Eight Will Fall, page 24
“What do you think will happen to Garran if you return to the Surface without my power?” Kyran asked when she hesitated. “Do you think the queen will release him? That she will release you? The moment you return, Ilona’s luminite-gilded blade will be at your throat. Your mother will die. Vania will die. Garran … Perhaps she will keep him alive.”
“Please,” Larkin begged through gritted teeth.
“Ilona has a taste for the young and vulnerable. And with such power … what a weapon Garran could become. A replacement for Amias, perhaps.”
“What does Amias have to do with this?”
“You can ask him yourself, when you heal him.”
When she healed him. She would only have the power to heal Amias after Kyran died.
Larkin had no choice. It did not matter if Kyran’s power corrupted her, or if she was brave enough to take on Ilona herself. If she did not do this, her brother and her family would die. Amias would bleed out in this very room.
Killing Kyran was exactly what she wanted, and yet she felt robbed of the victory. It wouldn’t be by her hand. She wasn’t in control.
“Let me see him, please,” she pleaded. “Let me be with Amias.”
Larkin stood, approaching the boy and the tangled mass that impaled him. She couldn’t bear to look at his body, choosing instead to focus on his face.
She lifted his chin and wiped the crimson from his lips. His garnet eyes found her, vacant and bloodshot, a small glimmer of life left within them.
They had been so close to succeeding, but Ilona had deceived them—used them. She was as much of a poison to Demura as Kyran was.
Larkin’s eyes fluttered shut as she sensed shards of glass slicing through her in a whirlwind, and gasped at the painful emotion.
It was Kyran.
She dug deeper, sifting through the glass, unearthing him, until the shards caught fire within her, turning molten like the rage she was all too familiar with. She understood.
He hated her.
No, he hated everything. Everyone. He did not want Ilona defeated for his people. He wanted Ilona dead because of what she had done to him. And all of the lives Kyran had consumed. The corpses and bodies he’d claimed as his own to breach the Surface. Casseem, Tamsyn, Brielle, Devon—Kyran hadn’t thought twice about killing them.
This power—this rage—would consume her. What would happen to her? Would she be able to control herself? Power corrupted. Power transformed.
Larkin kissed Amias’s forehead. She imagined a world where they escaped, families safe and well, living beyond the city’s boundaries. A farm at the base of the eastern hills; summertime; warm breezes laced with pine; meadows of tall, dry grass rippling beautifully. She would walk through them barefoot, her hand caught in his. When he laughed, she would no longer find it surprising. She would have already memorized the sound of it.
He would feel nothing but bliss and peace, and just like his laughter, it would be expected, the sense of it like breath in her lungs.
She tucked the thought of it away in her heart, the only place such a life could ever exist.
Larkin didn’t know what she expected Kyran to be like when she first entered the Reach. Part of her imagined a beautiful, young, and malicious version of himself, like Bianca. Another part of her thought she would find some terrible creature like the quartermaster.
Kyran was both. He was huge, and constantly consuming. Immortal, connected to so many bodies, yet utterly alone.
She approached Kyran, touching the smooth skin of his face. Blood rushed in rivers from the punctures in his body, though he didn’t care, watching her with eager eyes. Her fingers drifted downward to ribs and muscle, and she pressed her palm to his heart, feeling the thrum of it as it pumped his blood—blood he shared with his monstrous creation. She could still hear it echo through the chamber. Incredible. After all this time. Just like with Bianca, she couldn’t even imagine the kind of conjuration it took to keep his heart beating for a thousand years, his mind as sharp and capable of evil as it always had been.
And she would be the one to end it, but not with his blade. She would not make this easy on him.
Larkin siphoned and projected his rage, flesh and bone melting away as she sank her hand into his chest.
He screamed, his hate bolting through her as she wrapped her fingers around his heart. Blood spurted, the beat of the organ quaking through her palm.
She heard the squelch of a tendril near her ear. It lashed out, punching into the back of her neck, wrapping around her head.
