Gods of Blood and Bone (Seeds of Chaos Book 1)

by Azalea Ellis

  Jacky nodded. “Every once in a while we get the mental Trials.” She cracked her knuckles. “They’re…hard.” Her voice cracked along with her joints and her face was pale.

  Sam breathed hard, studying his own hands intently.

  I’d heard of mental Trials from the others before. There was often no Moderator, and the Players had to use clues and deductive reasoning to figure out how to survive and win. And there was usually a cruel twist of some sort. Needless to say, they were almost always a bloodbath, with higher fatality rates than any other type of Trial.

  This was bad. Very bad.

  I looked around for a clue to the cube’s message, and noticed an aberration in the smooth stone ground. Circles about a meter in diameter were etched into the stone. They were bordered in complex, almost Celtic looking knots, and on the inward-facing side, small, ornate letters spelled out the name, ‘Adam Coyle.’

  “Adam!” I called. “This one’s got your name on it.” I pointed to my feet, then walked to the one directly next to it and saw my own name. “And this one’s mine, I guess.” Good, that was good. Adam had the highest Intelligence in our group, and I the second highest, after recent increases.

  I turned to my team. “We’ll make it through this, working together.” I reached out and grabbed both China and Jacky by the hand.

  Jacky squeezed back. “This isn’t my specialty. Gimme a monster to fight any day, not puzzles and silence.”

  China took a deep breath and stood as tall as possible with her small body. “I won’t die here today. I’ve still got to find Chanelle.”

  “None of us are alone.” I squeezed their hands and met the eyes of both Adam and Sam, trying to instill confidence in my words. “Everyone!” I called out loudly, “Find the circle with your name on it, and get inside. Before the time runs out.”

  Slowly, the whole group of Players in that Trial obeyed. As soon as the last person stepped into their circle, the timer abruptly disappeared, and clear bars shot up around each of us.

  I reached out and touched one, and found it warm and buzzing, but unmovable. There wasn’t enough room between the bars to squeeze through. Which meant we were trapped.

  Angry calls rang out at me from around the ring, as if I was responsible for this.

  Adam tried to shake and rattle his bars in the cage next to mind, to no avail. He caught me watching and took a deep breath, pushing his hair out of his face. “I don’t know what’s going on. But this worries me.”

  I smiled. “That’s okay. Neither do I. But we’ll figure it out.”

  He cracked a small smile, and then another timer popped up in front of our faces, this time for thirty minutes.

  The ground of my circle moved strangely, causing me to stumble. Then out of the opening it had formed, a small black cube rose up and sat at my feet. I bent to touch it tentatively, and when nothing happened, picked it up.

  It was shiny and smooth, except for an infinity symbol on one side, and hairline cracks dividing the surface with curves and lines. I tilted the box back and forth and ran my finger over the surface, trying to see the cracks more clearly. They seemed to be geometrically shaped, not the random lighting branches of true cracks.

  “It’s a puzzle box, Adam,” I said, as soon as the thought formed in my mind.

  I tried to take a step to turn and face him, and I realized the floor had softened beneath my feet. I took a shuddering breath, and saw pretty ink-black hands curled around the bottom of my boots. The floor was grabbing me, and as I watched, the fingers wriggled, as if pushing out of the restricting stone, moving a bit further up my shoe.

  “Adam!” I choked out.

  He looked at me, and then followed my eyes down. “Oh, no.” Though I couldn’t tell exactly what was coming out of the ground underneath him, he swallowed. “A puzzle box,” he repeated, focusing on my previous words. “Which means, logically, we have to solve it before the time runs out. I used to love these things as a kid,” he said bitterly. “I had a Rubik’s cube that I would solve over and over again.”

  “Will the skill translate?”

  He laughed. “Damn. I hope so.”

  “The infinity symbol on the front, I’m thinking that might be the shape of the finished puzzle.”

  “Sounds good to me.” After a few minutes of intense thought that drove me crazy waiting, he wriggled one of the corners. It spun away from the rest of the box, swiveling along with his fingers. Then, he started to twist in earnest.

