“Ok, this time is actually the penultimate chapter.”
Suffice it to say, life has been busier lately than I had anticipated, for a handful of reasons. Do the reasons matter? No, not really. It’ll be something different, every time, that finds me on Monday night trying to crank out a new blog post at the very last minute. Doesn’t matter what it is, just matters that, you know, clearly this is a lower priority of mine. And that’s fine. I just have to recognize that sometimes.
The good news is that my higher priorities include family and actual work that pays, in that order. So at least I’m not wasting my time on something stupid, right? I did spend this weekend back in Illinois to see my parents for their birthdays, which was fun! That is why I’ve been too busy to write a better blog post, yeah, but it was worth it. I had a great time getting to see them and my brother and spending time with them before work starts to crunch my skull even harder. Also, I’ve been working extensively on a separate writing project that I don’t think I actually disclose yet, so that’s also very exciting!
Actually, come to think of it, I can’t believe I haven’t talked about it here yet. Or maybe I have, I don’t know. But I’m under contract to write a book for… someone. Am I allowed to say that, too? I don’t honestly know. I didn’t sign a non-disclosure agreement or anything, but I don’t want to get myself in trouble by spilling the beans too early. But I’m hard at work writing a book that’s actually paying me, and is actually going to be published, and I am very excited! And if this blog has to take a back seat while I do something with writing that’ll actually go somewhere, then that’s fine with me! I’ll be a published author, which is super cool. And I’ll talk more about it as soon as I ask my editor what I can say.
On an unrelated note, I also bought a VR headset, which is really cool! Setting that up… may have been a few hours that I could have spent writing this blog instead. But we’ll call it research because one day I’m going to talk more about that headset and what virtual reality is like, and then I can say that the hours I spent playing games instead of writing this blog weren’t totally wasted. Because the right to enjoy oneself is something I apparently can’t understand. Well, if I have to justify myself, so be it. At least it’s something.
That’s enough pointless rambling. This is the second-to-last chapter of Spectral Crown. This shit has been going on for too damn long at this point, but I’m gonna miss it when it’s over. Here’s the previous chapter.
Spectral Crown, by Andy Sima: Chapter Thirty-Six
I felt my heart writhe in a terrible pain, and my scalp was cut by glass. Ripped out of the body of the raven, I found myself once again in the tomb underneath the castle, where King Titus and Queen Viorel were laughing ridiculously. Atop my head, the tiara began to stab into my scalp, almost growing into me. With a strength I didn’t know I possessed, I grabbed it from my skull and threw it to the ground, where it shattered.
I stumbled and fell against the wall as I was suddenly wracked with the earth’s shaking. Bricks from the makeshift door I had used tumbled to the floor, and the chains that held the skeleton bodies rattled. As the very castle around me seemed to shudder, I struggled to straighten myself. My chest heaved, and I felt as if my heart were exploding.
“What’s happening?” I cried over the sound of bricks falling somewhere off in the distance.
King Titus and Queen Viorel, now both without the headwear of their old offices, stared up at me from the laps of their decayed bodies and clacked their jaws together in laughter. “Don’t you see, Saelac?” Titus said. “We won!”
“What’s happening to the castle?” I cried.
“My curse was to put an end to our family and our kingdom,” Titus said. “So that’s what’s happening.”
“What’s happening to the royals?” I asked.
“You know perfectly well what’s happening,” Viorel said. “You orchestrated it!”
“No!” I yelled. “This was your doing!” I felt my heart swirl and the locket against my chest grew hot.
“Forever and ever,” Titus cackled.
“Forever and ever,” Viorel agreed. And then the two of them laughed their loudest, most uproarious laughs yet, and their jaws clacked together with such vigor that they shook and rattled and began to fall to dust, chipped and shattered away by the very force of their mirth. Titus and Viorel Blestemat laughed themselves to death.
