It was quiet as a tomb when we climbed back inside the sub. We navigated our way back toward the crew's quarters, leading with our blades and startling at the sound of our own footsteps.
There were no birds to be found anywhere, and there was no more humming. "Crow?" I called when we paused in the galley, just outside his door. Our truce had ended, but he was still bound and unarmed.
I reached for the hatch.
Every light in the sub blew.
"You were warned," growled a voice from all around us, as if the darkness itself spoke to us.
Faster than we could put on our masks, the Prince of Light and Shadows struck.
We were blind. Webb cried out in the dark, and I saw his red sword fly across the room. The sound of a body thudding hard against pipes made my heart hammer. I heard the sound of ropes cutting apart in a single slice.
The monster used Webb's sword to free himself.
Vale hacked at where the sound came from, but only struck air. She, too, let out a shout when some monstrous force slammed into her.
Her machete clattered to the floor.
I called out for my friends. "Guys?"
And then there was one.
I held my spear out, flinching and jabbing at every noise. There was the sound of footsteps to my left-no, now there was a rustle of wings toward my right.
Then someone laughed in my ear from behind. Breath stirred my hair and made chills crawl up my spine. I screamed and spun around, hoping to cleave that bastard with my spear.
But Crow wasn't there.
From above me, a hand snatched my spear and wrenched it away. Some force like wind barreled into me, and tossed me hard against the wall. I slumped to the floor and could only watch as the two red tips of my spear spun in front of me. Then the spear's unseen wielder stabbed it at me.
My own spear pierced my chest.
The only thing I saw of my attacker was a pair of hellish red glowing eyes glaring down at me while I gasped, impaled, on the floor. I grabbed at my weapon with one hand in a feeble attempt to free myself. I reached my other hand out to Crow, pleading.
Those red eyes only burned hotter.
A raspy caw filled the chamber as a crow flew between Crow and me, scratching at the pole of the spear with her talons. "Nannāru?" the man said.
The rest of his flock joined the pesky bird. They squawked and beat their wings at their master, assaulting him with pecks and scratches. "Naparkû!" he yelled. He swatted at his enraged flock, but that did nothing to quell them. "Enough!"
The lights came on. My body couldn't stop shivering at the sight of my weapon embedded in my chest. At his birds' persistence, Crow withdrew the spear. The wound left behind had already begun to seal shut. I touched a hand to my injury.
The crows, now pacified, settled on the hollow's shoulders. Slowly, that evil red light faded from their master's eyes.
He could've killed me.
But...he'd held back.
"Why are you still here?" the shrouded hollow demanded.
There were groans from the other side of the galley as Webb and Vale pulled themselves up.
I grabbed onto a pipe and used it to haul myself to my shaking feet. "We want to see your memories, Crow." I told him. "I believe you, that you can't remember what happened-what you did. But we can help you remember. We need the truth." My wound healed shut. But my shivering didn't stop. "And I know that, deep down, you also want to know, too."
Crow flinched, ever so slightly, at that. He touched a hand to his chest, exposing his branded arm. "You want to see into my heart." His grip tightened on my spear.
Nannāru pecked his face. "I will pluck out all of your feathers, and when they regrow, I will pluck them again!" he snapped at her. He shooed her away, and she flew up to the network of pipes along the ceiling, cackling. "I do not understand why, but my stupid bird trusts you," he said without looking in my direction. Then he sneered beneath his hood. "Are you even certain that the dark prince has a heart at all?"
"We'll find out," was my answer.
The corner of his mouth curled up in a ghost of a smile. He looked amused-charmed, even.
"Aren't you curious, Crow?" I pressed. "Don't you want to know what happened in those ruins you and Blackburne found?"
Crow leaned against my spear for a long moment as he mulled over my words. Webb and Vale found their weapons again, but they maintained their distance from the prince. We kept him surrounded, though I knew now that would do us a fat lot of good.
Finally, the hollow man reached a hand out and felt around until he found the corner of a countertop, then the metal booth affixed to it. He sat down, one leg crossed over the other. He held out my spear to me, returning it. "Very well," he said. "But know that if you kill me doing this, my birds will spend all of eternity pecking out your eyes."
Every single crow pointed their sharp beaks at me and clacked them hungrily. I swallowed, definitely not intent on spending my afterlife being Prometheus'd by a bunch of crows. I accepted my spear. "Fair enough."
Then the prince removed his hooded cloak. Black, windblown hair fell free. It looked like it hadn't seen a brush in decades-like a very literal bird's nest. And there was his face in plain view. Behind his hair, dark purple shadows and crow's feet surrounded his stark white eyes. No rest for the wicked, evidently. But as I peeked closer at his eyes, I realized they weren't completely white. They were...swirling, like shimmering colorless galaxies.
