Beware the Fallen: Young Adult Mythology (Banished Divinity Book 1)

by Logan Delayne

  He grinned, transforming. Something that I had not seen very often. “No,” he said with finality. Then, more seriously, “They are my eyes and ears, and should I be in trouble, I can lose myself here and join with them where they are, but it’s rare and painful. However, Persephone was right. No one can bind me to darkness, not ever again. The animals would be free, always, if need be, and then I can join them. No more prisons can hold me.”

  “Oh, Alec,” I said. “You must have hated my father—do—hate him. Well… and all of us. My whole family. Me.”

  The place made him speak truthfully, I remembered. He thought, then said, “I did at first. I hated you and your sister. What could Titans be other than cretins of tremendous power and villainous plots? It is all I had ever known. You see, I’d never actually seen a titan-blood before. The originals, yes. Their offspring, no. Many of the originals are chained away except for your father. Some in the mountains, others in the sea, but I thought Cenia was the elder at first, until I saw you. That day on the shoreline, when you were in the ocean and you were so afraid. You killed the man and you regretted it. I sensed your regret between the salt of the ocean and the salt of your tears. You even killed the giant and I saw your regret.” His face softened. “And I wondered, how could a titan-blood hold so much regret over a mere human? How could she be anything but gloriously smug over their crushing beneath her heel? The giant was only half human, evil, but still you lingered at his end. You felt guilt and sorrow. Thick enough that I could wet my tongue with it and I still remember the taste.”

  Like a snake…

  Oh, how easy it was to forget him a child of the underworld. My breaths were shallow and tight. So many emotions from what he said rampaged through me. My ancestors chained. Alec watching me in my private moments. Alec seeing me like no one ever has. And lastly, my blood heated with the thought that he’d sensed what I’d felt so keenly and seemed pleased to know me. Had anyone ever cared this much to wonder about me? I am not sure that they had.

  He said, “I could no longer hate you as I once did. My plans afterwards…well… changed.”

  “And now?” I asked, touching his cheek without even realizing I’d been reaching for him. “What are your plans?”

  He had seen me and Arman then. He had watched our blossoming…friendship from afar.

  He cupped my hand. “For now, I cross the river. I try to make it once more. Arman didn’t deserve to die for my own revenge, and it’s a cost too great to bear. There will be payment.”

  Alec would punish himself until he felt the debt repaid. How cruel he was for his own guilt. How terrible he was for his own pride. And how familiar this all felt because, like it or not, I understood the gesture.

  Alec moved away from me, and I watched him take his first step into the golden water, then wince. But still, he kept on. The river of pain lapped around his waist and he hissed, his body tense, and I moved to the water’s edge, unsure of what I meant to do. I could not help him. I could not ease his pain and grief. But I could join him. I could also be punished for what I cost Alec, Arman, and everyone.

  It was my own blood that bound him to that cave. It was my own people who stole everything from him for a hundred years. It was my own family, once again, that killed Arman.

  And so, I stepped into the River of Pain. Into Acheron’s depths, half-expecting the great River King himself to climb out, golden and infernal, and to unleash his wrath upon us.

  But that did not happen. Instead, I seized from a mere tapping of my toe in the river.

  I fought through it somehow. I followed Alec into suffering, because I could be as terrible to myself quite as easily as the god-king himself.

  There is a kind of pain that you know. It may be sudden and sharp, but you brave through because it’s not so foreign to you. You’ve survived it before, and you’re very present throughout its threshold because you know that it will pass. Even terrible, it is short lived.

  Then there is the deeper, more wretched pain. One that you try to sleep away or avoid by going into yourself to keep from facing it. One that returns upon waking when you thought you’d gotten free. Perhaps it’s physical, perhaps it’s more. Tragic pain, scarring pain, the one you never forget, but once again, survived.

