Chapter 69

Ihad been endlessly trapped in a wordless hell of screams and torment, time lost to me as everything in my existence fragmented. But the sensation of falling suddenly made my gut lurch. My arms wheeled out to grab at the tattered cloak clinging to the beast who had ripped me from my place in the world as I found myself in his grasp once more, but his power far outweighed my own.

He hurled me around, that skeletal face of horrors leering at me as I was thrown down on my back.

Wooden boards dug into my spine, the thing I was on rocking wildly, the rush of fast moving water assaulting my ears.

Many voices were screaming all around me, their wordless cries of agony seeming to rip right into me and carve through every vein in my body.

I blinked out at the darkened space, a thick fog hanging in the air, everything reduced to shadows in the mist, but I was travelling along on a river, my body sprawled on a wide raft.

I moved to stand but the skeletal figure pressed his staff against my chest, shoving me back down forcefully.

"You have stolen from me," his voice cracked like broken branches, his words stirring the air like he was snatching it from the sky.

I swallowed, uncertain of this being and what he wanted from me, but his anger lashed at the world with a potency that made me weigh my words before I released them.

"Stolen?" I asked.

Those screams grew louder, their voices echoing through my skull, my body spasming beneath the furious power of their cries.

"I am the master of death," he sneered, leaning down over me, his staff driving into my ribs, a crack sounding beneath the pressure he exerted and those hellish eyes blazing. "I alone guard the river between here and there. I alone can claim the souls destined for reaping."

The screams seemed fit to burst my skin in two now, his words drowned by them, their power blinding as I realised they came from within me, not without. The four souls my mother had forced inside me during my conception.

"I didn't ask for this," I hissed, anger finding its way to me. "I made no claim on your property. I had no choice in my creation at all."

The staff began to burn where it was pressed to my skin, the pain of it blinding, far beyond any mortal wound I had suffered and survived.

My spine arched, hands locking around the staff as the agony of its power tore into me. Drops of water ran over my fingers where I grasped it, the wood sliding between my palms, its shape not rounded but wide and flat, making me realise it was a paddle, not a staff at all.

I tried to speak, but my voice was stolen by the lightning bolts of agony which tore through me, my lips opening and closing on the words that wouldn't come but somehow, I knew he could hear them all the same.

"You are not of the stars' design," he hissed, driving the paddle into my chest so hard that more ribs cracked beneath his force, the thrashing of my heart so pitifully close to the weight of that innocuous weapon.

I blinked at him, the truth of those words tearing through me. No, I wasn't of the stars' design, I hadn't been conceived of two mortal beings, I hadn't grown over months within the womb of a mother, hadn't ever been a bawling babe or stumbling infant. I was both Nymph and Fae. I had four unwilling souls tethered to my body, shadows laced within my flesh and I had simply become this. I had no name for what I was, but I had learned the title which others had decided for me. Monster.

I released my hold on the paddle, falling back against the raft as it bobbed and swayed in the wild current. Bodies were racing past us in the water, hands pale and bloated with death clawing at the edges of the raft, reaching for me.

I reached for them in turn, wondering if this was the answer I sought, if death might welcome me more readily than life ever had.

"No," the snarling skull roared, his paddle lifting then slamming down on me once more. "I forbid you from death."

The screams within me grew wild and suddenly something deep inside the fabric of all I was fractured, my grasp upon the Element of water falling away to nothing as the soul whose power I had unwillingly stolen was wrenched from my flesh.

I stared at the translucent image of the dead man which rose from within me, his screams finally falling quiet as he let himself slip into the water and was swept away at speed.

"I deny you passage," the skeletal being hissed, the burn of his paddle cutting through me so that it seemed like I would split apart at the seams.

Another screaming soul was ripped from my flesh, my grasp on earth magic going with it before it dove headlong into the river too.

"I refuse you entry to the realm beyond this one. May you linger forever in the clutches of life while all others pass on without you."

The third soul to tear its way from me stole my connection to air magic as it went, its screams dying out as it plunged into the river.

The raft bucked and rocked wildly beneath us, threatening to upend me into the icy water at any moment, the call of death growing ever louder as we sped down the rapids and the roar of a waterfall drew closer.

The final soul was torn from my flesh, my fire guttering so I was left utterly empty in the wake of the magic my mother had stolen for me, gasping and choking on the foul truth of all I was and all I would never be.

"Only The Ferryman can reap the souls of the departed," the skeletal figure hissed, his voice a rush of air between rotten teeth and yet still so loud it deafened me. "Only I get to rule over that branch of fate. You will forever pay for crossing me, Tharix, son of rot and ruin. You will forever be everything and nothing at all."

"Wait," I pleaded, grasping his paddle as I felt the weight of his words, of the curse he was bestowing upon me for the act of my creation, for the choices which were made for me, not by me. "Please."

The Ferryman sneered, looming over me as the rush of the waterfall grew utterly deafening. There was no mercy in his gaze, nothing but contempt for me.

He kicked me so suddenly that I only realised I was falling as I hit the icy water, my limbs leaden, my weight dragging me to the depths of the river as the hands of a thousand dead souls ripped and clawed at my flesh.

"Death will surround you but never claim you," The Ferryman's words sank into my soul and stained it a deep and impenetrable red, one so bright that I knew it would never wash out.

Darkness pressed in on me from all directions then suddenly I was falling, hitting the ground and coughing up water as I found myself back in the passage far beneath my father's castle, the dank puddle rippling on the floor before me, no sign at all of the master of death.

My hands shook as I pressed them to the cold stone, a flicker of fire scoring across my fingertips and a tendril of earth magic tainting my palm. This was no stolen power though; it was my own, the magic the stars had gifted me in truth and as I lay there aching, scarred, cursed and alone in the halls of this living hell, I began to laugh.

I was nothing and no one, alive beyond death, forgotten and promised and now…something new.