The Dark Between Dreams | ✔️

Chapter 14 🔻 The Throne Room

Webb shoved me backward through the doorway just as the chandelier came crashing to the floor. There was an explosion of red flames and scattered shrapnel. Both echelon ghosts disappeared behind the smoldering wreck of glass and lux.

Webb gave his sword an expert twirl before returning it to his scabbard. "Bought us some time!"

"Clever!" I said. "Weren't you supposed to be one of the biggest idiots in After or something?"

"Right back atcha! Let's bail!"

I spun away from the wreckage and led us into a whole new wing. The fizzing of angry lux and the pissed off shouts of the echelon echoed from the chamber behind us.

My heart screamed at me to run, that we were so close to whatever answer we were seeking! But this place was like a maze, and much less exquisite than the grand atrium. The sound of our racing footsteps echoed from every dusty corner of the narrow catacombs that made up the back wing of the king's rotunda, making it impossible to tell if we were being pursued or how far behind us our pursuers were. The flickering red lanterns on the walls grew more and more scarce.

The light dimmed.

I chanced a glance behind me, hoping for a reassuring grin from Webb. Except—to my shock—he'd disappeared, vanished into the dark that now surrounded me. "Webb? Webb!" The twisting halls only threw my voice back at me. I shivered, swiveling my head this way and that in search of him and the way out, half expecting a shadow to detach itself from the dark and rip me to shreds. Some kind of red light, dim and far away, flared down the hall. I followed it, breaking into a run. "Webb—Ah!"

I stopped short.

I'd stumbled into a dank chamber where the air was musky and damp like After's underground, and thick with floating dust motes. It was a small circular room with lamps barely flickering on the black stone walls, and it was completely empty...

Save for the enormous hole in the center of the room, carved right into the black stone foundation of the palace.

An updraft wafted from the abyss at my feet, sounding more like a ghostly wail—a funeral dirge.

So.

This was the Pit.

The view from the tops of After's skyscrapers never made my heart pound or my throat tighten. Hardly anything did anymore.

Staring down into the Pit, however, made a single bead of sweat spill down my brow. My hands, now clammy, trembled at my sides.

The Pit thirsts.

I took a single, shaking step backward from the hole and accidentally displaced a tiny piece of gravel. The pebble rolled forward and disappeared over the lip of the Pit and fell. I never heard it land.

"Are you lost, little ghost?"

I let out a strangled gasp and whirled around at the sound of a voice behind me. Blinky immediately grabbed me by the throat. His hand was large enough to wrap around my entire neck, and his grip was tight enough that if I had any bones, they would've snapped like toothpicks. I couldn't scream through my crushed throat. All I could do was claw at the other hollow's hand and kick at him. Those beady eyes came alight as the man raised me high and dangled me over the Pit.

Blinky laughed at me, and his laughter reverberated from the black chasm below, almost as if the abyss was laughing at me, too. "Why are you struggling?" he asked me. "Isn't this what you anchored lunatics want? Don't you want to disappear into the void?"

The Pit moaned beneath me, a famished sound.

I struggled like a crow in a snare.

"You can stay down there at the bottom of the Pit until Blackburne returns. And maybe he'll decide to let you out. Or maybe not."