Chapter 34

“Can’t you give it a rest for one damn day? Would it make your paint peal to stop being so damn shifty and slippery?”

I hear how rude and grumpy my hiss sounds and wince. I can’t afford to be my offensive, provocative self right now. I’m a beggar here. I gotta lighten up if I have any hope of smooth talking her.

Yeah, her. Cause I always considered her female, even before I learned enough Latin/Angelic to realize that Jeremiel Domus Feminae means Jeremiel’s House for Women.

Yeah again. I am talking to my damn dorm building.

For the past two weeks, every time I could, I skipped out on a class to get back here, for that reconnaissance tour I never completed. Hell, I haven’t been able to start. Because of her. She continued to lead me around like a blind mouse, and herd me where she wanted—without me even realizing it.

Right now, I got so frustrated after she again led me to our corridor, I decided to have a word with her. I am convinced she’s been diverting me on purpose, not according to some spell or programming, and that she had sentience. And moods. Some days she just leads me on for a few minutes then I’d find myself outside. Today she seems more—playful, seems to want to keep me around. She had me pacing that corridor for thirty minutes before she let me see where I was.

But that also meant I might be able to reason with her. Now if I can just curb my temper and coax her, I’d stand a chance.

I just hope no one witnesses this, or on top of all the strikes against me, I’d be known as the cadet who talks to walls. With the way I’ve berated her, and now would cajole her, they might even spread that I have a wall for a boyfriend.

Oh, well. It isn’t like I haven’t had worse. What’s important now is that I have a heart-to-heart with Fem, as I now call her. I think my best bet is to flatter her, while endearing myself to her by taking her into my confidence. Both strategies would sound sincere. Because they are.

Drawing in a calming breath, I inject as much sweetness in my demeanor and voice as I can. At least enough to soften my insolent and inflammatory edges. Can’t have my expression and tone undermine the truths I’d tell her.

“Sorry for the outburst, but you really had me chasing my own tail long enough, don’t you think? Gotta admit, though, I admire a fellow persistent lady.” I stop, focus. I can swear she’s listening to me. So I go on, “Since we’re talking at last, let me just tell you how I’ve been feeling since I first stepped inside you. How every moment of history permeating your spaces resonates within me, and how every fixture and ornament and painting beckons to me. Your every inch just calls to me on so many levels. Living inside you is the only thing ameliorating my—uh, unjust sentence, and the enforced company of my roommates.”

Somehow sensing she accepts my declarations, I venture further. “Can I call you Fem?” When I again feel she approves, I grin in relief. “Great. I really hope we can be friends—and that you will let me explore you, experience you without herding me back to my room or outside.” I again feel that she’s agreeable, so I take it another step. “I was wondering if you can help me? Anything I can do for you is yours to ask, too, of course!” I wait until I feel a sense of curiosity emanating from her before I ask, “Would you show me where we can hide within you, or better still how to escape in case of an attack? The Academy itself, if need be? Do you harbor secret tunnels or magical gateways that could lead out of this domain, without tripping the Palladium Wards?” I feel a dimming, a disapproval, so I rush to add, “I assure you I’m not trying to escape my sentence! I only need a way out in case of emergency, or a contingency plan if Sarah is in danger. You like Sarah, don’t you? This is all to protect her.”

Nothing happens, for ten more minutes. I’m again forced to consider that my mind could be irreversibly fried, convincing me the building can understand me, and would respond, too.

Finally giving up, I begin shuffling on my way out, and something flashes at the top of my field of vision. I snap my head up, and see those pulses of energy relaying within her soaring arches.

She is responding, guiding me somewhere!

Shrieking in gratitude and excitement, I rush to follow them.

This time, I feel the difference, between following her illusions, and actually going somewhere else. The farther away from our dorm she leads me, for real this time, the more hopeful I become she is answering my plea, and showing me a secret way out.

I don’t know how long it is before the pulses stop. When they do, I’m in a deserted area. One that doesn’t exist anywhere on the Academy map. I know because I consulted it, and the usual “You’re Here” glowing blue dot is nowhere to be found.

But then again, what kind of secret way out would be marked on the map?

With that thought erasing my initial discomfort, I finally look around.

