Thanatos (Guardians of Hades #8) - Felicity Heaton Page 0,1
jagged fangs of rock that hung from the ceiling, a distant murmur that blurred together into a stream of sounds and nothing more. She focused and strained, leaned forwards and closed her eyes, trying to make out what the guards were saying.
They didn’t speak very often, mostly went about their business, patrolling the area with their black spears or coming to torment those they held captive, whether it was with that same weapon or with the sight of food or water.
Her stomach growled again, but it wasn’t the thought of food that caused it to rumble. It was the thought of water. It had been too long since she’d had a sip of water. So long that her mouth was dry, throat thick. She cleared her throat and swallowed, tried not to think about water because it was unlikely she would be offered any soon.
The voices fell silent but then a single male spoke, and she caught his words.
“We have orders to move her soon…” His voice trailed off and she strained harder, desperate to hear what he was saying because he had to be talking about her. She was the only one they were holding now, the only one left alive in a sea of caged skeletons. He said something she didn’t catch, and then his voice grew louder again. “…Getting too close.”
Getting too close?
What or who was getting too close?
She put it to the back of her mind and focused on the fact they were speaking of moving her. She felt she had been in this place a long time now, longer than she had been in any other location.
Much longer.
They had moved her several times over the duration of her captivity, always to another cavern, through the warren of tunnels and openings that formed this strange realm. It had been many years, or so she thought, since they had placed her in this cage though.
The voices drifted away again and she sank back against her cage, swayed with it as her thoughts wandered. She closed her eyes and breathed deep, calming her mind to conserve her strength, conjuring images she had used often over the centuries to give her strength.
Reliving memories of better days.
Not those of her family, because they were dead to her now, but those of lush wild landscapes, of the Elysian Fields, of vast nature and wide-open spaces. She found seeing those fields of crimson poppies and sparkling rivers and feeling the warm kiss of sun on her skin soothing. It kept her going.
Because she was resolved to live in such a place once this was all over.
When her mission was done.
She was going to find somewhere beautiful and remote, and make a home for herself there, away from this wretched dark realm.
Her eyebrows pinched as other images flickered over the ones she was calling to mind, black and broken lands filling fractures in them, and then a village. Small. Barely a handful of huts clustered together for safety in a sprawling grim realm like the one she was trapped in.
Followed by a boy.
Golden hair. Eyes like a summer’s sky. Her twin. She tried to recall his name as he lingered, while at the same time wanting him gone because she knew what came next. It crashed over her before she could purge the memory, a rush of images where he went from smiling at her, to screaming something while reaching for her, to staring blankly into eternity.
She bent forwards and buried her face in her knees. Her matted hair fell to cover the sides of her face as she fought the wave of pain that followed those images, as the guilt churned like acid inside her as fiercely now as it had that day when he had died.
It was all her fault.
Darkness seethed inside her, gaining ground as she sank into the past and her regrets, as she cursed herself for recklessly following him and her father, believing she could help her twin.
She breathed through the hurt, the rage, fighting to calm her mind in the same way she always did whenever the past tried to overwhelm and break her. It was difficult, but she managed to force her focus to the future, kept telling herself she couldn’t change the past. She could only change herself so she never made the same mistake again.
And she had changed herself.
She had honed herself into a blade, one forged in this fiery crucible of pain and torment.