  The golden River of Pain, King Acheron’s river of anguish, Alec’s father’s glorious channel of suffering, is the third level of pain. The kind that makes you leave your body and fight to be free. Your soul wants no part of what the flesh is enduring, and even for immortals, this river had nearly turned the strongest of the powerful mad with agony. A type of pain that had you wishing for death, begging for relief. Death, in fact, would be a kindness. It seemed as though it would never end, and you couldn’t possibly survive it.

  I withered beneath the crushing slices into my very soul as waves gently lapped over me, their reach deeper, winding their way to grip me in an inferno of misery.

  My body was tearing itself apart without any visible sign and the water was no longer golden and pretty. It was dank darkness with souls trapped within that reached for mine to sustain themselves once more. It was inky black that started to eat away at me bit by bit.

  I opened my mouth, gaping in such a pain I’d never endured, struggling, walking further still, but stiff and without control, as if the river knew it had me and would not let me return.

  I got so far as my stomach before everything wavered in my vision, shifting left and right like a pendulum. The world, or rather the almost underworld, swirled and there were no more stars, no more sun, no more of anything.

  I knew sorrow then. I felt a widow, a woman who’d lost her child, a man who’d become a beggar, and a sightless being without name or home. All of the sadness of the world crushed in on me.

  Thankfully I could not take it any longer, and I drifted down, letting myself go….

  …Blackness. And I knew only later that I screamed long and loud when the river swallowed me up, before I sank into its depths…because later, Alec would tell me so with tears in his eyes.

  I woke with a gasp, drenched in pain, covered in it. I found Alec covering me as well, black hair shining like a seal, fresh from a dive, marred only by streaks of gold, with golden drops licking his nose, trickling from his dark lashes. His hair when wet was so long it shrouded us like tentacles visiting more pain. He was asleep, or unconscious, perhaps both.

  He must have carried me to shore when I lost my senses.

  His head was on my chest, rising and falling with my imagined breaths. The water was hissing softly near the shore at our feet, and I noticed his legs remained half inside the pretend serenity, and so I shakily sat up and dragged Alec away from the beautiful terror.

  As soon as his heaviness was free, I fell back, exhausted, him still over me. My body, even imagined, had nothing left to give but fear of pain.

  Alec stirred. He began to whisper first, healing us perhaps, cursing us more like.

  I could see his eyes beneath a flutter of lashes, like wings on a dying butterfly, and they were hazed with pain, and the madness that I now recognized from his time in the cave was there, apparent to me now that I knew to look for it. Like a black speck on the back of a white dove. Perhaps all his times in the crossing had risen it from its grave. All was revealed then, in his fever, as he came awake. Alec pulled up to watch me with an expression I’d never known from him before.

  Slowly, strength left him as well, arms shaking, so that he closed the gap between us as if to share air.

  I touched his face. Of the two, I was the braver in this moment, laughing softly at how such a simple thing as intimacy scared him more than that river. But I sobered, because it was not me who had spilled all of what I hid from the world. Alec had lanced a grave and festering wound with his story. And to the very enemy whose blood placed him in that dark hole, he’d confessed it all.

  And now she laughed.

  I sighed, knowing he felt it on his lips. It was an apology without words, and the slightest dip of his chi
n the acceptance of what I could not say sorry for. And what we knew he could never forgive.

  No lies. No more strange glances shrouded in secrets. We were laid bare to one another and I listened as our heartbeats synced while my finger traced one perfectly sardonic brow. His lips were falling towards mine like a star still, as if we could not stop this collision. With his warm mouth a breath away, I thought about how easily a soul breaks right in half so that you can share it with the person of your choosing.

  But he would never choose this.

  A moment of weakness is rarely a good time for new beginnings. To start once more, to let our feelings flow in a new direction, it would take a great reckoning of the past, if ever.

  Nay. We would not be always as we were just now….I sighed again and we shared a single and final breath and held it, his gaze filled with wonder. But there was a greater struggle within him.

