A Masquerade of Spiders

Chapter 31: The Next King

Chapter 31: The Next King

I had no air. My lungs burned in my chest as I tried to breath the void. But there was nothing, nothing.

It felt like being buried under a heavy blanket of sand as cold as snow. What I could feel of myself felt frozen down to my bones. The sensations intensified, and my panic burned through the dizzy haze. I was dying inside a dark nothingness.

I couldn't scream without air.

I couldn't struggle without a body.

I was ending. I was gone.

And then it was over.

I gulped air, my eyes streaming. Coughing, I bent over with my hands on my knees, trying to will through a bout of nausea. Next to me, Pyren was having a similar reaction. I made a note of this in my head. If I could kill him, it would be now when he was vulnerable.

He regained his bearings before I did.

We were standing in a circular room paved by long black flagstones. There was no light save for a few dying embers in a fire pit in the centre of the floor. There was a damp smell and dust crackled under my shoes when I swayed to regain my balance. A single door led out.

He had done it. He had used the spectre to somehow move us to somewhere else. It had happened so fast, I couldn't understand the mechanics of it. All I knew was that we were somewhere else entirely and I was shattered.

"Where are we?" I asked

"You wished to see Marin," Pyren said, gesturing towards the door.

"What is this place?"

"Don't play coy, Yael." He was in a foul mood today. "I'm lenient with you, but there are limits. You will see her, and then you will comply. Don't test my patience with your questions."

I didn't want to invoke Pyren's anger, so I walked to the door, trying with all my might to find as many details as I could—anything to indicate where we were. But there were no windows to this place. Beyond the door, I could barely make out a spiralling staircase that led downward.

This was a tower. A closed, windowless tower. The cold seeped in through my dress. I began descending.

How far did the power of the spectres go? Spectres appeared and disappeared within minutes. They could not cross the sea, but they were everywhere in Vynam, present in every room of every house, in every forest and mountain.

They were there and not there. As if they existed in every place at once.

Were we even in Delen right now?

The stone the tower was made of, that was a hint. But it was too dark to see. I didn't recognise it. I didn't know of all the stones used for building in all of Vynam, or of any book that catalogued them.

I reached a passage that broke away from the staircase.

"Continue down, Yael."

I managed to catch a glimpse of a long corridor, with many doors on either side before I went on.

There were three more such corridors to this building. I was finally instructed to enter the one at the very bottom.

There were dozens of doors set inside the black stone walls. I was chilled down to my heart. The place was eerily quiet.

The corridor created a T at the end with another, where I saw even more doors. "Is this where you hold the loved ones of all your cuckoo-bird-spies?" I asked. There were others like me, countless others, and all suffered the same anguish. All were innocents used for the lords' pleasures.