“Are you?” he snapped. “I can’t risk you going in there and being harmed before we figure all...this out.”
I hissed no less than the monster inside the palace. “Thissss is going to have to wait. My friends are in there!”
I blinked at the statement. It was true. My friends. And Alec….he was my friend too.
“Let me go!” I used my powers again, but Apollo merely grunted. “I swear by all of the Titans!”
Apollo covered my mouth and dragged me into the darkness, his mouth by my ear, his arm a band around my middle and the other around my breasts. “You daresay that within Hades hearing?”
My skin burned with embarrassment as his forearm cradled against the naked spot of my ripped dress. His skin was to mine, and I arched away then towards trying to find a place where he would not be touching me on accident with such intimacy.
“You have not your power fully,” he growled. “You will not go in there and kill yourself.”
“Let me go! I must go. I’ll call Persephone. She will force you,” I growled back.
From behind, he pressed his head to mine in frustration. “Fine. But you need something more. I will try to light the way.”
And my body seized and then was still. I panted and so did he. “What….what was that?” I was dizzy with power.
It slid along my insides, whispering to me promises of ancient things.
Apollo gently set me down and let me go.
When I turned to face him, he smiled, and I could guess why. In the darkness, two little dots of light were pricking at his face. From my eyes.
His light was inside of me. “Why?” I asked, touching my face as if I could feel it there.
“To protect yourself. If you must go to him,” he grabbed my hands, “then in a way, I will go with you. I have only found…you now, Freya. I will not lose you.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“You will,” he touched my cheek like I was a precious treasure. “You will.” He wistfully sighed. “I have prayed so many nights that you would come.”
I covered his hand like he had before, and realized that Apollo was not giving a speech of undying love. He needed me for some reason. The power I would no doubt provide. A torch….perhaps they were born for such a time as they were needed.
Apollo was so powerful so why would he need more?
I did not have time to think on it. I simply thanked him for the third time that evening and rushed for the palace now armed with his fire.
I found Milos on the floor and the warriors around him in a protective circle. It was obvious he’d been bitten. Before, when Alec had brought forth his snake, it had only been a shadow. This was twice as large, and fully physical. The scales glistened in multi-color reflections.
I took one torch from its place near the wall, feeling the fire call to me. It promised me things, and I held it in both hands, feeding it with Apollo’s power.
Slowly, I passed Heracles who shouted for me to stop, but I listened to nothing but the burning power.
The snake turned to face me, hissing, its green eyes strangely familiar.
I had to wait until it was close, and my heart pounded as it slid bit by bit in my direction, ready to strike.
“Freya,” Milos moaned, “Get away from it.”
It struck out and I felt Apollo’s glow in answer. It lit my arm and the torch in my hand was three times the fire it had been. As the jaws yawned wide, racing for me, I shoved the fire in its mouth.
The snake screamed a sound that shook the walls before it fled towards the hallway, burned and retreating…for now.
I rushed to Milos’ side. “Are you okay?”
He held his ribs and when he moved his hands, I saw the punctures were deep. “Will he be okay?” I asked Heracles who lifted Milos to carry him out
“Wait,” Milos said, turning back to watch me. “You come with us, Freya.”
“No,” I said, backing away from all of them.
Grabbing another torch since the first was snuffed out by the viper, I left them where they stood and entered the hallway alone.
The fire kept the plants away. Any ordinary fire would not have worked, but Apollo’s blaze made them behave.
I followed the flowers until they grew so dense, I had to press them out of my way to make it through. Every so often one stalk would grow brave, and I’d have to burn them slightly to get them away. But I always felt guilty when I did. They were merely obeying their master.
When I got close to where it was thickest, Alec’s room, I found two glowing eyes peering through the darkness, wary, and unsure.
I could sense the snake’s fear, and my heart fell. “I am sorry I hurt you,” I said in a small voice. “See. Look.” I put the flame down on the floor and lifted my hands. “You bit my friend and I wasn’t sure I’d survive a bite, but I will not burn you anymore.”
It waited for me, hissing, but I approached without the fire. I knew it was a dare, but I felt sick at the thought of hurting the very confused creature once more.
It let me get close, those perfectly green eyes narrowing, before it lowered its head.
A thrill rang through me of sheer power when I touched the scales. They were smooth and lovely and the snake’s eyes slitted half closed. “You like that…?” I asked, stroking the giant head that was as long as my body.
It sat tall again and glanced at Alec’s door. “Is he in there?” I asked. “Can I go in? Will you let me? I mean your master no harm.”
The snake hissed what nearly sounded like acceptance, and I passed it by and pulled on the door.
Alec’s room was another world. Thick dust floated on the breeze from the window, little puffs of bits of petals and things. Every inch of the room was now covered like a forest with life.
I gasped when I saw the impossible thing at its center, a giant oak of a tree that had grown roots deep into the floor of the palace and had broken through the roof as well to reveal the stars and the moon.
The place was eerily silent, with not even the wind making a sound.
