Page 52 of The Princesses of Ruin (The Princesses of Ruin #5)

Chapter forty-eight

Scarlett

“ R emember why you chose to fall.” Walt’s voice shocks me.

I gasp, opening my eyes to see the world blurring past in gray. He’s bigger, at the height of his strength when I was just a young girl.

Why?

“Because in falling, there was a chance to live.”

“This is your chance.” His ghostly hand reaches out.

I look down. Below me is a white doorway that feels like peace. It would be easy to keep falling head-first into it. To do nothing. But I know it’s death.

Not just death, but the end of all things.

If I let myself be taken, Ashai will own my body. She will suck the life from this world and everyone in it.

I can’t let that happen.

I grab Walt’s hand and my body jerks, flipping until my feet dangle just at the event horizon of the void into the afterlife.

There’s a cobblestone wall in front of me and Walt’s ephemeral presence above me.

I cling to him, looking up with desperate eyes, just like that day in the alley when he rescued me .

“Live, Scar.”

Walt thrusts me toward the wall. The breath leaves my lungs as I hit, and my eyes wince shut. Gravity in the world flips, pressing me into the stone as if it’s ground.

All around me is darkness so deep it swallows thought.

My arms shake and fail when I try to push myself up.

I’m covered in blood and black ichor. It’s seeping into me, making my muscles too sullen to function.

It’s draining the magic from the fibers of my being.

Sound gurgles up from inside my throat and spills out before me.

I don’t want to be here.

I reach forward and grope at the ground. There’s a crack, a separation of the cobblestones. I wedge my broken fingernails inside and drag, pushing with my legs at the same time. I scrape, inch by inch, across the ground .

Live, Scar.

A deep, droning trumpet thunders behind me. I tremble from the sound, from the fear of what that sound might bring. I look over my shoulder and see it, the white door that sucks everything down into nothingness, condensing it into the raw material of magic and souls.

Vivid orange tumbles past me, scrabbling at the stones I’m holding tight to, but they give them no purchase. The world flips and my hands are up, my feet are down, and gravity is working against me. I wedge my feet into the tiny holds and flatten myself, screaming thick wails of blackness.

The orange loses all its color at the end, turning white and plummeting through the world.

Where am I?

I’m compressed against the stone as the world shifts again, turning down the right way. I summon all my strength, my desperate will to see Zane, and my sisters, and my thriving kingdom. I don’t want to die here.

I’m not supposed to die here.

I’m the vessel, and I need to fulfill my duty.

My groans sound like an animal’s roar. I push again, getting my hands under my elbows, under my shoulders. I bend and get my knees down, pushing harder against the weight on my back.

It’s her.

Always her.

Always cutting, demanding, pushing. Always hurting. Trying to break me.

The trumpet blares again and the weight changes to push down on my head. I flatten against the stones and hold tight, the world turning.

Two streaks of color zip past me through the door to nowhere. I cling to the edge, just above the precipice. I look up at my gnarled fingers. They beg me to let go. I demand that they hold tight.

Just before the horizon I see it: a seam of colors that look like the battlefield I’m supposed to be on. I must make it there.

The world drops and I don’t waste time with pain or fear. I push and pull, crawling on my hands and knees.

Trumpets blast and I reach for the next stone. Pain splits the back of my head and I’m compressed before the axis shifts. Greens and blues plummet past me from the seam overhead until finally the inversion rights itself.

I dig my hands into the stone and pull hard, getting my feet under me for the first time. I take three stumbling steps before I’m slammed to the ground. My nails break as I scratch the stones for a hold. I slip back what I gained, standing on the protruding stone and balancing precariously .

More color streaks by. I pray for the lost souls, though none of the gods would do anything with those pleas. The ground slams into me and I jump to my feet. I’m fighting through thickened air, battling the world’s desire to swallow me whole.

Each inch I get from the portal infuses me with more strength. I grin, striding forward faster. The seam is getting closer. I can see the battlefield, the Spiders…running from me.

Trumpets smash me down and I crack my head.

I gasp for that too-thick air and hold onto the ground as I tilt. I’m sick to my stomach, watching as Spiders slip in through the seam and transform into beings of light that tumble down the darkness. I reach out for one as they go by, but his hand goes through mine.

His lavender magic lingers on my skin, soaking into my body. I feel his strength infusing my body, urging me to keep going.

The trumpets sound, slamming my guts and tilting the world farther upside down. My feet are slipping, my stomach clenching. The filth of the stones is too slippery to hold. My hand gives out and the world falls.

“You can’t keep me down,” I say, my voice warbling incoherence as I crawl forward.

Her voice comes from all around me. “I never wanted to keep you down.”

It sounds like my mother, the woman I used to know before the monster took her.

I grunt, balling my fists as I slither through the muck toward the exit.

“I’ve always wanted you to get back up.”

I gasp at the sound of Walt’s voice behind me. I look over my shoulder and he’s there, the white outline of the man who picked me up from the streets. Who plucked me out of the air moments ago.

But this isn’t Walt…

“I’ve always wanted to see you become the strongest you could be.”

“So you can take me. Puppet me,” I snarl.

He shakes his head. “So you can learn to fight me. And you did. You all did.”

