God’s fury made the very stones in the cavern walls crack. Everything shook, the ground rolling as if with an earthquake. I tried to run, but the strength had gone out of my muscles and my knees buckled. A massive tentacle wrapped around me as I tried to crawl away, right as my fingers closed around the handle of my dagger, and jerked me up into the air.
“What have you done?” God’s voice slithered inside my ears like cold, sharp wire prodding my eardrums. “What have you done? You offered your soul to another! You betrayed your God!” It roared, and the cracks in the cavern walls spread, chunks of stone beginning to fall. The Eld howled, panicking as the cavern began to collapse around them.
God was beautiful no longer. It looked like a beast that had crawled up from the deepest, darkest ocean depths. Its gray flesh was so pale it was nearly translucent, run through with a spiderweb of blue veins. Numerous tentacles, dozens of them, coiled around the cavern, up the walls and into the water, and tightened mercilessly around me. They were covered with white eyes, blinking among the suckers, looking around with wild anger. God’s face was no longer mist and swirling colors, but gaunt with wide bulbous eyes, and gills fluttering along Its too-long neck.
Its tentacles wrapped tighter and tighter. The cavern had completely collapsed in, and we were sinking down among mud, rock, and water. We were falling into nothingness, the dirt and stones vanishing into the abyss as darkness stretched out around us in every direction. Lightning flashed in the distance, and the air filled with thick white fog. The silhouettes of massive beings, briefly illuminated by the lightning, sent adrenaline coursing through my veins.
“You are mine!” Its voice was guttural and distorted, as if a hundred voices had all shouted at once. “You cannot take my sacrifice from me!”
We plunged down, into dark freezing water. All I could see were the numerous eyeball-covered tentacles spread out around me, a monstrous web in the water. Deeper and deeper we went. The pressure was building, my body aching under the weight of the water pressing down.
“You cannot escape me, mortal. You are meant for me. Your Earth is meant for me.”
My fingers ached as I gripped the dagger as tightly as I could. I was determined to hold on, no matter how deep we went, no matter how much it hurt. My body was being squeezed, slowly crushed in the grip of those tentacles and the pressure of the water. But my arms were free.
I swung back the dagger and plunged it down, as hard as I could, right into one of the pale eyeballs in the tentacle gripping me.
A nauseating shudder went through the water, and there was a roar of fury that nearly made my eyes roll back. I pulled back my arm and stabbed again, the dagger sliding in up to the hilt. The volume and horror of the sounds the God made were beyond words. Such wrath needed no language. It was palpable, wracking my body with pain as I was dragged deeper and deeper into the depths. I stabbed again, plunging in the knife and leaving it there when the pain made it impossible to retain any more conscious thought.
The tentacle’s grip on me loosened.
The water swirled, tumbling me, sucking me down, down, down. Water rushed into my lungs. Everything burned, everything ached. I couldn’t tell what was up or down, left or right, air or water. There was only darkness.
Darkness that seemed to go on for eternity.
I was dying.
Death felt…cold. Uncomfortable. But not as terrifying as I’d thought it would.
The silence was nice. The cold…after a while…felt nice.
There was catharsis in acknowledging that I wasn’t going to make it. I made peace with it.
Maybe I could drift for a while. Maybe I could sleep.
I wanted to sleep. Just sleep. I was so tired. But…
There was a silver thread in the dark, glowing bright and beautiful, and it wouldn’t let my eyes close.
I stared at it, numb at first and a little irritated. Why was it here? Disturbing my darkness, refusing to let me drift. Then I felt it tug. Just a little trembling tug that seemed to pull on all my ribs at once. It made my heart lurch. It made my brain wake up.
“Raelynn!”
That voice…so…soft…so far away. I’d have to swim forever to reach it. I didn’t want to swim. I wanted to drift.
“Raelynn! Keep going! Don’t you fucking give up!”
Where? I wanted to ask. How can I reach you? The voice was so familiar, but so far away. I wrapped my hands around the silver thread, using it to pull myself through the darkness. I didn’t know if I was in the water anymore. I wasn’t breathing. Air didn’t seem necessary. But it was cold and thick and strange. Would it be like this forever?
I didn’t want to be in the dark forever. I didn’t feel ready.
I clung tighter to the thread. It was pulsing, beating like a heart under my hands. It was the only light, at first, but the further I went, I began to see a glow above. Faint and golden, like the sun behind the clouds.
“You’re almost there, baby girl!”