His blinding rage was no longer just coursing through her body.
It was a part of her.
In his dying moments, Kyran had fused himself to her.
Not only himself. His creation.
She saw the Reach.
The Passage of the Damned, the languid river, the ocean menagerie. She saw Bianca’s empty cavern and the coils of the labyrinth.
And then the unfamiliar. Rivers of molten metal and chambers filled with hot bubbling water, crawling with strange reptiles and glowing flowers. Underground cities of stone spires, stretching for miles. Honeycombed cliffs and chasms of fire. He was showing her the other sectors.
Then, he showed her the Surface: Demuran fields studded with sinkholes, collapsed farms, and ruined caravans. The city in shambles, a pile of rubble on the mountain, the only standing structure: the peak of the palace.
Every emotion known to man poured into her: collisions of fire and ice, bright sparks and dark waters, roiling and raging and bursting through her.
Her body hitched as she released a scream she couldn’t hear. The sensations were tearing her apart.
Destroy it.
She became a sieve, latching on to those emotions most dark: the roiling, the weight, the fire.
Siphoning, projecting. The world was only pain and an endless void.
THIRTY-TWO
Larkin’s eyes blinked open to the cold light of crystals.
She lay on her back. All around her, dust drifted downward, catching in her eyelashes, coating her skin. It gathered on the ground in front of her, picking up and swirling back through the air when she released a breath.
Warmth swallowed her body, liquid filling her ears.
She sat up, pain tearing through her. By the dim light, she made out a figure slumped over in the blood.
She crawled to Amias. His body was lanced by the tendrils, his clothing crimson and sticking to his flesh. He was alive, but an empty shell, his breath hollow and fading.
She eased him onto his back. His eyes were glazed. She didn’t know if he could see her, so she leaned over him, gently touching his face and taking his hand. His trembling, bloodstained fingers twitched as his agony resurfaced.
She needed to end his suffering. But there was no light from him. No joy, no tranquility. She had no way to mend him, not even with her new power.
Her new power … Kyran lived inside her.
His blood had always been hers. Deep down, had she known this? Had she wanted so desperately to be Bianca’s because she had secretly known what dark potential ran in her veins?
“I can’t save you.” Tears of frustration spilled from her eyes.
Amias wasn’t supposed to leave her like this. They’d done the impossible, killing Demura’s god of the underworld. She should have been thinking of returning to Garran, and his release, of home. She’d entered the Reach wanting only her family’s safety.
Amias was supposed to mean nothing to her.
“I told you I would bring you home,” she whispered. “Don’t make me break my promise.”
Amias’s eyelids fluttered, but his breathing continued to slow.
“We aren’t finished.” She touched his cheek, the pad of her thumb grazing his colorless lips. “We are supposed to survive this. I’m supposed to meet Skye, and your mother. My father will love you, and so will Vania. My mother will be suspicious of you.” Something caught between a sob and laughter bubbled from her. “Garran will sense how much I think of you and never stop teasing me for it. And somehow—somehow—we will escape the queen. Live quietly in the hills. Bake like bread beneath the sun. You’ll take me to see the ocean. And…”
Larkin shut her eyes, pain silencing her. And someday I will love you.
And at the very last, she felt something stir within him.
A spark.
Bright.
Furious.
Ribbon and rope were simple objects woven from thread and hemp. A sword was nothing more than honed iron. But this …
Amias’s screams echoed off the cavern walls as she worked. His agony should have doused anything else he emitted, but she clawed through it, finding his bravery, the spark in darkness.
“You’re going to live,” she kept telling him, her voice soft. She had to make him believe that he would.
She could not fathom the time that had passed, nor how he stayed alive. The magic seemed impossible, against the rules of what she knew, but it was working. She knew to destroy the blood in him that pooled the wrong way. She knew which organs inside him needed mending, and how. She knew how to open his veins and fill them again.
She knew, she knew, she knew all of these things that she had never learned.