  I watched his intense concentration for a few moments and then twisted the same corner of my own box, hurrying to catch up with his movements. Staring at his hands, I mimicked him frenetically, always a few moves behind, until a few minutes later he stopped.

  “I’ve got it,” he said. In his hands was a twisting infinity sign, kind of like a double helix.

  Just as I was about to make the last twist on my own puzzle, screaming erupted on the other side of the ring.

  The boy opposite from Adam threw himself forward. The bars around his circle were gone, but that didn’t matter, because the stone of his cage had risen up fully, and huge stone spiders and snakes rushed over him, holding him down and covering him, biting again and again.

  The guy’s screams gurgled, and finally fell silent. The stone forms seemed to sense his death, and melted back into the ground, the empty circle looking perversely innocent. Discarded at his side, his uncompleted puzzle had turned from black to red.

  The silence permeated everything as we all looked at his silent form.

  When I tore my eyes away to look back to Adam, I saw his bars were gone, too. But the floor of his circle had stopped attacking and solidified, whatever had been coming out of it suppressed.

  He stared down at the looping double helix, expressionless.

  “Adam,” I said, my voice low.

  He looked at me, his eyes wide. “I just killed him.” He blinked. “I escaped the cage, and he was devoured by it.”

  I shook my head. “That wasn’t your fault. That was a coincidence. And…even if it wasn’t, you couldn’t have known.”

  He ran his hand through his hair roughly, and then seemed to gather himself together. “Yeah. I didn’t know. But everyone else does, now.”

  I bit my lip. “This is going to get bad.” I was now doubly grateful that our whole team was on the same side of the circle. But maybe that wasn’t coincidental. “We’re a team, after all. Wouldn’t do to have us killing each other,” I murmured without thinking.

  Adam nodded. “Yeah,” he said, but was obviously distracted, looking across the circle.

  I followed his gaze, and saw the girl directly across from me. The boy’s body lay still on the ground in front of her. She frantically twisted her box’s pieces around, glancing up at me every now and then.

  Adam took an experimental step out of his circle. When nothing happened, he walked over to the bars surrounding me and wrapped his hands around them. “She’s going to kill you, if you don’t fix that puzzle before she does.” His eyes were intent on mine, the dark brown irises looking harder than I had ever seen them. “You have to solve it, Eve. And you need to hurry.”

  I clenched the misshapen shape in my hand. “But…I’ll kill her,” I protested.

  He reached through the bars, grabbing me by the wrist. “She’s trying to kill you, right now, as we speak.”

  I looked at her.

  She desperately twisted and turned the pieces. Around her feet, the stone had risen to form a low-hanging, bubbly cloud of blackness.

  “She’s afraid, Adam.”

  He closed his eyes as if in pain, then clasped my hand between both of his. “We’re all afraid.”

  The ground under my feet shifted again, and I would have lost my balance except for his steadying grip on my hand. I looked down, and saw that faces were starting to pop out of the surface, along with the hands now crawling further up my leg. They looked familiar, too familiar, and then I realized they wore my own features, staring up at me with
eyes of stone.

  I started to tremble, and squeezed one of Adam’s hands desperately hard with my own. The sight of myself in that black abyss moved something sick in the pit of my stomach, and raised the hair on the back of my neck. “It’s like a nightmare,” I whispered, my voice too shaky to speak properly. The light dimmed further with every passing moment, and the thought of being in the dark as the stone swallowed me made me want to slam myself against the bars until either they broke, or I did.

  “It’s our personal nightmare,” he whispered back to me. “Each of these is different. Spiders and snakes for that guy, something else for me, and something else for you. Eve, if you don’t win here, you’re going to lose either way. She doesn’t have to solve the puzzle for you to die. What do you think happens when the timer runs out?”

  He looked down at the floor of my cage pointedly. “Do you want to be killed by them?”

  I shuddered visibly, unable to stop myself.

