“How strange. This can’t be right. It can’t be this deep…” Noam continued to mutter. “It was only once, but Ihavebeen here. It wasn’t this deep.”
How could the shadow of the Grim King be this thick nearly two centuries after his occupation of the castle?
Arienne stumbled and almost tripped. She looked down and saw a lump of what looked like stone and cloth on the stairs—then she realized the cloth was an Imperial uniform. She looked closer and saw a nameplate.CENTURION JUNIA. It was a skeleton, the bones so melted that she could barely comprehend that it was the remains of a person.
The darkness felt even more palpable. Then she realized that it was, somewhat, as there was a thin black fog—no, more like smoke—permeating the air.
“Danras wasn’t this bad…” she murmured, and suddenly she heard a whisper in the smoke, like the sound of a snake slithering by in the grass on a dark, calm night. Arienne held her breath and listened hard. She could hear it clearly.
“… hurts…”
A sudden piercing pain in her ear made her slip and fall on the steps. She slammed into the makeshift wooden banister, and the half-melted and rotted wood broke off and fell into the bottomless abyss. Arienne grabbed on to the side of the step before she fell with it, but the edge of the slick obsidian cut into her hand like a blade and she screamed. Her scream did not echo, but the whisper multiplied into dozens, indiscernible in their cacophony.
Her heart pounded. Her hand kept slipping on her own blood. Fearing she would fall in the attempt, Arienne swung herself to the other side of the staircase with all her might and grabbed on to the other step with her other hand. Slowly, she pulled herself up. How glad she was that she hadn’t brought a rucksack with her! She leaned against the wall of the steps and caught her breath, reminded of the collapsing stairs she hadclimbed in Danras. How many near misses, she wondered, was she allowed before dying horribly? There had been so many close calls in the last few years…
Something warm trickled down her neck. It was sticky. Only by the light of her orb did she realize her ear was bleeding, and the pustules on her hands had all burst from her exertions a moment ago. Just leaning a hand against the wall now hurt.
But Arienne stood and kept walking down.
“Noam, how is the tower?” In truth, she knew the tilt and creak of every single panel in that building, but she desperately needed to hear someone’s voice as she descended deeper into the unending darkness.
“It’s the same. Tychon is fine, too.”
“And the weather?”
She felt Noam get up and walk to the window.
“The usual. Nothing that you could really call weather.”
Her mind must be all right, then, but her body was getting worse with each step. She could feel her body wanting to melt into the thin black smoke, like the bones and wood of Mersia, melt with the pained voices that she couldn’t decipher. She knew, then, what permeated this place.
“Noam, remember how I said the thing that destroyed Mersia had come to be known as the ‘Star of Mersia’?” Arienne swallowed. “I think it’s still here somehow.”
It must have even made its way down into this deep, secret crack of the castle. But why it lingered after all those years, Arienne couldn’t even guess.
“… Should you be here then?”
“I think I’d have been dead a long time ago if this was anything more than just a residue of it. I should be fine, as long as I don’t stay for too long…”
But it was a force—apoison—that had taken down a whole country. No matter how faint the trace, no mortal could withstand it for too long. Could she live, if she turned back now? Her joints throbbed with a pain she had never felt before. She strained to keep up her pace.
The poisonous whispers continued. She tried not to listen to them, hoping that they wouldn’t affect her as long as she didn’t understand. Soon, it felt like the words were being whispered directly into her head. She kept ignoring them. If she gave them even a bit of thought, she would understand what they were saying. And that must not happen. She must not understand them, else the poison would surely flood her mind and destroy her… But then, Arienne lifted her head and glared into the dark.
“No.”
“No what?” asked Noam.
“I didn’t come all this way just tonotlisten.”
Arienne sat down in the middle of the steps and crossed her legs. She listened intently to the many whispering voices. Something poured over her like a waterfall, and there was a ringing in her head as if she’d been struck. Her own heartbeat was like a war drum in her head. Something was filling up…
“Arienne! Arienne! Outside, there’s, there’s a storm!”
Noam’s shouts came to her like he was on a faraway hill. With his voice came the frantic cacophony of the wind chimes of the tower in her mind. Arienne ignored these sounds, instead focusing on each whisper and listening to them one by one.
A sobbing filled with sorrow, from the shaman Yarin of thedistant southern island country of Arpheia. The king with his long black hair and renowned skill on the lute had been her husband, and the queen with her famously fine singing voice and embroidery her wife. When both were murdered by the legionaries as they breached the palace, Yarin had chosen to end her life during the battle by hanging herself on a length of silk rope. In the Circuit of Destiny, Yarin was number 21.
Radegunt was a priest of the thunder god of Tythonia. When their god was torn limb from limb by a gigatherion, he held a mourning ceremony in secret, which led to a spy informing on him to the prefect. Dragged to the Capital, he awaited trial for five years before dying in prison. In the Circuit of Destiny, Radegunt was number 217.