When his wounds were closed, she sagged with exhaustion. Larkin hauled Amias away from Kyran’s tomb and to the edge of the room, where she collapsed with him in her arms.
One of her hands remained pressed to his chest, rising and falling with his breath.
It was the most beautiful thing she’d ever felt. Larkin let out a sob.
Amias’s hand twitched against hers. “What did you do?” he asked hoarsely.
Larkin ran her finger across the little white scar near his lip. The crystal light caught in his garnet eyes. The color had returned to his cheeks.
“You don’t have to worry.” She wiped blood from his forehead. “You aren’t Kyran’s descendant. I am.”
She watched his face and sensed his awe as her words resonated inside of him. “Larkin…”
“It’s all right.” She forced a smile. “It’s just magic. I’m his.”
He lifted his hand to tuck a curl behind her ear. “You’re his descendant, but you aren’t him.”
Hearing the words from Amias gave Larkin strength. She pressed her cheek into his open palm. His skin was cold. Turning her head, Larkin breathed on his fingers, warming them.
“My mother will be suspicious of you too,” Amias said.
Larkin grinned against his hand. Amias had heard her. No, he had done more than hear her. He’d fought to stay alive for her. For their future.
“Let’s go home,” she said.
THIRTY-THREE
As Larkin and Amias sat at the threshold of Kyran’s throne room, Larkin studied their surroundings. “We’re beneath the palace.” Before her, the two crystal staircases wound upward. “He told me that he’d conjured a way for us to return to the Surface.”
“Through Melay’s palace?” Amias asked, groaning as he sat up. He was in pain. Too much pain.
Larkin nodded.
“She’ll kill you.” Amias’s cold terror shattered though her, terror greater than when Kyran held him in his clutches, on the verge of death.
“What did she do to you?” Larkin whispered.
He clenched his jaw, shaking his head so gently it was almost a shiver.
“I won’t let her hurt you,” Larkin said. “I’ll never let her hurt you again. But you have to trust me. The only way out is through Melay’s palace.”
* * *
Larkin had healed Amias to the best of her ability, but he was not well. With his arm around her shoulder, she dragged him upward, where she found a tunnel entrance to another set of stairs, the spiral steps lined with glowing crystals.
Kyran had made this passage for her. He’d granted her the power to save Amias, and now she was doing what he wished of her.
First she was Ilona’s pawn, and now she was Kyran’s. Kyran was dead, and if she didn’t kill Ilona too, Garran would still die. Maybe even the rest of her family.
Every fifty steps or so, Larkin would stop to let Amias rest. She was breathless herself, the air thinning as they climbed. But Amias was breathing much too hard.
Maybe she’d healed him wrong—missed an internal wound. She hadn’t understood what she was doing when she was doing it, after all.
She couldn’t let Amias sense her worry. “Everything will be all right when we get out of here.” Larkin pulled her water skin off her belt and passed it to Amias. He sat up to drink, uneasy. In the light of the crystals, shadows sank into the hollows of his face.
“I need to tell you something about Melay.” Amias wheezed as he spoke.
“Shh.” Larkin ran her fingers through his hair. “You need to rest.”
“It’s important that you know before we reach the Surface. Before we face her.” Amias shivered. “I wasn’t just sitting in a hole in the ground for five years. You know that, right?”
“So the rumors weren’t true?” Larkin asked with a small smile.
“I was only in confinement for a year.” He chuckled and winced. “I suspect that if I had been living in a hole in the ground since I was twelve, I’d be even more reserved. Which is saying something. No, I had a room in the palace.”
“You did?” All this time, everyone thought Amias had been executed.
“I rarely got to leave it, of course. Melay couldn’t have anyone knowing that I was alive. She would visit me often though. Even have meals with me … just the two of us. She presented herself as a savior. She could teach me how to control myself, and maybe one day work for her.”
“She wanted to use you.” Just like she is trying to use us now, thought Larkin. “But how could she teach you? She’s not an Empath.”
