After one week spent in the darkness of the underground tunnels, armed with a compass and a map of the city, Arran could have retraced the route from Zohra's house to Onshra's temple blindfolded. His ears picked up no sound save for the steady dripping of sewage down the arched walls and the much louder splashing of his boots in the pools on the ground. The silence bore an atmosphere of tension mixed with dread, but Arran welcomed the nervous adrenaline like an old friend. It would help him focus.
The only reason he knew he had arrived at the temple was the subtle engraving of a crow, Onshra's animal symbol, on the ceiling. A torch sconce had been fixed onto the wall, very convenient, and he placed his own torch in it. He grabbed the ladder, which screeched and shook under his weight, and climbed until he had reached the stone slab.
During his earlier observations, he had asked himself more than once why a priest of the god of death would have needed a private entrance to the ancient tunnel system, and whether the current High Priest was still aware of its existence. Regardless of the reason, Arran was grateful for it. He raised the lid, scanning the room for possible witnesses. After confirming the coast was clear, he pushed himself up. He slid the slab back in place without making a sound.
One might wonder why he hadn't chosen to enter the temple through the front door. After all, the Silver District's great pride was open to visitors throughout the entire day and night, with the only exception being the Night of Silence at the end of each year. The god of death and final judgment had no business interfering with festivities that celebrated a new beginning.
The reason why he had taken the detour was that the backroom bordered the rearmost part of the temple, where Onshra's mighty statue soared above his subjects. Embedded in the god's black-and-gold breastplate sat the object of his interest, a glowing dot of purple whose energy rose the hair on Arran's arms even from this distance.
Arran slipped out of the backroom and cloaked himself with his magic simultaneously. No one was watching him; the priest on night duty stood near the temple's center, talking to Primsharah's devout. Arran sneaked closer to the statue. At its base, he craned his neck to gaze at Onshra's strict, sculpted features. Despite his religious skepsis, a sense of foreboding settled on his skin like a shroud. He shivered. Did he imagine the look of disappointment on the god's face?
He blew a lock of his hair out of his eyes in what might have been a scoff. This was not the right time to repent of his sins, not when he was about to add the worst one of all to the top of the already impressive pile. His fingers brushed the rough fabric of his special gloves as he fished them out of his pockets and shoved his hands inside them.
The subtle tingle of magic made his blood rush through his veins. Its faint buzz in his ears blocked out the background noise of whispered prayers and words of reverence. Arran closed his eyes and took a deep breath, filling his lungs with oxygen until they nearly burst.
He was ready.
He was tall enough to climb onto the pedestal without the help of his gloves. A quick backward glance to check whether his spell still worked—just a precaution—and then he jumped up to grab Onshra's shin, dangling from the god's leg like a naughty kitten. He made a face and started climbing.
It's just a statue, he reminded himself. As long as you don't touch its balls, you're going to be just fine.
And then, Does this thing even have balls?
He banned the blasphemous thought out of his head before lightning would strike him from the sky. An anxious giggle bubbled up in his throat, but he swallowed it back down. Gods, he was trembling. Why was he trembling? He wasn't losing his nerve now, was he?
He made it to the god's hips without any complications. The gloves' enchantment glued to the statue's onyx just like Zayr had promised, and Arran had enough experience climbing houses to know where to place his feet for support. However, just when he reached up to continue up Onshra's torso, his right foot slipped and he lost balance. For a long, breathless second, his body floated in the air, weightless, heart thundering a wild rhythm in his chest.
His fingers latched onto the edge of the statue's belt, hanging on for dear life. Arran used his momentum to swing himself to the left, curl a leg around the god's thigh and grasp the belt with his free hand as well. A sharp, pulsating pain shot through his rib cage when his upper body collided with the hard stone. He stayed in that position for a few moments longer, catching his breath. He glimpsed at the temple's interior from the corner of his eye.
Most worshipers had left the building and the priest must have retreated to his private office or whatever room he used to take care of his administrative work. No one had heard his muffled yelp. Good.
Even more careful this time, Arran spent another five minutes climbing the breastplate until the Amulet's soft glow colored the edges of his vision purple. Leaning forward, he pulled one gloved hand free from the statue's surface and laid it across the Amulet to measure its size. Its triangular outline encircled his hand perfectly. His brow quirked. How he was supposed to carry the damn thing all the way down to the ground if he needed both hands to do so?