At first, I was too captivated by the blind man's eyes to notice his clothing. He wore the drab, tattered apparel typical of hollows. But above that, draped over a shoulder and wrapped across his body, was some kind of exquisite flowing cloth. Crow took special care to pull back the sapphire blue shawl that was spangled with an intricate pattern of golden suns and lined with gold fringe that glittered like treasure down a bit, exposing his chest.
I squared my shoulders and raised my chin as I approached the prince. My spear never felt as heavy as it did then. This was my idea-my duty. I would need to make my cut as small as possible, and as fast as possible before the prince bled out. Easy enough.
Crow leaned back, resigned and perfectly unbothered by the blades pointing at him, with a smirk on his face...like he didn't think I had the guts to do what needed to be done.
Webb, Vale, and I exchanged blanched looks. Vale gave me the smallest of reassuring nods. But that was all I needed. And then, with trembling hands, I aimed my weapon at Crow's heart.
Well. Here goes.
I pressed the tip of my spear to Crow's chest. I ground my teeth together and forced myself to keep pressing. Crow didn't lift a finger to stop me. Everything about what I was doing felt unnatural, but I wasn't doing this to harm him. It was like...surgery. At least, that's what I kept telling myself as I cut through his shirt and into his chest, piercing skin and a layer of black muscle just beneath it. I made an incision just small enough for my hand to fit inside. Then I set aside my spear.
And I reached inside the wound.
There was mostly emptiness within. The only organ inside Crow's freezing chest hung suspended from his ribs on a network of fibrous tissue and ventricles, like a spider in a web. And it dangled there, motionless and dead-waiting. I touched the prince's heart.
At least, I had to assume it was his heart. It really couldn't be anything else. But it felt...off. Like pieces were missing. Or clawed out by the feel of the long, parallel gashes in it.
I wrapped my hand around the ice-cold organ.
And it began to pound.
In an instant, a blackness filled my vision, spreading with each of his heartbeats like venom in veins. Everything went dark as I was sucked into Crow's mind. Why was it so freaking dark in here-?
Oh. Blind. Duh.
I didn't have a body. I was a floating entity, just a little blind fly on the wall, listening as memories bubbled into existence around me.
"Prince of Light and Shadows! We, um...We're here to end your assaults on After!"
Ugh. I cringed at the sound of my own voice in his memories-so high and shaking. No wonder Crow practically laughed in our faces when we first confronted him.
But this was a recent memory. I had to go back further. I searched through his memories, like I was thumbing through pages in a book. Or, more like I was adjusting the dial on a radio, trying to find the correct station-trying to make sense of all the noise.
I heard scuffles with scavengers, and battles with shadows, and the caws of crows-always the cawing of crows.
Still too recent. I kept traveling backward through the channels. I got a lot of static the further back I went.
I twisted the dial back as far as it could go.
I wished I could clap my hands over my ears at the deafening explosion that erupted and the sudden wails of thousands of agonized voices.
Then the roar of the behemoth drowned out everything.
I couldn't make sense of any of this noise. Everything was either mixed together in one chaotic storm, or absent completely. This guy's head was a mess. I had to get out of here.
The behemoth roared again, closer, and despite not having a body, my instincts still screamed at me to run. I flew like a gust of wind. I heard the giant monster chasing me. I could feel its breath on me. I screamed-
I hit the ground and opened my eyes, curious that I had eyes to open now. And it was even more curious that I could see. I found myself in a desert, a much different desert than the Dark. There wasn't a grain of sand to be seen anywhere. It was all just a flat plain of earthy brown clay, like a lake-bed that had long ago dried up, leaving behind spider-webbing cracks in the dry soil, carving it into little clay plates. Forests of palm trees swayed along the distant horizon. Above them, fat gray cumulonimbus clouds spat chains of lightning across the desaturated sky, promising a storm. Yet not a single drop of rain ever fell. I blinked. I could see everything. I was still in Crow's mind, but somewhere outside his memories. But how could I see?
Something rumbled behind me.
I spun to confront that something, and immediately regretted doing so. A writhing black mass of smoke and flesh that convulsed like slimy, slippery eels hovered in the air. The eldritch abomination opened all one hundred of its eyes-exactly the same eyes I'd seen in Blackburne's mind-and trained them all on me. Its many pupils constricted with hate. Then they closed shut, leaving just a floating black mist.
Alright. So the first objective was to stay far away from whatever the fuck that was.
I abandoned the creature and scurried off into the desert. The next objective was to figure out where I was. I lifted a clay plate from the ground and flung like a flying disc, relishing the soft clatter it made when it shattered into tiny pieces yards away.
