Page 74 of House of the Beast

Chapter

I opened my eyes, and he was there. I looked at him as if for the first time. I took in his moonlight hair, his sunfire eyes. His face, so pleasantly and perfectly symmetrical. The pristine white funeral robes. His left arm, the skin a slightly darker shade than his right.

He smiled at me sadly. “You know I hate when you do that.”

“Don’t you have something else to say first?”

His expression sank with remorse. “I’m sorry, Alma.”

“I don’t know if I can forgive you,” I told him truthfully. “That was the worst thing anyone’s ever done to me.”

“I know,” he had the gall to say. “But if you can’t accept killing them yourself, at least now you have someone else to blame. I will bear that burden for you, Alma. I only hope that one day you will forgive me.”

I did not answer. I asked instead, “Were those memories yours?”

“I kept them hidden from you for a long time,” admitted Aster, “but I put a piece of my soul inside yours, so they are open to you now that you know where to look for them.”

“You lied to me.”

He looked sheepish. The scourge of Kugara, the mighty monster that set our gods quaking in their temples, stood scuffing his feet before me like a docile schoolboy. “You were always going to find out at some point. I put it off because I was afraid of how you’d feel.”

I thought about it. All the signs I had overlooked, the circumstances I had ignored. “I had probably known for a long time that you weren’t the Beast,” I admitted, “but I hadn’t wanted to face it. It was easier to believe otherwise.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’ve said that already. You also said you would never hurt me, and you lied about that too.”

“I did it all precisely to keep you from being hurt,” he pleaded, reaching for me.

I promptly stepped out of his reach. His face fell, but he quickly regrouped.

“You were slipping away from me. I understand—the path we walk is a difficult one. But that’s precisely why I’m here, to guide you back to it when you need. ”

My eyes drifted from his plaintive expression to the altar over his shoulder, where my father stood before the Weeping Lady.

I hadn’t realized it from this distance, but she was easily twice the size of any man.

Even seated, she towered over him. My father spoke to her; I couldn’t hear what was being said, but the Lady did not resist as he climbed up onto her holy pedestal and reached for her head.

I could stop him now. I had meant to stop him. I could yell for his attention, rush down the nave and get to him in time before he completed his dreadful pursuit.

My eyes went back to Aster, whose remorseful gaze had not left me.

“I needed a place to hide,” he said sadly.

“I am a child born of man and god. An abomination. My father had believed bedding a mortal would bring him closer to humanity. But then he realized, as did the rest of them, that the one to bridge that gap would be me, and the power to be both was mine alone. They would remain their feeble selves while I held reign over the mortal domain.”

I said nothing, only looked at him. At the poor prince doomed to this terrible fate. He reached for me again.

This time, I let him.

“I needed to make them pay,” he said softly as his arms went around me. At first his hold was gentle, as if afraid I would shrug him off. When I didn’t, he held me with almost bruising force, as if he would never let go.

I chose my next words carefully. “You never meant to hurt me.”

“No,” said Aster quietly. “Never, Alma.”

“I believe you.”

He pulled back but stayed close enough to keep his arms around me. His fingers dug into my coat, desperate, and his eyes blazed with joy.

“I always meant to tell you,” he said in a rush. “I just didn’t want to lose you. You mean everything to me. I want to be with you for the rest of time. You and I, we’ll be unstoppable.”

His hold tightened again, drawing me close.

I remained there, unresisting as I watched my father pull the Weeping Lady down by her hair and rip out her sunfire eye—the one that had originally belonged to my monster.

The crux of his divinity, the heart of the umbral plane.

I could not bring myself to do anything about it.

The Lady’s grace, her blessed serenity, provided no defense against the might of the Dread Beast. Perhaps she knew there was no hope in resisting, or perhaps she, too, felt it was time to let go of the guilt she had hidden for all these years. She fell.

Blood spilled from the empty socket of her eye into the pool of holy water below, staining it black and foul. It spread quickly down the length of the waterways inside the Church and began to trickle out the drains in the walls, feeding into the canals below.