First things first, though. His fingers traced the contours of the violet gemstone confined in the Amulet's center by the silver triangle. An electrical thrill coursed through his veins, produced by the artifact's mere proximity. So much energy, so powerful. As soon as he touched the jewel's cool exterior, its glow intensified with a bright flash of light, blinding him. He shielded his eyes and peered through the cracks between his fingers.
He gasped. The Amulet had shrunk to a more acceptable size, small enough to tuck under his shirt next to Zohra's talisman. A silver chain, resembling the one he had seen on the mind warpers' drawing, grew from the triangle's top corner.
Too easy.
He shifted his vision past the limitations of human sight and almost lost his grip on the statue once again. A purely black energy came off the Amulet in steady waves, like a pulse. It reminded Arran of a solar eclipse, of darkness eating the sun and plunging the world into eternal oblivion. It reminded him of the mind warpers' auras: holes in space, tears in the tissue of time and everything that existed in it. A sense of absolute wrongness.
His instincts screamed at him, begged him to abandon the mission and let the mind warpers do their own dirty work. At the same time, his gut whispered that he could not let them have the Amulet, that he somehow had to protect it from their influence, that whatever they wanted with it couldn't be anything good.
Memories of princess Serafina in the black market's yard plagued him, her warning and threats echoing within his ears. You'll doom us all. She had seemed so certain. In hindsight, her fear might not have been as exaggerated as he had considered it to be at first.
That did it. He tried scrambling away from the Amulet to escape its compelling influence. He averted his gaze, struggling to move away, but his hands misunderstood the command and crept closer to the artifact. Arran's heart thumped with a kind of violence that nearly matched a heart attack's. If Zohra's talisman had had a voice, it would have shrieked of danger in his mind. Yet, it stood powerless against the mind warpers' magic, or rather, the magic of the contract Arran had signed with them, which now pulled the strings of his traitorous body. He was bound to it like a slave to his master, obliged to fulfill his promise in an irreversible way.
His fingers folded around the Amulet's triangle and pulled it free from Onshra's breastplate.
Several horrors occurred at once.
A dull roar rolled across the sky above, not unlike the vicious claps of thunder in a summer storm. Dark clouds blotted out the moonlight, plunging the entire temple into blackness. The air turned so cold Arran's breath formed small clouds of vapor. His frozen fingers slipped the necklace over his head and hid the Amulet underneath his shirt, just when his body arched with excruciating agony.
A scream rested on the tip of his tongue, but no sound came out of his mouth as his hands lost their grip and he hung suspended in the air. Time stood still. Uncontrolled fury, not his own, slithered across his skin, clawed at his throat, his heart, his stomach.
That's when he felt something dark enter his veins through the pores in his skin, a foul sickness that permeated his bones and sank its fangs into his flesh. This was his punishment for stealing the Amulet. This was a god's wrath unleashed on him in all its destructive power.
Onshra had pronounced his judgment of Arran's soul, and his final conclusion had not been forgiving.
Arran was snapped out of his trance when his back landed on the marble tiles at the statue's base. Something gave inside his right ankle with a sharp sting of pain. Grunting, he rolled over and pushed himself up on hands and knees. Apart from the ankle, he miraculously hadn't broken a single bone. But then again, the damage had already been done.
On top of that, his distraction had turned him visible once more.
High-pitched voices yelled at him behind his back; the noise must have driven the priest out of his office. Arran didn't look back to see whether anyone was following him. He fled toward the backroom, flung the door open and skidded to a halt before he could slam into the opposite wall. His sore arms protested while he lifted the heavy stone slab to climb back down into the obscure safety of the tunnels. Quick footsteps approached the open doorway, the voices growing louder. With a considerable effort, Arran lowered himself onto the ladder and slid the slab back in place, just when his persecutors entered the backroom and found the place to be empty.