It’s nothing like the rest of Fem’s pristine areas. The ruthless hand of time is evident in every inch. But that does nothing to hide it was once on par with the Court’s level of magnificence. Actually, even more, and in even more prodigious proportions. When Fem or any other building in the Academy aren’t large enough to house these dimensions.

I find only two explanations for that. Either I didn’t realize it when she led me out of her and the Academy altogether, and to a part of the Court I haven’t seen—which is almost all of it. Or she took me somewhere even further within the Celestial Region.

Whichever, this place isn’t only untouched by the timelessness that permeates every place I’ve seen in this domain, it feels—abandoned, by eternity. This formerly extravagant-even-by-celestial-measures construction feels like the court of a deposed dictator, or the temple of a forsaken god.

I hope this means it’s un-warded, and it’s where a way out of this prison can be accessed.

But before I can explore as I feel compelled to, the pulses resume, flaring within the walls themselves this time. Walls I’m sure can tell me many forbidding, forbidden stories. I actually feel they are trying to transmit something urgent to me.

But I can’t stop to listen. The pulses are leading away too fast, leaving me behind.

Forced to curb my burning curiosity, I rush to follow the signals.

This time, when they die down, they’ve lead me to a dead-end passage.

“Uh, Fem?” I prod, staring at the peeling wall. “Are you going to recalibrate, or what?”

Minutes pass with nothing happening, until I’m forced to start thinking Fem’s magic is designed to misdirect anyone trying to poke their noses where they don’t belong. Or she’s decided to take stymieing me to new levels.

But neither thought holds water, not after she showed me that place. What I feel certain is a massive and long-hidden secret. So why stop now?

Finding no answer as usual, I start turning back—and the wall warps, as if under the brunt of Godric’s power.

Oh, no. He must have felt I’m not where I should be through the leash.

I brace myself for another harangue, and probably a reinstatement of its constant use.

But moments pass and he doesn’t appear on the other side of that dissolved wall. By now I know he won’t. He isn’t the type to hold back for suspense value.

And now everything in me isn’t primed for facing off with him, I notice the eerie, reddish light flickering beyond the door-sized opening. Spooky.

Leaning forward gingerly, I try to peep through without stepping in. But the ground ripples beneath me, like a freaking wave, tossing me through the opening, and crashing me inside.

Heart thundering, hands and knees throbbing with pain, I scramble up to my feet, gaping around. I’m somewhere so vast, so dimension-defying, my mind and senses glitch. I can no longer tell if I am above or below ground. If I am still in the same realm at all.

The scare, the daze disappear under the impact of something even greater. That soul-deep ache of familiarity, only a hundred-fold in intensity this time. It emanates from what occupies the center of the endless cavern, the source of the unearthly, fluctuating light.

A statue of an angel.

He’s much larger than the massive one embossed on the Court’s main doors, but looks larger still in statue form. Even from a distance that seems like a mile, I feel like an ant in comparison. And not only because of his size. It’s his—presence.

If the statue has such an overpowering aura, what would the real thing be like?

His arms are raised against the backdrop of his folded wings, his fingers spread with his palms facing him as if rousing crowds. His head is bent in a way that reminds me of a maestro engrossed in the music he’s conducting. But I can’t tell his expression or what he’s wearing. It’s hard to fathom much detail because of the light swathing him. No. Not light. Flames.

He’s burning. Blazing.

Without volition, I find myself walking toward him as if in a trance. Even when I know the flames are real. More than real. I somehow realize that’s heavenly fire, far more devastating than any earthly or even hellish one.

I still approach, and the heat sears higher through me, echoing the memories branded on my psyche. My earliest ones, of that day I was dragged out of the burning rubble.

Then I’m close enough to make out the details of the massive pedestal he’s standing on. And I realize what it’s made of.

Bones. Heaps and heaps of them. A veritable hill of remains.

The horror of that sight finally fractures my stupor

I explode around, run back where I came from—but the opening I’ve been spilled through is gone. Nothing remains but seamless walls. Walls I can now see are made of razor-sharp crystals. Endless, deadly facets reflecting scorching darkness and suffering.

Horror still sinking in, taking root, I turn back, unable to resist examining the angel’s macabre pedestal.

