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Empty, I then left the castle.
The return to Prague passed in a blur of gray roads and numbing cold. I did not go to my flat or the river, but let my feet carry me to a district of shadows and narrow streets I did not know.
There stood a church, not grand but dying, in a forgotten square. Ivy choked its facade, and the stones crumbled under the weight of centuries. One bell tower leaned against the dark sky.
I pushed the heavy wooden door open, and it screamed against the stone floor, revealing air that was cold and smelled of damp rot and incense that had burned out years ago. Moonlight bled through a shattered rose window, cutting jagged shapes across the floor tiles. Across the room, pews lay overturned like ribs in a carcass.
A stone font, filled with stagnant holy water left to rot, stood near the entrance, and my shadows hissed. I reached into it, scooped up the gritty water—uncaring that it stung my skin with the remanence of prayers—and splashed it onto my face to scrub away the grime and wash away the tracks of my bloody tears.
I looked down the ruined nave, where the altar was a wreck of stones. Behind it, a statue stood in a shaft of moonlight.
The archangel.
The statue was larger than life, carved from pale marble. His features were weathered. One wing lay in shards at his base while the other stretched toward the ceiling in defiance, and his face was serene and noble and terrifyingly familiar.
Michael. My father.
I walked down the aisle with my boots crunching on the debris and stopped before the altar to look up at his stone face. He looked so calm, nothing like the conflicted warrior who had sentenced his own blood.
I tilted my head back as the water dripped from my chin like fresh tears. “Father…” The word was rusty on my tongue. “Oh, Father.” I let out a shaky breath. “What did you do? To us? To me?” I gestured at my face and the monster beneath the skin. “W-why?” I stepped closer and slammed my hand on the broken altar. “Tell me!” I screamed with the same chorus of voices. “What am I now?”
The marble angel offered no answers. Its sightless eyes stared into the gloom, serene and unmoved.
I was alone in that ruined sanctuary, under the weight of my questions and the echo of a broken heart.
28. Remiel
The silence of Limbo is not peaceful. It is a held breath, a pause before a scream that never comes.
Vyxia, Jareth, and I walk through a landscape stripped of color, a world painted in shades of forgotten gray. The ground is a vast, undulating plain of dust that rises and falls like the chest of a dying giant, each step sinking into the yielding surface. There is no wind here, no weather to speak of. Only a heavy stillness so absolute that it presses down like a physical weight.
Souls—not whole but fragments—drift past us. They are tatters of mist shaped like humans, their edges blurring into the surrounding nothingness. They float without purpose, their eyes vacant and their mouths moving in silent, endless loops. They do not scream or weep, existing in a state of perpetual fading.
One brushes against my shoulder, and I feel a sensation like walking through a spiderweb—cold, sticky, and clinging.
“Don’t touch them,” Vyxia whispers, her voice soft. Her violet eyes dart nervously as she pulls her cloak tighter around herself. “They cling. They want to remember what it feels like to be solid.”
Jareth walks on my other side. His hand hovers near the hilt of his blade, though there is nothing here to cut. He watches the drifting shapes, his jaw set tight. “Is this it?” he asks, his voice low. “Is this all there is? Just…dust and echoes?”
“This is the drain,” I say, my voice raspy. The air tastes of chalk and old bones, a flavor that coats the back of my throat. “This is where the universe pours what it cannot use. The leftovers. The forgotten.”
I look ahead. In the distance, a tower pierces the gloom. It does not look as if it was built by hands; it looks grown, a spire of pale translucent stones that glow with a faint, sickly light. It pulses, a slow throb I feel in my teeth. A heartbeat that is not my own.
Something pulls at me. Not a physical tether but a hook in my gut, a magnetic drag that turns my feet toward that tower whether or not I want them to.
“Kael,” I say.
“He is in there?” Jareth asks, squinting into the distance.
“Yes.” The certainty settles in my bones. “I can feel him. He is…so loud.”
We pick up the pace, the dust puffing around our boots in small gray clouds.
The closer we get to the tower, the denser the souls we pass become. They cluster around the light like moths to a flame, their transparent hands and feet beating against the stones and their silent mouths shaping words that no one will ever hear.
I step over a piece of debris half buried in the dust. It looks like a broken wheel. Or perhaps a rib cage bleached white by time. My boot catches on it though, and I stumble.
The impact jars my spine, a physical jolt that should be nothing, but the pain doesn’t stop. It explodes in my skull, a white-hot spike driving behind my eyes.