Leon…it was Leon.
I was tired. The depths had been soft, and everything hurt worse here. I could look up now, and see the surface of the water, and the gray clouds, and the rain dimpling the surface.
Then I was splashing, trying frantically to surface, and my fingers brushed against dirt and I realized the water was shallow. It was the shoreline. My head bobbed up and I could see the trees.
Warm arms snatched me up, dragged me from the water and pounded my back until air was forced into my lungs. Oxygen rushed to my head, making it light, and I blacked out for a moment as my head kept swimming while the rest of me hit land. There was dirt, there was wonderful solid earth under my hands. I could smell the pines and the rain, citrus and smoke.
“Fucking breathe, Raelynn, fuck, please!”
Breathing hurt. Everything hurt. But if it hurt, that meant I was alive.
I was still alive, and Leon was holding me, cradling me like a baby with my head beneath his chin, murmuring in my ear, “I’m so sorry, baby girl, I’m so fucking sorry. Just breathe. Breathe for me. I’ve got you. You’re okay.”
I was too tired to keep my eyes open. I was weak with hunger, dehydrated, and my lungs were burning. But somehow, I’d never felt so happy.
I pressed my face against his chest, taking in his scent, warm as a summer bonfire, sharp and dark as the pines. “They tried to take me from you,” I muttered, only half-lucid, somewhere between a dream and that deep darkness I’d swam out of. “They tried, but…but I’m yours. I’m yours.”
“You’re mine, baby girl.” His arms were so tight, so strong, as if they hadn’t been broken and bleeding the last time I’d seen him. “You’re mine, and nothing is ever, ever going to take you from me again.”
I drifted in and out of consciousness. Leon had tugged his shirt onto me and held me close against him to keep me warm. I still didn’t fully feel real, as if my body wasn’t sure if it was flesh and blood or still drifting in that awful, screaming other place.
Thunder cracked through the soft sounds of rain and I jolted, my eyes flying open.
“Shh, you’re alright.” Leon’s fingers stroked over my arm, easing the fear out of me. We were walking through the trees, and I was cradled in his arms. I felt so heavy and achy, and my head was pounding.
Muffled, as if from a great distance, I could still hear a voice in my mind, screaming in fury. “Raelynn! Raelynn, you’re mine!”
I shuddered, pressing my face closer against his chest. I knew there were more scars across his skin now, scars still pink from having only just healed. I wanted to kiss them, to thank him somehow, but I was so scared that my head felt like a balloon that was about to pop.
“God is calling me,” I said. “Still calling me. Leon, it won’t stop.”
“It will stop,” he said. “It can’t take you, Rae. It can’t take a soul that’s been willingly given to another.”
I looked up at him, even though his face was blurred without my glasses. “I thought you were dead, Leon. I thought the Reaper killed you.” The thought made me choke up, the memory of him lying broken and bloody.
“I’m not going to leave you that easily, baby girl.” He smiled, and his fingers tightened around my arm. “There’s no getting rid of me now. You’re stuck with me.”
The God’s voice grew muffled as we walked, until it was only a faint murmur. Then it was gone completely, and thunder rumbled again as lightning lit up the skies.
Leon chuckled. “God is furious. Such a storm.”
“Will It give up?” The thunder was so loud it hurt my ears. “When will It stop?”
“You injured It,” Leon said. “It’s weakened. The witch, Everly, told me she intended to kill the God. With It injured, perhaps now is her chance.”
“Everly…is a witch?” I thought back to that soft-spoken girl, who’d looked at me as if she could see my very soul, who’d drawn cards to warn me of my fate. I remembered that she’d felt wild, even though she was so quiet. A feral being, forced to pretend she was domesticated.
I closed my eyes again. I was completely soaked, but Leon’s body heat kept me from shivering. “Do you think she can do it? Can she kill a God?”
“Her mother was one of the most powerful witches I’d ever met,” he said. “Her daughter carries that legacy. If anyone can kill a God, she can.”
I couldn’t imagine how a being so great, so incomprehensibly powerful, could be destroyed. Thinking about it made my head hurt, and I groaned softly into his chest. “I want to go home.”
“I know, baby girl. We will. But I’m going to make sure no one ever takes you from me again.”
I wanted to ask more questions, but tiredness won out. Exhaustion wouldn’t allow me to stay awake another second. I drifted off to sleep in the arms of a Killer, my Killer, as he carried me away to spill more blood in my name.