  I pulled on his strong shoulders until he lay aside instead, his mouth to my throat.

  He murmured a language across my sensitive skin that I did not know, but it sounded like an ancient prayer of praise. Or again, a curse.

  Maybe both.

  I pretended to translate silently with dry and angry emotions that crested high at my middle so that I could not see beyond the red haze of my mind.

  Thank you, Freya. Thank you for stopping the momentum before our fortresses should crumble and we would forsake our sanity. Bless you, Freya the Fallen, for accepting a cruel and cold fate of loneliness that is yours ever after…

  My body stiffened. There were no lies here.

  Only truths and visions.

  Standing next to his bed, returned, I used my power to fix his rooms, to fix the entire kingdom now that he’d called his snake and plants back to him. My growing energy flooded through me in stops and starts, fighting with me in a tumbling puzzle because I had not come into my fullness yet. But Alec watched me carefully, his face a shield. It would be as if none of this had happened. Isn’t that what we all wished at times?

  Our “moment” together too, felt distant and like a dream.

  I came to stand before him after the palace was returned. His chin was about the height of my forehead, and he dipped it to look at me. What had he seen in the blackness of his prison?

  A cave that is deep will have no light. It will have nothingness. Eventually, you lose the ability to see at all so that when you leave there is pain and a transition to see the light once more. When returned, you are blind. After a hundred years, how foreign was the light to an immortal?

  And then it dawned on me. When outside, unless the sky was full of clouds, Alec wore a cloak. It pained him still to face the light. I closed my eyes and almost cried for him. I almost bowed to him and begged his forgiveness for what my father stole.

  But then I remembered I could press and look and see him in his cave. I could use my power to feel what he felt and saw.

  As if he read my thoughts Alec said, “Your power is close at hand. Your full power, I think.”

  I nodded. I could feel it in me like a caged animal. “I think soon,” I said, distracted by the hum of it lulling me into thinking I could face what would come next.

  The memory of Alec’s lips on my throat returned, in answer the power burned even brighter inside of me, hot and white.

  Without thinking, I parted my lips and touched the spot with a blush that traced my body. Darkness tracked the move sharply, the black of his eyes swollen to engulf the green.

  I’d let that possibility go. I’d stopped what could be. But even now, I was a flower opening to it once more.

  Alec closed the distance between us, and I caught my breath in a web of hope. He touched my chin with something unfathomable sitting deeply in his gaze. I felt a stir… a thing, a shape in the ether from within him there watching me, testing, pressing against my balance. “Beware the pain that you invite much more than the one you try to keep away from your door,” he said, and I shivered as his attention weighted on me, pulling me down, in, and under.

  My body shuddered from the strain, like being smothered invisibly.

  He was showing me what he was, even here, and not just in the ether of his memories.

  I swallowed audibly, feeling my body strain. I had laughed at his advances in a drunken stupor of pain. I had held him to me as a mother would, fearing that it would change the dynamic of our relationship, only, and in one moment, I was the student once more.

  I gaped at him until his lips curved.

  Beware a god who knew its power, I wanted to say.

  But as his eyes widened in surprise, I realized something else, too. More importantly, beware the goddess that did not know her own, because as he moved to kiss me—I knew it to my soul his restraint had snapped and he was about to gift to us what we so craved even if it was the madness acting for Alec in quick passion—my body was suddenly engulfed in white flames burning the second chance to nothing.

  Chapter 14

  The flames doused. The room darkened. But it only set to contrast twin daggers of light, two flickering specks of green that were narrowed on me. Alec’s wrath shook the bed across the floor and priceless items fell from the tables and walls to crash onto the stone. He growled the word loud enough to be heard in the underworld: Apollo!

  His plants shot from the ground ripping up my careful reparations. They were larger, angrier than ever before. They crowded the doorway and the window just as I realized what he meant to do.

