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But first, he willseeme!
At a fierce descent, my stomach bottoms out, and I slam my eyes shut, gripping onto him for dear life and biting my tongue so hard, it bleeds. The pain keeps me from retching.
Once his flight evens out again, I peek one eye open and choke on a gasp at the courtyard beneath us. Dark, polished marble shimmers like black mirror glass, accentuating the enormous statues with their bodies entwined but features forever lost in eternal longing. My heart shivers in my chest as they surround a great fountain, fed by the weeping tears of twisted gargoyles. Trees and overgrown roots riddle the courtyard. They bloom with gray and colorless flowers, but their petals reflect a ghostly luminescence.
“Beautiful…” I whisper, my voice escaping like the softest gossamer.
“What was that, little Butterfly?” He brushes his nose along my cheek, tingling my skin.
I don’t take my eyes off the sight. “They’rebeautiful.”
“They are the original souls of the lost who froze to time long ago,” he says in a darkened voice.
“It must be a blessing to look upon such beauty every day.” More emotion rises, and I let it. I let it surface because I’ve found a haven in my tears, a haven in the expressive suffering the rest of the world tries to escape or keep silent and shut far away to appease the comfort of others.
When I feel his warm and heavy breath along my cheek, I turn and look up to find those eyes upon me again. This time, his lips are parted, and a muscle bounces in his cheek.
I lower my brows. “What?”
“So curious…”
“What?” I demand firmer.
“Perhaps I will tell you as I savor you, little Aria Butterfly.”
If he had not said my name, I might have pressed.
When he tucks his wings and plunges beneath a large stone arch into the great castle, I lose all sense of everything but my somersaulting stomach. Hardly aware of the dark corridors and passages he drifts through, I cling to him.
Between the blur of the shadows, I make out tapestries hanging upon the walls. Tapestries with scenes of grief and torment, of love lost and broken promises and shattered hearts. Voices sigh, they whisper, pleading to be heard, transforming into a sorrowful symphony that reaches deep into my chest to play for the audience of my heart.
“Stop!” I whimper, struggling to hear them more, to listen to their stories and songs. “No, they want—”
“Theyalwayswant,” he growls, reinforcing his grip. “Always demand. Always speak. A never-ending hall of whispers longing for meaning and attention.”
The next room is a gallery—with as much despair from the portraits clotting the walls. Tormented souls captured in every last one, but unlike the tapestries, they do not move. Because they are trapped. Their mouths open in frozen screams, but their spectral eyes seem to follow us, longing to share their stories of love and loss. A deep, heavy ache throbs in my chest. Because there is nothing I want more than to listen and remind them what it means tobe.
The gallery fades into an all-consuming darkness.
Where is he taking me?
The god plunges lower, and I leave my stomach far behind. It snaps back into place when he lands on stone. Stone that fractures beneath his weight. He locks his wings behind him, and I feel the momentum as they shut. Anchoring a powerful hand at the base of my neck, possessive, entrapping, he makes me smaller, weaker.
And then, I hear them!
“Oh, god, what are those sounds?” I cry, trembling down to my bones from the moans of anguish echoing from the darkness ahead of us.
“Spirits of the damned and forsaken, cursed to an eternal existence of nothingness,” he whispers in my ear, triggering a raw chill to claw into my spine.
My heart weeps in my chest, and I can’t stop shivering as he carries me down the dark corridor until the glow of my living flesh and soul provides a dim view of cells. Countless cells are suspended in midair within a spiraling abyss of catacombs. Countless chambers and passages branch out in all directions of the main spiraling path. A path so narrow, it’s barely a thread—but one he walks upon with ease.
The cells and passages are broken by grim torture chambers, and I bury my head in the god’s chest again, struggling to overcome the deep weight inside me.
“Why?” I whisper.Why bring me here?
“I told you to be careful.” He brushes his lips along my temple, shifting aside my curls. “Now, you will know the price for using your tongue when I did not command it.”
My chest lurches, heart trembling, and my body follows as he waves his hand and opens a cell.
