in a silent scream as my lungs collapsed under the weight. Then my arms. My spine stretched and separated, cracking and bending. Blood filled the water around me. Then my insides. My guts and stomach and the shards of bone that had been ripped from me all floated around me like debris from a sunken ship. And all I could hear in that hellscape was his slow laughter filling the dense water.
Until other voices joined his. Screams. Agonized, tortured screams, all calling out desperately. Vidar. Meridan. Mullins. Suddenly the pain of my body being crushed inside tighteningtendrils seemed a relief compared to the pain of having to listen to them die. I knew it was not real, but it felt more real than even my severed limbs or my shorn insides. The way Vidar cried out. The way Merdian’s screams were cut short like a blade had sliced her throat. The way Mullins wept for mercy.
That same burning rage hugged me like a mother wolf nurtured her pups. It fed me. Held me together.
I was not my mother and I was not Lyla.
Akareth could try to claim me all he wanted, but I already belonged to another.
And he needed me. They all did.
The father did not know me at all.
I opened my eyes with a labored gasp like it was the first breath I’d taken in days. The orange light of a swinging lantern was bright above me and the familiar sway of a ship almost rolled me off whatever hard surface I was lying on. My skin felt tight. I burned like I’d been kissed by fire all over and my muscles felt like heavy bags full of glass. I whimpered, attempting to move my hands only to feel a sharp tug on my wrists. I lifted my head to look down at myself and noticed I was bound by chains to a wooden table already soaked with old blood that smelled of rotting fish. Lower, I could see that I had no legs. My fin exceeded the length of the table and hung limply onto the floor, my dark flesh dull and peeling, absent the luster I was used to seeing.
A door slammed to my right. I whipped my head toward it to see Vidar stepping out of the shadows.
“Thank Lune,” I rasped, my voice dry and brittle.
He walked into the room, but the shadows seemed to follow him, always keeping his eyes shrouded. The air cracked with a dryness that reached my bones as he pulled a rusty butcher knifefrom his belt. I watched the lantern light gleam off the newly sharpened edge and tugged on my chains, my heart lurching.
“Vidar,” I breathed.
He didn’t hear me and I could not see his eyes to know whether he cared.