Then my eyes narrowed. Near where my disc disintegrated, something jutted from the ground. I hurried toward it.
I was still a scavenger, after all.
It turned out to be a wooden handle of some kind of tool. The rest of it was buried in the clay. I dug into the ground around the tool with my bare hands, exposing a glint of a curved metal blade. It was a sickle. I grabbed the handle and pulled. The desert fought back. The hole I'd dug refilled with clay. The ground sucked the sickle deeper into itself. I planted my feet further apart and dug my heels into the ground. I yelled, "Come on, you stupid thing-oh, shit!"
The sickle came loose, propelling me backward with the tool in hand. But instead of falling on my ass on dry, cracked earth, I landed in a lush field, cushioned by tall grass. I sat up in a wheat field.
Everything was a little blurry. The details were fuzzy, like I was inside a photograph damaged by age. White mist floated across the field. Every breath of wind made the grains sway, like waves of a golden ocean. The leaves of all the date palms hissed just as the white sun began its ascent in a pastel pink sky.
Footsteps approached where I sat. A little boy waded through the field and made his way past me, carrying a bushel of fresh-cut stalks on his shoulder, and in his hand he held a sickle. He was maybe no older than seven, with brown and sun-kissed skin beneath the simple outfit of flowing white fabric wrapped around his waist. While he wandered, he sang in another tongue softly to himself-a language I'd never heard before. Yet, I found myself able to understand the words.
"Little one, who dwelt in the house of darkness,
Now you are outside, and you have seen the light of the sun."
I let out a little breath. I recognized that sad tune. It was Crow's wordless lullaby that he hummed to his birds. I raised a brow at the boy. "Crow?" I scrambled ungracefully to my feet and followed after the boy, over-taking him when he stopped. I scrutinized his face, my own inches from him. The whole time, he had no idea of my existence. But I could see the beginnings of a familiar angular jaw. His eyes were huge and round and alight from the dawn. At certain angles, his dark irises turned amber in the light. This was a fledgling Crow, long before becoming the prince of monsters.
The little boy smiled at something. Curious, I spun to see what. From the other end of the field, a flock of egrets took wing and flew in formation in the Mesopotamian sunrise. I stood side-by-side with Crow, and gazed upon a distant world that existed thousands of years before I came to know it.
The pastel sky melted away before my eyes. The colors all bled away, replaced by a stormy gray. Rumbles of thunder replaced the steady buzz of locusts and birdsong. I stood there holding the sickle-the unearthed memory. Instantly I set about scouring the dirt, searching for anything else and digging like an animal. My fingers grappled something smooth, and after another battle with the desert, I yanked free another prize-a necklace of interchanging gold beads and vibrant blue stones. I braced myself for the memory.
A little home of stone materialized around me. The furnishings inside the home were just blurs-unimportant things. Outside through the open doorway, the fields had all dried up, plagued by drought. The little boy, now a few years older, burst into the home in tears, calling, "Ummu!" He fell into the arms of a woman wearing the necklace I held. She held her young son close to herself and brushed his tears away. They had the same eyes, both amber and welling with sadness. Nevertheless, the woman smiled. When she spoke, time had taken her words from her, for no sound left her lips. But when she sang to her son, her melancholy lullaby was clear as crystal:
"Little one, who dwelt in the house of darkness,
Now you are outside, and you have seen the light of the sun.
So why do you weep? What makes you so heartsick?
Why didn't you cry in the dark, my little one?"
The little boy hugged her tighter while she sang. Slowly, his sobs eased. But both of them flinched when a man stormed into their home. The memory of him was tainted. Distortion like swarming black ants obscured his face. He grabbed his son's arm hard enough to leave marks and pulled him away from his mother. Crow cried desperately, clinging to his mother's robes and necklace, but it was no use. Her necklace snapped, scattering beads across the floor. Still reaching for his tear-stricken mother, the little boy was dragged from his home. His father had debts to pay.
The slave auction awaited.
I was running the very second the memory ended. Something long and spindly stuck out from the dirt yards away. I ran to it and ripped it from the earth like it was Excalibur. I nearly dropped the object in horror.
I'd uprooted a branding iron.
Grown men with no faces held the young shackled Crow in place. The boy struggled and screamed when one of them pressed a red-hot brand to his forearm, marking his skin forever with cuneiform text-the word Wardu.
Slave.
The sounds of the boy's sobs faded as I returned to the dry lake bed. I tossed the branding iron as far as I could away from myself.
I found a whip next.
A now grown Crow carried an immense stone on his shoulder in the hot midday sun. Sweat dripped from his drenched black hair down his brow in rivers. He followed along a line of other shackled slaves, all carrying stones, building a temple-a home for a god.
