Page 22 of Dark as the Cursed Abyss

Farah shook her head. “I don’t know everything. I only know what I’ve felt in the mountains, the pull when Acacius… When he told me.” Her voice dropped to a whisper as a chill ran through the ballroom despite the heat of the candles.

The music swelled, the dancers spinning in mesmerizing patterns, but Chloe could feel the undercurrent of a breeze that should not occur within these walls. The guests’ laughter sounded hollow, their eyes distant. Shadows seemed to stretch unnaturally along the walls. A faint vibration thrummed beneath the marble floors, subtle at first, then unmistakable.

The orchestra faltered. A single note hung too long in the air before collapsing into silence. The entire room froze mid-step.

Chloe felt it before she saw it—a shift in the air that carried with it the weight of death, the unmistakable presence of something immense, cold, and ancient. She gripped Farah’s hand tighter, her pulse hammering. The warmth of the other princess’s hand was grounding, but not enough to ward off the creeping dread.

A sudden flash, like lightning trapped in crystal, erupted above the grand chandelier. Candles shivered, flames bending violently, shadows scattering in impossible directions. The guests gasped, some falling to their knees, eyes wide, their faces pale.

Farah’s black dress seemed to shimmer unnaturally, as though the sheer overlay drank in the shadows, amplifying the darkness in the room. Chloe felt a tingling at her fingertips, a whisper of power she had never wielded before, reacting instinctively to the surge around them.

A pulse—deep and resonant, carrying from everywhere and nowhere—vibrated through the walls, through the floor, through their very bones.

The sound was death incarnate, a shiver in every living cell. Chairs overturned, glasses shattered, and for a moment the room itself seemed to tilt, the floor rippling beneath their feet. Even the music, instruments clattering in fear, tried to compose itself but could not.

Chloe’s heart leapt. Hades. It had to be his power threading through the earth beneath their feet. Her brother had not been able to stop him. He was alive. Farah’s grip on her hand tightened until Chloe could feel the strength in her very bones.

The orchestra attempted to strike a chord, but the sound was hollow, discordant. The crowd froze entirely, eyes turning toward the great windows where the flames of the city outside flickered unnaturally, bending toward the castle as if drawn by some unseen force.

Chloe’s mind raced, heart hammering. This was no longer a ball, no longer a test of poise or politics. This was survival. Hades’ presence warped the very air. She could feel it coiling, reaching for weakness, probing for fear, testing the living.

Farah spun, guiding Chloe toward the shadows beneath the grand staircase. Every eye seemed to follow them even though the guests were paralyzed with terror. Chloe could feel the pull of her own power, a thread connecting her to the looming darkness, whispering possibilities she had never dared imagine.

As they reached the edge of the staircase, Chloe dared to glance over her shoulder. The grand chandelier cracked audibly, sending a shower of sparks into the room. Panic rippled through the noble assembly, some crying, others scrambling blindly toward the exits. But the dead weight of inevitability—the presence of Hades—kept the princesses rooted.

Farah whispered again, urgent now. “Whatever happens next…you remember what I told you. We need to survive the Mysteries. And we need to find whatever is below that mountain.”

Chloe swallowed hard, the music of the waltz completely gone, replaced by the drum of her own heartbeat and the cold whisper of mortality in the room. She knew one thing with absolute clarity—the battle for Hespali, for Nexos, for life itself, had begun.

And above it all, in the shadow of the shattered chandelier, Chloe saw it—a flicker of gold and black, a crown not yet claimed, a power older than any mortal, bending toward the living.

Chapter Sixteen

Farah

There was no time to process Hades’ return to this world before they were whisked away. Water dripped down the walls of the underground cavern like a slow and steady melody. They were deep within one of the mountains, no possible way to escape whatever fate lay before them in the first trial. Farah could only help that whatever vague training Acacius had given her over the last two weeks was enough for survival. He seemed to think as much, but maybe that was his way of getting revenge on Farah or Chloe.

Left. Right. Left. Farah counted her final steps as the cavern’s passageway opened to a clearing. Before her lay a vast river the color as deep as a starless sky. It looked like how Ajax had described the Stygian River in the depths of Aidesian—claiming and damning. The air tasted of decaying leaves in the forest, like death and rebirth swirled into one. Oil-lit torches cast a ghostly aura across the expanse. Ebony marble pillars with gold veining lined the shore, each carved raw with what appeared to be names in the Elliniká Glóssa. Were they the names of initiates that completed the trial? Or the lost souls trapped beneath? Would her name be engraved alongside Chloe’s after today?

She took another step closer to the river’s edge, the onyx water unnaturally still and reflectionless. Kneeling, Farah reached toward the break of the river to see if it was real or merely an illusion cast by the glow of the torches surrounding it.

A hand landed on her shoulder just as her fingers were about to graze the water’s edge. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

Farah pulled back and spun her head around to face a cloaked man, nothing showing behind his hood except his lips, but she still knew it to be Acacius. His voice was an ever reverberating echo in her mind since they started training.

“I-I just wanted to see if it was real,” Farah stammered. Nothing about this seemed true. Even the fact that she had to be in these trials seemed like a bad dream, something she would wake up from any moment now, still in her cabin of the Parataxis sailing for these shores.

“I assure you, everything about this place is real.” The smile that so often graced Acacius’s lips was gone, replaced by a thin line, not even a scowl. “Do not mistake these hallowed halls for anything other than the tortuous place they are. It will take things from you—things you’ve kept deep in your heart, things you don’t even think to remember—and it will swallow you whole.”

“And if I don’t participate?” Farah already knew the answer to this question. Hespali was supposed to be a simple mission: infiltrate the court, find the missing artifacts her father hid, return to Nexos hopefully with her life.

“It is too late for those kinds of thoughts, phoinix. Now come, we must begin.”

With a swish of his cloak, Acacius began to walk toward an entrance path to the river lined with stakes wrapped in flaming cloth. Beside each stake stood another acolyte, draped in the same white cloak as Acacius. He took his place at the start of the pathway opposite to who Farah could only assume was Markos. He held Chloe’s hand, whispering things in her ear to which she nodded along. She looked calm, which was quite the contrast to Farah’s twitching eye and swirling gut.

Farah approached the entrance and when her eyes finally adjusted to the lighting, a series of stepping stones appeared to rise out of the water line, spanning all the way to the shore on the opposite side of the cavern. She glanced down at her nightgown and over at Chloe’s similar white garb and wondered why they had not allowed them to change into something more suitable for crossing the river.

“Welcome, initiates, to the Claiming.” Avra’s voice echoed in the cavern, making the very flames on the walls dance in a deadly melodic rhythm. “Today you begin your pledge to the Fates and to each other. To succeed today, you must strip bare, in both mind and body, leave yourself raw so that the other can see the truth that lies beneath your soul.”