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All of me feels like a cold pawn in this silly game of gods and kings. I’ll be damned if I let Allysteir keep playing me, leaving me in the dark beyond our amusing exploits in the bedroom or within pomegranate groves. Wherever he longs to take me next, I will agree. But it’s about damn time I learn the truth behind the imitation brides washed up on the shore of the grove island.
And if Finleigh could woo Master Ivory to reach the Unseen Section, I know I can, too.
* * *
I scream at the top of my rutty fucking lungs!
I am exhausted from combing through countless pages of the rarest flowers rumored to grace the god Isles. Master Ivory is stillnotsatisfied!
By now, it is the wee hours of the morning. At midnight, Allysteir came for me and offered his aid. When I’d refused, he’d encouraged me to come to bed, offered hisministrations. Of course, I was tempted, but I’d somehow refused and holed up in the library. Determined to please this infuriating tree, so it will welcome me into the Unseen Section. Regardless if he can help me, a persistent furor kindles my chest kindles. If he revealed the secret, it wouldn’t bereal.
A significant scarlet walker girl wooed Master Ivory with...what?
“What did she have that I don’t?” I groan. “I’m the Queen of the Underworld and the Mistress of the God of Death.”
A deathly chill envelopes my form, encases it, presses upon my chest. I inhale a fury of gasps to regain my breath.
“Little wonder...” the God shade whispers in my ear.
A violent urge?born of trauma from the wedding morn?overwhelms me, but I defy the adrenaline surge. I bite my lip in hope. And will it down because he is quiet but woos me withhonor. “Ary?” I whisper his name,mynickname.
When the God of Death presses again, when those shade arms fold around me in a dark quietude, I buckle, understanding. Tears glisten behind my eyes. All this time, it was so simple!
Aryahn Kryach raises my worn body so I may finish the task. So I may, with a full heart and thoughts bursting with compassion and love, wrap and fold my arms around Master Ibhry in apressinghold of a treehug! An embrace of understanding. Master Ivory needs no flowers, no adornments, no embellishments. He’s already beautiful. He desires my arms, my touch: the simplest and truest of gifts.
Because even trees want touch, want kindness, wantlove.
After a few moments with my eyes closed and Aryahn Kryach’s shade retreating, Master Ivory opens his trunk. I fall through desolate darkness. My screams fade into an echo the library will conceal.
My body dives through a coiling serpent of a grandiose slide until I am several levels underneath the Citadel, plunging into the belly of a grand and enormous dragon skeleton!
Throat crusty dry, I heave gasps on my hands and knees, curling my fingernails into bone powder shed from the skeleton. I wait for my body to still. My breath bursts, my muscles twitch, sweat cleaves to my brow.
At last, I look up. All the treasures, the jewels of this Unseen Section are like flames in this trove of Corpse Kings’ past.
I touch my throat, gulping lumps as I gaze at my surroundings. Here are jewels as large as Isle-fruits burgeoning on bone-grown vines and thousands of bone-enameled scrolls in a tapestry of colors. A golden mist like god vapors decorates this sacred place. The parietal bone skull of the original Corpse King, the one Allysteir shared from his past, slumbers upon a pedestal in the center of the Unseen Section.
After rising from the dragon skeleton and forsaking its enamel embrace, I brush my naked feet upon bone powder blankets, scanning the treasure. I am not interested in the parietal skull bone but the significant scrolls housing knowledge.
An hour passes of me rummaging them because nothing is accomplished in seconds, though Ari remains with me in his shade form the whole time, I read the transcription writ within a rebelling god’s blood. Not Ary’s. Not Ary’s blood. I purse my lips and bite my lower lip when I consider this generous god and how I long to meet him.
And perhaps I will someday. But for now...
“The truth of the Mallyach-Ender and theWorld-Mender?”
I freeze because nothing else matters. Goosebumps pebble my skin. The secrets of the god-rebels themselves, the rebels the higher gods slaughtered in the early days of the Curse for their transgressions of whispering the secrets to the races. Even the High Gods themselves have limitations.
And theyloveto play with us humans!
Before I may explore further, a distant cry penetrates the Unseen Section. An echo of a scream. And while Aryahn Kryach’s shade power transforms to a haunting wraith to eclipse my movements, I press on until I arrive in the vast underbelly of Nathyan Ghyeal. These White Ladies who must weep rivers of tears when I behold thousands of slaves working these mines to forge for gems, for riches to prosper Talahn-Feyal.
Thousands of slaves who hold the same eyes and skin and bodies as my...Franzy.
How quiet shewas after I’d shared Finleigh. How I’d longed for the thoughts clustered in her mind. She rushed to the library immediately after we’d returned to the Citadel. Nor did I stop her because I grasped how she needed time to sort through the chaotic mosaic of her thoughts.
Instead, I wait for her. Wait with my Sythe wine in hand because it’s been too long since I last fed from her. With my whole being rotting and withering by the hour as we draw closer to the Night of Masks, which falls on the Feast of Flesh this year as a once in five-hundred years’ event, I require more blood and flesh.
Grimacing, harnessing what little air I may into my lungs, I lower my head in shame. How could I have possibly shared the truth to Finleigh on our wedding night itself but not to Isla. For all these months, I’ve maintained this ruse, fallen back to old patterns as I did with all my brides, building them up, breaking them, baiting them, playing the victim to Kryach’s monster until they love me. And while Isla has accepted my respect, my favors, from the moment she shattered my bones when I introduced her to Finleigh—my darkest and greatest secret—, I knew she’d seen right through all my games.
