Total pages in book: 204
Estimated words: 193124 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 966(@200wpm)___ 772(@250wpm)___ 644(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 193124 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 966(@200wpm)___ 772(@250wpm)___ 644(@300wpm)
The screaming behind me shifts something deep inside my heart—or mind; it cannot be my soul, for I have lost mine, if ever I had one. Though I tell myself not to, though I order myself not to turn around, this is my little pebble, my compulsion. The thing I cannot not look at.
My head pivots.
Merc is strung between four black flames, as if he’s drawn and quartered. He’s naked, twisting against the holds, his wide, pain-crazed eyes focused on the murky gray sky overhead, his muscles in stark clench, his neck veins pumping, his mouth cranked wide so that the insides of his teeth are all showing.
The black flames are tearing him apart while he’s alive.
Except he’s dead.
So the consumption is perpetual. Even as his flesh is rendered apart, it regenerates on the spot, the stasis of torture unchanging such that he’s trapped in the agony. Still, I tell myself this is a lie, an apparition meant to appeal to a side of me I no longer have, if I ever possessed it at all—
The evil laughter that first greeted me as I stepped through the Fulcrum repeats, weaving in and around me like a gust of wind.
I’m reminded of my true purpose.
I turn to resume my assault against the Dark King, but when I put forward my palms, what comes out is nothing like what was before. My father easily casts the energy aside as he straightens from his tuck. Replants his hooved feet. Rises to his full, towering height.
Behind him, the fissure begins to close.
Recalling all the reasons I mustn’t be distracted, I redouble my efforts—
Merc’s screaming, even if it is an illusion, is not something I can ignore. My focus is no longer complete, and the trap I fall into invisible, but better than iron bars: I don’t know whether the torture is real, and if it is, I just cannot bear it.
Even though I hate him, my love is … complex.
And that makes the emotion real even though I strive to deny it, the smallest crack in my resolve becoming a fault line that destroys me completely—
“Hear him suffer, and know that it is real, daughter mine. No image thus, but rather a servant who tried to double-cross his master and for what? Love?” My father laughs bitterly and starts coming forward. “That castrating force is far, far more destructive than anything I have ever done, a weakening, killing, insidious fissure that sucks us in and holds us captive. I had love—for your mother. And what did she do to me? Stole my child, seduced me into this hell, and imprisoned me here for a millennium!”
Black flames explode into the fetid air at his rage.
And then he puts his own palm out such that it faces me. “You know, Sorrel, I do not think he suffers enough. Let us remedy this, shall we.”
Just as a wave of dark energy flows from my father, I do what makes no sense, what I shouldn’t, what I can’t.
I leap in front of the stream.
The agony is greater than the universe, everything that is cold and hard, that feeds off the suffering and misfortune of others, that sickly rejoices in the deaths of children and animals, in the leveling of houses and families. It is war. It is famine. It is pestilence. It is torture.
It is cruelty.
And now it is me.
The stream lasts forever, and when it relents, I slump down, landing beside Merc, who has been released from the flames that held him and also crumpled into the red dirt.
As I roll over to retch out a black, viscous stream from my stomach, our eyes meet.
He is real.
I don’t know how I know this, but I can sense his essence.
And though he is a demon, the tears that fall from his eyes are also real and they are not for himself. They are for … me, and they come from a place of love, even though he is what he is.
Even though I am what I am.
I loved you even though I knew your whole story because who you are is so much more than the curse you carry.
I make a decision before I’m aware of coming to any conclusion, and my body moves not from my mind, but from my heart: I reach out my hand weakly toward Merc. And he meets my palm with his own.
As the connection is made, I am reminded of my other truth, the quieter one.
I am half my father … but so am I half my mother, too. And whatever she did to me, she was not evil. In fact, she attempted to save all of Anathos.
The Savior. The Dark King.
My history. My origins.
Me.
A tear forms and slips free from my eye. Two sides of the same coin, the good and the evil, and shouldn’t it be up to me if I land on heads … or tails?