Cross stumbled around in near darkness. A dim glowing orb – some arcane vampire trinket the size of a softball – dangled from one of the enumerate chains that hung overhead. The orb leaked steam and smelled like gasoline.
He inspected the chains. Dozens of them hung down from the high ceiling, but the lower ends of the chains were still several feet over his head. Bits of molded meat, ragged cloth and bone dangled from the hooks.
He sloshed his way back to the steps and the sealed iron door. The steps had been swallowed up by the water, and even when he ascended he was still submerged up to his ankles.
Cross reached for his spirit. She was there, but she was incredibly weak. They’d done something to her, something to the bond that the two of them shared, some damage he couldn’t quite identify. He felt it inside of him, a wound so deep it ate at him and blackened his soul, like he’d been filled with oily smoke. That wound wouldn’t let them heal or truly touch one another.
Not again.
“
God damn it!”
His voice echoed into the darkness and faded away. He was answered only by the slosh of deep water and the jangle of rusted chains.
Cross limped the perimeter of the room. His spirit managed to keep his body warm – he worried about Dillon, who had no such ability – but there was little to be done about the water. He thought about trench foot. He’d be able to sleep on the top step next to the door so long as he propped himself upright, but he’d only be able to doze, at best, and he knew that if he was too exhausted he’d quietly slip under the surface and drown.
He tapped on the walls, and tried the door. The steel was lined with thick patches of grey-red rust, but it was free of handholds, and impossible to climb.
Time passed. Cross tried to reach the chains, but he couldn’t. He paced and limped through the grimy waters. He tried the walls again.
They’d taken his gauntlets. Even if his spirit hadn’t been so weak and their bond hadn’t been as damaged as it was, it was incredibly dangerous for him to call on her. At best, he’d scar them both forever.
I know better than to have even tried
. His mind felt numb and slow.
What the hell is wrong with me?
He walked, back and forth, and memorized the particular smudges on the wall, the spots where the steel had been damaged in peculiar ways. One pattern of scratches looked like some ancient language. He thought that another looked like a lizard wearing a hat, and that was when he understood that he was losing his mind.
His skin was cold and clammy. He was afraid to look at his feet under the boots. His stomach growled.
Cross closed his eyes, and hours seemed to pass in the space of that
hands with claws reach out of the water grab pull you down slide the skin off your bones suck lick chew our way up your body
blink. He slept standing up. Horrid images assaulted him in his dreams, so he did his best to stay awake.
They’re trying to break you
, he told himself.
This is what they do.
This is what they did to Snow.
He thought about his sister. He tried not to, but sometimes he couldn’t help it. He missed her. Her death was his fault, because in the end he hadn’t been able to save her. His chest tightened at the memory. His hands shook. He saw her face, younger than when she’d died, when she was maybe ten years old. He heard her voice.
Cross wept.
He sees her on the train, burning.
The light grew dimmer. He saw things move in the shadows, things he hoped weren’t really there. The chains rattled now and again, blown by some phantom wind. There was no breeze in that dank pit, of course, no clean air at all. Cross tasted poison on his tongue and bile in the back of his throat.
He pissed in the corner, not caring that it would blend with the other water in his cage.
Cross lost time. It might have been only hours since they’d deposited him there, or it might have been days. It soon became very difficult to tell if he was awake or asleep.
He guessed awake, because there were no hands or voices that came out of the water to claim his mind or his flesh.
Cross started to cough unceasingly. He used his spirit to fend off sickness. Doing so without a thaumaturgic implement burned his fingers, and they sizzled with pain, but Cross was thankful for the reminder that he could still use them. He was happy to be awake.
“
Hello?” he said. His voice echoed and faded. Only the chains answered.
He tried to count the hours, and realized that he had no way to even start. There was nothing he could use to mark the passage of days aside from his own blood, and he wasn’t ready to do that. Not yet.
Cross stared at the wall. He was exhausted.
I’m never leaving
, he thought.
This is my grave.
NINE
FADE
He walks on a mountain, but it isn’t really him. Whatever body he inhabits now is light and lithe and moves with feline grace.
He slithers through the shadows of a falling forest. The sky is bright and cold. Azure light shines down and melts thick patches of dark ice at the base of petrified trees.
He smells sap and winter flowers. There is snow beneath his bare feet, and he tastes nectar and honey in the air.
Leaves rattle as a hard wind pushes its way up the steep mountainside.
Below and behind him is a valley filled with burning trees.
The blaze rages silently. The smoldering fire gives off no heat: it is a cold blaze. Wind carries bitter frost and charcoal mist that lands on his tongue. The flames are black and blue, the color of hurt.
Everything around the mountain is on fire. The world below is lit with dark flames.
Where am I?
He fears that he is back at the glade, looking into the soul prison within the obelisk. But this is something else, a landscape that is unknown to him, an undiscovered land. This place serves as a refuge for some lost and lonely mind.
Deep clouds cling to the air like grease on glass.
Something deep inside the mountain stirs. The stone under his feet groans and shifts. He hears a distant crack, like an enormous stone has fallen.
He runs.
It is not his body. She is tiny, whoever she is, short and light, and she is used to running, used to pushing herself beyond her limits. It is what she has always done.
