In the break of dawn, the sunflowers bent from their stalks, reached for the sisters, and enveloped the two together. Petals folded over their limbs, soft and sturdy as an anchor. Corin closed her eyes. With Elly’s hand in hers, the sunflowers carried them back to where they needed to go.
CHAPTER 24
101 YEARS AGO
AMELIA DID NOT know where she needed to go, but at some point, she felt the plunge. The descent was like hitting the first wave of an ocean, except it was a dark cloud, dense and barely breathable. The smell of blood had grown so thick that she felt like she had swallowed fistfuls of copper. Then dirt filled her mouth, and she lay face down on a hard surface. She spat out soil and let mud fill the chips of her nails as her fingers dug the ground. Amelia hoisted herself up and inhaled her first breath, one that felt nothing like life.
She’d landed on a dusty road, rocks digging into her ribs. The air was thick with smog, filling her lungs with coal. Deep orange blanketed the hazy sky, as if a wildfire had spread across the land, except there were no flames to be seen. She’d expected roiling flames, wails of agony, even molten lava. She thought she would see horned demons fly across the sky and had mentally prepared for the scratches and fangs of predators in a new, dangerous world.
The Otherworld was nothing like she expected. Not a wall ofred, not even a secret hell living underground. Instead, it felt like she’d been encased inside a jar. A still moment in the aftermath of destruction. Unclear what is meant. Reds were merely dull sepia, while everything was eerily still.
Amelia looked down and saw her skin covered in a translucent sheen. Her body had turned to glass. Even her dress looked transparent, like water frozen in time, blue fabric melting to a river that swirled around her body. She stared at the lines of her palms like cracks in a mirror. Her hands pressed to her cheeks and felt the cool surface of glass. Her fingers fiddled with the hard crystals of her lashes. If she pressed too hard, the lashes would crack off. She wondered, if she fell over, how she might shatter entirely.
A voice called her name in the distance. A pair of horns emerged from the fog, followed by the shadow of a raven. Malicine cut through smoke and ash, then stopped when they saw her. “Why do you look like that?”
Amelia stared at her hands, not knowing how to respond. To her surprise, the raven did.
“The Otherworld is a different counterpart from the world you know. In here, your sin becomes part of your skin.”
Amelia gawked at him. “How can I understand what you’re saying?”
“Because this land is where I was born, little girl. You may call me Talon.”
Malicine held up their arms and tried rubbing the green off their skin. Still the shade remained. “Looks like my sin will never go away.”
“That’s because you were born in sin, Malicine. It is your whole existence.”
The demon swallowed a lump down their throat, their featurestwisting as if they had tasted something bitter, before they looked around. Amelia followed their gaze to the rust-colored sky where they had fallen from. Thick clouds rolled over the atmosphere, and between the folds, a circle glimmered in light. At first, she thought it might have been the sun. But the borders around the shape were dark like ink, and they began to crumble. Tiny flecks of gold rained from the sky like ash. She let a piece fall in her palm before the slightest movement made the scab crumble and disintegrate.
She looked up again, and the portal was gone.
“Blood opens the portal, and the portal is sealed once it dries.” Malicine’s eyes sharpened at Talon. “That’s why you weren’t able to return.”
They squinted at their surroundings, but the smoke was too thick. Wings sprouted from their back as the demon flew in the air to find a peripheral view. As they reached higher, Amelia heard them starting to cough. A large ash chunk hurtled through the air and struck the demon’s side, burning a hole in their cape. They crashed into the ground and heaved more soot from their lungs. Amelia rushed over, but Malicine put out the already put out the flames with their fist.
“What’s wrong with the air?” they snapped.
“I do not know. It has been too long. But I am starting to remember now, life before this.”Talon pecked at the crumbs littered on the ground until they dissolved in his beak.“There used to be trees that stretched for miles in the sky. The world was a barren terrain of ice and sleet, and demons roamed everywhere. Now there is nothing but red.”
Amelia blinked at the land of ash around them. Burnt tree trunks were left as headless stumps, rotten and decayed. Everything was covered in a coat of grime, so that wherever she touched, ash smudged her brittle fingers.
They wandered around the barren land, the oppressive heat fogging her glass skin. The air was heavy with the smell of burnt flesh, and she followed the stench of death to uncover a pile of debris, where corpses rotted in ash and dust. She recognized bent horns, broken wings, spikes and slimy black coils that had long been dried in charcoal.
“We’re too late,” Malicine murmured. Disappointment betrayed their face. Even if there were other creatures, perhaps ones that looked like Malicine, they were all dead.
“This can’t be it,” Amelia said. Denial fueled her to move. She raced to the shore, where waves of a dark sea creeped steadily toward them. Black water moved in a slow, rhythmic pulse. Layers of soot covered the surface in a muddy expanse. A weak gust of wind barely moved a canoe that had been stuck in the water. She tried pulling the stern, but the fixture refused to budge. Every time she pulled, the canoe groaned like it was dying, and new cracks etched her skin from straining too hard.
“You’re not going anywhere,” Malicine said flatly.
Amelia jammed the shards of her fingers into the rotting boat, but it refused to budge. She would never move forward. The water was too still, too solid, a semi-stagnant pool of death and decay. Frustrated, she gave up and sat inside.
A long moment of silence passed as she sat in her failure. How quickly her hopes had disintegrated, like dreams that would never be remembered after the cruelty of waking up. She’d wanted to stay in those dreams, even for a moment, to see if she really could live somewhere.
In the thick smoke, she turned to Malicine.
“Why did you curse me?”
Malicine blinked, taken aback by the sudden question. Perhapsit was the hard press of Amelia’s lips that made the demon answer in earnest.