He didn't linger to listen to their puzzled outcries. As fast as his injured ankle would carry him, he limped into the darkness, one hand holding the torch while the other clutched the Amulet bouncing against his bare chest with every arduous step he took. A strangled sob broke from his throat as he thought of home and how much he longed to reverse time and undo the events of the past seven days. Had he been given a second chance, he would have sent the mind warpers away with a rude gesture that would have told them exactly how he felt about them. He saw Adira's face before him, crystal clear as fear for him, her brother, contorted her sweet face. He felt the weight of her and his mother's disappointment with each one of his ragged breaths.
The stench of human waste grew stronger, indicating he had crossed the border with the Copper District. A sigh of relief built up inside him. However, his moment of respite was cut short when three familiar shadows materialized in front of him. Arran clenched his fist and bit back a frustrated, desperate scream.
"What do you want?" His voice broke. The mind warpers came to a halt just outside the circle of light cast by his torch.
The middle one held out their hand. "The Amulet."
Arran shuffled backward, bracing himself for the contract's coercion to kick in. He twisted his upper body in a vain attempt to shield the Amulet from these abominations. "No."
He swore he heard at least one of them growl like a feral animal. The sound raised the hair on the back of his neck.
"You filthy little cockroach," the mind warper with the extended hand snarled. "Give us the Amulet, NOW!"
Arran hunched his back and shut his eyes, begging whichever merciful god was listening to help him. "Go away!"
The mind warper took a threatening step forward, but then stumbled back as though they had bumped into a wall. Their two companions stiffened, confused and alert. "You have a contract! You cannot refuse!"
No ... But the magic which had forced him to comply before was as absent as the sun in a night sky. He glimpsed at the Amulet underneath his shirt. Whereas the artifact's energy had been pitch black before, it was now streaked with orange, the color of Arran's own aura. As if he had given a piece of himself to it when he had held it in his hands for the first time.
Haala. Ownership. A special bond that tied a magical object to its owner by absorbing part of their aura, much like a talisman did. Zohra had explained the basics to him earlier that day after she had given him his monkey talisman. It was made for him and him alone.
How it was possible, Arran did not know, yet he did know that the Amulet of Doom could not be taken from him by force. Functioning like a talisman, the Amulet overrode the effects of his contract. From the moment he had plucked it from Onshra's breastplate, it had belonged to him.
The mind warpers seemed to have realized that too. Arran sensed their minds reaching out to his, insistent and seductive, but Zohra's talisman stood its ground. Their magic evaporated as soon as it touched his brain. A shriek, too high for a human voice, scratched the walls of the tunnels. He flinched.
"NO! This cannot be! That Amulet is ours! Give it to us!"
Their bony hands, stark white and coarse like a dead man's, stretched out toward him, yellowed nails aiming for his throat or any other soft spot where a wound might instantly kill him. Arran scurried away from them, but he tripped and fell. His ankle protested painfully. The dirty water on the ground turned his clothes into a sodden mess. He kept crawling backward, his breathing quick and panicked, but the mind warpers' cloaked forms glided to him as though they hovered above the ground instead of walked on it.
Although he had just robbed the temple dedicated to the very same god, the name that rolled across Arran's lips was the only name he could think of in a situation where his death was an imminent possibility. "Oh, Onshra, please help me. Forgive me."
All three mind warpers dropped down like dead flies.
Arran stayed frozen in place while his mind processed what his eyes had registered. The Amulet of Doom was so hot it seemed to burn his skin. Slowly, he rose to his feet, not taking his eyes off the dark, motionless shapes sprawled before him on the tunnel floor. Their chests rose and fell with steady breaths; they were only unconscious.
Arran had prayed to Onshra for help ... and the god had answered.
Or so it appeared.
He rested a hand on his chest. The Amulet had already cooled down a bit, yet a distinct whisper of magic clung to its every fiber, to every inch of metal and gem. Since the Amulet had been guarded at Onshra's temple, Arran assumed the god had a personal connection to it. Perhaps the artifact had simply passed on a message to Onshra itself while the mind warpers had been advancing on him. Perhaps the god had only interfered to protect his Amulet instead of its wearer.
Arran shook his head. He deemed it best not to stick around this place and test the god of death's patience and goodwill any further. He picked up the torch, which he had dropped when he had tripped, and held it out in front of him like a beacon to light the way back to Zohra's house.