He reaches down, his hand flickering between white mist and weathered skin.

The violence has stopped. There’s no more world shifting, no more Spiders plummeting past me into the abyss. It’s a trick. It must be.

“What is this?”

He shimmers, changing from Walt to the queen. “Your destiny.”

I turn, gaining my feet to run. The world tilts and the trumpets blare. I reach for what little magic the Spider gave me and project it. Wind whispers around my body, and a faded memory comes to me of a courtyard long ago and a need to protect my territory. It was one of my men…

It’s not enough. The arcane power sputters out instead of propelling me to the seam. I fall forward and grab hold of the ground. My hands sink into the blackness with sickening sucking sounds. It’s thick and cold like spring mud, chilling my arms to the bone.

More people fall screaming through the seam.

“I was never making you to destroy the world,” Ashai says.

“Liar,” I shout, clashing against the pull of the ground and the warp of gravity.

Her warm hand against the back of my neck makes me gasp. She shoves me into the mud. I close my eyes and seal my lips .

She leans in until I feel hot breath on my shoulder. “I was making you to destroy the gods.”

Her grip tightens on my neck and she pulls me free. She stands there, defying gravity, holding me aloft. Her visage appears in front of me, too, and she wipes the muck from my face.

“You think I want to destroy all I helped build? No matter how wretched humanity becomes, I’m still proud of what you few have accomplished.

Toppling dynasties, bringing yourselves together, fighting beasts that once reigned over your pathetic little squats of land where you lived in squalor. I gave you magic!”

She laughs and a thousand colors burst from her mouth.

“I made you what you are against their will, and they banished me to the depths of the lowest realm, the deepest hell. It was the most pitiful existence, surviving on scraps, but at least I got to watch you fight, climb, grow, lead, and reign until…you just stopped.

“You stopped striving, stopped caring. You built your walls and determined your borders and refused to come together anymore, to work any harder than this—” She thrusts her arms out, and the world explodes into view. It’s all of everything, all at once.

And there’s so much suffering.

“You could easily keep fighting, but so many of you don’t! I was tired of watching you waste my gifts. And then I realized you weren’t wasting them, you were sacrificing them to the other gods. You were praying, groveling, begging for more from them when I had already given you enough.

“But they made you believe that you were lesser without them. They made you believe that you owed them everything you had. And so you built temples, and you got comfortable. You settled like pigs in the mud. You allowed your gifts to wane. You forgot me. Just like they wanted. ”

The world shifts again, but we don’t move, suspended in this strange angle together as we look upon all of Gaien.

The goddess of the earth cradles the continents in her arms and holds the swell of the sea in her belly.

When she breathes, the wind caresses the land, or creates storms. Her tears nourish the crops, or collapse buildings in mudslides.

And her sickness, the same one that’s been growing in each of us, manifests as the Verdant Drown.

The plague of the plants far to the south that I’ve never once put my mind to.

It wasn’t a problem I needed to solve, but I see now at this height how dangerous it truly is.

It’s a sickness of wild things, of brain rot and body growth.

Cantankerous cysts of vile impotence boil up from below the ground and poison the land, making it more theirs than hers, or ours.

“You see it now, don’t you? Each one has their domain.

Each their required supplicants, feeding them.

Nol’Ther takes your soul, nourishing her own with your spirit.

Eyzanth takes your passion; he feeds on your fighting and fucking, dancing and dallying.

Yegress lives between each of your breaths, and Kor’Tar flourishes at the very last when rage has spilled blood in the soil.

“Vexune glistens with your gold trading hands, Juuren drinks your tears, Osselna thrives on the stroke of your pen, your brush, and the flutter of skirts around legs, and Morgah sucks on your mind when you work. She is not grit, but grind. She wants you broken under the wheel of industry.”

“What about Zephrom?” I ask, noting the one god she forgot.

She moves close and my mind snaps me into action. I reach out, wrapping both hands around her throat. I squeeze, calling on my magic to pull on hers, but nothing happens. There’s nothing in this body. It is not her, but a projection .

“That’s my girl, trying to use her power.

That’s what you’ve all forgotten. The less you use your power, the more of it returns to them.

The less you flex and grow your strengths, the stronger they become.

And I’ve seen what they do when they’re truly immortal.

So beyond the power of anything else that even their gentle breath can kill a world. ”

She pries my hands away easily like I’m a child.

“Zephrom is not justice. She is righteous indignation. My theft of their magic to seed power in this world. She burns to unmake you.”

For the first time, I believe her—just a little. That pebble of doubt in the shoe of my reasoning aches with every mental step forward. What if the gods don’t want us to kill her because she’s dangerous to us, but to them .

I grit my teeth against the troublesome idea, rejecting it for what it is: a distraction. Ashai wants me weak and stupid. She wants me questioning my path.

I spit in her face. “Get fucked.”

She manifests a third hand that wipes the offending saliva away while the other two hold my arms steady.

“I supposed I couldn’t expect a mortal to understand.”

Blue light pierces the dark wall below me. Ashai’s image opens her mouth to scream and the trumpets blast, rattling me to the bone. I drop to the ground, boneless. It turns into ash around me until I’m freefalling once more.