It was impossible not to laugh at how they flinched beneath the falling stones. There was no need to run or hide. It would be over soon.
As the trembling ceased and dust settled, I padded forward, admiring the blackened roots holding me aloft, no longer swollen and weeping with blood. My own still trickled from my hand, drip, drip, dripping onto what remained below. I lifted it, inspecting the welting red slash beneath the thick coating of ash. The ash was everywhere, clumps clinging to my eyelashes, my dress, my hair. It settled over the rest of the chamber, shrouding the debris and bodies in a blanket of grey. Under it, limbs jutted at impossible angles, brains leaking across the floor. I had the thought to ask someone to capture it in a painting. It was a masterpiece, fit for a fresco.
Movement caught my eye. Pressed to an acolyte, next to a lump of rock the size of a horse, quivered two horns. Falstaff quaked, one side of his mesh veil hanging loose, a hand clutched to his face like a maiden would grasp at her bodice, keeping it in place. I beamed at them both, and the druid may have beamed back, I could not be sure, but the acolyte… I pouted at his countenance, hisstare, lips downcast and cheeks hollow, jaw slack.Pity.
I opened my lips, ready to advise him to smile, but then, I saw them. Not acolytes. Not druids. Not paxiams or monks.
The white of their dresses and shirts peeked through the ash.One, two, three,four, five. Five. Five laurels. But I was last… I waslast.
My gaze locked on the one nearest the dais, to his bundle of dishevelled, curly hair, and I shivered, unsure why, for I was so,sowarm.
The thaw was small at first, a breath of a chill that crept from my toes, crawling like pins up my legs, through my navel, and into my chest. Then it swelled, the warmth dissolving away just like the Blood Tree, vein by vein by vein. Falling behind a cloud, the sunlight overhead shuttered to grey, turning everything dull, save for the blood…the blood and the hickory eyes burning into my own, glowing like honey amidst the ruin and death.
Impossible.
Feet moving before I could understand why, I clambered down the petrified roots, two at a time, hands reaching, trembling, desperate to touch him, desperate to confirm he was real.
He outstretched his hand, amber eyes wide. Our fingertips brushed, so close, so cl—
A punishing strike smashed into the back of my skull, sending a wave of pain rippling from its base.
“Demetri,” I breathed before the shadows came to claim me.
Chapter eighteen
Demetri
The Sky Fall
The Dendralis shalt ne’er forsaken thee; but great mercies require great sacrifice. -54:7–8 - Book of Dendralis
Though one of my eyes had swollen to the size of a fucking apple, and the other was clouded with blood, I knew it washer.
It wasn’t just the river of slate hair that cascaded down her back, but the defiant set of her shoulders, the way she shrugged the acolytes’ vile little hands off her arms, wanting to climb the roots to Druid Falstaff on her own terms. At her own pace.
Surprisingly, they let her.
All men—if you could even call the acolytes such, balls shrivelled and rotten as the rest of them—knew when to leave a woman be, it would seem. And fuck me if we weren’t witnessing the birth of a goddess. Not one borne of blood, creation, or death, but something far more dangerous… A woman with no more fucks left to give.
The Blood God had, predictably, shunned my last, desperate prayer.
Ignoring the throb in my back, shredded and bruised from where they’d dragged me across stone, grit, and dirt, I beheld her reach the Blood Tree’s dais. Nothing mattered now, nothing but her.
If Ashara was dignity made flesh, then I was humility.
She faced Falstaff without a cower or wince. A difficult thing, to stand toe to toe with a spider wearing the skin of a man. The spindly bastard was but an inch or so taller, just those pricks of his helm giving him any real height over her frame.
Pain throbbed through my temples. Propped up by two acolytes, my mouth was gagged and my wrists bound. But for all my many bindings, everything on the inside felt all out of place: heart in my stomach, lungs knotted in my throat, kidneys and liver lodged somewhere in the pit of my arse. I writhed as Falstaff grasped the needle, only to drop it back onto the cushion a moment later, his veil honed on Ashara. She was speaking to him. Gloved fingers curled around her shoulders, his knuckles peaked. Jeering forward, Falstaff’s helm brushed her right ear,the chain of his veil settling in heavy folds upon the gap of her exposed skin between shoulder and neck. An acolyte tightened my muzzle, trapping theget your fucking hands off her, you old cunton my tongue.
He spoke to her, muttering too softly for the pitiful dregs of what was left of us to hear. I craned my collared neck to listen, the searing heat of a few broken ribs and pulled muscles not enough of a deterrent.
His absolving hand crested her temple, and she reared back, lifting her chin as if to…Fuck.I huffed a breath, the linen ball near thrust down my throat absorbing its heat. She…she’dspatin his face. Not his true face, masked by mesh, but squarely in the centre of where his forehead would be, wetting the metal. A smile cracked despite it all, the slash on my cheek spilling fresh with hot blood. It fell when the acolytes raised their belts, abandoning their posts at Falstaff’s side to swarm her. I took a step forward before clammy, strong hands yanked me back.
“Enough!” Falstaff’s command halted their advance, his voice no longer frail and brittle, but cutting and clean. “This one needs to be letted. Such a foul, filthy little heathen, undeserving of absolution and sanctification both.” The sneer in his voice was palpable.
So high and mighty up there. Sopowerful. Give me a sword, or a godsdamned butter knife, and he’d last not a breath on the ground.
“A plague upon you.” Her voice, the usual soft swell like knitted wool, turned as crisp as flax, perking my ears. “A plague upon you all,” she repeated, louder, jabbing a slender finger towards his veil of chain. “To the fucking pits with you all…the Blood God as well.”
