I sink into the realm of Death.
How noble it must be, the pain of Moritas,
to stand guardian forever to silent souls,
to judge a life and choose to take it.
—Life and Death and Rebirth, by Scholar Garun
Adelina Amouteru
I don’t remember what happens, or how I arrive. All I know is that I am here, standing on the shore of a flat, gray land, its edges lined by the quiet, unmoving surface of the Underworld’s ocean. It is still as a pond.
I look up. Where the sky should be, there is instead the ocean, as if I were standing upside down on the sky and looking down at it.
I turn to face inland. Everything is painted in the same muted tone of gray. The pulse of death beats all around me, the silence ringing rhythmically in my ears. I find myself staring at a flat landscape littered with thousands, millions, countless numbers of towering glass pillars. The pillars are iridescent and white.
Each one is in the shape of a quartz and the color of moonstone, evenly spaced from the next, forming perfect rows that extend outward to the horizon and then tower high up into oblivion. Each pillar seems to shine with a faint silver-white light, a hue that sets it sharply apart from the uniform gray in the rest of this place. As I draw nearer to the first pillar, I see something inside it, suspended in the space of the stone. It is hard to make out the shape, although it seems long and blurred. I step up to the pillar and press one hand against it.
There is a man inside.
My hand jerks away as if the pillar were ice cold—I jump backward. The man’s eyes are closed, and his expression is peaceful. Something about his face seems timeless, frozen forever in the prime of his life. I study him a while longer.
This is his soul, I suddenly realize.
I turn away from him and look around at the pillars stretching as far as I can see. Each of these pillars is the final resting place of a soul from the mortal world, the remnants of that person long after flesh and bone have been reclaimed by the land. This is the library of Moritas, all who have ever existed.
My hands start to tremble. If this is where all the souls of the dead reside, then this is also where I will find my sister.
I look around me, searching for the others. It takes me a long moment to notice the beam of light illuminating my body, as if marking me as a moment of life in this world of the deceased. Four other beams are scattered in the midst of this maze of lustrous pillars, their glow distinct against the backdrop of silver and gray. They seem very far away, each of us separated from the others by what seems like an infinite amount of space.
Everyone enters the realm of Death alone.
Across this eerie landscape comes a whisper. It permeates every empty space around me, echoing up to the ocean in the sky. There is a darkness creeping forward, something greater than anything I have ever seen, a black cloud stretching from the heavens to the sea. It roils onward.
Adelina.
It is Moritas, the goddess of Death. I know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that this is her voice.
You have come to bargain with me, Adelina.
“Yes,” I answer in a whisper. “I’ve come—we’ve all come—to heal the tear between your world and ours.”
Yes, the others. The cloud towers before me. Your immortal energy has been missing from our realm for a long time.
My powers, I start to say, but the words falter on my tongue. Even now—even after coming all this way. The whispers in my head churn, angry that I would consider giving them up.
Step forward, Adelina, Moritas commands.
I hesitate. The cloud before me is a terrifying tangle of black bruises and curves, shapes of monsters all joined together. Terror freezes my body in place. I have walked through forests at midnight. I have traveled through the darkness of caves. But to step into Death herself . . .
Fear is your sword.
My sword, my strength. I take one step after another. The cloud looms closer, closer still. I take another step, and then I am inside it, consumed whole.
I walk in a land of black mist and silver-white pillars. Within each pearly structure, a person hovers in eternal sleep, and over them I can see a faint reflection of myself peering in, wondering how their mortal life used to be. My heart pounds rhythmically in my chest. I’m grateful to feel it, to know that I am not dead here. A whisper floats through the mist now and then, the voice of Moritas, calling out for me. I follow it, even though I don’t know where she is leading me. I pass one row of pillars after another. Their luminous glow reflects against my skin. I walk until I lose count of how many rows I’ve passed, and when I look over my shoulder in the direction I first came, I can see nothing but rows of these pillars all around.
Are the others wandering through their own nightmare of pillars, searching for me? Now and then, I see ghostly figures walking the paths amongst the moonstone too, figures that I can never look at directly. Perhaps those are lost souls, ghosts. Perhaps Moritas is speaking to the others, each in turn.
Adelina.
Moritas sounds closer now. I turn back to the path before me—and then I stop short. The face inside the pillar closest to me, her eyes closed and her expression peaceful, belongs to the former queen of Kenettra. Giulietta. Her dark hair seems to float inside the column of moonstone, and her bare arms are crossed over her chest. I take a hesitant step toward her. There are no signs of any wounds on her body, no evidence of Teren’s sword cutting through her chest. She is pristine, forever preserved in the Underworld. I study her face in a way I never did when she was alive. She was beautiful. Enzo looked so much like her.
I continue walking. Then I realize that the pillars now nearest to me are all people I once knew.
There are Inquisition soldiers. The Night King of Merroutas is here as well, his brows no longer furrowed in anger. Dante hovers nearby too. There is Gemma, her purple marking stretching across her peaceful face. I utter a whisper of a prayer as I pass her, asking for her forgiveness, and then force myself onward, recognizing one face after another. I pause for a moment on Teren, who now stays encased in his own pillar, arms crossed over his chest, lost to eternal night. It is the most serene I have ever seen him, and I find myself hoping that he has at last found some semblance of peace.
