Immediately, the field devolved into chaos.
Atrius’s men were outnumbered, but they were also far more skilled than these Pythora-afflicted soldiers. Blades clashed, blood spurted, voices roared as steel met steel, Atrius’s men forced to fight three-to-one. They were everywhere—pouring from the forest, from the barracks to the east and west, from every direction but the Pythora King’s palace itself.
“Go!” Erekkus screamed, single-handedly holding off four soldiers, yanking his sword from one of their throats as he whirled to us. “We’ll hold them.”
He jerked his chin up to the cliff ahead—to the steep upward steps, and the castle perched atop them. His presence reeked of fury, mouth twisted into a bloodthirsty snarl.
Atrius’s lips thinned. We were preoccupied too, fighting through body after body. Though they were cumbersome, they weren’t threatening. Still, I could sense his hesitation—torn between seizing this moment and leaving his men behind.
Tearing his blade from another body, Erekkus edged closer, teeth bared.
“Go make him fucking pay, Atrius,” he said. “We have this.”
Resolve sat heavy in my heart at that, echoing his.
Yes. We’d make him pay.
Atrius’s will hardened, too. His jaw tightened. He gave Erekkus a firm nod, and a quick clap on the shoulder that might as well have been a tear-soaked promise.
Then he turned to me. He nodded to the castle.
“How many?”
I couldn’t tell. Not this far away, and certainly not surrounded by this many souls.
“I don’t know,” I said, honestly.
“Too many?”
The smirk had already started at the corner of his lip.
I felt it at the corner of mine, too.
It didn’t matter that we were exhausted, injured, weak. We were this close to the Pythora King’s throat.
“Never,” I said.
Atrius casually took down another charging soldier, then grabbed my hand.
“Good,” he said, and I held him tight, drew a thread tight between us and the stairs, and together, we slipped through it, ready to face whatever lay on the other side.
Up here, it was too quiet. Too still.
Atrius and I had to fight our way across the fields between my thread steps, swiftly distributing death as we cut through the hordes. Between our efficient fighting and my use of the threads, we made it past the onslaught quickly, disappearing into the trees beyond and re-emerging on the steps that led up the palace.
The contrast between here and the world below was chilling. We were barely steps away, and yet here it was so quiet, the only sound the echoes of the battle we had left behind. We were ready, blades still poised, waiting for someone to chase us—waiting for someone to fling themselves from the doors of the castle.
It didn’t happen. I didn’t sense a soul.
The Pythora King kept his guards at arm’s length, yes. But… no one?
It was too easy. So easy it felt dangerous.
We made our way up the winding steps of the cliff, to the castle at its peak.
“Castle,” actually, was a generous word for it. It was a relatively small building, albeit beautiful, carved from a single piece of stone. Every face of it was covered in intricate carvings, each telling stories of the gods of the White Pantheon.
As we ventured further up the steps, the columns on either side of the pathway held these stories, too. The outstretched hands of Vitarus, the god of abundance and famine, one coaxing forth crops and the other distributing plague. Ix, the goddess of sex and fertility, placing a rosebud in the womb of a weeping woman—granting her a child. Each column was a tribute to another god, their importance in the hierarchy of the White Pantheon rising as we traveled higher. I couldn’t help but pause at Acaeja’s column, halfway up the steps—she stood upright, blindfolded, a web of threads tangling from her outstretched hands, faceless silhouettes caught within it like flies in a spider’s net. All of us at the mercy of fate—the mercy of the unknown.
I touched my blindfold, swallowed back an uncomfortable pang of guilt, and kept walking.
There was no column for Nyaxia, of course. There would be none for a goddess shunned and exiled by the White Pantheon. Atrius barely glanced at the carvings. Maybe by now he was used to the way humans worshipped our gods. Maybe, after all he’d been through, gods now meant nothing to him at all.
We didn’t speak until we neared the top of the stairs—the empty stairs—and Atrius leaned down to whisper in my ear, “Anything?”
The threads were so silent, so devoid of life, that it was almost uncomfortable. It felt… unnatural, like the threads were being manipulated in some way, not unlike how I felt on Veratas. Except, while the soul of the island had been so overwhelming I had been effectively blinded, this was the opposite—a blanket of silence that choked out everything.