The air is sluggish and thick. He moves as if through deep snow.
The light fades. Shadows spill across his vision like dark wine. Leaves crash and shatter on the ground like glass and stone.
Whoever’s mind he has intruded on is tearing itself apart.
Help.
He doesn’t know the voice. He feels that he should. He feels her words, and they cut across his ethereal skin like dull razors.
Help me. Please.
He stumbles up the mountain, moves deeper into a forest as it collapses into drifts of dry ash. The air swallows itself, becomes a cyclone that shines through the eye of an oily storm.
Everything turns hot. Mercurial wind scrapes through the bone trees. White dust falls from the sky.
A dissolving silhouette melts in the cold white eye of the liquid storm. It is a dark human outline that pulls apart like snow in water.
He reaches for the figure with a hand that isn’t his. The mountain shifts, and everything spins. Dismal breath washes over him. He silently plummets back down the mountain, into the heart of a raging cold inferno.
Cross wasn’t sure how he’d slept, or even
if
he’d slept. He stood against the wall, hurting everywhere. His knees felt like they’d been pelted with hammers. His back and shoulders ached with knots of tension, and his eyes were raw. His body was soaking wet. He shivered miserably, and sneezed.
He had no idea how long he’d been awake. He didn’t actually remember waking, just as he didn’t remember falling asleep.
Cross wandered through the ankle-deep waters of his oversized cell. His feet were sodden within his boots. His sinuses burned. The air felt toxic.
The oubliette was a nightmare of cobalt blue steel littered with dark detritus that floated in the air like clouds of heavy soot. The chains above his head rattled and clanged, forced by some breeze that wasn’t there.
Sometimes Cross imagined bodies up there in the darkness of the ceiling, lost in the jungle of chains. If there were corpses, they had to be as bored as he was.
He only barely felt his spirit, and her presence faded with each passing breath. They were killing her slowly. Her whispers were barely audible above the water and the chains.
What have they done to us?
Cross drifted. He felt like a shadow. Every time his consciousness started to fade he sloshed through the waters and tried to stay focused. He felt like he’d just woken up.
H
e had
the dazed sensation of having just stepped into an unfamiliar room, over and over again. He had to remember what had just happened, had to re-establish some sense of place, of self. He felt like he was dreaming.
Maybe I am.
It was a nightmare of isolation, a dismal end to a dismal tale that would finish with him alone and in the dark, trapped in a metal coffin filled with water, shadows and chains.
His body was weary to the bone. He’d barely sat since he’d been brought to the prison. His legs had gone dull with pain. His muscles were so stiff it was a wonder he could move at all.
Cross couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten. He had moments when he couldn’t recall much of anything, and that frightened him, but fear, he decided, was good. It meant they hadn’t broken him yet.
He tried desperately to hold on to whatever thoughts he could, but it was difficult with his brain shifting in and out of focus. The world was a dark and noisy blur.
He thought of Snow and her dolls and her faceless boyfriend Geoff who he never actually got to meet; of Mom and Dad and his childhood, swings and plastic basketball hoops and bikes with training wheels; of the world turning black, The Black, shifting out of focus, the sky tearing open like a bloody and festering wound and raining blood and ash and spewing forth things that roamed the streets and ate people; he thought of days of sickness, floating in and out of consciousness, feverish and at the edge of death while nightmares lurked outside of his window; staring off into a hot darkness, a nightmare of eyes and teeth and the shadow of a cold and vast mountain; Drogan, an old mystic, a man from the mountains, who’d healed him, who’d explained to his wailing mother how her son was a warlock, a freak like the things that were destroying the world.
Cross remembered Razorwings and their vampire riders as they flew low through a red sky and searched for survivors, for refugees and lost children that they stole away and took back to the Ebon Cities’ feeding vats and skin factories.
He remembered the red-haired beauty he lost his virginity to, a whore whose name he couldn’t even remember but whose face and body he would never forget.
He remembered Samuel Graves, his best friend, so full of trouble and life and piss and grit, covered in mud and grime at his side in Blackmarsh, a prisoner of the very city Cross was lost in now, but Graves was dead, killed back in Rhaine in what felt like another lifetime now.
He recalled the study halls of Glaive and the cracked and listing monument on Ghostborne Island and the cold fields west of Thornn.
Cross recorded and catalogued his mind. He tried desperately to remember it all, to shelve away every ridiculous detail and fact about himself, to hold onto them, to place them somewhere and keep them there without having to even try. The memories blasted through his brain with staccato rhythm. It was difficult to keep up with them.
Soon, he lost track of everything but his mind.
He felt his spirit as she struggled. She stayed close, tied to him like a drowning swimmer in a pitch black sea. Cross couldn’t call on her for much more than fending off his pain, and even that strained her. He felt her whispers, so quiet they were like rustling leaves in a soft wind, completely out of place in the grime and stink and eye-numbing darkness.
Easy. Easy, I won’t let them hurt you.
It struck Cross as mildly insane that this was the first time since he’d acquired his new spirit that she wasn’t driving him crazy.
The light faded to a blur. It was hard to see even his own hand in front of his face.