I was left alone in that crypt below the castle as the entire structure began to tear itself to pieces. I had to find a way out of here, or I would risk being trapped beneath tons of rubble for all eternity.
Leaping through the hole in the wall that the guard had created, I found that I landed with a squishy thump. Looking down, I discovered that I had landed in the quickly-decaying body of the umbra soldier. I gasped and stepped out of the thing as best I could. The metal of its armor rusted before my very eyes, and beneath the iron plating the thing’s body turned to a stew of meat. I gagged a little, but kept on running.
I was, for the most part, still lost, as I had no idea where to go or how to get out of the tunnels in the walls, but lo and behold, eventually I did hit upon something familiar; the ash marks that we had left behind so much earlier.
Little arrows and marks, scored into the wall by smoke, lead me back through the tunnels. I couldn’t believe it. They were still here, still holding up. It was incredible luck, but as I ran, I was nearly brained by falling rubble on multiple occasions.
As I tore my way down the halls, the castle continued to shake and quake around me, knocking me into the walls and sometimes knocking the walls into me. Before long, though, I came across a skeleton lying in a heap, bones chained to the wall. Yes, I knew this place quite well by now.
I managed to find the weak bricks, still marked by trails of blood from our previous expeditions and punched through. Rolling out into the fireplace, I jumped up and bolted for the door on the other side of the common room.
The door, as usual, was locked, though it was falling to pieces as I watched. I used a large chunk of rock from the ceiling to smash the door open. It fell apart like old butter, and I stumbled through.
The halls around me, with their white tiles and vaulted ceilings, were a mess of dust and debris, door splitting open under their own rot, tiles cracking beneath my feet as I stepped on them.
So I ran. I ran and I ran and I turned down as many halls as I could, until I finally found the spiral staircase I had walked up some many nights ago. But it, too, was crumbling, and as I jumped onto it, the entire structure collapsed below me. Once more I was falling through empty space, and hit the ground with a sickening crack.
I had broken a number of bones, but the locket around my neck burned my skin away, and my body righted itself. And in good timing, too, for as soon as I had stood up, a brick the size of a large dog fell from the ceiling and flattened the spot I had been in just a moment before. I kept moving.
After countless hallways, just as it had been when Iacob’s servant first led us through those cursed halls, I found myself in the foyer. Huge open spaces, grand staircase, enormous dark doors, pillars of darkness. All of it was cracking and collapsing in upon itself. Horrible screaming came from the throne room, and from under the door seemed to seep a shifting mass of darkness.
A gap had broken its way into the front door, and on the other side, I saw not blackness as I had once seen, but rather a dirt road, unpaved and untamed, that lead through the village outside the castle. I mentally prepared myself and hurtled my entire weight through the swiftly-widening gap.
I made it safely to the door, but there was a sound of shattering behind me, and I briefly turned back. The door to the throne room had exploded outward, and a horrific corpse in a black dress and a green crown, ancient beyond numbering, clawed out from a seething body of shadows that had engulfed the throne room.
“SAELAC,” the thing that had once been Sorina yelled. With her last strength, she flew forward, arms outstretched. Her eyes were burning with hatred as she lunged for my throat. I jumped out of the way, and Sorina crashed to the ground again. She turned to me and raged. The crown fell from her head, finally, and shattered in a puff of darkness.
“CURSE YOU CURSE YOU CURSE-” she wailed, but before she could say anything more, breath rushed from her throat and her eyes turned to dust. Her last bits of skin, rotting away, turned to ash in the air, and all that was left was a pile of bones.
I tried not to think about it too much as I made a mad dash for the exit. And as I crossed the threshold, the sunlight was blinding, and, for the first time, the clouds above were shifting. They all seemed to be converging on one spot, just above the castle. They swirled and spun, but in their wake there was only sunlight. I kept going.
As I ran, all around me the village was on fire. As houses and workshops cracked and fell to the ground, raging fire spread from abode to abode. I turned and I ran down the dirt road, heading for the gate in the wall at the other end.
