Page 31 of Holy Wrath
I stand frozen to the spot as Nyatrix turns and races back toward me. The Hexen reaches a scaled limb into the corridor, its massive claws just missing her. My body finally reacts and I turn to limp away, but the knight scoops me up into her arms without breaking stride.
She sprints headlong into the twisting, winding corridors as I cling to her, treated to the terrifying view of the Hexen thrashing its leathery, armored body against the tunnel’s entrance. Even as we gain ground, the beast brings rubble raining down upon us. With an ear-splitting cry that sounds far too much like the High Ecclesia, it begins to tear at the sandstone with its claws.
My heart pounds viciously against my throat, so furious I fear it might tear through my skin, as Nyatrix takes us deeper into the ruined citadel. She all but leaps down twisting stairs, curling her body around mine as she races through passageways. Eventually, the sound of the Hexen’s pursuit disappears beneath her steady breaths and the blood pounding in my ears.
She only comes to a stop when we reach the bathing chamber again, gently releasing me from her arms and then leaning her shoulder against the stone wall, her chest rising and falling with long, deep inhales.
It’s a long time before either of us speak. Nyatrix straightens and looks up at me. Her eyes meet mine only briefly, but her expression is haunted, ghastly—not like she’s seen a phantom but as if she’s become one.
“Are you all right?” she asks, one hand gesturing toward the direction from which we came. “It can’t follow us, I don’t think. Too many narrow passages.”
My hands shake as I try to grasp my cane and something deep inside me trembles. “I-I . . .” I swallow hard and squeeze my eyes shut. “He might have survived.”
Her eyes bore into mine. “Perhaps.”
I hold her gaze, and it’s only then that I realize how deeply unsettled Nyatrix is. The pulse in her throat flutters madly even though her breathing has returned to normal. She takes a step toward me, opening her mouth, only to press her lips together.
“The Tithe,” I begin, my voice coming out tight and unsteady. “The High Ecclesia’s plan for me. He . . . he may have only been trying to upset me.”
“No,” Nyatrix says, hoarse, haunted. “No, I’m afraid . . . I’ve known something is happening, and I could never . . .” She pauses, squeezing her eyes shut. And then her gaze meets mine. “Ophelia, I’m worried he’s not lying about a Liminalian Tithe.”
I want to be strong for her. Just once, I want to be the one who holds her up, who carries her across a ruined land and finds something soft and sweet on the other side. But fear lashes at me, sure as any flail, and I tremble.
“What?” I ask, my voice a tiny echo in the vastness of the first Lumendei. I haven’t given more than a fleeting thought to what might await me in Liminalia. I assumed, I suppose, that the city would be like Nyatrix—principled in its own way despite a feral exterior—and that it would make me feel safe.
No place that cannot protect its people could ever make me feel safe. I grew up in such a place, the sole survivor of a slaughter that took everyone else—babe and crone alike, and of course the life of my own mother. I cannot live in another place that devours its own, that feasts from the inside out.
With a glance over her shoulder, Nyatrix sheaths her sword and then closes her eyes, bringing her hands to her face. Her shoulders round forward, and suddenly she is so small, like her future is as fragile as mine. Her grief reaches for mine, a call-and-response I cannot resist.
Hesitantly, I walk toward her, my trembling fingers brushing her shoulder. Her hand finds mine, our palms pressed together. She raises her hand, taking mine with it, and presses the back of my palm to her cheek. I tingle all over despite the fear, despite the weight of my decisions threatening to crush me into little more than windblown sand, lost forevermore to the Sundered Lands.
“I will permit no harm to come to you in Liminalia, nor anywhere else,” Nyatrix swears, opening her eyes. She speaks with a fervency that makes me tremble, my pulse slipping out of my rib cage and tumbling lower, lower, lower. “You have suffered enough, I think.”
I pull back from her, just slightly, not understanding. Do her Fatum senses permit her some understanding of my insides, of the places where I am tender and raw? No one in Lumendei would ever claim I have suffered; there, I was only told how lucky I was to have survived the riots and the Sepulchyre massacre, to have found a home in His glorious city, and then to be betrothed to someone like Renault.
The thought sours inside me, and tears slip down my face. I try to turn away, filled with shame, but Nyatrix catches my jaw in her fingers. Her touch is nothing like Renault’s. She does not hold me there with clamping pressure, insistence burning in her eyes. Instead, it is a request made by a thing far more dangerous than Renault, and all the more confusing for it. Shouldn’t someone of Nyatrix’s might take whatever she wants? Anyone with her power in Lumendei would certainly do that—for it must mean she is favored by her goddesses, just as it would indicate the First Son’s preference.