  “Alec, no!” I shouted, panicking as they crisscrossed too quickly for passage. Even so, I turned every which way, hoping for an escape, my heart beating fast.

  He would undo all that we had built in these last moments.

  Fury gripped me as finally I found there was no way out. Imprisoned, once more. I’ll be trapped in here again!

  Apollo’s fire within me roared, threatening Alec, before I leashed it into my hands. The flame sputtered.

  “Stop this instance!”

  “He dared to taint you with his power,” Alec thundered, striding close, finger pointed at my chest in accusation. “In my house! He dared to touch my ward under my nose!”

  “It’s not like that,” I argued over the raging vibrations of our powers warring in the small space. The palace shuddered with it. “I’m his…”

  “His. What….his what, Freya?” Alec said with a deadness that I knew was beyond reaching. He dared me to go on, and I lifted my chin.

  “I’m his torch.” Damn my voice for wavering.

  His eyes went a fraction wide before they squinted and Alec was suddenly hovering over me, hands like claws. I knew the god-king was aching to put them around my throat and throttle me. His rage built into the snake’s shadow. It coiled around us, around me, in warning. “How could you be so naïve! He’s tricked you, titan-blood. He’s ensnared you for his own ends and your innocence will not let you see the truth.”

  Apollo’s heat died beneath the fear I held in my heart that he could be right. But Apollo had seemed as surprised as I’d been when I’d felt the tug between us. As the link had been realized, neither of us had expected it. I was certain. “No.”

  “Yes,” Alec hissed, his sharp teeth gleaming when he snarled, “And you’re here to do his bidding already, with his power tucked neatly inside of you. You let him in! When your power grows into its fullness, he will dine upon it, Freya, same as his father, same as all skylovers do to the simple and weak. Smiles and beauty but corrupt to the core.”

  I opened my mouth, but Alec made to leave, spinning on his heels as if he could no longer stand the sight of me. I chased after him, my feet tripping over my dress. “Where are you going?”

  “To throw him and everyone one of them off of my island.” His back was to me and it was braced as he stopped at the door.

  My hands shook with sudden and swift anger. How long would he lock me in here this time? What if he never let me free again? “You will not force me to stay here, Alec! You will not imprison me again. You have no right!” />
  “Until I have finished what needs to be done, you will remain.” He turned toward me, in regret, in anger, I did not wait to see. I held up my hands in warning and though the flames had died at my bidding, instead, my face went cold with a new power: my own. The ice of a thousand winds encased us, making the tip of my nose numb. My fingers, they too had lost feeling from the ebbing freedom loosening the cold from deep within. Stretching like an animal too long kept in its cage, it flowed, easing outward, seeking, searching, without control. Power shook through my arms uninhibited and I mentally reached under and up for the immortal heart that hid beneath his sternum. I felt for the blazing core of him until it beat its slow thuds against my palm and then…then I squeezed. It was second nature. My body felt as though it was floating away from my mind. My thoughts scattered to the ends of this mortal world and then broke through to another altogether. I saw places I’d never been, heard languages I’d never spoken, and I must have repeated some of this to Alec because he gripped my arms and shook me. “What did you say?” he demanded, his gaze laced with pain from my grip. But I could not answer. I was in a trance. It was something far and away from the power Apollo had leant me of fire that I used on the king now. It was an emptiness, the opposite of the fullness that the heat had seemed. It was in me like a gaping chasm that would suck in all other power for its own. For…my own, and it was hungry, dark and wicked.

  Alec strained from the pressure of my invisible hand still buried within his chest, and he groaned, which snapped me out of my state. I gasped, finally seeing the blood that trickled down his chin.

  And then my control was stolen in a haze, spun and turned around on me like icy daggers of death. They lanced through me with a flick of his thoughts. His retribution was swift, but less than it could have been. But still, it stung, and I blinked through the water that ran out of my eyes and I had to glance down to see if I was bleeding from dozens of cuts, but nothing showed.