Chapter 469: The Existence of Hell
“Oh shit, what have you done.”
His voice came out shaking.
The darkness was the same one I’d seen on the wall of the canyon, the same that had crept up under the man who killed Tristan the moment he first arrived. Cracks spread across my body, and blood welled through every one of them. White Feather was holding me up now, because the flames I’d been using for legs had guttered out under me.
I dragged my glare up to them and forced out a shout, weaker than I wanted it.
“You monsters! What are you doing? What are you doing with the gates?”
For a moment Uio froze, his expression going blank with shock. Then the shock slid off him, and he smiled.
“I was as careful as anyone could have been. What do you mean, what are we doing with the gates? I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Maggie had already summoned another flame, and this time she drove it at the snake. The fire spared nothing it touched. The water itself was alight, white flame skating visibly across the surface, and that was proof enough of how far her domain reached. Over Uio I caught a thin sheet of air wrapped close against his skin, most likely how he kept himself from cooking inside Maggie’s domain.
White Feather and Kassie stood untouched by it, though their skin was slick with sweat all the same. A shield of cold sealed off Brunhilde and Ilse, who stood well back from the main fight in any case. Tristan’s body was shielded too. Maggie’s doing, I guessed.
“Don’t fucking lie to me. Experiments. Two gates crammed into one. Strange monsters that don’t sit right with anything I’ve seen. And now the darkness inside a gate, the same kind that snuck under your partner. Or was it you, since you can melt into the air?”
He laughed.
“Sharp wits, for how dumb you look.”
The grin didn’t move.
“But you’ll forgive me if I don’t go spilling our plans across the water to you. And even if I did, even if you knew every last piece of it, what exactly would you do?”
He said it the way a man might read out the weather.
“We are a force greater than everything in your world. The only reason you have never once heard our name is that the world itself keeps us hidden. The church. The six gods. Every one of them owes us their very existence.”
“I didn’t ask for a damn prologue. I asked what nonsense you’re pulling with the gates.”
In truth, I didn’t need him to answer. I already had the shape of it sitting in my head. Ever since the chameleon, and then watching those two monsters up close, a suspicion had been settling low in my gut.
“You bastards are trying to make something, aren’t you. Let me be more accurate. You’re learning how to open gates, close them, control them. Build them out of nothing. And more than that, you’re learning how to write the blueprint itself, and the Spirit Beasts that crawl out of it.”
Uio froze. Then his face did something strange.
“Ohhh.” Something flickered behind his eyes. “You got that far on your own?”
He grinned, and there was nothing kind in it.
“Not quite close. Not quite far, either.”
Then he sighed.
“I think I’ll put an end to this little charade, then. Before you cost me the whole mission ground.”
He lashed his hand out and opened it toward us. His right hand vanished. The next instant the cathedral simply came apart, as though the wind had balled itself into a fist and punched clean through the stone.
By then Maggie had already torn into the snake. Far out across the water it thrashed and wailed, writhing where her fire ate through its scales. The core of it wouldn’t take the flame.
Under the scales the flesh sat packed like stone, impregnable, and though the scales themselves burned away in ugly, peeling sheets to bare the muscle beneath, not even Maggie could drive the fire any deeper than that. Still, the pain of it was enormous. The thing screamed, and screamed again.
As the cathedral blew apart beneath her, the upper span she had been standing on crumbled and took her footing with it. She didn’t fall so much as spin up into the open air, trailing white flame behind her.
Her silver chains shot out and threaded through the black sky, then came down through the sea in wide, terrible arcs. Where they cut, the water split clean open and took a moment to close again behind them.
She worked the chains with a strange delicacy, and their reach seemed to run on without any end to it. The control in it was past anything I could have imagined.
‘Well, shit, Cade. That is how you use a damn chain.’
She wasn’t ing down. Every pull she made, she rode the momentum of it, rolling on and on through the sky while the chains lashed out after Uio and his partner, vicious and tireless, though the two of them were far off across the water.
And Uio was dodging, far better than he had any right to. He would melt into the wind and step back out of it somewhere new, over and over, quick enough that I kept losing the thread of where he was at all.
The snake caught what he didn’t. Every lash he slipped landed on it instead, and it took each one in pure, grinding agony.
For all that range and violence, not once did a chain so much as graze Kassie, or White Feather, or me. One even whipped past right in front of us, close enough to leave a spatter of black blood on the ice and a thin groove scored across it, a hand’s breadth from our feet.
And still she kept moving, never once breaking her rhythm, even though that same pass had just batted an attack of Uio’s clean away from me. She was backing him into a corner and forcing him to run, and keep running.
Kassie chuckled in disbelief.
“This church fossil. Had she been hiding her strength this whole time?”
I watched her blur across the sky, there and then not there.
“I don’t think she was hiding anything. I think she just never had a reason to fight before now.”
Which left me wondering what had happened back at Recimiras. What had put that kind of fury into her.
At the same time, the broken wall of the gate flickered again, that strange thing that managed to look far off and close up all at once. The whole place shuddered. Then the eyes of it slid closed, slow, and when they did there was nothing left but darkness, and the darkness had the look of a pit with no bottom to it.
Uio came out of the wind for a beat, distracted, his head flung back. In that half-second of an opening, Maggie’s chain caught him full on and sent him skidding for kilometers, tumbling and rolling across the surface of the water. But before the chain could swing back around, he had already vanished mid-tumble and reappeared beside his partner, screaming.
“Damn it! Get a grip, Ritt! We have to leave this damn place, now!”
The darkness I’d marked before, a smaller version of it, welled up out of Uio’s feet and spread over the pair of them, swallowing them whole in an instant. Then it shot away, fast as light. No. Faster than that.
“Chase them!”
I shouted it the second I saw it happen.
Kassie shot forward. White Feather came right after, with me still gathered up in her arms. And that was the moment the gate chose to fall apart. We were tearing along the lowered floor of the water when the ground beneath us began to go. The whole scene of it, sea and ice and sky, peeled away into a darkness of nothing. White Feather threw more speed into her legs, but there was no outrunning a gate ing apart at the seams.
In the space of a single breath the world went black, endless and without a floor, and before any of us could get our bearings we were falling, all of us together, down into the pit.
[End of Volume 3: Let All Hell Loose]
***
[A/N]
Been a while since I spoke here, I wonder if you guys miss me. This volume had been quite the journey, and I do know we have a lot of unfunished business, Cade does, plenty of them.
However, sadly though… this is where the volume es to an end. And we will be entering a new volume tomorrow. I am particularly giddy about this one. This is where our dream will e through.
I want to take this opportunity to thank you readers for supporting me, and voting those golden tickets, although, I have to say those votes have bene lacking these days, see the book is not even in top 100, but thank you anyway, I love you guys.
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