The blight was the cumulative result of hundreds of souls sacrificed for a cause and forgotten, left to rot in the dark until evil festered out of its wounds.
So I had to let it in. I had to let it show me what it had tried to show me from the very beginning.
I let my vision blur. I let my power free.
All I saw was white. And all I felt was a torrent of horror pouring through my blood and slipping into my soul, clashing with everything I had ever known. My head tilted toward the invisible sky, my limbs stiffened, and the echoes thrashed into me, desperate, hungry, forgotten.
I saw every single prisoner who had been tortured here. I saw what had been done to each of them. I heard how they screamed, felt how their insides turned on themselves when their blood boiled. I heard their cries echo through the dungeon cells, cries that had crumbled into groans as they lost themselves and forgot how to speak. I heard and felt it all. And it was too much.
Vines seized me, wrapped tight around my limbs, coating me in black tar that felt ice cold and scorching at once. I did not see or feel Kael’s presence anymore. I was alone, sinking into a pit of darkness, ash and hell following me, swallowed by a curse I had never deserved to bear.
And that was when I fell into the pit. Behind me, Kael screamed my name.
The mountain swallowed the sound.
Chapter 30
Evie
An interminable fall down an endless pit. The blight swallowed my body whole. When I opened my eyes again, I was standing in a dark place, my feet poised above thick black water. I could hear a pulse, loud, booming, like a colossal heartbeat. I was at the heart of the blight.
In the darkness, I felt nothing. Not the vines that twisted and coiled around me, choking until breath became a memory. I didn’t feel their burns, the pain of being stretched and crushed at once. I knew I wasn’t in the physical world anymore. The blight was in my mind.
Or maybe our minds had converged and become one.
In the far distance, as if miles away yet carried by some impossible wind, I heard Kael call out my name. I heard thunder.
An urge overcame me, and I began walking. The tar rippled beneath each step as I moved toward nowhere at all, only endless darkness.
And slowly, the pulses became whispers, something ancient speaking not in words but in sensations. The darkness began to shift, reshaping itself, and up ahead I no longer saw mere black, butshadows rising out of the tar. Hundreds of them, forming a lattice of unseen souls.
I came closer until the lattice became a crowd, people drowned in oozing tar, dripping and grotesque, yet eerily calm. I couldn’t see their eyes, but I knew they stared at me. I wasn’t afraid, even as my heart threatened to burst out of my chest. I was curious.
I approached until I was within arm’s reach and stared back. After a long, uncomfortable pause, the shadows quivered as one. Then they spoke, low voices rising in layered echoes, folding over each other until they forged a single, resonant sound that throbbed through the vast, hollow dark.
“We are the fallen. You are the one who hears us.”
They repeated it again and again, their voices rippling through my bones.
“What do you want from me?” I shouted, my voice breaking over theirs.
They went silent, eerily so. For a moment they slipped back into the water, then other shapes rose in their stead. Memories, or something close to memories, warped and corrupted by tar.
Drachenfels Keep. The laboratorium. Dark wizards boiling blood.
Kael…
A figure meant to look like Kael, but certainly not him, rose and walked toward me, distorted and furious. It unleashed a storm of black lightning around me. It destroyed the tar-made laboratorium. It killed every subject and cast them into the endless pit.
Then it rushed to me, stood before me oozing instead of breathing. Its hands coiled around my arms and sent a dark shockwave into my blood.
I fell to my knees with a scream, pain becoming the only thing I knew.
When I looked up again, the crowd of shadows stared at me once more.
“This is what he does, and will do it again.”
I wasn’t going to be fooled by this false version of Kael. I knew what the darkness was doing. It wanted me to yield.
