I spun to see a female walking toward us. She was wearing leather sandals and draped in white swaths of fabric that reminded me of a toga. Her hair was piled on her head in an intricate weaving of braids and curls, and her dark skin gleamed, creating a soft halo around her.
“This is a sacred place for souls. You do not belong. Go now,” she ordered with a frown.
Apollyon reached into a pouch that hung on his waist and pulled out a black stone cube.
I gasped. It was the black onyx cube my mother had spoken of. The object that she said Apollyon used to divert souls to the Netherworld.
Lifting the stone, Apollyon did something to activate it and it started to vibrate, shaking his entire upper body. Souls had started to drift over toward Apollyon from the village, and now they stared at him with confusion.
“Run!” I yelled to the people. “Stay away from him!” I tried to warn them, but no one looked at me and I wanted to scream in frustration.
I couldn’t change the past, and that was a hard pill to swallow.
With an audibleboom, magic blasted from the stone in all directions. It kept moving outward, washing over the entire village and beyond. Looks of fear finally began to appear on the souls’ faces, but it was too late.
Apollyon brushed his fingers over the top of the cube, and all of a sudden it was like a vacuum was created and souls started zooming through the air toward him like they were being sucked into a vortex.
No.
Some tried to hold on to whatever was near them, but the stone’s magic eventually overpowered them and ripped them free. As they neared Apollyon, their bodies started to go semitransparent again, like they were when they died. They shrank, slowly turning into bright light, before disappearing into the cube.
The woman who had ordered Apollyon to leave was somehow stronger than the rest and hadn’t yet been sucked into the cube’s magical vortex. Her hair blew wildly about her. One of her sandals was torn off her foot as she clutched the trunk of a nearby tree.
“Why are you doing this?” she screamed at Apollyon over the roar of magic swirling around her.
That was the third time within this memory Apollyon had been asked “why,” and I wanted to know as well. Why would he do this to these poor people? What would make a former angel of Avalon do something so hideous as to rob the dead of their afterlife?
Apollyon looked at the woman with a spark of desire in his eyes, but I didn’t think it was lust for her flesh, but rather hunger for the power she could give him.
“I can assure you,” he said, “your sacrifice won’t be in vain. Your souls will give me the power I need to make myownrealm. A place whereIalone rule and I can create my own subjects.”
And that was it. Apollyon had devised a plan to steal the souls of Tartarus in order to get the power he needed to start the Netherworld and create his demons.
I didn’t need to see anymore. I was already sick to my stomach, but there was more to learn.
With a simple thought, I fast forwarded through the rest of this memory to the next time he came to Tartarus. I’d gotten my portal making powers from Apollyon, that much was obvious, as Harley had the same ability, and so because Apollyon had been to Tartarus once before he just opened a portal and walked into the realm. All we needed as portal makers was to visit a place once or see a photo and then we could return there. I saw a flash of the Netherworld behind him before he stepped into Tartarus and the portal closed behind him. The Netherworld looked sparser than I remembered, but that was probably because he had just started to build it.
This memory was a repeat of the last. He sucked more souls from Tartarus into the onyx cube and then left again. I fast forwarded to the next time he came to Tartarus, and the next, and the next. It was the same every time. He came, the souls tried to run, but they were overpowered by the magic of the stone. Eventually, I noticed that Tartarus began to dull. Plants withered, dark clouds appeared in the once cloudless blue sky, and the ground looked leached of vitality. In fact, the sicker the world got, the stronger Apollyon looked. It was like every time he pulled souls from Tartarus to gain the power he needed to grow the Netherworld, it damaged and took energy away from the souls’ true home.
I zoomed forward in time even more quickly, seeing flashes of Apollyon developing the Netherworld and even the first demon he created. But I didn’t linger. I needed information on Tartarus and stopped the memory the next time Apollyon visited. The once lush land was now dry and devoid of life. There may have still been souls there, but if so they were either hiding or in a different part of the realm. He’d completely ruined it, sucked the life out of this once beautiful place.
Apollyon walked past me and I turned to watch him, surprised to see an endless blue sea beyond the cliff that we stood on. This was the first time I’d been to this part of Tartarus. I followed him to the cliff’s edge and looked down, seeing waves crashing against the rocks below. The bluff we stood on had to be at least a hundred feet above the water, and when I looked left and right the entirety of the land was raised from the ocean. I couldn’t help but wonder if there was anything beyond the water or if this was the edge of the afterlife realm. And if it was the edge, why was Apollyon here?
I stepped back and saw Apollyon once again pull out the black cube. He closed his eyes, and from what I could tell it seemed like he was gathering his power. It wasn’t long before dark streaks of magic swirled around him. When he opened his eyes, they were completely red and leaked smoky black magic that ran down his face like tears.
It was a chilling sight and I had to remind myself this was just a memory.
Gripping the cube in his right hand, he pointed his left hand skyward and energy shot up from his palm like a firecracker and then exploded, but rather than dissipating like a firework would, the black mass spread over the land as far as the eye could see in all directions, and then shot downward toward the ocean, creating a barrier right where the land met the water. It was like a net woven to cover the entire land.
“No angel will find this realm with my concealment spell in place,” I heard Apollyon mutter to himself. The confession confirmed my suspicion that the net of dark magic above was what had hidden Tartarus from Cael, Aurum, and all the angels of Avalon for so long.
When the sky had completely darkened, Apollyon set the stone on the ground and then opened a portal to the Netherworld. With a flick of his wrist, his magic wrapped around the stone and created threads to the edges of the portal, growing smaller as if the threads were folding it inward. I watched in fascination as the portal was slowly suckedintothe cube, leaving the threads to fan out around it like tentacles in all directions. As I watched, bright lights zoomed over the threads like cars on a highway and disappeared into the cube. I gasped at the realization that he’d turned the cube into a funnel for all souls. As soon as a soul appeared in Tartarus, the cube’s magic sucked it in and diverted it to the Netherworld.
I’d seen enough.
Quickly gathering my own power, I created a portal back to Skye in the Hall of Angelic Records and dove through.
CHAPTEREIGHT
