Chapter Six

Blackness is all that surrounds me. I don't know if I'm standing or sitting; all I know is that I'm surrounded and I'm not alone. Something else is with me, something that's always been there. Something evil and cruel… something whose power refuses to be defined.

Moments pass, or maybe an eternity passes. Time doesn't matter in a liminal place like this, a place with no end and no beginning. No limits, no boundaries, both to infinity and to nothing. I don't know where I am.

A deep, monstrous voice far too low to belong to a human speaks, "And here you are." It's low enough to make me shiver, low enough to crawl into my head and wrap itself around my brain. "It seems a part of us remains connected."

Though that voice is so unnatural, so deep and unnerving, I can't help but feel drawn to it. My mind is a hazy mess, but it feels as though I know that voice. I know it so much more than anyone else could.

The voice goes on, "It matters not. Rest, plan… all you can truly do is wait for me to finish what I began twenty years ago."

I open my mouth—or at least I think I do. I want to ask the voice why. Why we're here, why he must finish what he started, why, why, why. So many questions, but a part of me knows I'll never get the answers.

"You and the rest of Laconia will see the splendor that is unbridled chaos, the destruction that is only a harbinger of your death. Death is my only purpose. You… Rey, are irrelevant. Stand against me or surrender, it does not matter. Before I come for them, I will come for you."

"That's an awful lot of talking for something who thinks I'm irrelevant," I say. I want to shout it to the black sky above me, but it's impossible to tell which way is up and which way is down. Everything here is the same. Eternal, never-ending blackness. "Sounds like you're trying to intimidate me into backing down and giving up."

It takes a long time, but finally it comes to me: who I'm talking to. Who I'm standing up against: Invictis. And this field of blackness is nothing but a dream I'll hardly remember when I wake up.

The nonhuman voice chuckles, a jarring sound, like I amuse him. "Whether you fight or kneel, it does not matter. I will come for you regardless of what you do. If I were you, I would spend my remaining time with friends and loved ones—but wait, you don't have any of those, do you?"

An ancient weapon mocking me? I won't have it.

"I have Frederick. I'm sure he'd be glad to keep me company until you show your golden ass again," I rattle off.

I swear, I hear him seethe, but maybe that's just me. Frederick is a sore spot even now. "Ah, yes. Frederick. So earnest. So desperate. Perhaps I should kill him before I kill you, just so you can watch him die. Perhaps I should kill all of Laconia so you can watch them all die, like that little girl of yours."

Prim. He's talking about Prim.

"Perhaps I will leave you alone in Laconia, watch in the shadows while you wither away and wait until you fall to your knees and beg for your death." I can practically hear Invictis growling with approval at the thought. "Tell me, Rey, how long do you think you'll last on your own?"

"Fuck you." I have a whole lot more to say to him, but before I have the chance, I wake up.

My eyelids fly open, and I stare at the stone ceiling above me. I yawn, still groggy, and I decide I want to catch some more z's, so I roll to my side and try to get comfy again. And I probably would've gotten comfy too, if someone wouldn't have been standing there, watching me with a curious expression on his face.

"Frederick?" I mutter. "What is it?" As I blink, my vision clears, and I see it's not Frederick who stands near the bed I'm in.

It's his dad.

Clean and shaved, his hair cut and his unruly beard now a neatly-kept goatee, the family resemblance is uncanny. Sure, Fred is still way too skinny, his cheeks too gaunt, but put a few years on Frederick, and he'll look exactly like his dad.

Not bad, actually, for a man in his upper forties or early fifties.

"Not my son," Fred quickly says, his brows furrowed as he studies me. "My son is outside, waiting. He said you'd still be asleep—he was right." His brown gaze narrows. "You were sleeping, but you were dreaming, weren't you? Dreaming of it."

At the mention of Invictis, my heart constricts in my chest. I'm slow to sit up and swing my legs off the side of the bed. "Um… yeah." For a moment, I hesitate, not knowing if I should tell him, but at this point, everything is pretty much hopeless, so why not?

"Yes," Fred says with a nod. "Based on bodily reactions to the dream, had to be either Invictis or…" He coughs and averts his eyes. "…something not so appropriate." I'm seconds from asking him what that's supposed to mean when he gestures for me to get up. "Come, come. We have a lot to do today, and if you're with us we can simplify the process."

