Last Rites by Nazri Noor

Author:Nazri Noor [Noor, Nazri]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Nazri Noor
Published: 2019-04-10T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

That same night, when we’d all gone back to the Boneyard, I figured it couldn’t hurt to look into the Dark Room again. Maybe I was hoping I’d trip over another ball of golden string, and find another lead through this gods-moot or that.

But a guy can only get so lucky.

I was spoiled, I figured, as I stepped through the Dark Room, with how much the entities were offering, and had already offered. Sure, it wasn’t in their nature to directly influence our reality – which I always thought was kind of hypocritical, honestly, because clearly Amaterasu could hide the sun whenever she wanted. And I’d never met them, but I was pretty certain that either Zeus or Thor would happily fry someone with a lightning bolt as a passing fancy.

Yet something in my heart told me that there were still answers to be found within – inside myself, or inside the Dark Room. I kept my mother’s amulet clenched between my teeth as I negotiated the tunnels. Juvenile, maybe, but it made me feel safe, having the strange, ambient warmth of the garnet so close by. And like Carver said, it was best to get the object accustomed to the ethereal signatures of my body.

“Then it will more readily accept an enchantment when the time comes,” he’d said. “Which should ideally be sooner rather than later.”

Which was why we planned the thing we planned that night, something I’d think back on and regret, but it had to be done. I didn’t know where else we would acquire the screams of anguish we needed otherwise.

But I digress. Something quiet and unknown was drawing me, pulling on my chest and guiding me through the Dark Room. I wondered if Nyx hadn’t given me one final gift, planting a lodestar in my heart, giving me a clue about what I was meant to discover in the Dark Room.

And then I saw them. At the far end of the corridor were pinpoints of light, only these weren’t steady and blinking, like Nyx’s distant stars. They swirled in midair, vortices of white light that spun like whirlpools. Their appearance – hell, their very existence was ominous enough.

The sound they made was worse. A soft keening, a quiet screeching, not unlike the songs of the Eldest. I crept closer, my fingers curled, prepared to launch shadow or flame as the situation called for. No. That noise really did sound like the Eldest. Surely Nyx wasn’t sending me to my death?

I approached cautiously, my mouth dry, my heart a jumble of excitement and terror. The wheels of light – five of them, that I could see – spun within the confines of a black chamber, a room within the Dark Room. They were spaced evenly from each other, separated only by towering columns of that leathery black stone that made up the Dark Room’s architecture. And in the center of each wheel was a black dot.

My heart fell. These were the gateways of the Eldest,

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