“No,” I sighed, stepping over the tree’s roots to approach it.
I would be lying if I said I was not afraid—perhaps more afraid than anything I’d ever been afraid of—to look at the gnarled wood of that tree and see part of Alec’s form buried inside.
Part of him was as I’d always known him. Half his face was perfect and pale, and relaxed in slumber. The other part was petrified into the tree. Places of him were already twisted as if in great pain and torture.
His face on that side, too, was screaming in some sort of agony.
I covered my mouth in horror.
Pain and life. Alec was split down the middle. And I suppose he had to decide which he chose because he would be lost, I knew, perhaps forever, if the pain won.
“Oh, Alec,” I moaned, and the tree’s branches rustled in answer. “Can you hear me?”
Another rustle of leaves.
I took a deep breath and chewed blood from my lip. The thought of climbing up into that tree terrified me but knew that I must climb.
My dress was already ripped so it did not hinder me as I took my first steps upwards. My sandals found pockets in the wood to place my feet, and my hands found other divots to grab in my slow climb.
It was a great height, but I kept going until I could sit on a branch that was directly next to his face. The freed side that seemed peaceful and serene.
Hands quivering, I reached out while bracing for balance, and stroked the side of his face. “Alec, you must not give up. I know that losing Arman hurts you. It hurts me as well and…if anyone should pay this price…”
My tears fell and the drops landed on the branches. They shuddered in reaction but otherwise it was silent.
I glanced around for help but knew that none would come. The snake had not allowed anyone else to pass. Its master was in trouble and it would protect him.
The plants, too, were protecting him, but in his grief, he wa
s giving himself over to all that he was. I saw a spot where I could put my feet to bring my face closer. I stepped into them but cried out as I lost my footing to dangle over the ground that was very far away.
Despite my immortality, the fall would hurt.
My arms were the only things holding me as my feet scrambled for purchase.
“Ah!” I cried as my hand let go, the sweat that had begun from the work it took to climb had now brought me back down.
I was falling…falling…
And caught.
The trees limbs raced to catch me, and I landed in what felt like a bush of leaves that prickled ever so softly along my back.
Then it did something unexpected. It brought me back to where I had been next to Alec and held me there.
Carefully, I pushed to a seated position to find that my face was now inches from the king’s.
I barely brushed my hand across him. His lips where the same before on one side and twisted on the other into wood.
I had an urge that later I might think of and blush, but in the moment did not seem so strange at all. My hair had been unbound for the ceremony and now it was loose and sprawling all over the tree. I brought it out of the branches and gathered it to me before I leaned in and hugged the tree- or rather – Alec, and my hair wrapped around us of its own accord, slowly winding its way as far as it could go around the large trunk.
Alec had said there was magic in my hair, and so I sent the power of myself down through it. Like I had with Cenia as a babe, I held him in his pain. I thought of her and then I thought of Alec.
“You can beat this, my friend” I whispered. “Come back to us.”
“Come back to me.”
When nothing happened, I closed my eyes. “Then I will come to you.”
Chapter 13
“What is this place?”
Alec stood ahead of me; his body gilded in sunlight that set far in the distance. The coloring was otherworldly, oranges and yellows that danced in a contrast unknown to my eyes.
Though, at the edges there was a twisting blackness that hedged the scene.
If he was surprised by my sudden appearance in his mind, he hid it well. I moved to where he stood and gazed down at a golden river. So inviting, the swirling depths were rich with life, yet, somehow, I knew that it was dangerous to wade into the liquid.
“The River of Pain,” he said, softly, reverently. “We’re just outside of the underworld. Can you sense it?”
I nodded but Alec was a thousand worlds away. His glowing eyes of green held a distance unimagined, and his face was pointed at the other side.
“How many times have you tried to cross?”
“Dozens. Hundreds. Maybe thousands.”
“Have you ever succeeded?” I asked.
“Never. You need the boat to cross. Charon must bring you.” He finally snapped out of his reverie and frowned down at me. “Are you really here, Freya? Have I brought you to witness my punishment?”
“No.” I shook my head and touched his shoulder. “I found you turning into a tree.”
I felt his smile. “I found you in a tree, do you remember?”
I nodded. “You knew I wasn’t Cenia though I had used my power to look like her. I told lies that made me bleed and then I stabbed you.” I sighed. “It feels forever ago.”
“Doesn’t everything?”
“Not everything…Alec, I..I want you to come back with me. I want this to stop. You did nothing wrong. Arman is lost, and it’s my fault, truly, mine and my family’s.”
That snapped him out of it as if he suddenly realized that I could not have said that as merely a figment of his imagination. He turned and gripped my arms so tightly that I gasped. “What are you doing here?” he thundered.
“I…” I struggled to get loose from his grip. It was hard to concentrate because all I could think of was his snake tightening down on me, crushingly, as he was now. “You’re hurting me,” I gritted out, surprised that he could when I was here only in my mind. He relaxed some. “I followed you,” I hissed. “I cannot bear your suffering.”