And yet she makes no demand of me as she holds my gaze, her fingers burning torch-bright on my skin. I want to sink into the heat, melt into it until I am boneless and free.
“You have suffered, Ophelia,” she murmurs. “How you wish to come to terms with that truth is your prerogative. But I need you to understand that you have suffered in a way many cannot imagine.”
I blink away tears and try to shove away her words, too. They twist strangely in my stomach, pulling at the door to my inner room. I wonder distantly if everything I cut out of my chest all those anni ago could grow back, like Renault’s fingers did.
“For now,” Nyatrix says softly, pulling me from the depths of my mind, “we should eat and prepare for the final leg of our journey.”
I nod without a word. Then I allow the Lupa Nox to take my hand, and together we walk through the ruins of a citadel my beloved God may have smote with His divine fists.
W e rest deep in the city. Nyatrix voices her concerns about the Hexen, and I can’t disagree. She takes me into Old Lumendei’s carcass, slipping through small gaps between downed pillars, pulling back moth-eaten tapestries to reveal hidden hallways. We say nothing as we walk, and without the howl of the Godwinds, silence hangs between us, though not uncomfortably. My mind strays to my surroundings, anyhow, distracted by the original iteration of the city I’ve known for most of my life.
There’s the Libris Sanctum and the Devorarium. The Great Hall is smaller but grander with intricately carved ceilings and arched windows of sapphire-hued glass. Instead of the compact but elegant layout I’m accustomed to, this Lumendei is sprawling with inner courtyards that would’ve been open to the verdant forests that once covered this land. Instead, through grime-covered windows, I see heaps of sand piling up, corpse-gray and crumbling. I tell myself it’s all an illusion, a goetia Curse, a goddess-contrived lie. I tell myself what a wicked thing I am to imagine differently. I do this until I am too tired to conjure up full sentences in my mind.
Eventually, we come to rest in what must’ve been an old chapel. The sunset—I think—trickles gray-gold through the stained-glass ceiling, but it’s the lamp Nyatrix carries that provides real illumination. Whatever Saint this chapel was created for has been toppled from their plinth, only a few meaningless shards of marble left.
Nyatrix lays out our bedrolls in a nook beside the altar, where a faded but mostly intact curtain swoops, held by a scrolled metal tieback. It’s a bit warmer this deep in the ruins, as if some residual heat of the once-grand city still lingers like a ghost.
We eat strips of dried meat in silence, Nyatrix offering me a skin of water. She’s dragged a sturdy-looking pew over toward our bedrolls so I can sit more comfortably, but she opts to sprawl out on the floor, her back propped up against the stone wall. At first glance, she appears relaxed, but I can see how her eyes rove constantly, how she’s positioned herself to face the door.
“The First Son returned here,” I find myself saying, my voice worn. “And then what?” I need to hear it again, I think, to uncover the lie.
She turns to look at me, eyebrows raised in surprise. After another sip from the waterskin, she sets it against her thigh and clears her throat. “He tore the city apart,” Nyatrix tells me, gesturing to the grand ruin all around us. “Murdered many of His own people. Only the ones who still followed Him despite evidence of His lies were Spared.”
I swallow and nod, folding my hands on my lap like I’m back in scholae, learning to read and write under the tutelage of Host nuns. My mother’s song lilts in the back of my mind even though the Godwinds’ Nocturnes shouldn’t be able to reach me here. She was a heretic. She believed, most likely, a similar version of the events Nyatrix relays now. She also believed the Creatrixes would return, that they hadn’t abandoned their children forevermore.
But if that were true, where are they?
“The Sundering that started here, thanks to His rage, is spreading,” Nyatrix tells me. My head snaps up at this new information, unease stirring in my chest. “You’ll see when we get to Liminalia. Growing crops is almost impossible. Clean water is nowhere to be found. We have to desalinate the seawater instead. It tastes wrong, though. Not like the spring water I remember. There used to be lakes. Rivers.”
“Is that why you’re always attacking us? Are you trying to take our city for yourselves?” I want to know, but I am afraid of her response. Surely a creature as powerful as Nyatrix won’t tolerate direct questioning like this, just as Renault wouldn’t.
Her shoulders slacken and she tilts her head back, the crown of her skull meeting the wall. “It’s because we’re trying to get to Him ,” she finally says. “Because He’s the only way to stop the Sundering. Every day, more and more of the land is poisoned for the sake of sustaining His power. Liminalia won’t survive another winter at this rate. Not most of us, anyway. We have to make it stop, Ophelia.”
