4
MOROS
Finnian
The Present
The executioner ledFinnian down the corridor by the end of his chains with Shivani in front, her long ponytail swaying between her shoulders. Withered ivy painted the stone walls without a remnant of green life amongst its perished vines. Smothered by the atmosphere of Moros, no doubt. Smoke hung thickly in the air. The smoldering heat stuck to his skin, damp and crusted with blood.
The pain of Cassian’s mark did not last. It traveled as quickly as a fork of lightning and then the pain vanished—suspiciously so.
Afterwards, Cassian left, and an hour passed with Finnian refusing to acknowledge the obsidian brush strokes poking through the torn fabric of his shirt collar. In the end, he could not resist.
Dark tendrils ran over his pec and onto his collarbone and coiled at the base of his neck, like one of the tails of Cassian’s serpents. Finnian wanted to peel the engraving of the curse fromhis skin before it could sink deeper beneath the surface, but it was much too late for that.
A dull pain prodded behind his eyes—what mortals often referred to as aheadache. A pain he was familiar with. His head had throbbed for months after losing his hearing in his right ear. Once his brain had adjusted to the loss, the pain would find him after long periods of time wearing his hearing aid.
He assumed the symptom was from the curse excavating into his brain.
Since, he’d been hyper-analyzing the reflex of his wit, the storage of his memory, the operation of his cognitive abilities. He tested himself by mentally reciting recipes for potions, or by recalling as far back as he could of his and Naia’s jungle escapades in Kaimana.
It starts as a quiet hum.
Finnian sighed, exasperated by the anxious tingling underneath his skin.
Focus.
He could worry about breaking the curse later.
Right now, he had to be vigilant.
He analyzed the executioner leading him by the chain. Its folded wings stuck out from the hem of its robe, dragging its curled talons against the stone. Shivani’s cargo pants were full of knives, absent from their sheaths.
They traveled beside a row of cells. Every few feet, executioners were stationed—towering figures encased in a layer of dark robes, scarlet blotches on the smooth ashen-bone surface of their masks that glinted in the firelight.
As they passed the inferno, Finnian peered into the velocity of the flames. It was birthed from a dense, bottomless pit of churning lava.
Where was it coming from? Were there souls within it? Prisoners of Moros?
He didn’t trust his hearing without his hearing aid to rule out distant cries buried in its blaze.
“Tell me,” Finnian said as they rounded a corner. A hot gust blew across his face. The pyre in the mountain’s core roared in a vertical whorl at the compound’s center. Stone railings boarded it off from the rest of the floor. “Exactly how long have I been in that dungeon?” He angled his head and listened closely with his left ear in preparation for her reply.
Shivani turned to look back at him over her shoulder, the edge of her smirk twisting his insides with annoyance. “Five years.”
Finnian’s nostrils flared at the information.
She gave a velvety laugh at his silence, looking ahead as she walked. “Time—Land of the Dead.”
Finnian’s eyes jumped over the new corridor they crossed into, searching for traces of his father. “You don’t track time here.”
“Correct,” she twisted her head, giving Finnian a clear view of her lips. “In Moros, time is altered to amplify the prisoner’s suffering. In the Land, time does not exist. The sun rises and may stay that way for days. Nightfall may come after, or you may experience a delightful dawn.”
“How creative,” he drawled, his eyes jumping back to the walls. The veil of smoke thinned, clearing Finnian’s view of the pale gray grout between the creases of stone.
As they rounded another corner, a river of plush moss caught his eye.
His pulse flickered.