That rocked him back onto his heels. Gods he was tall. And nearly broad enough to block out the golden river from my sight. Was he growing here in this place? “How did you follow me?”
“I made it past your vines. And your creature.”
“Impossible.” The green depths of his eyes were a million shades. They swirled from mossy then ocean hues that ran from dark to nearly light blue, dancing in a battle of brightness that heralded his tremendous power.
This close to the underworld, he did not dim, he merely grew stronger.
“Why are you forbidden to be here? Is it because you become…whatever it is I see in you now?”
Alec waited for me to confess that it was untrue how I’d arrived but when I said nothing, he finally let it go. “I should know you’re telling things as they are. Here, there is no way to lie. There is only truth and visions.”
“Visions…?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me, what you have seen, Alec?”
He turned back towards the river. “I will,” he said quietly, “Only, not at this moment.”
“Will you cross it?” I asked after a time and he nodded. “It’s your father’s river. Will he stop you?”
He shook his head, face determined.
This was my chance to learn more. “Tell me something of yourself. Something you have not told me. If you will not tell me your visions.”
He turned to face me, and his lips were sealed in a tight line before he seemed to decide something. “We are at the furthest corner of the underworld and there is another opposite to this one. On this side, there is still light and sun, barely. On the opposite, it is as if all light has been removed. No warmth, only bitter cold that will crush a soul. And in this darkest deepest area of the underworld there is a place that no one knows about. Not hardly, anyway. Even Hades cannot say what is there fully, not every part. And in the places he has never been, there is a hole.” He swallowed before he went on, speaking softly, “And.. and in that hole is nothing and no one—not any life. It does not even echo your own voice.” His cracked to say it and his eyes searched mine for judgement when he added, “For me it was home. For a very long while to a young god at least it had seemed, it was where I lived.”
“I don’t understand.” I spoke evenly to keep from bursting through with shouted emotions. Somehow, I knew that this was a secret as terrible as the hole he described.
“Forced to live, I should say.” His face was pale, and his eyes rattled me with how dark they became. “I was punished, Freya. By your father and someone…else. Together they plotted to drug me and put me there. With my own plants, they sent me into a stupor where I couldn’t fight back. And when I woke up, I had no idea how long it had been or how long it would be before anyone found me.”
“That’s so terrible...” I needed something to prop me up. My father had done this to Alec? Had he really? “How long?” My voice was dead and flat.
He grimaced. “It felt like eternity as I was too young to know better at how it was not. I was in there for nearly one hundred years.”
I gasped. I bit my lip until I tasted blood. “A hundred years,” I whispered. “You must have gone mad!”
“Worse than mad.” He spat the word so that I would feel it. “Worse. And it would have been longer had the hag not told Persephone.”
“The hag…?”
“A river nymph, what was left of her—barely a shade—had many times come to my place to speak with me. I had been alone for so many years that the first time I heard her voice, I was desperate. But she could not release me herself, and for a while, she toyed with me, making bets. To get me free, I offered her everything.”
“Everything?”
“Everything.” He said it flatly and his eyes held a chip of iron within them. My heart sank.
“What was her payment?”
He finally relaxed away from the brink of�
�what, I could not know. “That’s a story for another time.” He blew out a sigh of relief as if this had weighed on him for so long.
“What did Persephone do?”
“She knew that if I were released, they’d only plot to find another place to put me. She was so horrified to find out what had happened, and that it was right under her and Hades’ nose, she promised I’d never be imprisoned like that again. She made sure of it.”
“How?”
“The animals,” he said. “Where they go, I can too. I left the Underworld after that, unable to bear beneath any longer. Unable to stay with the unseen ones any longer. A place I loved, a place I once cherished, was no longer a rich darkness to embrace, it was as ash in my mouth. The animals ensured my freedom, but I wanted to seek further release.”
“You can’t return to the Underworld because of this?” Then I realized. “The hag,” I said with anger. “You can’t return because then you’ll owe her the repayment! Is that it?”
I could read him easier here. He would not tell me that part yet, but I had guessed true. “The animals,” I tried. “What do you mean they ensured freedom? Do you turn into them?”
“Not exactly. I send them out from me, and if I choose, I can become them and leave where I am in a special kind of melding. I am here then I am there in an instant as them. Free.”
“You say animals. As in more than the snake?”
Alec nodded and I felt my cheeks heat. “The owl…”
“Yes.” He smiled softly with memory of something. I glanced away thinking of all that I’d told the owl. All that the wise old creature had seen. “The dog as well when you and Arman dined. The white horse when you battled the giant.”
“That was you!”
“No. Yes. In a way.” He lifted a hand, but it fell. “Do not fret. I gave you privacy by shutting myself away from the owl more often than not.”
“You better have.” I touched my cheeks to cool them. How many times had I stood naked on that balcony? Poured my hopes and dreams as well as misery while stroking those soft feathers. “You promise?”
Beware the Fallen: Young Adult Mythology (Banished Divinity Book 1) Page 15