I slip my feet into my shoes—shoes that are looking worse for wear now, but they're still kicking. I get up and follow Fred through the makeshift hospital, and we come upon Frederick standing outside in the morning sun, his face angled up to the sky as he soaks it in.

"You were right," Fred says as he pushes past his son. "She was sleeping." He says not a word more as he walks with a quick pace, and Frederick and I exchange a quick glance before we trot after him.

"Here," Frederick says as he tosses me something he was holding onto. "Thought you'd be hungry."

I catch it. An apple, shiny and red. Not my favorite breakfast by a longshot, but here, I'll take what I can get. I eat it as Frederick and I follow his dad. "Where are we going, exactly? He said we have a lot to do?"

I told Fred everything last night. Everything. How I got here, how I was tricked, how I'm basically responsible for all the lives left in Laconia because I unleashed the supernatural entity that was sent to destroy them.

Still don't understand why, but whatever. I'm working with the information I have.

"My father," Frederick is slow to say as he stares at the back of his dad's head, "has a plan, apparently."

"A plan to beat Invictis?" If I sound incredulous that's because I am, you know, incredulous.

"Not exactly."

Okay, color me confused. If he doesn't know how to beat Invictis, what was so important about getting him here? Empress Morimento made it sound like he knows how to turn the tide or something. Ugh, stupid visions, not being clear.

The three of us head through the upper district, and soon enough we stop before the doors separating us from the markets. Fred sounds commanding when he says, "Let us through."

The guards glance at each other. It's evident they don't think they should, but in the end, they step aside and let us pass.

I take another bite of my apple as I slip through the door after Fred. Frederick is right behind me. Where we're going is anyone's guess, but soon enough my curiosity is sated. We end up in the field that doubles as the cemetery and the area where the blight-free animals are kept.

Truly, we were fortunate the storm didn't touch them. Laconia would be in dire straits if all of their livestock was wiped out.

I don't ask what we're here for. Frederick takes the lead, guiding us through the field. He brings us to a place where the dead still have stones marking their graves, and we stop before one that's chiseled with LaRoe.

It shouldn't have taken me so long to figure out that we're before Frederick's mom's grave. I make sure I stand back to let Fred do what he has to. Don't know why I had to be here at all; isn't this a personal thing?

I step back as Fred kneels before the stone. She must've died back when they still did headstones.

Fred drags his fingertips along the stone and whispers, "My love. I'm sorry I couldn't come back to you." The emotion is plain in his voice; it trembles, almost breaking, no longer the voice of a madman but the voice of someone who's lost almost everything while he was imprisoned.

Frederick places a hand on his back, comforting his dad, and I step back as I finish my apple. It's a private moment, so I try not to listen to whatever they say next. I give them my back.

It's as I'm turning around that something wet nudges my side, and I nearly fall back out of shock before I realize it's just a goat wanting what's left of my apple. I don't know much about goats, if they can have apples, but seeing as how I'm done with it and the goat is staring up at me with hope in its eyes, the only thing I can do is give the damned goat what it wants.

The goat slobbers all over my hand as it takes the apple and chews the entire thing right there. Ew. I don't want to wipe that slobber off on my clothes, so I instead pet the goat's head, right between its tiny little horns.

I've never petted a goat before. Their hair is kind of coarse and rough, ain't it? Not really petting material.

More goats venture closer, and I swear, I blink and I'm surrounded by goats—and a sheep here and there—all wanting their own apples. All staring at me with their crazy eyes. It's Children of the Corn , animal-style, and I'm about to be overrun.

I hold both hands up, as if to show them they're empty, and I tell them, "I have nothing else. I'm sorry. So just… go do whatever it is you do." None of them move. "Go away. Shoo." I make a shooing motion in the air, but not a single one listens. "Brats, you're all brats."

The goat near my left hip nudges me with his nose, and I make a squeamish noise. Not that I'm scared of an army of goats and sheep, but… uh, I'm pretty outnumbered here, and I don't need to be covered in saliva or hair.

