Chapter 19 The Hall of Broken Faces
The water was freezing. It felt like thousands of tiny needles poking my skin. I stood in the middle of the flooded arena, my chest heaving. Around me, dozens of girls who looked exactly like me rose from the dark water. Some were toddlers. Some were teenagers. All of them had hollow, black eyes.
"Pick one, Eara," my mother’s voice echoed from the high stone walls. She stood on a platform above the water, spinning her bone spear. "Kill your past, or let your past kill you."
One of the "Earas," a version of me that looked about fifteen, lunged with a kitchen knife. I dove to the side, the cold water splashing into my mouth.
I can’t do this, I thought, my heart hammering against my ribs. They are me. How do I fight myself?
"They aren't you!" a roar came from above.
I looked up. The older Solis was clinging to a rusted chain hanging from the ceiling. He swung down, his obsidian blade cutting through three of the fake girls in one motion. They didn't bleed; they popped into clouds of black smoke.
"It’s an illusion, Eara!" Solis shouted, landing beside me in the waist-deep water. "Seraphine is feeding on your guilt. She wants you to feel small so the Void can swallow you!"
"But my mother," I started.
"That thing is not your mother!" Solis grabbed my shoulders, his golden eyes burning with a fierce light. "The real woman loved you. This creature is just a puppet made of shadows and lies. Look at her arm!"
I looked up at the platform. The woman holding the spear wasn't bleeding red where the older Solis had nicked her earlier. She was leaking black ink.
"Enough!" the creature screamed. Her face peeled back like old paper, revealing a jagged, toothy grin. "If you won't play the game, then everyone dies!"
She slammed the butt of her spear into the platform. The water in the arena began to swirl. A giant drain opened in the center, creating a whirlpool that sucked in the smoke-girls and the debris.
"Eara, take my hand!" Solis yelled.
I reached for him, but a hand grabbed my ankle from beneath the surface. I was jerked down into the freezing dark. I kicked and clawed, but the grip was like iron. I looked through the murky water and saw my "mother" swimming toward me, her hair floating like dead snakes.
She didn't want to kill me. She wanted to pull me into the drain.
I realized then that the drain wasn't just a hole. It was a mouth. Seraphine was using the arena to funnel all the "failed" timelines into a single point. If I went down there, I would be erased.
I remembered the silver needle my father had given me before the reset. I didn't have it in this timeline, but I had the memory of it. I had the feeling of weaving.
I am a weaver, I told myself. I don't need a tool to find the thread.
I closed my eyes underwater. I stopped fighting the grip on my ankle. Instead, I reached out for the "threads" of the water itself. Everything is made of strings, heat, cold, life, and death. I found the tread of the whirlpool and yanked it.
The water didn't just stop; it exploded upward.
A geyser of silver light blasted out of the arena, throwing me and the shadow-creature into the air. I landed hard on the stone platform, coughing and gasping. The creature landed a few feet away, her bone spear shattered.
"You... little... brat," she hissed. Her human skin was mostly gone now. She was just a skeleton made of smoke.
I stood up, my small hands shaking. "You took my father. You killed my real mother. You used Solis like a toy."
"And I'll do it again," she sneered. She pointed toward the far end of the arena.
The wall crumbled, and the twelve-year-old Solis walked out. But he wasn't crying anymore. His skin was gray, and black veins were popping out on his neck. He was holding a shard of the Dragon’s Heart.
"The boy is gone, Eara," the creature laughed. "The Shadow King has already moved in. He didn't need the selection. He just needed a weak heart."
The young Solis raised the shard. A beam of red light hit the older Solis, who was still in the water. He screamed, his body turning into golden dust.
"Solis!" I screamed.
"He was just a ghost, Eara." Seraphine’s voice drifted down from the ceiling. She appeared out of the shadows, looking like a queen in her child's body. "A memory. And now, he’s forgotten. Just like you're about to be."
The young Solis stepped onto the platform. He looked at me with empty, black eyes. He raised the golden dagger.
"Wait!" I shouted. "Solis, look at me! I’m the girl from the square! I’m the girl who didn't let go!"
He didn't stop. He raised the knife to strike.
But then, he paused. He looked at the black mark on my arm. A single tear, gold and glowing, ran down his gray cheek.
"Eara... run," he whispered.
He didn't stab me. He turned the dagger and drove it into the dragon's heart, shard in his other hand.
The explosion of red and gold was so big it blew the roof off the arena. The shockwave sent me flying backward, over the edge of the tower.
As I fell through the air, the world didn't reset. It cracked.
I hit the ground, but it wasn't stone. It was soft, white silk. I looked up and saw that the entire city was being covered in giant, glowing threads.
And standing at the end of the street was a man I hadn't seen in a long time. He was wearing a crown of thorns and holding a loom made of bone.
"The Weaver has finally finished the pattern," he said. "Now, give me your soul so I can start the fire."
I looked down at my chest. A glowing, silver thread was coming out of my heart, and the man was reaching for it with a pair of rusty shears.