  The bodies pulled themselves out of the ground, inch by inch. Each face was my own, the arms and hands my own, but the eyes…

  I slipped my hand out of his and squeezed the puzzle. My fingers shook, but I kept a good grip because I was too afraid to drop it to the ground.

  Adam let out a deep, relieved breath. “Thank you. We need you to live, as much as I hate to admit it. With you gone, the team would dissolve.”

  I chuckled without humor. “I’m doing this for selfish reasons, believe me. And what’s this, you, protecting the team? I’m surprised. I thought you’d resent being coerced into joining it.”

  “I see the value in what you’re trying to create. And besides, don’t you know by now that I don’t do anything I don’t want to do? I could have said no, when you asked.”

  I paused before the last twist, staring at the almost completed puzzle.

  Then someone else solved theirs. Not the girl across from me. A guy. Across from him a woman, one of the very few adult Players I’d seen, tried to run, ripping out of the animated stone holding her. She got a few feet before the completely freed stone form knocked her down.

  It was a giant muscular man, with a curly beard and hands like clubs. He straddled her, and hit her again and again until blood splattered outward with every blow. Until her face was unrecognizable, caved in.

  I couldn’t look away, couldn’t move, throughout the whole thing. I wanted to, oh, I wanted to, but my body wouldn’t listen, and so I watched.

  The meaty, thunking…squelching went on and on, and the scent of blood and raw meat filled my nostrils.

  She must have finally died, because the stone man melted away and flowed back into the circle. The only evidence he’d ever existed was the corpse lying in a puddle of blood in the middle of the ring of Players.

  My own stone tormentors were grabbing at my hips by then, and I could swear they moved faster as they freed themselves further from the floor. My hands were slippery with sweat, despite how very, very cold I was.

  So I breathed in through my nose and out through my mouth, ignoring the smell of her. I forced myself to calm down and focus, to ignore the terror and unyielding hands on my body. I closed my eyes and focused on the breath in my lungs, the sound of blood rushing through my ears with every heartbeat, and the shape in my hands.

  I opened my eyes and twisted the last piece into place, staring at the girl. The snick of that piece sliding together with the others sounded like thunder in my ears. That last move, perfect and horrible. The puzzle was without any edges or discernable cracks, smooth and unending.

  In her hands, I saw a shape almost exactly like my own. But the timer disappeared. The clear, warm bars were gone from in front of me, and I looked down to watch as the faces of my destruction melted and formed back into the floor, staring back at me as they sank. The stone beneath my feet was once again solid, harmless.

  The girl’s screams were loud, sobbing. She pleaded with no one, with everything, to save her, to spare her. The black cloud rose around her body, a swirling, amorphous mass. As each particle of stone touched her, it sizzled into her skin, and kept sizzling till it had eaten its way through.

  Her cheeks shrunk in, and then her face collapsed as the bones melted away, her eyeballs sinking down and inwards without the support of her cheekbones.

  I watched as her legs crumpled under her and she sank to the ground like a deflated balloon. Please, please, let it be over. Let it be done already.

  But she didn’t die. She just kept screaming, and screaming, and screaming.

  And then she finally stopped, her body little more than a pile of burn-riddled skin wrapped around an oozing sludge. Her hand still held the misshapen, now red puzzle. Silence reigned.

  My stomach revolted, bile rising up in my mouth. I retched onto the ground. “Oh, god…” I could not keep thinking about it. Could. Not. What was important right now was…the team.

  Adam and I were okay, but what about China, Jacky, and Sam?

  I stood and spit, then wiped my mouth against my sleeve. No time to be squeamish now.

  Adam already stood by China’s cage, resting his hands on her shoulders as he guided her through each twist and turn.

  Two others solved their puzzles. One of their opponents screamed and cursed, spewing vitriol across the circle as some large creature I didn’t look at long enough to identify devoured him.

  But what interested me was the other girl who’d solved her puzzle, and threw away the twisting infinity symbol in horror. It flew through the air and landed, and then its color seeped from black to red, as if wounded.

