The world had bent and shifted around me as I passed through a ripple in the world on that bridge, nothing and nobody existing beyond it while I was crossing, balanced on the thick, bone white trunk.
It was a little like travelling via stardust, but instead of those glimmering eyes watching me pass them by, all I felt beyond the edges of the bridge was an endless drop into a lightless void filled with creatures of malice and greed.
If I slipped, I knew I wouldn’t ever return here. That dark would consume me, bit by bit.
By the time the end the of the bridge became visible ahead of me, I was more than ready to step from it, and I leapt down from the trunk onto grey sand with a sigh of relief.
I was still in the Damned Forest, the white trees all around me in every direction but one.
Directly ahead, an expanse lay before me, a body of water so still that it seemed more like glass, reflecting the sky above so perfectly that stepping into it would have been like sinking into the heavens themselves.
I strode towards it, my chin held high and that otherworldly sense of him still close.
This was going to work. Whatever it took, I was going to claim the answers I hunted here and keep my oath to him and the stars.
I paused at the edge of the water, looking out over the endless expanse of it to the horizon where it faded from sight. How was I supposed to pass beyond something so immense? I would have called it an ocean if it hadn’t been so perfectly still.
I took the Book of Water from my pack, opening it and turning the pages as I hunted for a passage I half remembered about crossing a great sea. I’d dismissed the magic there as irrelevant, but perhaps there had been more to it, something which could help me.
I flicked through page after page until a phantom hand seemed to reach out and flip the book open to a specific one, my heart damn near leaping from my chest and a curse spilling from my lips.
To pass across a great sea, you must simply pay the ferryman.
Well, that sounded a whole lot like travelling into the realm of death, and if I’d been here for any other reason, then I probably would have run screaming for the fucking hills before attempting it, but I was beyond the point of return. I hadn’t come all this way to leave without fulfilling my vow, and I refused to back down even now.
My gaze roamed over the image accompanying the vague instruction, a crying girl throwing a gold coin into a river while calling for the ferryman to aid her.
That seemed…suspiciously easy.
I returned the Book of Water to my pack and took the small coin purse from the bottom of it, taking three ancient, golden auras from it and holding them tight in my fist. I’d borrowed them from Darius’s treasure, my research on the five books I’d stolen from the Library of the Lost having prepared me for the use of both gold and gemstones. So I’d thought to bring some of each just in case.
I moved closer to the water’s edge but made sure not to so much as nudge that iridescent pane of liquid with the toe of my boot.
I raised my fist above the water and pushed my power into the magic of the world, calling out across the silence and hoping this wasn’t an act of insanity.
“I need passage from the ferryman!” The three coins I dropped into the water splashed loudly, the ripples they cast spreading out across the surface in an unholy arc, like a signal designed to tell every beast and monster within that water precisely where I was.
Nothing but that creeping silence greeted me for several long minutes, but then I heard it.
A faint splashing sound caught my attention and I looked to my right, finding a figure shrouded in darkness guiding a raft along the water’s edge towards me.
The flame at my side burned hotter, my power swelling within me as the heat of it warmed me through and helped give me the courage to hold my ground while the raft drew closer to me.
It bumped against the sand before me, and I tried not to flinch as the figure standing on it lowered their hood.
My father stood there, his gaze expressionless and hard, the mask of the Savage King firmly lining his features and nothing but contempt oozing from him as he waited for me to board his vessel.
“What is this?” I hissed, holding my ground as I stared at the creature who I knew couldn’t really be a relative of mine.
“Your chance to cross,” Hail replied gravely, waving a hand at the small space beside him on the raft. “If you can face the cost of passage.”
A glint of gold caught my attention and I glanced down, spotting the three coins from Darius’s trove still sitting there, ignored and unwanted by this thing wearing my father’s flesh.
He didn’t wait for me to think on it, his pole sinking into the water as he pushed off, floating away from the edge, and leaving me on the bank, a certainty filling me that this was my only chance at making it across that water. I could try to fly, but I doubted it would work, the magic here more than able to make that journey endless if I didn’t fulfil its requirements for passage.
“Fuck my life,” I muttered.
I backed up, still unwilling to touch so much as a drop of that water and taking a running jump from the bank instead. I landed heavily, the raft bobbing wildly, but Hail barely even looked at me, simply pushing us further out into the water with his pole.
“Why are you wearing my father’s face?” I ground out as the creepy as fuck fog began to rise in the trees behind us, tendrils of it crawling over the surface of the water.
“I am wearing the face of your enemy,” he replied simply, his voice a cruel and aloof thing.
“Well, I’m sorry to burst your bubble, but my father isn’t my enemy. Lionel Acrux tops that miserably long list,” I told him, folding my arms against the chill.
The fog continued to build around us, slowly working to hide us from view. Nothing but the soft splash of the ferryman’s pole sounded while a pause just long enough to venture into uncomfortable stretched between us.
“Lionel Acrux did not make me into the monster your kingdom feared above all others,” Hail purred softly. “He only aimed my nature at those he desired to see wounded.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I bit out.
Instead of answering, the ferryman waved a hand before me and as I looked down into the water where he’d indicated, I saw what I had to assume was a memory from the past.
My father was in his shifted form, the many headed Hydra resembling a Dragon with its black scales and reptilian body, though the fire which burst from one of its mouths was a toxic looking purple instead of red.
I forced myself to watch as Hail raced towards a small army of Fae, around a hundred of them pouring from the edge of their village to fight him, their screams filling the air as he cut through them without hesitation. Their cries for mercy haunted me as I watched him burning those who ran, ripping bodies in two, bellowing his fury at the world then turning towards the village at a terrifying pace which promised more carnage.
My lips parted on a plea for the memory to stop, but it fell away anyway and changed to a new vision. Instead of seeing my father cutting through countless Fae like it was little more than a game to him, I saw myself in the battle. I was in my shifted form, my enemies turning and fleeing as Phoenix fire raged from me, wings of red and blue tearing from my outstretched fist and hunting them down as they ran.
“It wasn’t like that,” I hissed as I watched myself cutting through Nymphs and Fae, a snarl on my lips and bloodlust lighting my eyes.
“Do you deny the truth of your nature?” the ferryman asked mildly. “Can’t you face what you are at your core?”
“That isn’t me,” I denied. “I never wanted to do any of that. I had no choice. I had to protect the people who-”
I was cut off as the vision in the water became my father again, his face set with self-loathing as he carved a hand through his dark hair, pacing before my mother.
“I had no choice,” he said, a near pleading tone to his voice while Merissa looked at him like she didn’t know him at all. “They were threatening our kingdom. They were going to hurt the people I have sworn to protect. They were planning to hurt you.”
I tore my gaze from the water and scowled at the ferryman.
“Lionel Acrux made him believe those lies,” I said.
“What’s your excuse then?” he asked.
I flinched at the implication in his words, shaking my head in a refusal of them as more moments from the battle played out in that water. I was blood-soaked, furious, vicious, unstoppable.
A monster.
I’d never seen it before but there it was. The thing which was such an intrinsic part of me, and it was capable of so much destruction, so much pain and death…
“What is selfless and selfish. Kind and cruel. Endless and fickle. Priceless and without cost. The harbinger of war and the one thing which can end it just as surely?” the ferryman asked, his words a taunt as the riddle washed over me and I just shook my head, having no idea what he meant. “What is excuse and reason. Validation and violence. Need and demand?”
“I don’t know,” I replied, and his laughter was cruel and cold.
“Yes, you do.”
