Against all comprehension, the Dark King begins to move backward toward the fissure. Even as he fights the momentum, he cannot seem to break out of it, his head making rounds of me, the worthless pebble, and the black hole that I am sending him into.
“Wait! Wait—daughter mine!”
I can barely hear him over the grunting that rumbles out of me. I feel as though I’m lifting a house from its very foundation, and the strength required is more than I have—yet I am in the throes of the effort, shaking and sweating, straining and groaning, and it’sworking. The evil is being sucked into the ground now.
“Daughter mine!” The Dark King marshals his voice. “I have something of yours you need to see. Look… behind you. Look… at what you are doing to him. Look at the one you love—”
“You lie—”
And that is when I hear the one voice I cannot ignore, even though I should.
Merc’s:
“Help… me…”
Ninety-FourThe End.
I close my eyes. And I remember once again what Merc himself told me, even as I never want to think of him again.
Not all is what it seems.
“You’re a liar,” I yell at my father. “He’s not here, that is not him, he’s not here, that is not—”
The hoarse moan that rises up behind me goes in my ears and through my body. I tell myself this is an illusion created for my benefit only, nothing but a manipulation, a chimera created by dark magic and chosen with deliberation as the only way to get me to stop. And because my father thinks he can dupe me, my vengeance strengthens even more, and for this, I’m glad the Dark King has tried to play to a weakness I no longer have—
The screaming behind me shifts something deep inside my heart—or mind; it cannot be my soul, for I have lost mine, if ever I had one. Though I tell myself not to, though Iordermyself not to turn around, this is my little pebble, my compulsion. The thing I cannot not look at.
My head pivots.
Merc is strung between four black flames, as if he’s drawn and quartered. He’s naked, twisting against the holds, his wide, pain-crazed eyes focused on the murky gray sky overhead, his muscles in stark clench, his neck veins pumping, his mouth cranked wide so that the insides of his teeth are all showing.
The black flames are tearing him apart while he’s alive.
Except he’s dead.
So the consumption is perpetual. Even as his flesh is rendered apart, it regenerates on the spot, the stasis of torture unchanging such that he’s trappedin the agony. Still, I tell myself this is a lie, an apparition meant to appeal to a side of me I no longer have, if I ever possessed it at all—
The evil laughter that first greeted me as I stepped through the Fulcrum repeats, weaving in and around me like a gust of wind.
I’m reminded of my true purpose.
I turn to resume my assault against the Dark King, but when I put forward my palms, what comes out is nothing like what was before. My father easily casts the energy aside as he straightens from his tuck. Replants his hooved feet. Rises to his full, towering height.
Behind him, the fissure begins to close.
Recalling all the reasons I mustn’t be distracted, I redouble my efforts—
Merc’s screaming, even if it is an illusion, is not something I can ignore. My focus is no longer complete, and the trap I fall into invisible, but better than iron bars: I don’t know whether the torture is real, and if it is, I just cannot bear it.
Even though I hate him, my love is… complex.
And that makes the emotion real even though I strive to deny it, the smallest crack in my resolve becoming a fault line that destroys me completely—
“Hear him suffer, and know that it is real, daughter mine. No image thus, but rather a servant who tried to double-cross his master and for what?Love?” My father laughs bitterly and starts coming forward. “That castrating force is far, far more destructive than anything I have ever done, a weakening, killing, insidious fissure that sucks us in and holds us captive. I had love—for your mother. And what did she do to me? Stole my child, seduced me into this hell, and imprisoned me here for a millennium!”
Black flames explode into the fetid air at his rage.
And then he puts his own palm out such that it faces me. “You know, Sorrel, I do not think he suffers enough. Let us remedy this, shall we.”