  The girl shrieked as the floor of her cage reanimated like the rush of a tidal wave. Huge twisting vines…no, snakes, shot out and caught her, slithering around and around, and then squeezing until bones crunched and blood seeped out from between their coils. Her opponent had died, too, not spared by the death of the winner.

  Damn. Note to self. Do not throw your completed puzzle away. I stood beside Jacky’s cage and reached for her. “Okay, what have you got?”

  She ground her teeth together audibly, then forced out, “Nothing.” She took deep breath. “I’ve been trying and trying, but I’m just making random moves. I dunno how to do this.” Her voice broke on the last bit, and I could literally hear the creak of her knuckles as she clenched her free hand around nothing.

  Stone men had formed from the ground, their reaching hands pressing lewdly into the flesh of her thighs and hips.

  I grabbed her fisted hand between both of mine, passing warmth into her clammy digits. “You’re going to be okay. We’ll figure it out.” Once again, I was reminded of the empty reassurance I’d given the boy. I would not let these words be empty. “Look at me, Jacky,” I said. I had to repeat it before her terrified brown eyes met my own. I spoke clearly and slowly, putting weight into my words. “I won’t let anything happen to you. I’m here now, and you’re going to be okay. Believe in me.”

  She looked into my eyes for several long moments, and then nodded. Her body sagged as she released some of the iron tension she’d been clenching in her muscles. “You know how to solve the puzzle?”

  “No, not quite yet.” I could probably solve the puzzle from scratch again, but Jacky had changed the positioning of its pieces who knows how many times, so I couldn’t go on memory alone. I needed to fully understand the puzzle. I was halfway to the answer from walking through the solution with Adam as guide, but not close enough to save Jacky. “But I’ll figure it out.”

  I slung off the pack I’d prepared for this Trial, the contents of which were mostly useless, as we hadn’t ended up fighting as I predicted. But I’d also stashed something extremely valuable in it, on the chance that I might need it. And I needed it now. I brought out a small pouch, and poured three unused Seeds into my palm.

  Though I’d never tried it, I believed I’d be able to use them, even with a Trial in progress. If not, we were screwed. Adam was helping China, and after that would move on to Sam, who had seemingly frozen in fear and not made a
single move with his puzzle box. By that time, the ever-ticking timer would have reached zero. Saving Jacky was up to me.

  I held the first Seed up to my neck. “I wish I was more intelligent,” I said, and it injected itself into me in that all-too-familiar way. I held the second Seed up to my neck, but paused before repeating myself, as something Vaughn had said played through my head again. The Seeds were wish-fulfillers. I debated with myself for a moment. Was it really the time to be experimenting? But if my hunch was right, it could mean the difference between Jacky’s life or death. “I wish I could better visualize three-dimensional movement.” It injected itself into me, recognizing my words for a wish, even if it wasn’t for one of the thirteen Attributes. And for the third Seed, “I wish I had better pattern recognition and could make better projections based on said patterns.” Splitting the last Seed between two wishes was an even riskier move, but I was all in on the high-stakes bet.

  I stared at the puzzle in Jacky’s hands and focused everything I had on it, waiting for the tingle in my brain to come and pass. I breathed slow and deep, imagining the possible moves and their countless different outcomes. I focused everything I had on it, and for a few seconds, I thought I understood.

  I placed my hands over hers and started to guide her soundlessly in rapid-fire movements of the puzzle. I made a few mistakes, but realized in time to correct them without much time lost. I knew, finally, that the next turn would be the last. I paused for a moment, and then pushed against her fingers for the last time.

  The bars surrounding her disappeared and I fell forward, wrapping my arms around her. I turned her so her back was toward the center and hugged her to my chest with my hands over her ears. She wouldn’t see the price of her continued life, and maybe the screams would be muffled, too.

  I watched for her, as Jacky’s former opponent bucked in what was either defiance or maddening pain, as stone chains attached to his arms and legs literally ripped him apart. Drawn and quartered.

  When it was done, I released Jacky and gripped her shoulders.