I hear someone chuckling, and I whip my head around to see Frederick moved away from his mom's grave. He now stands just beyond the army of goats and sheep, his arms folded over his chest, an expression of amusement on his face. "I think they like you," he tells me.

"Yeah, well, I don't really like them." The seconds those words are out of my mouth, I swear the animals around me give me pitiful, wide-eyed looks, which then guilt me into adding, "It's not you, it's me. I'm more of a cat person."

Fred must be finished at his wife's grave, because he moves beside his son and surveys the scene: me and a whole bunch of hairy, needy beasts. "Huh. Perhaps you should rethink that. It looks as though you could be the flock's guardian, once this is over."

Once this is over, AKA once Invictis is defeated. Fred's putting a lot of pressure on a girl with no magic.

"Let us go," Fred says. "We have one more stop to make in the lower city."

We leave the field after that, much to the disappointment of the animals that gathered around me.

Our last stop in the lower city turns out to be Frederick's hut—which, I guess, used to be Fred's hut, too, before he left for Acadia and never saw the light of day for years. Fred's the first to venture into the house, and he immediately sees the journal left on the table.

"Ah, what's this?" He picks it up and flips through it. "My journal!"

"I told you I asked Rey to follow your trail through Acadia," Frederick speaks as he steps around me, moving toward the table where he does his experiments. It's cleaner now than it ever has been—probably because he's been stuck in the upper city since that storm. "She brought this back to me. I hoped there would be something in it that would point me in the right direction when it comes to the woes."

"Yes, yes." Fred flips through the pages absentmindedly, rambling on, "You want to reverse the effects of the blight and plague, of course. Noble goals, but short-sighted. Crops and well-being of animals mean nothing when the scourge can zap a shadowstorm at your doorstep and turn you into the walking dead." The man snaps the journal closed and tosses it behind him. "Useless, trust me."

The journal's pages fly open as it hits the wooden ground, and Frederick rushes to pick it up like it's discarded gold. To him, I suppose it might be: the only thing he had left of his dad for the longest time.

"Is there something we're looking for?" I ask, but Fred doesn't answer me. I watch as he disappears into the bedroom, and it sounds as though he rummages through everything. Frederick and I exchange clueless glances. At least I'm not the only one who doesn't know what's happening.

Fred emerges from the back of the hut carrying a small metal shovel, and he marches right past us to go outside.

What the…

I follow him, and Frederick is right behind me, though he tucks the old journal between his trousers' waistband and his tucked-in shirt before coming along. Fred leads us around the hut, to its back side, where he then closes a single eye and lifts up his shovel-free hand to do some measuring in the air.

Okay, I thought the man wasn't so out of his mind today, but it looks like he's still off his rocker.

"Uh," I start, glancing at Frederick, "what's he doing?"

Frederick shakes his head the same moment his dad lowers his measuring tool—cough, cough, his hand—and breaks ground with the shovel. "I have no idea. Maybe he buried something here before he left? If he did, I don't remember what it was or why he'd need it now." He runs a hand through his hair, perplexed.

I feel that. I'm pretty much hopeless at this point. It's silly to place any hope on a man who was kept alive by magic and imprisoned for years. Empress Morimento wanted me to go to the undercrofts in all of the castles? Call me crazy, but I don't think that's going to happen.

And, say, if I am miraculously able to travel to each of the castles on foot, with no magic to speed up the process, and I can find the undercrofts… what good will it do? Do the castles hold some kind of secret that nobody except the empresses were in the know about?

Oh, yeah, and who can forget about the golden bastard who wants to kill me? I doubt he'll let me roam the countryside in search of a way to kill him when he can squash me like a bug at any time.

"It's here," Fred says, digging deeper with a shovel that has clearly seen better days. The rust on the metal has pretty much turned the entire thing an ugly brown. "I know it's here." He digs about twelve inches down before the shovel hits something hard, and when that thud reverberates through the air, Frederick and I glance at each other before moving to help him retrieve whatever it is.

It takes all three of us, but we manage to lift the heavy object out of the hole and onto the undisturbed grass. A metal box, a foot wide and half that deep, no lock that I can see.

