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Ada
My nostrils burned with the smoke quickly filling the chamber as flames came together into nothing short of an inferno. Worse was how the corpses littering the ground caught fire, skin melting to their faces like wrinkled leather—something they hadn’t done for two-hundred years.
Enosh must have lifted his curse, but I commanded them to rise, regardless. If they tossed themselves onto the flames blazing along the furrows, I might be able to escape, but where to? The corridor I’d come from had been full of pine pitch and was likely already roaring.
Eyes burning, I glanced back at the metal screen, trying to blink it into focus against the violent heat that brought tears to my eyes. If I ran that way, what were the chances they hadn’t poured the amber resin into the stone there as well? Small.
With a single thought, I commanded the corpses to throw themselves onto the flames back toward the corridor. At least there, I knew where I was going.
Obeying their mistress’ command, they collapsed onto the flames two and three at once. I sprinted down the dais and crossed pile upon pile of soldiers like bridges.
Bridges doused in oil and set ablaze, for the flames engulfed them too quickly. They blackened the train of my dress, singed my hair until its bitter reek crept into my nostrils, scalded along my arms until it blistered.
Pain prickled my skin like a thousand needles driven into my flesh at once, ripping several whimpers from me until the first scream wedged from my throat. A cough doused it, doing my lungs no favors as I heaved and pulled boiling air into my chest.
Was I going the right way?
Orange flames depleted the air as they frantically danced all around me, suffocating me, making my mind go blank. Floor, walls, ceiling… everything burned.
W-where is the temple?
Where…? Oh my god, which way lay the gate?
A sudden roar ripped through my focus as my dress finally caught fire. Dissolving one of the corpses into nothing but bone dust, I let it sprinkle onto me, extinguishing the flames. Another end of my train caught fire instead.
My chest heaved in tight convulsions as my legs gave underneath me. I collapsed to the ground, screaming in silent agony as the fire burned me alive, causing such havoc on my focus that I couldn’t sense a single speck of bone. This was it. I would crawl out of here charred to—
Gravity shifted around me.
No, I shifted as someone picked me up, pressing me against the ungiving hardness of a familiar chest.
Enosh!
He said something, his voice nothing but deep vibrations against the roar of flames as I tossed in his arms. Darkness devoured me as he let something form around me, leather perhaps, shielding me from the worst of the flames while they certainly devoured him.
I jostled about, screaming against his chest as the heat continued to bite at my body. The pain was agonizing, but it had nothing, nothing on the shock of gnawing cold that suddenly drove its sharp fangs into my flesh. Were we… outside?
Enosh shook the leather off me, hushing me from lips black with soot, set into a face almost as disfigured as the day I’d died. He looked like the monster people made him out to be. But this one was mine, my god husband, who had gone through fire to save me.
“Soldiers are coming,” he ground through his teeth, visibly in pain as he spoke. “The valley is too narrow to escape them easily.”
Mind reeling, I only reached up, watching my fingers, charred to the first knuckle, cup his blistered cheek. “You saved me from the fire.”
“I have told you I would stand at the center of flames for you and our child, have I—” Enosh stumbled, and everything spun once more before he sunk to his knees with a hiss. “Listen to me, little one. Gather bone with me as fast as you can from wherever you mind reaches and pile it around us, yes?”
It wasn’t so much his words that instilled blood-curdling fear in me, but the tension in his voice. When I looked around the distorted landscape, I understood the urgency.
A frigid breeze numbed my face, amplified by the sight of mounted soldiers galloping toward us. Hundreds of them, maybe even a thousand. Their hoofbeats drowned beneath the roar of flames coming from the open gate of the temple, and smoke rose in raven-black billows from the stone buildings.
Chaos surrounded us, trapping us between a large army storming ahead, archers ru
“Ada!” Enosh shouted, startling me out of my daze. “Bone. We need bone!”
Bone. Yes.
Against the panic in my chest and the pain of my burn wounds, I focused on whatever bone was in reach. Skeletal remains of rodents trapped between boulders, beetle shells hard enough to break through the frozen ground, the corpses inside the temple… I gathered it all, letting it drift toward us like a snowstorm.
Arrows whistled.
One embedded itself into Enosh’s upper arm, ripping a grunt from him. More followed, thudding into the snow all around us as the hoofbeats of too many horses shook the ground on which we kneeled.
“Enosh,” I whimpered, fearing immortality more than I had ever feared death. “They’re closing—”
He threw himself atop me, ripping me to the ground with a hiss. Another arrow must have struck him somewhere with the way he flinched, and again, curling himself around me.
“When I say now, you blow the bone in all directions at once with as much force as you can!” His command was harsh because it needed to be, yet I sensed how his fingers stroked along the back of my head, offering comfort as he pushed me into the snow. “Wait.”
Pressed against the ground like this, I couldn’t see much. But I didn’t need to. I heard the sharp thuds of arrows puncturing the ground, sensed each flinch when one struck my husband, and felt how the beat of hooves bore all the way into my heart.
When the bone around us trembled, barely distinguishable from the snow, Enosh stroked my head with more fervor. “Patience, Ada. Patience.”
He jerked once more.
Another moan.
“Wait,” he mumbled as though he’d sensed the panicked rage build in my core, the brutal urge to kill all those out to hurt us. “Wait. Wait. Now!”
It emerged as a cry toward the gray clouds, the energy that thrust the bone we’d gathered into all directions like a deadly tidal wave, rippling on the surges of my rage and grief.
Trembles ransacked my entire body, stiffening my spine to such a degree, not even Enosh could hold me down as the surge of bone ripped through the line of soldiers.
Like a powerful gust, it threw everyone and everything back, lifting horses off the ground only to let the beasts collapse several feet away. Some of the spiked walls blew across the field, lancing soldiers and horses alike, leaving them to wiggle and squeal.
My chest nearly burst with glee.
The army was… gone.
Whatever was left screamed and wailed, but a loud rumble soon overshadowed it as parts of the bailey broke off with a deafening boom. The crumbling stone ripped the archers down, burying them and their pestering arrows beneath it.
A smile ached my cheeks.
The temple was gone, too.
Nothing remained around us but severed limbs, chaos, and a few soldiers who walked about the field of slaughter disoriented. But not much longer.
I struggled myself onto my wobbly legs and lifted my arms, my voice a mere whisper but the dead heard it just the same. “Rise.”
Soldiers pushed themselves up to stand, screaming in panic and confusion as their limbs moved at my will, their souls mere onlookers that would depart soon enough.
“Kill them,” I said. “Kill them all.”
They spread out like a mischief of rats, cleansing this place of its remaining depravity.
I kneeled back down where his upper body swayed, where he sat with at least five arrows protruding from his back. “Enosh.”
“Ca
“I’m so sorry.” For how I, one after another, pulled the arrows from his flesh, sending jolts and grunts of pain through him. “You’ll heal faster like this.”
“You have done so well…” Enosh wrapped his blistered arms around me and pulled me against him. “We will… rest here for only a moment, little one. Only… only a moment. Then we will go home.”
Home.
To our Pale Court.
Nodding, I allowed myself to go slack against him, only now noticing my badly burned legs, not a shred of wool left around them. No, he was right. We needed to heal before we would return home.
So there we sat for an hour or two or forever, a god and a goddess mending in each other’s embrace. Perhaps he was the liar. Perhaps I was the monster. I didn’t care.
Neither did love.