Page 21 of Divine Fate (Cursed Legacies #4)

20

CRYPT

Crane gets sick all over my subconscious as one of our keeper's worst memories-turned-nightmares plays before us. Wretched hands squeeze her throat as she lies naked and vulnerable in a barren bed, thrashing as tears leak over her temples.

“Anything else,” Crane demands raggedly, wiping his mouth and swatting at something that exists in his head, as he keeps doing. “Remember anything else but this .”

“One fluffy unicorn-filled prance through Paradise, coming right up,” I reply blankly, trying to numb myself further when the Entity himself arrives as a faceless shadow in this dream of a memory.

But it’s futile. My keeper’s past sobs seep through the emotional barricade, cutting me.

At this point, I’m too dream-starved and weak to numb myself properly. I’ve not bothered to ask Crane how he waltzed in here, nor how long I’ve been in this twisted abyss of unrelenting memories, since none of that matters. However he came to be here, there’s no escape for either of us.

Death, I would've embraced, for it would have brought me to her.

The goddess of reaping must have known that, because this punishment for harming the temples of the gods and their servants is far worse.

“ Anh hoc uair tempore, shut up!” Crane shouts, ripping at his dark curls and staggering slightly. The blood-red aura around him flickers like a candle on the brink of going out.

Mad as a fucking hatter.

I might’ve found his meltdown hilarious if I felt anything at all right now. Instead, I watch him and feel nothing as the scene around us changes to the first time I slaughtered predators disguised as foster parents, before Hearst tracked me down and put me through hell for it.

I merely exist in this void of emptiness with a madman at my side until I see it.

That heart-stopping aura.

Only now, it’s ever so slightly different. It's more of a dark, vibrant violet than shadowy mauve—but still shimmering and so magnetic that the metaphorical barricade guarding me from this web of misery trembles, weakening further.

Was Crane spewing truths earlier despite his madness, then?

Deep down, I've craved that aura.

Craved her .

But no. It doesn’t matter. There’s no godsdamned escape.

I begin to resent that aura more by the second as it permeates this space, tainting these abominable dreams and tempting me to let my walls down. Obsession teases the peripheries of my mind, a small reminder of how much I yearned to share this subliminal space with her from the moment I first saw her on that stage.

I need to get closer.

I need to run so I’ll continue to feel nothing.

The nearer she draws, the more my past addiction tries to drag me back. I fight it, looking away and clinging to the nothingness that’s protected me throughout this cycle of hell.

“ Thanafluir?” Crane says from beside me, and promptly sets out to look for her in this maze composed of my mind. “Come on, she’s this way.”

“No.”

“Crypt. Maven is looking for you.”

No.

It will hurt.

It will crush me, finally feeling everything I’ve tuned out since that cursed moment on the battlefield. I didn’t numb myself to survive losing her—what use would survival be without her, anyway? No, I did it to pause the inevitable agony.

I’m still not ready to face that.

Right now, when I wish to feel nothing, I cannot face the woman who so effortlessly makes me feel everything acutely.

Crane is irritated with my unresponsiveness and leaves to find her, his presence fading until I no longer sense him. I’m left to watch as the cycle starts again, a crowd of bland legacies surrounding me as that potent aura beckons me from the stage of the Seeking.

But this time, as I approach, I sense the difference. This isn’t a watered-down memory of my keeper.

It’s her.

Here. Alive .

The moment my gaze falls on Maven, standing in my subconscious with those bewitching dark eyes trained steadily on me, I force myself to stop walking.

I can’t survive this. I can’t get closer—can’t even fucking breathe .

Syntyche’s scythe, she’s mesmerizing.

Terrifying.

It’s taking all my willpower to keep my walls up.

Maven can see I’m fighting this. Curse and bless her, she doesn’t miss a beat as she descends the stairs. When she’s directly in front of me, one of my hands lifts toward her of its own accord. I force it back down. Between the desperation to get closer and my innate monster instincts fighting for self-preservation, I’m being ripped apart.

My obsession doesn’t speak as she offers me her ungloved hand.

I stare at it, not breathing.

Maven’s gaze turns piercing. “You promised to haunt me for the rest of our lives and into the Beyond. I refuse anything less, so take my fucking hand.”

Adoration crashes into the barricade protecting me from my emotions, weakening it until it barely stands. Swallowing, I finally place my hand in hers.

“There’s no escape,” I rasp.

“Tell that to Silas.”

I realize I can no longer sense the fae necromancer in my subconscious. He went to her, and now he is gone, so he must be outside this dark labyrinth. If she was able to get him out, perhaps?—

But no. Maven’s face tenses in concentration for several long moments as glowing light ripples around us like a colorless aurora borealis.

Nothing happens.

“Motherfucking mother,” she finally swears, glowering at the heavens in my subsconcious as if they are real. “Some favor this is. By the way, if he doesn’t wake up, I’m destroying all the makeshift temples, too.”

Amusement trickles through my tattered guard, infusing me with warmth I can’t bear.

“Leave me,” I mutter. “You’re not confined if you?—”

“Never mind. We’ll do this the permanent way,” my keeper interrupts, pulling my hand until I follow her through more torturous memories.

She doesn’t bat an eye at the nightmares I witnessed from her. There is no anger that I never told her what I’ve seen in her dreams—the dreams that were so torturous for me to witness, despite how I craved the flavor of her subconscious.

She only pauses in whatever she is searching for when she glimpses me as a child, climbing through an orphanage window at night with a backpack full of stolen gifts for the children.

Maven continues, traveling quietly with me into the vague, colorless memories leading right up to my current psychological incarceration. At long last, we emerge into a vaulted, ornate hall of stone and stained glass.

When I see the onyx altar and the remains of mania-induced people who ripped each other to shreds, I’m confounded.

“This is your mother’s temple. The one I destroyed.”

“I’m familiar.” She leads me to the flawless onyx altar before turning to face me, arching a brow. “Silas told you about my mother?”

“He’s stark-raving mad. I didn’t fully believe him until just now.”

The shock that I would typically feel at the full realization of my darling’s origin is dulled so significantly, it’s like I’ve just overheard that it’s about to rain.

Maven leaves the altar, searching for something in the dead priests’ pulpit off to one side of this temple that I desecrated. When she returns, she moves to the other side of the onyx altar, facing me.

The breathtaking determination on her face makes my pulse begin to pound, despite how hard I’m fighting to feel nothing.

But it only gets more severe when I see the bronze dust that she begins to use on the top of the altar to draw a symbol I recognize immediately.

It's the holy symbol all incubi know means muse .

Gods above.

She’s trying to do the ritual now?

The shock of this surreal moment is the final straw, crashing through the walls I can no longer keep up. I never had the chance to formally ask her. I wanted this melding of our souls so desperately—and incubi can only experience it once in a lifetime.

My own lifetime may now be laughably short on account of how fervently I was leaning into my curse before Syntyche sentenced me to this punishment, but I’ll be damned before I miss what it feels like to be joined with Maven.

But in order to experience this intimate moment fully, I have to feel every fucking thing.

So I do.

As the barricade finally falls, emotions flood back so quickly that I'm suddenly drowning. The shock and horror and denial and bitter fucking agony. The soul-crushing grief. The unspeakable emptiness day after day, existing in a world she no longer occupied.

I choke on it all.