"Thank the empresses," Fred exclaims as he throws open the lid. "It's still here." The lid swings open to reveal… mud ? No wonder the damn thing was so heavy; it's full of dirt that's been so waterlogged it's basically turned to clay.

Frederick speaks carefully, "Is there supposed to be something inside it?"

Fred spares only a glance to his son, his brows creased. "What are you talking about? There is something inside it. Don't you see?" He gestures to the thick, wet dirt inside the small chest.

"I see a lot of dirt," Frederick says. "I don't see anything else."

The way Fred sighs tells me he's had it up to here with his son, even though, you know, his son is one hundred percent right in this case. "I thought I taught you before I left that sometimes what's on the surface is not as important as what's underneath." He cracks his neck and then his knuckles like he's about to do something incredibly strenuous, and then, without another word, he starts to dig through the chest.

He digs and digs, his fingers searching for something in the chest, and then—big shocker—he digs some more. The seconds turn into a minute, then two. It's enough time for me to stand back and think: Man, Laconia's doomed.

"Ah-ha!" Fred suddenly exclaims as he pulls his mud-covered hands out of the box. He's holding onto something, all right, something small… on a chain? It's hard to tell what it is, thanks to the dirt.

Without sparing Frederick or I a glance, he abandons the chest and leaves us to rinse off the object in the nearby pond. By the time Frederick and I catch up to him, he's lifting his hands out of the water and chuckling like he just discovered a long-lost treasure chest and all the loot inside is his.

"I knew it'd still be here. I knew it." Fred kisses the object. With his back to us, it's still impossible to tell what it is.

"What is it?" Frederick voices the question we're both wondering.

Turning around, Fred holds up the small item. Now clean of dirt and mud, I can see it's a necklace with a single vial-shaped pendant. The chain is thick silver, and the pendant is about half the size of my pinky finger, made of glass. I notice it has liquid inside it.

Even after all this time… that's something, although I don't know what it is.

"Come," Fred says. "Let's talk somewhere it won't hear us." As he says that, he glances all around, as if he's anxious Invictis will pop up out of nowhere, a concern I feel in my heart, too.

Through the city we walk until we're back in the upper district. Our destination is the library beneath the conclave, and Fred kicks everyone out. No one wants to go; but he's got a look in his eyes that tells everyone he won't take no for an answer.

Only when we're alone in the dimly lit library does Fred move to the bookcase on the furthest wall. "This one. Help me move it."

He's a man on a mission, and Frederick and I are just along for the ride. It's full of books, so it's heavy as fuck, but the three of us together manage to scoot it aside. The wooden legs of the bookcase drag along the stone floor, an ugly sound, but it's made easier to swallow thanks to the progress we make by moving it.

The bookcase is almost as tall as the ceiling; some of the old books on it fall off it as we move it. Inch by inch, we struggle until Fred tells us, "That's enough." Both Frederick and I move around the bookcase to see what it was blocking, and I don't think either of us expects what we see.

It should be nothing more than the wall, the end of the library's rows and rows of books, but it's not. It's more.

Chiseled into the wall, hidden perfectly behind the bookcase we just moved, is a door.

"What…" Frederick is at a loss for words as he studies the door. It almost looks like a hieroglyph, a symbol of a door and nothing more, but being as how this place is full of magic, I doubt it's just a life-sized symbol. Somehow, someway, that's got to be a working door. Above the carving of the door lies an archway inscribed with words I can't read.

"Before my lady sent us away, she told me a great many things that she then locked away in my memory," Fred says. "It's all coming back to me now. Son, you won't be able to open that door." With his free hand, he points to me. "Only she can."

I give the man a sheepish smile. "Uh, don't take this the wrong way, buddy, but that doesn't look like a door I can open. There's no handle—" The look Fred gives me stops me dead in my tracks.

"It's not that kind of door, child," Fred says. "You are the key to opening it, but opening it now, without the essences of my lady's sisters, would make it pointless. You said Empress Morimento told you to visit the undercrofts, yes?"

"Yeah." The word comes out of me slowly. I'm a little nervous at what he's going to say. Going on a cross-kingdom journey on my own two feet doesn't sound fun. Revisiting Pylos and what's left of Acadia… not to mention a castle I've never been to in Magnysia, all while crossing my fingers that Invictis doesn't finish what he started years ago.