My mind twists and tumbles as I try to make sense of so much competing information—the truths I’ve held as self-evident since my tender youth and the words falling from the lips of the Lupa Nox. Am I only so susceptible to what are likely lies because of her beauty, because the world she offers me is one where my mother isn’t a heretic? Where the woman I loved and lost too early didn’t live her life in complete opposition to everything I believe? And where—perhaps—I’m not an utter abomination?
“I’m sorry,” Nyatrix says, breaking the silence that stretches long and empty. “I’m sorry for all the people I’ve killed. You probably loved some of them. You’re a healer, so you definitely tried to save more than a few. I’m sorry. We’ve tried to make Lumendites see. We’ve tried so many times. If I thought there was any other way?—”
“How can death ever be the way?” I demand, surprising myself. Something in me yearns for the rich bloom of Lumendei’s gardens, the downy carpet of dew, branches heavy with blossoms—even though it may be naught but an illusion.
“Death is always the way, Ophelia,” Nyatrix replies, her gaze meeting mine. Her tone is weary, her elbows resting on her knees. “It’s the only way, where every path leads. It’s your God who seeks to defy nature with His empty promises and lies, taking power from the land and the sky and the sea. How could it possibly be right for my city to die so yours can live? And yet.”
Her words land against my chest like a pile of stones. “It’s not,” I whisper, holding her gaze even though I want to tremble and hide. “Nothing like that could ever be right.”
One side of her lovely mouth curves up, the dark depths of her eyes gleaming with something that makes my heart thud harder. That connection between us tightens and pulses, a damp heat flooding my core.
She leans forward and parts her lips to say something. My entire body hangs on the precipice of the words that might leave her mouth. Like she’s always been my salvation or my damnation, like the entire universe was written just for this moment.
But then she looks away, frowns, and says, “You should get some rest.”
I hold still, as if I can snatch the moment back, but it’s gone, faded as the frescoes lining the walls of this lost chapel. I nod and reach down to unlace my boots. White-hot pain flares in my back as the wounded skin stretches, and I let out a whimper.
“Here,” Nyatrix says, getting to her feet in an instant. “Can I help?”
“Yes,” leaves my lips before I think better of it.
She kneels before me and begins to unlace my boots. With the utmost gentleness, she pulls them off and sets them aside. I begin to work on the laces on the front of my dress, shifting my weight off my hip. As I do, I catch sight of the pouch Renault gave me, lying innocuously on the pew by my leg.
On our walk to this very chapel, Nyatrix directed me to several pitch-black crevices where I could’ve thrown it. But I couldn’t—because I’m weak, because I thought he was my friend and then I watched him die, because I need to know what’s inside. So now, with a fuller belly and my thirst quenched, I abandon the laces of my dress and open the pouch.
A small, elegant square of parchment with delicate calligraphy—a verse of the Catechisma about how new brides are to serve our husbands the same way we serve the Church.
At my feet, Nyatrix stills, her attention razor-sharp, though she says nothing. I reach back into the pouch, my fingers brushing something leathery. Confused, I pull it free, only to find I’m holding my flail by one of its knotted leather strings, the material stained with my blood.
Revulsion floods every inch of me, and I toss the flail down onto the pew with a feral howl, not unlike the Godwinds outside. I yank my hand away from it, clutching it to my chest as though I’ve been burned.
“Is that...” Nyatrix trails off, understanding dawning on her expression. She meets my gaze, taking in my heaving chest, my face probably pale and tight, looking like a stupid child terrified of a simple object.
“Yes,” I manage, the word hoarse and brittle.
Something in the depths of her eyes darkens, like a storm rolling in. “No,” she says simply, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “No more of this. No more of your pain for the sake of a man’s pleasure, his dominance, his ambition. No.”
In fervent movements that lack her usual lithe grace, she grabs both of my hands. “Ophelia, I want to do something for you. But I want it to be for you . And that means that if you don’t like anything, anything at all, you tell me to stop. And I’ll stop immediately. You don’t need to explain why.”
I stare at her, my mind racing, heart throwing itself against the cage of my ribs. “All right,” I manage, unsure.
“You have to promise that you’ll tell me to stop,” Nyatrix says, her fingers closing around my wrists, eyes wild.
“I promise,” I whisper.
She releases me and settles back on her haunches, wolf-like. “Then go to your bedroll,” she says, picking up the flail, “and lie down on your back.”