And there is Enzo. I stop before his pillar. He looks like he is merely asleep, his face calm and flawless. His arms still bear the burns he has always had, his skin there ruined and scarred. I stand there for a long moment, as if perhaps he would wake up if I stare long enough. But he doesn’t.
Finally, I continue on. The faces seem to blur together around me.
I stop again when I reach my mother, who is entombed beside my father. It has been so long since I’ve seen her that I might not even have recognized her—except that Violetta looked exactly like her younger self. My lips part slightly, and my chest tightens in grief. I lay a hand against the cold surface of the pillar. If I concentrate hard enough, I feel as if I could hear her voice, her soft, sweet singing, a tune I remember from when I was very small. I can remember her hands on the swell of her belly, can recall wondering who would emerge from it. I stare at her for a long time, perhaps an eternity, before I am finally able to move on.
I do not bother looking at my father. I’m searching for someone much more important.
Then, I find her. Violetta.
She is lovely. Stunning. Her eyes are closed, but if they could open, I know I would be staring into familiar brown eyes, not the lifeless gray ones she’d had toward the end of her life. I reach out for her, but the moonstone blocks my way—and I have to settle for pressing my hand against the surface, staring within at my sister’s face. My face is wet with tears. She is here, in the Underworld. I can see her again.
Adelina.
I tear my gaze away. And there, I see it. I know instantly that this is what we came for.
In the center of this landscape of iridescent pillars is a dark slab, a black column in the midst of the moonstone. It cuts through the air and into the sky, as high as I can see, and around it is a swirl of dark mist, a wound stretching from the Underworld, up to the mortal world, and higher into the heavens. Raffaele’s words return to me in a flash. This is the cut—the ancient tear—that opened the immortal world into the mortal, when Joy descended to the earth as a human and then passed through the Underworld again. This black pillar is where Joy himself had been encased after his mortal death, before returning to the heavens. Where the blood fever first originated. Even here, I can feel the dark power, the wrongness of it. I can remember the feel of a wooden table beneath my body, the taste of brandy on my lips that the doctor prescribed for my illness, the sound of him coming into my chambers when I was only four years of age, holding a red-hot knife over my infected eye even as I screamed and cried and pleaded with him not to do it.
This is the origin of the fever that has touched each of our lives. The closer I step, the darker the space behind the pillar turns, until it seems like I am walking directly into a world of night, being swallowed by this fog.
I reach the pillar. As I do, the swirling darkness changes, morphing into the shape of a towering figure, dark and elegant, her body shrouded in robes of fog and mist, a pair of horns twisting high over her head. She stares at me with eyes of black. I open my mouth to say something, but nothing comes out.
Moritas, the goddess of Death.
My child, she says. Her black-eyed stare focuses on me. Her voice is deep and powerful, a sound that echoes across the landscape and inside my chest, a vibration so ancient that it aches in my bones. The children of the gods. To either side of her, other figures now appear, tall and silent. I recognize Formidite, with her long black hair and featureless face. Caldora, her fins huge and monstrous.
Then, a man clad in a cloak of gold and jewels. Denarius, the angel of Greed. Fortuna, goddess of Prosperity, in a sheet of glitter and diamond. Amare, god of Love, impossibly breathtaking. Tristius, angel of War, with his sword and shield. Sapientus, god of Wisdom. There is Aevietes, god of Time, and Pulchritas, angel of Beauty. Compasia, angel of Empathy.
Laetes, angel of Joy.
The gods and goddesses are all here, come to claim their children.
“Moritas,” I whisper, the word barely a sound from my lips. My power seethes in her presence, threatening to destroy my dying, mortal body.
You were never meant to wield our powers, she says. We have watched from the immortal realm as your presence changed the mortal world.
Moritas lowers her head and closes her eyes. To my side, the others now materialize out of the black mist. Raffaele, Lucent, Maeve. Magiano. I want to step forward, aching to go to them, to him . . . but all I can do is look on. They, too, seem to be in a trance.
“What do you want, in order to fix this?” I whisper. I know the answer, but somehow, I cannot bring myself to say it.
Moritas opens her eyes again. Her voice echoes in unison with her siblings. Your powers. Relinquish them, and you shall all be returned to the living realm. Give them to us, and the world will be healed.
In order to repair the world, we must hand back our powers. We will be the last of the Young Elites.
The whispers rear in my head, clawing, hooking deep into my flesh. No. I cry out from the pain. How dare you, they roar. After all we’ve done for you. How dare you think of life without us. You cannot survive without our help. Have you forgotten what it feels like to have us taken from you? Don’t you remember?
I do. The memory of Violetta wrenching away my power now hits me so hard that I take an unsteady step back. It feels a hundred times worse than I’d remembered, even—as if someone had ripped into the hollow of my chest, closed a fist around my beating heart, and tried to pull it out. I tremble at the pain. It is unbearable.
