AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Great.” Jason grinned. “I’ve had the same number of lovers.”
Theron ignored him. “Eighty-eight panels. Eighty-eight keys. It’s a piano.”
He said it, and just like that, I saw it. “The black keys are sharps and flats,” I cried, running over. “This has to mean something. So far, nothing in this place was put here by coincidence.”
“Aella, behind you.”
We all watched transfixed as the floor opened up, and a platform carrying a grand piano rose from the bowels. A bench chair sat before it, but no one and nothing was sitting on it.
I opened my mouth to question when two keys depressed and a haunting, eerie note washed over the room. The piano played—teased by invisible fingers—a tune I’d never heard before. Just as the melody sunk into the corner of my mind where it’d always stay, the song was over.
Daciana blinked, tears clinging to her lashes. “What was that? It was beautiful.”
“The ballad of Blood and Sorrow.” Theron paced the length of the floor, studying it. “It’s an old Olympian song written by a mother who lost all of her children in the Typhon War.”
My brows snapped together. “If it’s an Olympian song, then it was written long after this place existed. At least to some extent, the prison is still connected to the outside world.”
That’s how Selene was able to bleed through the cracks of this place and find allies to help her escape. Did the gods make a mistake, or was this inevitable? Can anyone truly trap a god? And if the twelve most powerful beings in the universe couldn’t build an inescapable prison, how were a couple Sisypheans and a son of Hades going to stand in the way of her freedom?
“Connected enough to know that’s only part of the song.” Theron snapped his fingers. “Uh-ha. What if we’re supposed to finish it? That’s why they, or he, or this place let us stay together.We split up, take a section, and play. A fitting challenge for Apollo.”
“Hmm. Could be,” Nitsa said, stepping up to one of the panels. “But are we sure these are keys to be played? How do we know—?” She stomped on it and a loud, discordant note ripped through the silence.
The panel tore out of the floor, flipping up like a seesaw and launching Nitsa screaming through the air.
She crashed headfirst into the wall, snapping her neck, then thudded to the floor. Dead.
“Nitsa!”
We launched off our feet, running to her.
Eeeee.
Ahhh.
Ehhh.
Panels ripped up, flinging us into the air like water off a duck’s back. Daciana hit the ceiling. Theron and Ionna sailed through the window, and I watched them die as my feet left the floor—soaring through the air as Selene’s and my screams mingled.
“You cannot die! Free me. Free me!”
The wood rose to meet me, promising a broken spine if death didn’t claim me first.
“No!”
Darkness opened up and swallowed me whole.
I blinked to find myself in the time abyss. Wasting not a second, I grabbed the thread nearest me.
“Eighty-eight panels. Eighty-eight keys,” Theron said again. “It’s a pi—”
“No one move!”
Daciana and Ionna jerked, half jumping out of their skin.
They were fine. All fine.
Nitsa stood there whole, well, and confused.
