A ragged breath catches in my lungs. No. No, no, no, I cannot, I will not think of her. That’s the last thing I need down here in the dark. That’s the last thing I want.
But she’s here. Her voice, clear as new spring dawnlight, fills my head. And with that voice, there comes a burst of illumination straight to the most sinister corners of my brain, and there, down in the very bowels of the mountain, buried under unfathomable weight of stone, my lungs crushed, my bones on the brink of pulverization…I see her. I see her face, uptilted to mine. Bathed in moonlight.
I cannot breathe.
Valtar, she says.
The way she speaks my name…I always thought it such a harsh, unforgiving sound. The name of a monster. But not the way she says it. When she speaks my name in that spring-song voice of hers, it is like I am reborn. No longer the monster, no longer the villain, but the hero of the tale.Herhero.
I could learn to love the sound of that name when spoken in such tones.
But I cannot love. My heart—not this shuddering organ in my breast, but the soul of me, the vital part that made me once a living, feeling man—it died long ago. Drowned out in the flood of crimson spilled from the veins of my victims over the last many years. Not even Arun can claim my love anymore, only my focus, my drive to succeed at something despite Mhoryga, despite the power she wields over me. If I loved my brother, perhaps I would have let him die long ago. But I never could, not even when Arun begged me to. I kept him alive by whatever means necessary, by whatever foul deed my goddess required.
And now…her death?
Is that to be the end of this sorry little tale?
No, for I will meet my end here and now. I will do as I purposed and slit my own throat. Let my body rot down here, alone and forgotten. Arun will be slain, of course. But it will be a quicker death than the slow agonies he’s suffered these last many years.
And her? She will die.
She will die.
She will die…for Mhoryga will never suffer her to live.
She will die, and this world will fall to fire and smoke-shrouded madness. The springtime of life and renewal will never come again, blasted in eternal damnation. She will die in pain. In horror. Her flesh seared, her heart devoured. Her lungs rawwith poisoned fumes and screaming. Consuming flames the last sight those shining eyes of hers will ever behold.
These thoughts mill through my head, crushing, grinding. I realize my own teeth are grinding as well, hard enough to break stone.
“It will not be so,” I whisper. “It willnot be so.”
I will not let it be so.
I will get out of here. I will endure and survive. I will return to her from this pit, and I—and no one else—will be the one to end her life. It is the last, the only gift I can give her.
I slip the blade back up my sleeve. Then, with a painful contortion of my body, I writhe my skeleton to the absolute limits of joint and muscle. For a moment, I fear I will succeed only in breaking my own spine. Then I feel it—a slight give. It’s enough to send a jolt of pure energy straight through my heart and into every limb. With a scream that could topple mountains, I heave myself forward. It feels like hours, like days, like an eternity of agonizing lives and deaths unending. Then my body moves.
I slip through the opening and slide. Down and down, as rocks tear into my flesh and dirt fills my throat, my nostrils, and blindness makes me sick with all-encompassing horror. But I come to a stop at last and lie at the bottom of some dreadful incline. Alive? Who knows. It’s hard to tell the difference down here in the dark, in the heat, in this bitter isolation. I might as well be in hell. Hell is where I belong, after all, and it is to hell my soul is bound.
But…no. For in hell, I should not be able to conjure even the memory of her face. And yet, there she is—hovering just on the edge of my awareness. Her.Rosie.In all the guises I’ve known her. The child screaming as her sleeve burned. The woman yanking me from hiding and smashing her lips to mine. The mournerweeping over the death of a stranger, the nurturer cradling a gremler kit in her hands. And the fury, whirling straight for my throat with the edge of her blade.
Rosie. All her oddness and beauty and full-blooded life. She does not belong in this dark place. She does not belong in hell. So I must make it out of here again. I must carry these memories of her back to a place of air and light and life where they belong.
I start to turn, to crawl back up that dreadful incline, to face again that hideous squeeze, which so nearly claimed me once already. Before I can well begin, however, something touches my senses. At first, I’m too dulled to all thought or reason to recognize what it is, which sense is affected. It might be sight, for my vision seems suddenly to bloom with reds and pinks and soft, shimmering whites. It might be sound, for my ears are filled with a whispering breath of song.
But no—this is scent. An unexpected perfume, down here in a place where it could never belong. Awakening my mind, my heart, my body to perceptions greater than I’ve ever known. It’s so overwhelming, I cannot name it, cannot recall where I’ve smelled such glory before in my life. It comes to me slowly, almost painfully. A single word, short and simple, but carrying with it an entire world of meaning.
A grim smile twists my lips. By some miracle or accident…I have found the token.
26
Rosie
It’s horrible. Absolutely horrible.
At first, I foolishly thought this was an easy trial by comparison. I mean, they’re basically going for a walk in the dark to fetch back some trinket. How bad can it be?
But as time creeps slowly by—as minutes turn into hours—I have ample opportunity to reconsider. To think of the reality of what they are facing, of what it must be like down there. All the unease and discomfort I feel even in this large and open cavern must be exaggerated a hundredfold. How many times have I been nearly overcome with the sense of weight above me, of the pervasive, bone-deep fear that I will surely, at any moment, be crushed to powder?
