A Surface of Pressure and Burden

Chapter 10: A Riddle of Mystery and Malice

The only thing worse than being stuck in a room for two days was having Feyre as company while being stuck in said room. And for an icing on the cake, being invisible. Oh, and the constant barrage of younger lower faeries with those strange devices (they call them cameras?) popping in and out all day like we were some sort of way station.

I will say, it was a very nice room- sort of a suite with a lovely balcony and bowls of fresh fruit and room service to one's heart content (no one seemed to notice the extra servings disappearing into my now invisible stomach). However, for whatever indiscernible reason, Feyre preferred to hang out all day in front of a cardboard painting of a prison cell that the Faeries had set up for a photo booth and eat moldy bread made out of painted Styrofoam and moan about her sorry existence. I personally slept most of the day on a bed of feathers and caught up on some legal reading while eating pastries.

My sleep was often interrupted by Feyre pretend screaming-in-her-sleep about Tamlin and crying out things like "the crystal circle!" and "Aramantha's imagination knows no bounds" .

Thankfully, the walls in the suite were paper thin and i over heard a lot of conversation from the lesser faeries (when Feyre wasn't drowning out all other sounds with her fake night terrors) about what was going on and why we had just been sitting in this room for two days while Feyre provided an angsty backdrop to my existence. According to the faeries, the whole thing was thrown of schedule by Feyre not guessing the riddle as quickly as they had expected (apparently there was a lot of something called "content" being taken down as "online bullying" about my sister being "a bit thick"). Because of this, they had to reconstruct the entire schedule of programming and hastily build and construct an added "trial" that Feyre would be expected to deal with.

"A worm?!" I cried, standing beside my sister, as we were led into the rather spotty sunshine of an early morning on the third day. "Seriously?"

Feyre stepped forward into what appeared to be a sort of arena, surrounded on all sides by Faeries, and the Queen Bee herself. Feyre mumbled under her breath about the "cacophony of laughter" and "unearthly howls".

A faerie ran up to my sister, looking excited and asking for a first look response at the set.

"There have been no attempts to decorate this torch lit cavern," Feyre criticized. "I can't even tell if it's been hewn from rock or just formed by nature. This floor is slick and muddy."

The faerie burst into tears and ran away.

"OMG rude!" another faerie burst out. "Me and my brother were up all night designing this thing! We're studying set design at JMU. I'd like to see you do any better."

Feyre glanced around. "These cruel ethereal faces and wide grins tell me everything I need to know. I can't decipher what they're shouting."

Younger faeries draped themselves over the railing holding up signs and screaming things like "#Faelin!!!!" and "Tammy's gurrlllllll" over and over.

"What up what up what up!" Amaretto screamed from her giant throne. "It's time for Amaranthathon Challenge #1, the great Beast from the Deep!" Cheers, shouts, horns, more music. "But first, we've got a special surprise for our girl here."

Faeries pushed Feyre forward as Mandalorian gestured grandly to a spot high on the wall. To my horror, a young woman was tied up there, dangling horribly from the rafters, her eyes closed, covered in blood.

"Behold what you should have been!" Amazonia declared. ""Perhaps I should have listened when she said she'd never seen Tamlin before. Or when she insisted she'd never killed a faerie, never hunted a day in her life. Though her screaming was delightful. I haven't heard such lovely music in ages." She turned to the camera-fae. "I don't know guys, too much?"

"No, no, you're good," said one with a pencil tucked behind his pointed ear. "Prythian Plus really wanted us to go darker and edgier this season."

"K," said Maraschino. She turned back to Feyre. "Behold Clare Beddor! I should thank you for giving Rhysand her name instead of yours."

What? Great fiery cauldrons, this must have happened before I joined up with Feyre. I didn't know who Rhysand was, but had Feyre really given him the name of another village girl instead of her own? How could she have such disregard for Clare and her family?

I felt nauseous as I wove my way through the crowd over to where Clare's body dangled from the ceiling. Shy, freckle-faced Clare was one of the few village girls our age who had deigned to talk to Elain and me - even if she only did so when no one from her family was around. She'd actually been in the village, passing by the day - it seemed like years ago now - when Tomas Mandray had asked me to the Solstice Dance, and she'd been so excited for me -

Splat. A huge drop of blood fell from Clare's body and landed on my face. Wait. Why did it smell exactly like tomato sauce? I looked up again at the young woman's body. That wasn't Clare - she had brown hair, not blonde. And she was much shorter than that woman. My fears were put completely to rest when I kept watching and saw "Clare's" eyes pop open, a small door unlatch in the ceiling, and a pair of hands slip out to touch up her makeup. This was all part of the performance!

Cauldrons, but I wished I could tell Feyre she wasn't actually responsible for an innocent villager's death. Still, giving the faeries someone else's real name like that - what in the courts had she been thinking?

I had no more time to wonder, however, because another impossibly loud blast of music poured into the hall, and the floor started rolling back - the faerie magic was so incomprehensible - to reveal a huge, muddy labyrinth at Feyre's feet.

"I took the liberty of learning a few things about you," Mariana said, "You dumb humans don't even have socials, so I had to send out a team to actually talk to people, it took forever, but anyways, they said you were like a huntress or whatever? Well HUNT THIS."

Reader, I am honestly at a loss to describe what happened next. The Beast from The Deep, as I mentioned earlier, was basically a worm? But with teeth? For an audience of terrifying humanoid-bestial faerie creatures, to this day I couldn't tell you why this worm was supposed to be scary. I'll spare you all the details of the next half-hour - Feyre whipping around corners of the labyrinth with her blonde hair flipping back and forth, the mega-worm wriggling and writhing its way after her, sometimes bursting through the mud walls like the Court-Aid Man (I still don't know what this meant, but I heard several faeries in the audience say it). The audience, for that matter, seemed less than impressed by this challenge as well - despite the camera-fae and Llama-Drama's attempts to drum them up. (Let's be honest, reader, I knew what Amarantha's name was by this point, but I'm having fun). At last, however, even the Faerie Queen herself seemed to give up on the underwhelming escapade, and pushed a giant, shiny red button on the arm of her throne.

The next moment, a gruesome contraption made of what looked like giant bone shards cranked up from the muddy labyrinth floor, and the moment after that, Big Daddy Worm had impaled himself on them. To be honest, it was pretty disgusting.

The first genuine cheers of the evening went up as a crew of faeries in long grass skirts and colorful flower necklaces came out to light a massive fire under the giant worm, pop an apple in its toothy mouth, and start roasting it in the flames. Cheerful music blasted throughout the hall and several fairies started playing a sort of dancing game that seemed to involve bending over backwards to walk under a giant stick.

"It's an AmaLuau, party people!" Amarantha crowed to the camera-fae.

Covered in mud and shivering in a corner, Feyre was completely forgotten in the midst of the celebration. Mercifully, she didn't seem any more interested in feasting on worm than I was, so I followed her back to her room as she trudged out of the hall without so much as a glance up at the ceiling for the fake Clare Beddor.