In the end, he gave me stone.
“When all is lost, honor demands death,” Roque once told me. “It is a noble end.” But what would a rich poet know of death? The poor know death. Slaves know death. But even as I yearn for it, I fear it. Because the more I see of this cruel world, the less I believe it ends in some pleasant fiction.
The Vale is not real.
It’s a lie told by mothers and fathers to give their starving children a reason for the horror. There is no reason. Eo is gone. She never watched me fight for her dream. She did not care what fate I made at the Institute or if I loved Mustang, because the day she died, she became nothing. There is nothing but this world. It is our beginning and our end. Our one chance at joy before the dark.
Yes. But you don’t have to end. You can escape this place, the darkness whispers to me. Say the words. Say them. You know the way.
It is right. I do.
“All you must say is ‘I am broken,’ and this will all end,” the Jackal said long ago, before he lowered me into this hell. “I will put you in a lovely estate for the rest of your days and send you warm, beautiful Pinks and food enough to make you fatter than the Ash Lord. But the words carry a price.”
Worth it. Save yourself. No one else will.
“That price, dear Reaper, is your family.”
The family he seized from Lykos with his lurchers and now keeps in his prison in the bowels of his Attica fortress. Never letting me see them. Never letting me tell them I love them, and that I’m sorry I was not strong enough to protect them.
“I will feed them to the prisoners of this fortress,” he said. “These men and women you think should rule instead of Gold. Once you see the animal in man, you will know that I am right and you are wrong. Gold must rule.”
Let them go, the darkness says. The sacrifice is practical. It is wise.
“No…I won’t…”
Your mother would want you to live.
Not at that price.
What man could grasp a mother’s love? Live. For her. For Eo.
Could she want that? Is the darkness right? After all, I’m important. Eo said so. Ares said so; he chose me. Me of all the Reds. I can break the chains. I can live for more. It’s not selfish for me to escape this prison. In the grand scheme of things, it is selfless.
Yes. Selfless, really…
Mother would beg me to make this sacrifice. Kieran would understand. So would my sister. I can save our people. Eo’s dream must be made real, no matter the cost. It’s my responsibility to persevere. It is my right.
Say the words.
I slam my head into the stone and scream at the darkness to go away. It cannot trick me. It cannot break me.
Didn’t you know? All men break.
Its high cackle mocks me, stretching forever.
And I know it is right. All men break. I did already under his torture. I told him that I was from Lykos. Where he could find my family. But there is a way out, to honor what I am. What Eo loved. To silence the voices.
“Roque, you were right,” I whisper. “You were right.” I just want to be home. To be gone from here. But I can’t have that. All that’s left, the only honorable path for me, is death. Before I betray even more of who I am.
Death is the way out.
Don’t be a fool. Stop. Stop.
I lurch my head forward into the wall harder than before. Not to punish, but to kill. To end myself. If there is no pleasant end to this world, then nothingness will suffice. But if there is a Vale beyond this plane, I will find it. I’m coming, Eo. At last, I am on my way. “I love you.”
No. No. No. No. No.
I crash my skull again into stone. Heat pours down my face. Sparks of pain dance in the black. The darkness wails at me, but I do not stop.
If this is the end, I will rage toward it.
But as I pull back my head to deliver one last great blow, existence groans. Rumbling like an earthquake. Not the darkness. Something beyond. Something in the stone itself, growing louder and deeper above me, till the darkness cracks and a blazing sword of light slashes down.
The ceiling parts. Light burns my eyes. I clamp them shut as the floor of my cell rises upward till, with a click, it stops and I rest, exposed, on a flat stone surface. I push out my legs and gasp, nearly fainting from the pain. Joints crack. Knotted tendons unspool. I fight to reopen my eyes against the raging light. Tears fill them. It is so bright I can only catch bleached flashes of the world around.
Fragments of alien voices surround me. “Adrius, what is this?”
“…has he been in there this whole time?”
“The stench…”
I lie upon stone. It stretches around me to either side. Black, rippling with blue and purple, like the shell of a Creonian beetle. A floor? No. I see cups. Saucers. A cart of coffee. It’s a table. That was my prison. Not some hideous abyss. Just a meter-wide, twelve-meter-long slab of marble with a hollow center. They’ve eaten inches above me every night. Their voices the distant whispers I heard in the darkness. The clatter of their silverware and plates my only company.
“Barbaric…”
I remember now. This is the table the Jackal sat at when I visited him after recovering from the wounds incurred during the Iron Rain. Did he plan my imprisonment even then? I wore a hood when they put me in here. I thought I was in the bowels of his fortress. But no. Thirty centimeters of stone separated their suppers from my hell.
I look up from the coffee tray by my head. Someone stares at me. Several someones. Can’t see them through the tears and blood in my eyes. I twist away, coiling inward like a blind mole unearthed for the very first time. Too overwhelmed and terrified to remember pride or hate. But I know he stares at me. The Jackal. A childish face in a slender body, with sandy hair parted on the side. He clears his throat.
“My honored guests. May I present prisoner L17L6363.”
His face is both heaven and hell.
To see another man…
To know I am not alone…
But then to remember what he’s done to me…it rips my soul out.
Other voices slither and boom, deafening in their loudness. And, even curled as I am, I feel something beyond their noise. Something natural and gentle and kind. Something the darkness convinced me I would never feel again. It drifts softly through an open window, kissing my skin.
A late autumn breeze cuts through the meaty, humid stink of my filth and makes me think that somewhere a child is sprinting through snow and trees, running his hands along bark and pine needles and getting sap in his hair. It’s a memory I know I’ve never had, but feel like I should. That’s the life I would have wanted. The child I could have had.
I weep. Less for me than for that boy who thinks he lives in a kind world, where Mother and Father are as large and strong as mountains. If only I could be so innocent again. If only I knew this moment was not a trick. But it is. The Jackal does not give except to take away. Soon the light will be a memory and darkness will return. I keep my eyes clenched tight, listening to the blood from my face drip on the stone, and wait for the twist.
“Goryhell, Augustus. Was this really necessary?” a feline killer purrs. Husky accent smothered in that indolent Luna lilt learned in the courts of the Palatine Hill, where all are less impressed by everything than anyone else. “He smells like death.”
“Fermented sweat and dead skin under the magnetic shackles. See the yellowish crust on his forearms, Aja?” the Jackal notes. “Still, he’s very much healthy and ready for your Carvers. All things considered.”
“You know the man better than I,” Aja says to someone else. “Make sure it is him. Not an imposter.”
“You doubt my word?” the Jackal asks. “You wound me.”
I flinch, feeling someone approach.
“Please. You’d need a heart for that, ArchGovernor. And you’ve many gifts, but that organ, I’m afraid, is dearly absent.”
“You compliment me too much.”