The bones are in gradual stages of disintegration. At his feet, they’ve burned to ashes. The piles lower down are still flaming, but feel ancient. Further down still, they look newer, until at the very bottom they are—fresh.

Heartbeats almost burst my head as a dozen dreads inundate me. That I’ve been beyond stupid trusting that capricious edifice, when it must be as disregarding of human life as those who built her. That she’s punishing me for attempting to probe her secrets, like she has thousands before me, trapping them here until they died. That I’m looking at her handiwork throughout the ages, and until recently. The newest bones still have decaying flesh coating them.

But even in my panicking mind, it still doesn’t make sense.

If those people died of starvation, they should be lying around in complete skeletal forms—in their clothes. The bones wouldn’t be separated and piled like this.

There’s only two possible explanations. Either the place itself magically took the skeletons apart, and gathered them beneath the statue, or someone has been doing it.

I lean toward the second explanation.

If I thought the cavern where Godric takes me looks out of a cult movie, that one feels like the real deal. It must be the largest sacrificial chamber in existence. Fem could have been leading gullible and greedy humans here—and other creatures by the look of many bones—for millennia. To become sacrifices at that statue’s literal feet, to burn at the pyre his heavenly fire fed.

Suddenly, the blaze of my panic is doused. And like the time when that thing pursued me in the woods, I’m incensed.

One second I’m about to beg Fem to let me go, the next, I’m screaming at the top of my lungs. “I’m not letting you use my bones to decorate this grisly pedestal, you treacherous bitch! I’m calling Godric and he will put out your precious idol’s fire with one flap, and level the whole place with one blow. Then I will suck the sentience out of you and this whole place, until you collapse into so much inanimate rubble. Do you hear me, you evil heap of bricks?”

But even as I rave and rant, I know my threats are just that, fury with nothing to back it up. I can’t reach Godric, through the leash or any other way. And my Essence gathering ability is nowhere that powerful, and I may never be able to use it that way anyway.

I’m running out of threats and shrieks, when something at the closest wall to my left moves.

Heart already booming beyond its capacity, I stare at it, knowing that if someone comes in to kill and fillet me, I won’t be able to stop them.

But I won’t go down without a fight. Godric hasn’t taught me much yet, since he’s been focused on building my strength and stamina from the ground up. But I will use every dirty trick I know. As for my “power” I will give it all I got, one last time. I owe it to myself, to Sarah, to strike back at this shitty existence and the monsters who populate it, to do as much damage as I can on my way out.

Aggression and rage boil my blood as I reach deep within me to that thing that takes Godric on in the Mindscape. I’m trying to draw it to the surface, to with it while conscious, when I realize the movement isn’t someone coming in. It’s another wall warping open.

Without a second’s hesitation, I streak towards the forming exit, even as more dreads swamp me. That Fem may be leading me someplace worse. Or may actually be showing me the way out of this domain. Instead of only knowing about it, I’d have to get out, and be unable to return. Once Godric catches me again, my four-year sentence might become forty.

But worrying about anything but becoming sacrificial tinder is a luxury I don’t have.

I throw myself through the opening without trying to look where it leads—and fall.

I plummet in blinding nothingness, forever.

I have no idea how long it is before I finally land, slamming on solid ground on my back.

Lying there stunned, I find myself staring at the cloud-laden sky. I drag myself to my elbows and realize I’m outside Fem, just at her back, where I’ve never been before.

The moment I can use my legs again, I explode up and into a run.

Thanks to Godric’s conditioning for the past two weeks, I last almost a mile before I am forced to slow down. Then as I drag my feet all the way back to Jophiel Hall, questions inundate my still-spinning head.

Why did Fem take me to that place, and show me that burning angel? And why did she let me go? Did she believe my threats? Or did she mean to scare me before letting me go all along?

Whatever the answers, this is it between me and her. I’ll zoom to and from our room with my gaze glued to my feet, so no part of her would catch it. I’ll fill my thoughts with mind-worm songs, so she couldn’t read them. And I’ll certainly never try to explore that crazy building again, or say another word to her. Not even if I’m dying to know what this was all about.

But since dying is an actual possibility here, I’ll just have to live with another mystery. What’s one more to add to my growing collection of potentially lethal ones?

I just have to wonder, will I ever find answers to any, before one finally kills me?