Even at the start, their relationship was messy and dark and chaotic, but it was also safe and trusting. It was those very things that kept her gravitating right back to him, ready to hurt by his hands again and again.
She kept her eyes on him as she advanced, dispersing her weapon and teleporting her way through the small pockets free from the Daemons, carefully carved by her phantasmal beasts. They held them back as she gave a battle cry and conjured her strength forward in a final push.
Night surged out from her back like the release of a chrysalis before cresting a monstrous wave. From its maw, a colossal nightrazer began to take shape, its churning shadow blotting out the daylight above them.
Like a dark, spectral titan, its torso and a single arm fully emerged from the pool of pure shadow, towering above Acacius and making him look as if he were an insect to its frame.
It sent a roar up to the calamitous sky as it plunged its arm up, the end of its limb fully extending, before puncturing its sharp claws straight through Acacius’s chest.
As her divine power invaded him, the movements of his Olethros lagged, before collapsing entirely. The jagged portals to Tavora began to knit themselves up, the sound of the harsh breeze beginning to return. The rain of broken earth halted.
Marina watched as the stream spilling from Acacius’s mouth ceased, and his jaws slowly ground back together.
The leviathan of smoky midnight that towered above her gradually lowered the High God, slowly releasing the skewer of its fingers, one at a time.
As Acacius’s frame finally returned to the ground, she collided into his back and wrapped her arms around him, burying her face between his shoulder blades.
“Come back to me, Acacius, so we can feel it all together.”
36
ACHE OF CHAOS
Acacius
A gustof moths fluttered over her corpse, their white, silky wings decorating her long black hair. The snowy clearing around them was empty, entrapping him in a peaceful mourning.
A static hummed through the trees. There was no movement, no wind. Just the thrumming in his ears as he clutched the rose pendant in his pocket.
Tears rolled over his lips and into his mouth. He tasted salt on his tongue, the bitter chill of the cold wrapping around him in a haunting chamber.
The rose pendant’s metal edges cut into the creases of his palm as he stared down at Marina’s body, his insides hollow, reverberating the irregular beat of his heart.
What was the point of immortality when he spent it walking through heartbreak, only to heal and experience the agony all over again? Suddenly, he understood Marina’s grief after losing her father.
I do not care about anything anymore.
She cared too much, just as he did, and it hurt.
He’d resisted Naia and the Himura demigod’s power, out of fear. A fear that no longer existed within him. Death brought reprieve from the pain of this world, and death would reunite him with Marina.
“Is this the misery you walked with?” He hung his head and brought his hand up to his eyes, catching his sob. “I am so sorry, Ruelle. I understand now.”
“ACACIUS!” A voice screeched through the sky, resounding like sharp birdsong in the trees.
Acacius snapped his head up.
His pulse fired like explosives in his throat as he jerked down to her corpse.
It was no longer there.
Acacius spun, hysterically searching his surroundings—over the frost, through the thin bodies of the trees, into their shadows.
“ACACIUS!”
His dissociated state of mind began to fracture, and everything returned to him in pieces—how she’d summoned him, and how the clearing had become a battleground of monsters. A battleground that he watched from…
What is going on?