And for what? To protect the rest of the world? You owe them nothing; you rule them. Return to your palace and continue your reign.
It is such a tempting offer.
“I cannot do this,” I say to Moritas as my voice falters. “I cannot give you my power.”
Then you will die here. Moritas raises her arms. If you offer your power, willingly, you may step out of our realm and back into your mortal world, alive. Your powers cannot return with you. Each of you must do this.
Each of us. If we all give up our powers, we will be allowed to return to the living world.
The landscape around us is engulfed in darkness. I take a deep breath, filling myself with it, and shake at the feeling. The power within me, all the darkness I have ever felt, and all the darkness that I have ever been able to call upon, pale in comparison to the power of the darkness from the goddess of Death. Moritas wields a million, billion infinite threads all at once, and under the terrible influence of her power, I can see in one glance all of the suffering that has occurred since the beginning of time. The visions swallow me whole.
I see the fires that created the world, the great ocean that existed before the gods created land. There is the descent of Joy to the mortal world, and the first spread of the blood fever. It sweeps through the villages and towns and kingdoms, infecting the living with its touches of immortality, killing many, scarring a cursed few . . . gifting immortal powers to even fewer. I see the screams and the moans of terror from Kenettra. I see the malfettos who burn at the stake, and then the Elites, who fight back. I see me.
I see the darkness that the world inflicted upon us, and we onto them.
Poor child, Moritas says. Beside her, the forms of Caldora and Formidite watch me silently. You would die with darkness clutched in your hands?
No. I wrap my arms around myself and look behind me desperately, as if someone might come to save me. Violetta. She had been there for me, once. We had loved each other, once.
Moritas tilts her head in my direction curiously. You are bound to your sister.
And then, something occurs to me. We had to enter the realm of the dead with all of our alignments, together, even those who had perished on the way. Teren. Violetta. If we return our powers to the gods, then we are given our lives in exchange, can walk out of this immortal realm and return to the living. Does that mean . . . if we do give up our powers, if I give up mine, that all of us who had come to offer up our powers can return to the mortal world? That even Teren would live again?
That Violetta could return? Would this bring my sister back?
The scene changes again. I am a child, walking hand in hand with Violetta. I am lying in bed, losing my fight with the blood fever. I watch my hair color shift from dark to light, settling into silver. I see my scarred face, watch myself shatter my mirror into a million pieces. Then I see my future. I am Queen of Kenettra, ruler of sea, sun, and sky. I sit alone on my throne, looking out over my empire. The sight stirs my ambition, and the whispers in my head coo. Yes, this is what you want. This is all you have ever wanted.
But then I see myself curled on the marble floor of the throne room, sobbing, surrounded by illusions that I cannot erase. I look on in horror as I chase my own sister out of the room, as I hold a knife to her throat and threaten her life. I see myself lashing out at Magiano, ordering his execution after he tries to stop me from hurting myself. I see myself sobbing, wishing I could take back what I’ve done. I look on as I lock myself in my own chambers, screaming for the illusions that claw with their long black talons to leave me alone. I stay locked away forever, mad and terrified, until, finally one night, I have my nightmare once more.
I wake to the horror of it, over and over again, only to be lost in another layer of the dream. I run to the door, trying in vain to keep the darkness outside. I wake, and do the same thing again. I cry out for help. I wake. I push uselessly against the yawning door. I wake. I cycle again and again—except, this time, I cannot pull myself out of it. I cannot wake up in reality.
Instead, I cycle until I finally can no longer keep the door closed and it swings open. On the other side of it is a never-ending darkness, the gaping mouth of the Underworld, Death come to claim me. I try once again to shut the door, but the darkness pushes in. It bares its teeth at me. Then it lunges, and even as I try to shield myself, it tears me to pieces and devours my soul.
This would be my life.
I think of the pile of stones we had to leave behind in the mountains. I remember the feeling of my sister’s body cradled in my arms, of myself sobbing into her frozen hair, telling her over and over again that I am sorry, begging her not to leave me.
If I give my powers to the goddess of Death, if we all do, then perhaps, just perhaps, she will return my sister to me. Violetta might live again; perhaps we will all walk out of here. The possibility is fleeting, but it is there and it sends a shudder of wild hope through me. She might live. I can, at least, undo this one wrong. I can fix what I have broken between us.
And I can save myself.
Slowly, I rise to my feet. I am still afraid, but I lift my head high. The whispers in my head suddenly start to howl. They call to me, begging me not to leave them, hissing at me for my betrayal. What are you doing! they scream. Have you forgotten? Your father’s hands, beating at you—your enemies, laughing at you? The burning stake? This is life without power.
I stand firm against their onslaught. No, that is not my life without power. My life without power will be one of walking through a crowd without darkness tugging at my heart. It will be seeing Violetta in the living world, smiling again. It will be riding on the back of a horse with Magiano as we crest another mountain, searching for adventure. It will be a life without these whispers in my head. It will be a life without my father’s ghost.
It will be a life.
I look at Moritas. Then I reach deep within myself, grasp the threads that have entwined themselves around my heart since I was a child. I pull them away. And I relinquish them.