From behind me, I heard a chorus of ravens, and glancing over my shoulder, they were spiraling around the top of the castle. The birds circled, and my heart leapt as I ran away from them.
Running through the ramshackle street, fires glowing ferociously on either side, I heard the distant screams of those things that I had once met before, the creatures that lived inside the village. They were burning alive. I had to run.
I felt as if I had run for hours by the time I made it to the gate set in the wall of the castle, but the gate had already fallen to the ground and begun turning to dust as I arrived. Cavorting over the rotting barrier, I ran through the wall, which was just as thick as I remembered, and made it out the other side.
I thought I was free but I kept running anyway. My legs pounded harder and harder, muscles tearing and the pain inside nearly unbearable. But I looked over my shoulder once and I had to stop and turn around just to fully appreciate what I was seeing.
High in the sky, above the very center of the castle, a cloud of ravens swirled. They seemed to be moving towards one spot, all dipping and diving and getting tighter and tighter until all I could see was a horrific shifting mass, not unlike the shadows that had lurked deep within the Blestemat crown. And then the evil shape descended with a sudden force, crashing into the castle’s heart.
And the castle devoured itself.
All the spires, from all the edges of the castle, began to fall inward. The great wall, as it stretched off seemingly into infinity, toppled and collapsed. The fire in the village grew ever larger, ever hotter, and the flames leapt over the sides of the fallen wall. But then there was a great wind, and everything was sucked inward, towards the castle. All the great architecture, the turrets and towers, the walls and windows, shook and imploded, falling into the great crypt that rested below the castle. Or at least something below the castle.
I stumbled back when a sudden black wave rose up out of the collapsing structure’s center. I wasn’t sure what it was at first, but as it soared high into the air, I was shocked to see that it was a huge upsurge of ravens. Avian bodies poured out of the gap in the ground, flying up, and then spreading outwards. Spreading outwards to me.
I did the only thing I knew how to do anymore. I ran.
“Mother forgive me,” I said, and used what little remaining energy I had left to dash away from the castle. I had to dig deep inside myself, searching for reserves I wasn’t sure I still had, but I ran. I ran blindly down a dirt road, flowers and grasses poking up from the ruts, and from behind me I heard the sound of cawing and the flapping of wings. I didn’t bother turning around.
It was a mad struggle, and I ran on. I thought I felt the wind of the raven wave at my back, thought I could sense their beady eyes on me, an enormous hand reaching out. I imagined one of them snapping at my neck, pulling the locket off. And I did, in fact, feel one of them swipe at my scalp. I thought I was done for. I screamed, shut my eyes, and left myself up to fate.
And then it was over.
The sound of ravens was gone. The terrible beating of their wings had ceased. As I crossed some sort of invisible line, everything stopped. A huge weight had been lifted off my chest. I opened my eyes.
I was in a forest, just like any other. The trees around me shone dappled through the leaves above, and the sun dazzled quietly. The road beneath my feet was well-trodden and pockmarked with little holes. I turned around carefully, and saw that there was nothing behind me. No birds. No wall. No border. No castle. No Umbra. Just a road, winding through the forest and off into some other territory. I collapsed to the ground in exhaustion, and my heart and my mind screamed themselves into unconsciousness.
Yeah, that comment about the self-destruct countdown sequence from last post? Literal. This is literally just an escape sequence. But there will be one more chapter after this, for better or for worse. I’m torn on the whole narrative framing thing I did with the prologue, way at the beginning, and then the next chapter, which is an epilogue. I think it adds something to the text, but it also detracts from it by making the beginning slower, I think. Or does it make it more interesting, with that hook? I don’t know. I haven’t read this thing with a critical eye since 2018, and isn’t that fucking weird? Well, it’s almost at an end, and my novel will be, in one form, “published.” Whatever that actually means. If you’ve read up until now, let me know if you liked it or not, and why. And thanks for reading.
