“Fine.” He cleared his throat and turned a smile no one would believe on the warden. “We’d like passage through the gates. We know we’re entering the bowels of eternal damnation, and as it turns out, that’s exactly where we’re headed.”
The warden’s earlier uneasiness was gone. His irises were so dark, she wondered why it hadn’t been the first thing she’d noticed about him. And was that a smirk?
The locks were already open. The warden reached for the gate and swung it open. He exaggerated a servant’s bow and waved to permit them through.
Jesstin didn’t look at her when he held out his hand. She was just as determined to avoid him when she grudgingly accepted it.
They were still a team, and the only certainty ahead was that it would be nothing like what they left behind.
Together, they stepped under the crumbling sign reading Ignis Implaca and entered the land of eternal night.
Chapter 12
Three Doors
Always night on the other side undersold the situation. It wasn’t just dark. There was no light at all beyond the flames pulsing against their chests. It was enough to see a handful of steps ahead on the path but little else.
Elloven handed him a talisman right away, but as he turned the tiny wooden statue in his hands, Jesstin found no comfort.
“Put it away.” Fear undercut her words. “Jesstin, if you drop it, we only have mine.”
“Yeah,” he muttered and shoved it into his deepest pocket. She’d been cold since the tense conversation about Gennady, and there wasn’t anything he could say that mattered more than their imminent survival.
Entering the gates had been their riskiest move yet, but they had nowhere else to go. Neither the sickness in his belly nor the dread in his chest offered anything but distraction, so he ignored them, same as he continued to ignore the intermittent whispers to swing, swing, swing, which had become increasingly more frequent.
Elloven suddenly leaped toward him, then jumped sideways, hopping in a haphazard dance. “Do you hear... Oh, they’re everywhere... They’re...” She flapped her hands around her like she was being swarmed by a flock of birds, shrieking and screaming.
“What? The whispers?” Jesstin followed her movements, unsure what to do.
“What whispers?” Elloven screamed again, and he grabbed her from the side.
“What are you hearing?” he asked, as calmly as he could with her thrashing in his arms.
Her next scream could have raised the dead. “Everything, the fiends. Everything, everything. How can you not hear it all?”
Jesstin pinned her to his chest and clamped his hands over her ears. They’d hardly gone fifty feet. The gate no longer existed. Darkness enclosed them on all sides. “Can you block it out?”
“You try blocking out a thousand voices all calling your name!”
He had. In Rivenholde. “What are they saying?”
“I don’t know!”
Jesstin couldn’t hear what was driving her to madness, but he suspected he knew who—what—was behind it. “Do you recognize any of them?”
“Would you know one voice in a thousand?” Elloven ground her face against his flame with a distressed moan. “You really don’t hear them?”
Jesstin shook his head and kissed the top of hers. “We can wait for it to pass?—”
An object whistled past his ear, then another. Jesstin whipped around as more and more unknown things were hurled around them, but the darkness obscured everything. Elloven howled into his chest, and her panic grew louder and louder as the air became even more hostile. Something struck him hard in the arm.
“Are you doing this?” he said close to her ear.
Elloven broke free and scurried back, arms straight at her sides as she screeched with her whole soul.
“Your chaos magic...” Jesstin rushed back to her. “Elloven, your magic. It’s working! It works here.”
She stared at him like he was a stranger. The delusion in her eyes gradually went away as her breathing normalized. “They’re... gone.”