The light that had inhabited the Lady ruptured out of her.

She was no longer the bright, glowing thing that had watched us regally from her altar—only a gray, tired husk weighed down by her sin.

The light spilled up, seeping through the high ceilings, pulsing in time with the heartbeat of the monster wrapped around me.

The very air seemed to shift.

My father dropped down from the altar, his feet thudding back onto the ground loudly and with decisive triumph.

“The key to godhood has been reclaimed,” he declared skyward, holding the eye aloft in his hand. “The palace of your mind is free, O Abomination. Now, for your final offering of flesh.”

He turned to me—and paused.

The foundation holding the umbral plane in place had been freed, and Aster could finally exist outside of me. He was no longer a ghost occupying my soul; his body was real, and his life had been released from its deathless bonds. For the first time, my father could see him.

My father began walking toward us, his steps slow with caution. His sword remained drawn, dripping black blood down the aisle.

The look he wore was more confused than anything.

It almost made me laugh. After all, he thought he had succeeded.

He had killed a fallen star and broken the wards around the Church, and then taken Kugara’s greatest, most terrible treasure from a god.

His enemies were either dead like Lord Carnus or driven to madness like my uncle.

All that was left was to bind the power he had awoken to himself.

But I wondered if he knew that it had already bound itself to me.

“Daughter,” he said, stopping a few feet away. His eyes went to Aster, who still had not acknowledged his presence. “And... I don’t believe we’ve met.”

My monster retracted his arms at last. He turned, and in that moment, he looked very much like the prince I had imagined for myself in my childhood daydreams. He eyed my father, his noble countenance cold.

“I suppose I should thank you, Zander Avera,” he said congenially, “for all the dirty work you’ve done on my behalf. You served your purpose well.”

My father’s eyes widened. He was not the type to ever bow to anyone, but now he lowered himself on one knee, head angled down respectfully.

“The curse of Kugara,” he said. “Son of the Beast. I have yearned many long years for this day. You grace me with your presence and with your words, but... I had not realized that you would be here in the flesh. The ritual for your awakening is soon complete. My daughter has been bound by the Beast himself and will not resist.”

He still thought I wasn’t in control of myself. But of course. I hadn’t tried to stop him like I had so desperately wanted to; I had barely moved since stepping into the Church.

“Indeed,” Aster agreed. “The ritual must be finished.”

My father rose to his feet and raised his sword, pointed it straight at my heart.

“Goodbye, Daughter,” he told me.

I had so much to say to him. So many years of anger hidden away from his sight for the sake of this very moment; so many hours spent lying awake in the dark formulating the speech I would give upon my victory over him as I conquered the umbral plane.

I had just never expected it to happen like this, and I found I was lost for words.

There was no point in them. My father would never recognize his faults even if I wrote them down and presented them like one of those essays my tutors used to request of me. In his mind, my regard had never been of any consequence.

And, I realized, neither were his words of any consequence to me. Not anymore.

When I was growing up, he had always been my villain.

Larger than life, an impossible obstacle to overcome.

But now I saw him for what he truly was: a shortsighted man too obsessed with himself to ever achieve any amount of greatness.

His was a pathetic existence, and I was done wasting my energy on someone I would soon be free of.

“Goodbye,” I settled for saying.

With his metal hand, my father plunged his sword toward my chest.

It never reached me. Aster caught it in midair, the bare fingers of his left hand holding it calmly.

My father’s eyes went wide. “I don’t understand,” he stammered as the sword trembled in his touch. He turned upon my monster, expression wild. “Is this not what you want of me?”

Aster scoffed. “Stupid man,” he said.

Those two simple words unraveled him. Gone was the smug, self-satisfied man I had known all these years. My father looked lost, his wild eyes flickering between me, his sword, and my monster, and back again. “I—what do you—”

“That’s right. You thought I was going to take residence inside you, didn’t you, Zander?”

“I summoned you,” my father snarled. “I awakened you. I am the one now making the sacrifice of the flesh. Your power belongs to me!”