Furious

Chapter Nine

I stumbled out on the other side of the portal. Hector stood with his back to me, his hand still clutching mine where he had been holding me as we passed through the portal. I pulled against his grasp, feeling dirt under my shoes, smelling fire and desperation. The world around me was bleak, dark, and stone. A cavern sprawled out before me, lit by an unseen force somewhere along the expansive rock ceiling suspended above us. Desolate weeping came from somewhere on my left. The sounds of running water almost drown out the crying, but I could hear it. My first instinct was to comfort her but Hector stopped me.

"Leave her be." He shook his head. "I brought you out here to show you what you'll be fighting for. It may not be as glamorous as the realm you're used to, but it is the most important of all the worlds. Without the Underworld, we would have nowhere for our dead. Your world is crowded enough as it is, don't you think?"

I didn't want to answer. "Let go of me."

Hector let go, beckoning me to follow him away from the crying sounds. I dug my heels in. "What's wrong with her?"

The Lord of the Underworld's lips pursed momentarily, deciding whether or not to indulge my inquiry. "She weeps for her dead children, slain by Artemis and Apollo. Niobe died of sadness, her body turned to stone by her unceasing tears for her children," he explained begrudgingly. "There is nothing you can do for her. Though it is noble that you would want to."

What was that in his voice—annoyance, hedonism, exhaustion?

Satisfied that he had answered my question, Hector turned and continued in the opposite direction of the cries. There was nothing but open space so far as I could see.

And tunnels. Three tunnels hundreds of feet away from the crying woman, leading away from the direction Hector headed. Tunnels that might lead to a way home.

"It can always be worse," a voice sobbed in my ear. My skin prickled as I whirled on the speaker—a woman with wet eyes, her face so drawn she may never have smiled in her life. Her voice strained and low, she promised me: "Nothing safe ever comes out of that tunnel."

My breath caught in my chest. When she reached out her hand towards me, I scrambled after Hector; it was beginning to feel like all I would do for the rest of my life was follow him around. That wouldn't do; I jogged a few paces and placed myself in front of Hector so that instead he was the one following. He said nothing.

As an afterthought, I glanced back in the direction we had come, still walking towards who-knows-what in a never-ending cavern. Behind us stood an enormous castle. There were spiral towers and parapets, slits in the stonework for defensive mechanisms, and the portion that I could see loomed above me until I couldn't discern the castle from the stone of the sky. It seemed like the whole world was carved inside a rock. A boundless, hollow rock.

"You'll need to watch where you're going, Autumn. In your human skin, you won't be able to breathe out here for long and we have a ways to go."

Then why did we come out here? It's too soon to kill me.

I followed his suggestion and looked in the direction my feet were carrying me.

We walked on for too long; my hair stuck to the back of my neck with sweat and my lungs didn't seem to be working properly. Breathing was difficult. My legs had turned to concrete. The dirt beneath my shoes came alive and sucked at me, begging me to stay put. Each footstep heavier than the last, a wordless promise of peace whispered in my ear if only I would stop lifting my feet.

And what would be so bad about stopping here, just to rest, just for a second?

"I was under the impression that you would be strong than this. Didn't you eat the pomegranate?" Hector scooped me into his arms. It wasn't so bad. Nothing out there in his world was so bad; it all ran together, colors, feelings, sounds, they all became one entity and I was tired, too tired to care that the Lord of the Underworld was carrying me, or where we were going, or anything, really. Nothing mattered.