Chapter 32: Seen

The skin on their exposed arms didn’t burn; it instantly turned black, curling back from the bone like scorched parchment before bursting into yellow grease-flames. Their clothes vaporized in a single breath.

The auburn hair of the baker’s daughter disappeared in a puff of silver ash, her skull showing through her blackened cheeks as she clawed futilely at the iron bars, which were already glowing an angry, translucent cherry-red.

Within four seconds, the screaming stopped.

The vocal cords had been incinerated.

All that remained was the thick, sweet, sickening stench of rendered human fat and scorched marrow, rising up from the pit in a towering, columnar geyser of purple smoke that drifted directly toward the clouds.

The spectators in the bleachers erupted into roaring, ecstatic cheers, throwing stale bread and copper coins down toward the dais.

The noble lord leaned back against his ermine furs, wiping a speck of roasted fat from his lip with a silk napkin, nodding in lazy, satisfied approval.

"A good harvest," the lord’s voice rumbled, casual and bored. "The wards should hold for another winter. Clear the ash before sundown. The smell gives me a headache."

Lucien stood ten feet from the lip of the pit.

The heat was phantom, but the suffocating weight of the malice in the air was so dense that it felt like he was breathing wet cement.

His fists were clenched so hard inside his dressing gown pockets that his fingernails were digging into his palms.

’This is disgusting,’ his mind screamed, his modern, civilized consciousness recoiling in primal revulsion. ’This is sick. This is beyond cruelty. This is just senseless, parasitic slaughter disguised as statecraft.’

He turned his head away from the smoking pit, desperate for the dream to shift, desperate for his brain to pull the emergency parachute and wake him up in his velvet bed.

And that was when the knight moved.

Of the two knights who had manned the levers, one had already turned to march back down the obsidian ramp.

The second knight, however, had not moved.

He stood directly beside the lever, his massive hands resting atop the pommel of a five-foot executioner’s greatsword planted tip-down in the blood-stained stone. His blackened armor was streaked with ash from the furnace, the iron plates emitting faint, ticking sounds as they cooled in the mountain draft...

And then, slowly...

With agonizing, mechanical deliberate slowness.

The knight turned his head.

He didn’t look at the cheering crowd. He didn’t look at the fat lord on the ivory throne. He didn’t look at the smoking, char-choked pit where thirty souls had just been extinguished.

He turned his full-faced, blackened iron helmet directly toward the empty patch of air where Lucien stood.

Lucien froze.

He’s looking at a pillar, Lucien told himself frantically, his heart beginning to hammer like a machine gun against his ribs. ℴ

’This can’t be what I am thinking it is, right? Here, I’m a ghost. I’m a spectator. This is just a dream. He can’t see me. Nobody can see an intangible projection of an observer—’

The knight took one step forward.

CLANG!

The heavy, iron-shod boot struck the stone with an impact that Lucien didn’t just see, he felt it vibrate through his knees.

Through the narrow, horizontal vision slits of that battered, blackened iron visor... something met Lucien’s gaze.

It was not a blank shadow.

Beneath the rusted iron brow, two eyes were staring directly, unmistakably, and unblinkingly into Lucien’s pupils.

They were human eyes.

But they were eyes that had crossed into the territory of the damned.

They were bloodshot to the point of being nearly crimson, the sclera mapped with ruptured capillaries, swimming with unshed tears that were boiling away in the ambient heat of the altar.

And behind that moisture burned a furnace of pure, incandescent, world-ending rage, a silent, suffocating hatred so so personal, so utterly terrifying that it felt as though two red-hot iron spikes were being driven directly through Lucien’s ocular nerves.

The knight didn’t shout.

He didn’t raise his sword.

He simply stared into Lucien’s soul, his chest rising and falling in deep, ragged, shuddering breaths, his fingers slowly, agonizingly tightening around the hilt of his blade until the rusted leather wrapping groaned.

’He can see me,’ Lucien’s brain shrieked in panic. ’HE CAN SEE ME!’

The knight leaned forward, his blackened visor inches from Lucien’s face.

And then, from behind the iron grill of the helmet, a voice hissed, not into the air of the volcanic crater, but directly into the center of Lucien’s temporal lobe, wet with blood and trembling with biblical malice:

"REMEMBER."

"WHOA—!"

Lucien leaped backward with every ounce of kinetic energy his phantom body possessed.

The volcanic crater shattered like a pane of brittle glass hit by an iron ball.

The chanting crowd, the fat lord, the smoking furnace, the iron cage, and the blackened knight all tore into swirling, spiraling ribbons of purple ash and violent white flame.

GRAVITY.

The sensation of falling returned with violent speed.

THWACK.

"OOF!"

Lucien’s face made intimate contact with the polished hardwood floor of his master bedroom.

The impact drove the air completely out of his lungs in a wheezing, undignified grunt. His forehead bounced off the edge of the mahogany nightstand with a sharp clonk, sending an empty silver water goblet rolling noisily across the floorboards.

For three seconds, Lucien lay there, flat on his stomach, his cheek pressed against the cool, beeswaxed floor, his nose throbbing with dull, rhythmic pain.

"Ow," he whispered into the wood. "My nose. My dignified, aristocratic nose."

He didn’t move immediately.

He lay there, his fingers frantically clawing at the hardwood, desperately confirming that he was, in fact, horizontal, surrounded by normal walls, and not currently suspended over a white-hot furnace of screaming maidens.

His breath was coming in ragged, shallow gasps.

His throat felt as though it had been scrubbed with coarse sandpaper, his windpipe constricting with that phantom, suffocating tightness that usually accompanies an acute panic attack.