Fred goes to sit at a nearby table where abandoned books lay, open to whatever page their readers were on before we kicked them out. I am sluggish in going with him, taking the chair across from him. Once he's done inspecting the stone door, Frederick sits beside me.

"My lady sent me on a mission," Fred began, "but it was not the one I told everyone. I was instructed to keep it to myself, lest the secret get out and it finds a way to seal off the aether for good."

"Aether?" I question. I've heard the word before, but I can't remember where.

Beside me, Frederick answers, "It's said the aether is what connects the empresses to their magic, and to the empresses who held the power before them. It is a… concept that has not been proven, but used to explain much of Laconia's history."

Fred gives his son a strange look. "Nonsense. It is not a concept. It is true." He takes the vial that contains some liquid between two fingers and holds it up. "A piece of the aether, from the undercroft of Magnysia. My lady retrieved it for me before she… before she changed."

"That's aether?" Frederick tries to take it from Fred, but his father jerks his hand away.

"No, son, you cannot unbottle it yet. We must have all three first, and we must open that door." Fred points to the stone door we uncovered. "My lady told me there is a great chasm beneath Laconia. Only there can we combine the aethers together." He looks at me, his eyes lucid. "And only then can you truly defeat Invictis."

Frederick still has hope in me, as does his dad, apparently, but that doesn't change the fact that I don't believe it. How can I fight that golden bastard when I don't have nearly as much magical power needed to match him? It's obvious Fred wants me to go to Pylos and Acadia to fill those other two vials with the aether from their undercrofts.

But how? How the hell am I supposed to do any of that?

"Don't worry," Fred says. He must sense my trepidation. "We have time before Invictis regains its full strength. I think it will be a while before it dares show itself again, and if my intuition is correct…" He quiets as he stares right at me, causing Frederick to glance between us.

"If your intuition is correct, what?" Frederick asks.

Fred doesn't hold back his thoughts. "I don't think it will try to attack Laconia. I think it will put all of its effort into defeating you ."

Me. That tracks. Just my luck, really, get some ancient evil who was hellbent on destroying an entire kingdom obsessed with killing me when I have no way to defend myself.

"It would take me forever to go to Pylos and Acadia," I say. "And what if the only reason I was immune to the shadowstorms was because I was carrying a piece of him around with me?"

" It ," Fred corrects me. "Invictis is a weapon. It is not a man. That much knowledge my lady imbued into me. It is a being of unimaginable strength, something that goes against the fabric of what we, as Laconians, were taught of our own history. We thought our empresses were the only ones that could control the aether and will it into form—into the magic we see with our own eyes—but its existence proves otherwise. There are other forces out there beyond our comprehension." He must realize he got a bit too intense, because he coughs and adds, "And I don't think your bond with Invictis was the reason you're immune to the scourge."

Hmm. As much as I believe him about the whole weapon thing, I still can't bring myself to call Invictis an it. Maybe I got a little too close with him during our journeys together; maybe we bonded too much, but I swear he has feelings. Mostly anger and jealousy and haughtiness, but those are still feelings.

And a true weapon doesn't have any.

"You did not stumble upon Invictis in your world by accident, Rey," Fred goes on. "You were always meant to come here. My lady foresaw it, and she hoped she could make your journey easier by sending me with my own question. I was to go to Acadia and ask Empress Morimento if she could fill this with Acadia's aether."

His fingers toy with the vial on the necklace he dug out of the dirt before he reaches to his neck and pulls off a similar chain, one containing two more vials, though both are empty. He places the second necklace on the table beside the first.

"And then I was meant to travel to Pylos to ask Empress Gladus to do the same. What my lady did not anticipate, however, was the fact that her sisters fell first. My lady lasted the longest against the madness. When I told Empress Morimento of my quest, she took my research and threw me in Acadia's dungeon."

Frederick rubs his cheek. "I had no idea."

"Of course not," Fred quips. "I didn't tell you or your mother the truth. I couldn't. My lady forbade it. During my travels, I hoped I'd discover a way to counteract the scourge, reverse the blight and protect crops from the plague… but the closer I got to Acadia, the more it tried to get inside. It grew stronger and stronger the closer I traveled to the castle. Invictis was waiting for me."

