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“I am a god,” Okot snaps. “I am the natural order.”
There it is. The arrogance he’s only barely managed to hold back. He truly believes I should want the things he’s offering me. Except I’ve had a taste of other gods. I’ve seen that true deities serve the natural order instead of themselves. What Okot is proposing to me is an abomination, and I want no part of that.
So I return my attention to him. “I will be as well when I become the Singular once more. So no, I don’t need you to bring my mother back. And even if I wished for that, she doesn’t, and I would never force such perversion on her.”
“You are assuming you have the choice.” Okot’s voice is suddenly the rumble of an awakening volcano, and those clouds flash so fiercely over his brow, they almost obscure it. Darkness wavers behind him, that abyss I’ve only seen glimpses of.
I look him dead in the eye, too far gone to fear his threats any longer. “I’m not the one who came begging to be saved,” I snarl back, wriggling against his vise, which has somehow become tighter again. “I hope that when the others discover your treachery, they devour you to the very last drop.”
Glaciers form around Okot’s head, a crown of icy determination. “You will not bargain with me?” he asks, suddenly every inch the remote, unfathomable deity he presents himself to be.
“Not even if you were the last god in all of Otera.”
“Then you leave me no choice.”
Okot gestures, and the cottage vanishes. Darkness descends, the one I’ve been glimpsing all this while.
And inside that darkness, lights.
23
“Keita? Britta?” I call out. There’s no answer.
It’s like my friends aren’t here, and yet I feel them nearby, sense them somewhere in the darkness that crowds closer and closer.
My extremities are freezing cold now, as if all the blood has gone out of them. But something warm surrounds me, a moist, fleshy softness. It’s accompanied by a strange scent, a calming, almost intoxicating aroma that reminds me of the flowers that once bloomed in the fields just above Irfut. A fluorescent blue-green mist wafts past my gaze. My eyelids grow heavier and heavier. It’s as if that scent—that mist—is curling around me, lulling me to sleep.
I try to struggle, try to keep my eyes open, but the scent, it’s too powerful.
Deka! Ixa’s voice jolts through my brain the same moment his head butts against mine. Deka wake! he growls.
I’m trying, I reply groggily, struggling up.
But that softness just tightens further, keeping me in place. Squeezing my armor into me. If I were wearing anything other than ebiki armor, it would have no doubt broken under the pressure by now. I recognize this dimly, even though I’m still half asleep.
What is that thing? I ask sleepily. What’s around me?
Monster, Ixa growls, snapping at something I can’t see. Monster trying to eat you!
The horror of what he’s saying shatters through my daze. I gasp up, push against the softness. As if in response to my efforts, the lights brighten and I finally see my captor.
A vale wraith.
I know immediately what it is—because how else to explain this coiling, writhing monstrosity of a creature? Its head is a colossal, shapeless mass that seems to melt into the slimy black tentacles slithering around me. Black grains powder them—black sand, which exudes the same sort of wrongness I felt back in Irfut and in the first vale. It covers the creature so completely, moments pass before I finally spot my friends, also wrapped in those writhing tentacles, their bodies limp as that scent wafts around them in a cloud of fluorescent blue-green, no doubt drugging them the same way it did me.
“Britta?” I shout, heart pounding with fear. “KEITA? BELCALIS? LI?”
None of them answer. They’re all fast asleep as the wraith slowly, inexorably pulls them closer to its gargantuan head, its tiny blue eye slits narrowing as its gaping, rounded maw of a mouth opens to display row upon row of jagged teeth.
For a creature with no meaningful delineation between its head and the rest of its body, it certainly has a lot of mouth. Mouth enough to swallow each one of my friends whole, as it clearly intends to do.
“BRITTA! KEITA! LI! WAKE UP!” I shout, but none of them so much as moves a muscle. They’re too deeply drugged, too caught in the dreams that the creature is weaving using that hypnotic scent.
Panicked now, I try to wrench myself from the creature’s grasp, but it’s like fighting against water. The creature’s skin is too soft. All my strikes just glide off it—as do Ixa’s bites. Even when he grows to a larger size to fight, his mouth can’t quite find purchase. The wraith easily slaps him away when he lunges in for another bite, sending him barreling into a far-off dune.
“IXA!” I shout, horrified, as he disappears into the darkness.
I fumble for my atikas, only barely managing to slide one out of its sheath.
