The Descent

TWENTY

Adair opens his eyes and finds he’s on his feet in a dark, misty space. At least the journey is over. It had been awful, a rocky plummet, and he had been choked with dread and, strangely, a sense of failure every inch of the way. He’d had the feeling of déjà vu the entire time, too. Impossibly, he was reminded of an experience he’d never had, clinging to a cliff somewhere, surrounded by blackness with flashes like lightning. But the descent is over now and he wants to put the journey behind him. He aches as though he has been on the losing end of a fight or locked in a trunk and thrown down a mountain.

Where has he ended up? he wonders. He seems to have touched down at a castle. He doesn’t recognize it but, again, feels as though he’s been here before. The sensation of déjà vu is insistent, clamoring in his head like a fire alarm, and he reacts in a basic, instinctual way. Fight or flight, his senses tell him. The urge to flee is almost irresistible.

Adair moves down the hallway slowly and carefully, listening for the sound of approaching footsteps. In a place this big, there are bound to be people: the occupants, but also guards, servants. He is diligent and checks around doorways, peeks down staircases, at a loss as to how to even begin looking for Lanore in this place. He no longer feels her presence, the thread by which they have been connected and the means by which he’d figured he’d locate her.

And he feels awful. After centuries of being perfectly healthy, of not having a day of illness—no cold or headache, or a broken bone that lasted longer than an instant—the sensation is unbearable. He is racked with pain from head to toe, as though his body is trying to turn itself inside out. He has the most powerful urge to curl over, hands on knees, and vomit. To purge himself. Something inside him is trying to get out—he is carrying something that must be expelled. Ignoring the pain, Adair presses down another hall, one that seems to take him closer to the center of the building. He doesn’t know where he is, or who lives here—though he thinks he knows . . . he feels the awful truth in the pit of his stomach.

Before long, Adair realizes he is getting closer to an occupied part of the castle. He hears murmuring, distant rumblings at the end of the hall. It’s an indistinct conversation being held between two people; he can hear the tone of their voices, but all the details have been washed out. Meanwhile, the pain in his head hasn’t gotten any better; if anything, it’s gotten worse, so sharp now that he can barely keep his thoughts together. His vision is broken up with white flashes before his eyes. His head feels as though it’s going to explode, as though it would pulverize if you touched it—and there’s that sense of déjà vu again, because he’s felt this precise pain before. Yes, the sensation is so familiar at that moment, it’s as though he felt it only yesterday—

Suddenly, Adair finds he has stumbled into the middle of a huge chamber. The ceiling stretches skyward, soaring so high that it disappears in what appear to be clouds, so that you can’t tell if there’s a ceiling at all. The room might actually be open to heaven. Giant columns anchor the room and they, too, reach for heaven. Through his blurred and racked vision, Adair sees there is—my God—the demon from his dream standing before him. The topaz eyes have definitely found him, but the beast has no reaction. In a moment of clarity, Adair notices a second demon, and a third, no—there are a lot of them, and they ring the perimeter, standing guard. Great ugly beasts they are, more frightening in life than in the flat, safe space of dreams. Each demon weighs at least a half ton if he weighs an ounce. Their glittering eyes are trained on him, each and every one. Adair’s stomach drops to his knees. He expects they will seize him and take him to their queen, if he is lucky, or tear him limb from limb if he is not. He is frozen, waiting to see what they do next.

To his utter amazement, the demons do not rush toward him, snarling, with bared teeth. No, to his disbelief, they bend to one knee, each and every one of them, one demon after the other, each bending and bowing their heads to him. Adair turns in a slow circle, surveying the demons kneeling before him, and as he does so, a thunderbolt rings through his skull. Through the intense pain, he comes to a realization. He has been here before, he has lived here before. He remembers. He knows this place. His past rushes back to him, haltingly, in pieces, scenes, memories, responsibilities, duties. His time on earth, the life he has known, starts to shrink in his mind. It seems so short in comparison to what he has given to this place, to the underworld. To his home. That’s what has been trying to get out of his head: false memories, the man he thought he was, the story that had been planted in his head. Stories he’s believed implicitly for a thousand years, and they’re all lies. It’s incompatible with the truth that rushes up to him now like a happy child being reunited with its parent, embracing him, unwilling to let go of him. Recollections of his past, his true past, rush to fill his head.

Suddenly, the queen is standing before him. How happy she is, her sternly beautiful face lit up with joy. She walks toward him, her arms outstretched, reaching for him. She is magnificent in her way, the quintessence of a particular kind of female beauty, coldly triumphant.

Adair is dumbfounded. Unbelievably, she comes up to him, taking his hands in hers and—when he doesn’t resist her—slips into an embrace with him. This embrace feels as familiar to him as breathing. Held in her arms, he knows that they have done this thousands upon thousands of times. Yet, his skin crawls when it comes in contact with hers, as though they are incompatible, as though they are two chemicals that form a corrosive acid when they mix. He wants to escape from her, but he can’t. She holds him tight like the very embrace of death.

“You’ve come back to me,” she whispers in his ear. Her voice is thick and sweet, like honey. “I knew you would come back to me, and to your kingdom. Nothing has changed; I have held it all in wait for your return. We have all waited for your return, all your faithful servants. Now that you are back, you will resume the throne as king, and as my husband, and together we will rule the underworld, as we were meant to by our father, the lord of lords.” The queen is nearly crying with joy, and, trembling, she brings her lips close to his. She pauses before she kisses him. “Welcome home, my lord.”