The Opelux and Other Monsters || Book One

CHAPTER 24 (PART 1) - ORION

Whatever Colleena had numbed me up with must have started wearing off.

Gratefully, the worst of the pain stayed away as long as we didn't rush. Rilyin's arm helped a little, especially on the stairs. There were a lot of them. Apparently, the purple doors didn't portal right to the place Rilyin wanted to take me. But when we entered a circular room with a checkered floor, I held back tears when I saw even more stairs spiraling upward into the dark depths of a tower.

"Colleena is going to be furious with me," he said, squeezing my hand. He pointed up to a narrow bridge that spanned from one side of the tower to the other forty feet above our heads. It had to be no more than three feet wide. And unless the rail was invisible, it didn't have one. "Will you be able to make it to that first bridge?"

It was moments like this I almost forgot he was blind. "Sure," I grunted, afraid if I thought about it too hard, the pain would get worse.

"We're almost there," he reassured me, like he could see the pain I was in. "We won't be going any higher than that."

"Almost where?" The bridge ended at a wide platform and then more stairs continued up, disappearing into the darkness above. "Are we going up there for the view? Or are you planning to chuck me off?"

"You'll see."

"At least say it isn't either of those things."

He chuckled. "It isn't either of those things."

Curiosity was the only thing that got me to the top.

Finally, at the narrow landing before the even narrower bridge, I grimaced and leaned against the wall, pressing my hand to my aching side. I knew the skin was healed, but the steady burn beneath the surface felt like a living thing, encircling my insides and lacing itself in and out between my ribs.

The blind Emperor stepped out onto that bridge with no rail and began to make his way across it.

"How do you always seem to know where everything is?" I asked, eyeing his cane tapping the ground with every other limping step.

"My other senses are quite spectacular," he said with a smile.

I glanced down briefly and could've sworn my foot and side burned a bit more intensely in response. "I see where Tritteon gets his humility."

Rilyin chuckled. "Tritteon doesn't have a single, humble bone in his body." He turned back as if to look at me. "Are you coming?"

"Do you have a destination in mind other than narrow bridge and more stairs? Because if we're really here for the view, I'll just take a seat right here."

"I do. Yes. I'm told about halfway across the bridge it comes into focus."

"What comes into focus?"

"The door."

I grinned. "Really?"

"Indeed."

"This place is bizarre."

"Wonderfully so."

I followed, limping slowly behind him. And about halfway across, just like he said, a tall, gold plated door appeared, engraved with trees and flowers and vines covered in thorns.

"But...why?" was all I could say.

He understood what I meant. "It is simply an enchantment of minor concealment. This is something very personal to my family that doesn't need to be on full display except to those who have specifically been invited to see it."

He stopped in front of it, waiting until I stood beside him on the round platform large enough for two people to stand uncomfortably close, before he pressed his hand against the door's engraved handle and whispered, "Aeriss."