Marina stood from her satin stool. The sheer fabric of her gown slid down her legs, opening the slits on each side, spreading up to the middle of her thighs. A gown perfect to run in.
She smiled a little to herself, her stomach waltzing as she teleported to Tavora.
And so it begins.
Marina stepped out of the whirling smoke of her divine power, immediately greeted by the blood-orange atmosphere, like the sun had rotted and bled through the cirrus clouds.
Vortexes ravaged the space between the isles, which all circled the mainland. The loud scream of the wind threw her hair in every direction. Strands stung her cheeks and stuck in the corners of her mouth.
Four of the larger isles surrounded the High God’s home, like moons orbiting their planet’s pull. Each isle contained its own landscape and flavor of calamity—one, an evergreen forest swarming with hundreds of moths, or another, a tributary of canyons that fostered monsters within its veins.
She stepped up to the edge of the island, its terrain rocky and made of red clay. Massive slabs of earth hurled from the nearby currents and into the isle’s ground, like small meteors, each collision echoing through her skeleton like an empyrean thunderclap. One piece of debris would shatter into smaller ones, creating shrapnel to be picked back up by the wind and reformed. The mountainous ground was nothing but a collection of craters, ever forming.
And, in the center of all the destruction, was a puzzle of labyrinthine ruins—Acacius’s fortress. Nothing touched it. Thecomets of ruin that molded the dry dirt seemed to stay in a clean rotation around the home.
Marina looked down off the island’s rim, as far as her vision would allow, into the chasm at the heart of Tavora. It was a cavity that went on, black and eternal, like the deepest parts of the sea.
Such entropy. Acacius must’ve found solitude in his calamitous bastion.
She would be honored to strip him of his disorder, if only for a fleeting moment. It was her move, after all, and what better way to split his nerves than to hide his havoc from him in his own realm?
Her pulse raced; she was exhilarated to be the subject of his scorn.
With both arms extended, she outstretched her fingers. Inky, ebony wisps unfurled from her palms.
Suffocate the light.
The darkness poured from her, a wicked grin stretching across her face.
15
A NEW FORM OF REVENGE
Acacius
Acacius’s bodytrailed with sweat.
He wiped his forehead with the back of his arm, holding the forge hammer in his other hand. He inspected his design. The iron rail burned a bright tangerine on the wide, weathered anvil. He’d nearly perfected the shape to replace the rusted fence post in his garden.
Using his tongs to hold the molten metal, he lifted the hammer again.
These moments of creation were small ways to channel his destructive tendencies into something useful.
He halted, his senses attuned to another’s energy infiltrating his realm. Tavora’s ground was like a second skin to him, the earth his terrestrial blood, and he could feel it flutter, alarming him of the intruder.
Heraura infused in the air. Blackness blotted around him, the particles spreading like a miasma in the firelight glow.
A zealous elation lit in his veins.
Acacius put his tools aside on a nearby stone workbench.
Above, the ebony mass unraveled and clung to the sides of the towering walls.
Acacius reached for his shirt from the stool and wiped his damp face with it, watching the veil enclose the hellfire.
He smirked, impressed by her efforts and eager to continue their feud.
In the five millennia that he’d resided in his realm, notoncehad anything taken him off guard there. His realm always spun in a violent ellipse, constantly reforming its own damage. Tavora was built to be a breeding ground for anarchy, a satiation for Acacius’s eternal thirst.
