AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Freya, I’m serious. I’ve been all over this part of Paradise Hole. I’ve beenhere. The only caves are in the south. There are a few caves in Gang Mountain and up north on the way to the Glass Flats. This isn’t supposed to be here and I don’t want to go in. It doesn’t feel right.”
“The man in the cave won’t speak to me without you,” she hisses, her feet black up to the shins from the mud. The tips of her hair are black, too, as black as coal. Fitting, since her eyes are diamonds, clear as ice and cutting. “And I need to know why…” She shakes her head and starts again, this time even more severely. “There should not be another Omega with my gifts. I need to know how to stop her.”
“But this…”
“She…unalivesthe creatures of Paradise Hole.” Her severity does nothing against the grief that rolls through me as it finally clicks.Those creatures are her family. Her friends. Not ever having had either of those two things, I don’t really understand, but I don’t need to understand to know Fear. To know Pain. I feel hers acutely and it hurts me, because she feels Pain and Fear on behalf of someone else. I’ve never felt that, so focused on looking out only for myself.That’s not true. I’ve felt it before. I felt it for Adam.
“Fuck.” I rub my face roughly and take a step down the muddy incline towards the hole. There are rocks here out in the open, forming the mouth of the cave. It doesn’t make sense. I point.
“Therearen’trocks here,” I say in contradiction of what’s directly in front of me. “This is a forested area away from Gang Mountain. There shouldn’t be rock formations.”
She grabs my extended arm by the wrist and shoves my hand down. “I have been inside. It is safe. The man in the cave is a…friend. He waits for us, but he does not…doesn’t have much time.”
“What does that mean?”
“He is far from the shore.” She pauses, as if lost in thought. Then she shakes her head and moves further down the incline. “Come.”
I approach the open hole that looks like the actual entrance to Hell, wondering how much I trust Freya. I decide that I do. Sort of.
A little.
I trusted Adam too, though, and look what happened.
I stare between Freya and the hole, worried and wondering if, after Adam, my instincts aren’t a little frayed…is this a trap? Just like Adam and all the things he promised?
“Why do you wait?” she says to me from the shadows as she climbs nimbly over the rocks down into the below. The way she moves confuses the crap out of me until I notice that the bottom half of her legs resemble that of a goat’s. She hashooves. The woman has hooves. How can younottrust a woman with hoof feet? Huh?Huhhh?
“Fuck me,” I say with a half laugh. “If I die, I die…”
“You are not going…to die,” Freya says, responding to a whisper not at all meant for her, but for me and my sanity, which has evidently gone bye bye.
I move forward awkwardly, slipping over mud-covered boulders until I’m able to see a scattering of twigs and vines and rocks leading down into Hell like an earthen staircase. It makes the rocks easier to navigate as I follow Freya, who skips on her goat legs from boulder to boulder while I make my way down, down, down in between them.
The rocks get bigger and eventually the ground rises up above my head. I stare back over my shoulder at the entrance to the cave. I haven’t gone far, but the opening manages to look very small from here.
The quality of the air doesn’t help. It’s thick and misty and warmed by the earth surrounding it. When I round the next set of rocks, I see why. There’s a lake down here.
The cave is wide and the lake spreads to reach nearly all of its curved edges. A narrow path rings the lake, wrapping around the inside of the cave wall. Freya follows it right, without hesitation, as if she’s done so many times before. I follow her around the rocky ledge away from the light, towards the dark.
There aren’t any other entrances into or out of this place that I can see and the primary light source is the hole in the ground that’s far behind me now. The light passes through the mist, turning the world white and then dark and then…the palest yellow. And it has nothing to do with the light from Paradise Hole. This light comes from the glow.
An ethereal, yellow warmth emanates from behind a stone. I round it and find a man leaning against a large boulder stroking a floating orb. He holds the ball of light lovingly in his lap, its murky exterior emitting fog and light. It’s strange, not just in its strangeness, but because it casts no shadows. He keeps it close and smiles as we arrive.
“Ah. The Fallen Earth Omega. We meet at last. Freya has told me quite a bit about you.” He smiles wide enough to show all of his white teeth and looks directly at me. I’m simultaneously soothed and petrified.
As far from the entrance of the cave as we could be, we stand on a wide, flat stone ledge. It’s much wider than it appeared from the other side of the lake. A small camp has been set up here and the man holding the orb sits at its center. It looks like a camp that’s only meant to last a few days, though I know that can’t be. He must have been here for weeks. And he’s… Wait. I…
My gaze, which was trapped by his for these past moments, tears free and hovers over the place where his legs should be. I don’t understand it, at first, and then my mind catches up to me. They’remissing. His pants deflate high around his thighs. I don’t see any blood anywhere. Maybe he was born this way. Maybe the army of the dead got to him. Should I ask him? No. That’s rude. Or maybe, it’s more rude to pretend I’m not thinking about it…
“I wasn’t born this way.”
I jump and glance at the water where Fear completes a lovely, lazy backstroke.
“And no, I cannot read your thoughts. I can read your future and I saw that you were going to ask me about my legs. The answer is that the Fates took them.”
I have so many questions. I open my mouth to ask the first, but I don’t get it out. Instead, he replies, “For the blood, of course.” He gestures to the mats laid out on either side of the now dead fire. It looks long dead. Days dead, if not weeks. “You have many questions and I will attempt to answer them all. But first, have a seat.”
Numbly, I sit across the empty firepit from Freya who looks with frustration between me and the man lying back on a blanket-covered stone. “You said bring her and you will…you would tell me of the Beast Fate. I do not want to hear the rest of the story.”