“There are a few Empaths who secretly work for her,” said Amias. “Melay hates Empaths, yes, but she’s not an idiot. That’s why she hasn’t ordered all Empaths to be killed. She wants to keep the power alive to use the magic at her convenience. As long as it’s under her terms.”
“And what did she want to do with you?”
“She wanted me to hone my destruction.”
“She wanted to make you into a weapon?” Larkin was unearthing so much darkness in him, breathtakingly silent darkness.
Amias’s eyes glassed over.
“You don’t have to tell me,” Larkin said as she stroked his cheek, wishing there was a way she could make reliving this moment less painful for him.
“I need to tell you.” Amias took a deep breath, pain etched into his face. “Because this secret is exhausting. It’s poisoning me.”
She stroked his hair again in encouragement, silently bracing herself.
“Melay wanted me to have the right tools to practice destruction. I needed emotion, and she provided it. She tortured people in front of me. The agony was both a threat and a fuel. Because if I didn’t practice magic with their pain, it meant they had been hurt for nothing.”
“Gods,” Larkin whispered. How many innocent children like Amias had Ilona taken advantage of over a millennium?
“When I was younger, I’d cry after. She’d hold me like a mother. Wipe the tears from my face and tell me that I would understand someday, that this would only make me stronger. And I believed her for a long time. I did what she wanted, even. Performed her exercises. Destroyed.”
Everything clicked into place: why Amias didn’t want to destroy, why he panicked when they’d come across the tortured soldiers. The trill of fear Larkin sensed when she mentioned Melay. He wasn’t stubborn, and he wasn’t a rebel. He was simply trying to survive without spiraling down into the darkness of what the queen had done to him.
Ilona had taken advantage of a child. She’d nearly ruined him because of her greed. Anguish from the memories flooded him. She hated how he suffered.
“What changed?” she asked. “Why didn’t you become her weapon?”
“My tutor,” said Amias. “She told me more often than not that I had a choice. And I grew older and realized that she was right. So I began to refuse. Melay wasn’t too happy, and the torturing became more frequent. Sometimes it was even people I knew. Empaths from my old farm. Every time the guards marched me down to the carving board, I expected to see my mother or sister pinned to it. That never happened.”
“She needed to keep them alive for leverage,” said Larkin.
“I taught myself how to remain calm in the midst of the worst emotions. If she couldn’t threaten me by torturing others, she was powerless. And it worked. She finally grew tired and shoved me in a cell. I was certain I’d die there. I never expected this.”
“To die in this hell instead?”
He snapped out of his daze, and his eyes found hers. “I’d rather die here with you than live without a single purpose, wasting away in the dark.”
Here with you.
He relaxed, as though he’d found momentary peace. And she wished more than anything that she could let him relish it.
“Kyran told me something important, Amias,” Larkin said hesitantly. “Something that terrifies me, something I don’t understand yet. The queen—Karsyn Melay—she isn’t who we think she is. Melay is Queen Ilona.”
Larkin didn’t sense any alarm from him.
“I’m not surprised,” Amias said, breathing deeply. “I’ve been wondering about Melay myself since we met Bianca. I was in the palace for five years, and Melay—Ilona—didn’t ever seem to fall ill or age.”
“Who’s been keeping her alive all this time? The Empaths in the palace?”
“Maybe.” He bit on his lower lip, thinking. “My tutor knows more than I do.” He managed something between a wince and a smile. “And luckily for us, she lives just above the palace dungeons.”
Larkin hoped this was confirmation that they could enter the palace with an immediate ally. If Amias’s tutor had coaxed him to reject Ilona’s routine of torture and destruction magic, it meant she’d been working against Ilona for a while.
After Amias rested, they continued upward. Larkin dwelled on her task as they climbed. Killing Ilona seemed so much worse than killing Kyran. Kyran was evil. Ilona, on the other hand, was supposed to be a protector. The Goddess of Light. If Larkin succeeded, she’d change a thousand years of ingrained Demuran myth.
