The noise in my head wasn’t abating. It didn’t get worse, but it certainly wasn’t getting better.
“He’s agreed to let you destroy him so you don’t both get destroyed, the least you can do is not talk about this like it’s a possibility! Find another way, or I’m done! I’m gone!”
My head turned.
Two eyes peered out of the darkness.
“What is ‘this’?” Alister asked. “Is it so much worse than death?”
“Yes,” the voice belonging to the eyes said.
Green Eyes crawled through a gap in the trees.
There was a coldness in her eyes as she looked at the main group.
“You shouldn’t have come here,” I said. “Leaving might be hard.”
“You shouldn’t have left me behind,” she retorted. “Again.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m actually sorry.”
“I could hear you from a little distance away. The nugget is loud.”
I nodded.
“Nugget,” Evan muttered, “says sushi girl.”
She approached me, but she didn’t climb onto me like she had in the past. She climbed up the throne, flipped her tail over so it was on what amounted to an armrest, and reclined, sitting sideways. If a fish could ‘sit’. The sinuous nature of her lower body was especially clear with the way she’d draped herself back over the throne.
“You can’t,” I said.
“I know. It’s not for me, and I’d be really bad at it,” she said. “Won’t work. Getting past this isn’t as easy as having someone else take the seat.”
She moved her head, rolling it back over the other armrest, facing skyward. In the doing, she pushed her head under my hand, where I was still touching the throne. I moved my thumb to flick a bit of hair away from where it trailed across her damaged face, but I left my hand where it was, the palm touching the bridge of her nose, the fingers and heel obscuring her eyes.
She’d healed, just a little bit, I noted, looking past the gaps of my fingers.
A benefit of being so close to the Abyss, perhaps.
She spoke, “He’ll live a long time. It won’t be good living. This is maybe one of the worst places for him to be, or it will be, once he settles in. A perfect, personalized misery, just for him.”
“It’s not being destroyed,” Ty said. “It’s being condemned.”
“Essentially,” I said.
“What would you rather do?” Alister asked. “As far as I can tell, it’s the exact same choice you made with Rose earlier. Either we all suffer through being here, or one person does.”
I turned to look at him.
They looked as worn out and scared as I’d suspected.
He was right. It wasn’t pretty, but he was right.
The Abyss wanted me to be its plaything. I’d been given the power to affect change, to take action and try to defend my friends, and it had all led to this.
I started to move my hand, ready to move Green Eyes from the throne. She seized my wrist.
She held my hand there, staring at me from an upside-down perspective.
“Why should he do it?” Evan asked. “He made the hard choice once, so he can do it again? No! When’s the last time any one of you made the big sacrifice?”
“Missing a hand here,” Alister said.
“Thank you for that,” the High Priest added. “I do owe you something for it.”
Alister nodded.
“Big sacrifice,” Evan said, stressing the ‘big’. “You know… um- I’m not good with words. Help me out here, Blake. Green?”
I could hear the cries of the various denizens of the Abyss. I could hear the tolling of the bell, even though it wasn’t here, and I could make out a deep rumbling, promising a reconfiguration, a change in broad strokes.
I opted to keep my mouth shut rather than risk the possibility that the noises in my head might become sentiments expressed through my lips.
Green Eyes answered Evan’s call. “I don’t know what the nugget is saying-”
“And stop calling me a nugget!”
“-but the thing I keep hearing, over and over again, is that everything comes with a price. What I’d like to know is, what are you paying Blake? What does he get in the deal?”
The group exchanged glances.
“I’m not sure this isn’t another trick of the Abyss. One more mouthpiece, so it gets what it wants,” the High Priest said.
“No,” I said. I squared my jaw, and stood up a little straighter. “No, Green Eyes is right. This isn’t something you ask for without giving something in return.”
“What do you want?” Alister asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “As far as I can tell, there isn’t that much that’s worth enduring a personalized little hell for gods know how long. You may have to sell it to me.”
“Blake,” Ty said.
“What?” I asked, and my tone was a little harsher than it maybe should have been.
He spread his arms, then dropped them to his side. “I don’t want to say it, but apparently I wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for you. I won’t say I regret it, but… I don’t remember it, and that’s making it feel really hard to justify. There’s Tiff, and there’s Alexis.”
He put emphasis on her name. It had the desired effect.
“I’m going to side with Blake on this one,” Rose said.
I looked at her in surprise.
“Green Eyes is right. Everything has a price. If we accept this option, let Blake make this choice, we’re going to pay somehow, further down the line. We should give up something, to make it more equitable.”
She drew in a deep breath, then exhaled.
“Ty,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Blake was cut from the same cloth I was. The cuts were meant to achieve things. Blake was rigged to surround himself with allies. Just like he was created to ultimately destroy himself. I don’t know how much choice he had in the matter.”
“It’s a fair accusation,” I said. “I did get them involved.”
Rose nodded slowly. Her breath fogged. The trees and branches were so thick around us that it felt like they were closing in. Like a piece of music that was rigged to sound like it constantly escalated in pitch, ad infinitum.
Ty had shown me the piece of music in question, now that I thought about it.
“You did,” she said. “But I’m more inclined to blame the demon, but that’s… I’m so very tired right now, Blake. This isn’t even certified over, and I’m exhausted on every measurable level, and several levels that can’t be measured. I’m tired of blaming you. So maybe I’m biased, and that’s coloring my perception. Don’t let me come across like I’m stopping you two from resenting Blake.”
She was talking to Tiff and Ty.