Azazel first, and the rest of us took the rear. My Spear was reassuring against my back as we passed an alcove with an ancient, crumbling skeleton draped over the altar within.
Azazel’s stars provided an easy path, but once we moved through the hall, it became obvious that the Between was not, in fact, as benign as it had looked at first.
The hall ended in a large, empty room. Azazel waited for us to catch up, and when we turned around, the hall was gone. In its place was a simple plank door.
“What the fuck?” someone whispered.
Azazel turned his shadowy head. It was impossible to make out his expression, but I imagined he’d be giving his most dry smile now. “What did you think this place was? This is the mildest thing you will see in here.”
He pushed the plank door open.
There was a new hall in front of us. We stepped in, staying so close together I felt multiple arms brushing against me.
The door closed at my back, and I peered around Tascius’s wings.
There was a young woman kneeling in the middle of the new hallway of marble columns. She wore plain white robes that puddled around her knees as she leaned forward and pressed her forehead to the ground, genuflecting before something we couldn’t see.
“Who is she?” I asked, brushing against Azazel’s shadows.
“Who knows?” he said, raising one shoulder in a shrug. “She’s long forgotten now.”
The woman sat up suddenly, crying out in a language I didn’t recognize. She held up a dagger and drew it across her own throat before anyone could react.
Blood spilled out in a torrent, then she vanished, blood and all.
A dark stain remained on the white floor, but it looked centuries old.
“Keep moving,” Azazel said, sounding amused. He walked right through the ancient bloodstain.
Nobody strayed behind, and the self-sacrificing woman was far from the last apparition we saw.
At one point we turned a corner and almost walked right into a seraph. Six wings spread wide, each one covered with blinking eyes of fire. The faceless metal helmet turned towards us, and the seraph struck out with a sword before crumpling into dust and vanishing entirely.
My stomach flipped at the sight of it, remembering my own reflection in the orb in Azazel’s library.
The hallways twisted and turned. Some of them doubled back into places that hadn’t been there before, and on occasion we took side halls I hadn’t noticed until Azazel pointed them out. Once, we walked up a wall to a door set in the ceiling overhead, and as we stepped through, the world shifted and righted itself again.
We walked between two oddly twisted columns into a room that looked like it’d once been part of an ancient temple.
A chorus of voices called out from above us. I looked up and saw several hundred people crawling on the ceiling of yet another antechamber, prostrating themselves before an upside-down god.
My breath caught in my throat. The god was nearly thirty feet tall, goat-headed, his horns brushing the ground behind us. They were the twisted columns we’d walked through.
He lifted one of his worshippers to his mouth and ate him alive.
At that point, my courage failed me for a moment. I tore ahead and almost ran full tilt into Azazel’s shadowy tornado.
“It’s only the past,” he said gently, several clawed hands reaching out to hold me. “The old times. They’re not real anymore, Melisande. Most of them are asleep or dead.”
“It looks real right now,” I whispered, my mouth dry. Only asleep? I’d rather have heard that all of them were dead.
If this goat-headed thing that’d eaten humans alive was sleeping, it’d better hope for its own sake that it never woke up.
“Just memories,” Azazel breathed. “Remember that.” He swept me along, keeping me within his shadows.
We turned a corner, mercifully leaving the ancient eater behind, and stepped into white sand dunes.
I blinked. There was darkness overhead, but there were stars, as well, and the air smelled of dry desert plants and dust. We were inside and outside at the same time.
A simple stone construction stuck out of the dunes in front of us. A human man stepped up to a roughly hewn altar and laid a pure white dove on it.
Then he buried a dagger in the bird’s heart, saying a familiar name along with an incantation.
Shadows rose from the stones, and a tall creature stepped out of the stone construct like it was a doorway, shrinking to become the size of a human