Shaking my head, I mutter, "I still don't understand how you survived in that dungeon for so long."

"My lady's will is eternal," Fred says simply. "And you—" He pulls the full vial off and slips it onto the chain with the two empty ones, and then he pushes it toward me. "—must gather the aethers so we can combine them. I would go with you if I could, but… only an empress can enter the undercrofts."

"I'm not an empress," I say, for about the millionth time. These people… fuck. You'd think they'd realize I'm nothing special. "I don't have magic. It was all Invictis. I'm not the hero you want me to be."

The look Fred gives me then makes me think he's hiding something, and what he says next confirms that suspicion: "There's so much you've yet to discover."

I cause both men to jerk back in surprise when I slam a fist on the table and say, "Then tell me! Stop keeping me in the fucking dark! What else is there, huh? What aren't you telling me? If I'm supposed to risk my life for all you people, for a world that's not even mine, the least you can do is tell me everything you know."

Fred speaks quietly, "Some things are meant for you. Not for me, not for my son, not for anyone else. The guardians of the undercrofts will sense what you are and let you in—and perhaps, once there, you will find the answers to the questions you've been wondering."

Oh, my God. If I could strangle this man, I would. I would totally strangle him.

"Guardians?" Frederick asks. "What's this about guardians?"

"Beings as old as the castles themselves. They will know exactly who Rey is, I've no doubt about it." Fred's lips quirk into an awkward smile as he looks at me. "You can do this. You were meant to do this."

I roll my eyes and groan. "Yeah, believe it or not, that's not as comforting as you think it is." I want to get up and storm away, end this conversation here and now, but I don't. Something keeps me on that wooden chair beside Frederick, and it's that same something that makes me ask, "Where are the undercrofts?"

"Only those who need them find them. It is why only empresses can go inside. When you are in the castles, you will know where to go."

Ugh. Perfect.

Perfectly fucking vague.

I set an elbow on the table and rub a temple. This day just keeps getting better and better. It's also one hell of a quest to go on while hoping Invictis doesn't find me and smite me like the all-powerful being he is.

Beside me, Frederick asks his dad, "How do you know so much about Invictis? Before this, I never heard about it. I don't recall it being mentioned in any of these books." He references the vast library around us, old tomes that apparently detail everything except Invictis.

"I only know what my lady told me. The empresses have ways of passing down information to each other, to their next kin, that we cannot dream of. I told you Invictis is a weapon. It is a weapon of unimaginable destruction, but it is ancient, older than the Laconia we know. Older than the original empresses. It predates our written history."

Frederick's eyes widen, and he glances at me for the quickest of moments before asking, "How can we defeat Invictis if it really is that ancient? If it's so old it predates everything we know about Laconia—"

I frown, mostly to myself, as I mutter, "Weapons can break." Misfire. Jam. Rust. Become unusable. I don't think anything's invincible or unstoppable. There has to be a way—I just don't know how to get there.

Fred nods along with my statement. "Precisely. Weapons can be broken, and you will be the one to break it. My lady knew you would come. She knew her time was at an end. Her sisters denied the truth, but my lady never did. This is your journey, Rey, yours and yours alone."

Shit.

I measuredly reach for the necklace and pick it up. The chain is long enough that I can get my head through the loop with no need for anyone to help me with the clasp. I fix my hair over it, and then I pick up the small vial in the middle, the one that contains aether from Magnysia.

The liquid is thick, from what I can see. It doesn't bounce around in the vial as water would. Its movements are much slower, like honey or amber. Inside the glass, its color must be dulled down, but even so, its orange hue peeks through.

When I release the vial, it clangs with the others, and I heave a weary sigh. "All right. I guess I have no choice. Back to Pylos and Acadia it is." If I don't sound happy about it, that's because I'm not.

I'm not happy to go on another quest. I'm not happy Fred thinks I'm the only one who can defeat Invictis for good. And I sure as shit ain't happy that I'm going to be doing all of this alone.

God. And here I thought my world sucked ass sometimes. This? This is one beatdown after another with no time to breathe in between.