Depths of Madness - Erik Scott De Bie [121]
Could she have come so far, only to fail now?
Doubt closed around Twilight. What was she doing? She was here to attack a demon priest who couldn't help but know she was coming, and who would surely slay her with his superior powers. Where was necessity-her beloved pragmatism?
She had led so many to misery-companions like Taslin and Gargan, innocents like Slip and Asson, even villains like Davoren. By which of Beshaba's cruel whims was it that Twilight lived, when they did not?
It would be so simple to let go. What did she have left to hold onto? Everything she had ever loved had deserted or betrayed her. What seemed years of brutish darkness had hammered her already-jaded spirit into real despair.
Liet, Twilight thought, and resolve returned.
She started to swing back and forth, pumping her legs. As a child on a rope swing builds momentum, so did Twilight move, agonizingly slowly. Her arm screamed in protest, but she gritted her teeth and pushed the pain from her mind.
As she swung back and forth, visions came to her, reasons not to give up. She felt again the peace of the goliath village, saw the passionate Taslin leaping into the worm's jaws to avenge her beloved, and she basked again in Slip's ceaseless smile.
Images from deeper in her past returned. She saw the men and women she had loved and watched die-saw their living faces rather than their skulls. She saw Neveren sacrificing himself for her, and watched Nymlin's eyes as he plunged to his death for her. Memories from the near past. She saw Gestal's mocking grin and heard the way he laughed at her murdered companions. She felt Liet's loving gaze and remembered the way he leaped into danger to save her.
She saw her own face then, but the eyes were not hers. Those eyes she had glimpsed only in dreams-those of her lord, the being she had just met and had known all along. The face she saw was both the beings she served-herself and Erevan- though only one of those two served her in return.
Twilight realized, then, that she had something to hold. She had so much more.
She swung and swung, building up speed back and forth until…
The force became too much for her arm and she pushed off.
A weightless heartbeat later, she slammed into the stone, her legs jarred as though by a lightning strike. Twilight suppressed a gasp of pain and toppled-forward, not backward, she made certain-onto the ledge.
There she lay, stunned, blood seeping from her mouth. Her legs hadn't liked the landing, but her tender ribs had hated it, and she spent entirely too many breaths wheezing on the stone.
Get up, you mad wench, she told herself. Get. Up.
She did.
She knelt before a painted archway, and her senses picked up the passage of heat through the stone. Gestal's door. A door for her to…
Scout first.
With a gesture, Twilight sent her shadow slipping into the archway. It needed no words-only the flicker of the elf s will- to know it was to search and return in the span of five breaths. Meanwhile, she recovered Betrayal, her boots, and glove. No sense facing Gestal unprepared.
Twilight waited ten breaths for the shadow to return, but it did not. She sneaked forward, as quietly as she could move.
It turned out to be unnecessary. As if by command, the door ground open before her, and she looked in upon a chamber of cut stone lit by roiling flames. She let her eyes shift out of darksight and into her own keen vision. In the center of the chapel burned twin charnel pits-the throats of Demogorgan, she realized-from which rose flickering orange and red flames like dancing fiends. Beside them was a tilted copper basin with something like water trickling from its edge.
It was certainly a trap, but that didn't matter. Twilight had come this far; she couldn't stop now. She stalked in slowly, keeping to the dancing shadows that flickered against the walls.
The chapel was marred with perversity. Symbols and scenes of violence and depravity plastered the smooth walls, drawn with blood and offal. Bloody bones and discarded bits of flesh, as left from a meal, lay