At every misstep, at any hint of dawdling, a whip would leave a new angry red line across his back.
The years passed, and a colossal ziggurat rose into the sky; stone by stone, tier by tier.
A fistful of arrows was the catalyst for the prince's next memory.
Crow, looking much like the ghost I knew except for his intact eyes, ran for his life across the Mesopotamian desert. His back was a roadmap of criss-crossing scars. Guards in leather armor chased after him, attempting to corner the fugitive slave at a bend in the Tigris River. One of them raised a bow and took aim. An arrow pierced through Crow's chest with a spray of red blood. The man fell to the sand along the riverbank. But only for a moment. Panting from pain and from effort, he heaved himself back to his feet. He tried to run again. Another arrow buried itself in his thigh. He screamed and fell into the water, taking me with him. And he and I both watched the wavering silhouettes of the guards that stared into the water above us. They left the river, and the man in it for dead, while the water turned red.
The next object would've been easy to miss, if it hadn't been flapping in the wind from where it stuck into the clay. The tiny, frail thing I pinched between my thumb and forefinger came away without a fight.
A jet black crow's feather.
Feather in hand, I wandered through the reeds that sprung into existence around me, following along the Tigris. I found Crow laying on the riverbank, amongst reeds, his limp body half-in and half-out of water tinged red. I knelt beside him in a mixture of mud and blood. Arrows still pierced his body that was streaked with dried and fresh, flowing blood. Every breath of his was a tortuous labor. But with every exhale, he prayed aloud.
I attempted to lay a hand on his heaving, bloodied side in some small comfort, but my hand phased through his body. There was nothing I could do but sit there and watch a dying man pray for mercy from his pantheon.
A yawn of thunder rolled across a graying sky. Crow shut his eyes just as rain began to fall. He spent his life building his god's home, but no god answered him then. Instead, his only mourners were the silent black crows that gathered around him, waiting to feast.
And then he stilled.
My soul rose with his to the realm of the dead. I was still with him when he dug himself free from the black sand.
He'd arrived in a desert, but this was also a desert I didn't recognize. It had the black silky sand and mountains of the Dark, but spiraling nebulas of flickering red stars filled the vast purple sky.
Crow's amber eyes were alight as he stood, alone in the desert, drinking in the strange world he awoke in. He still bore the scars across his back and his arm from the cruel life that had just ended. But he touched a hand to his chest and smiled when he found it healed and free of arrows. And, though Crow couldn't see it himself, a brilliant ring of light-a halo- hovered over his head.
He and I stood together and observed the surreal heavens dancing above us. I realized then that this place was the Dark. Far away, cresting a distinct mountain range, was what appeared to be the glow of a red sun. With no other direction in mind, Crow walked towards it-the beginnings of a very long journey. And I followed him, intrigued to see what would happen next.
Black tendrils swarmed the corners of my vision. They wouldn't clear no matter how much I blinked.
"Skye!" Vale's voice wafted across the desert like a breeze. "Skye, wake up!"
The strange sun still blazed bright as ever on the horizon, yet everything was growing dark. I hurried after Crow, following in his footsteps. I needed to see what would happen next. Where was Blackburne? Where was the behemoth? But Crow kept getting further and further from me, never once looking behind him. I quickened my pace. What that was lighting up the desert?
Those tendrils kept eating away at my vision. No. Wait. It wasn't my vision that faded.
Crow was fading.
"Get out of there, Skye!" Webb's voice joined Vale's. "Let go of him!"
I followed Crow a few more paces, reaching for him as my vision went black.
Then I stopped.
I had to let the haloed man go. I shut my eyes.
And I left the other ghost alone in this sunlit version of the Dark, and resurfaced.
With a jolt, I sucked in a heaving gasp of air back in the sub. I sat up from where I'd collapsed on the floor after releasing Crow's heart. My friends were still shouting, but this time at Crow. They gathered around him, holding him together. The prince didn't move. He just hunched over, limp in his seat with eyes shut and lips slightly parted. Feathers of frost coated the machinery in the room.
His flock screamed.
"Oh god!" I scrambled to his side. "Crow! Crow, can you hear us?"
Touching him was like touching an ice sculpture. My fingers joined my friends'. Together, we held his wound shut. Miraculously, his cold flesh stitched itself back together.
The man jolted awake with a yell, making us all scream and jump back. He craned his head back to the ceiling and gasped for air. Finally, after a tense minute, he calmed and relaxed in his seat, uttering one last shuddering sigh. "Lucky fledglings..." he said.
His crows clacked their beaks.
Vale clapped him on the shoulder, making him flinch. "You had us scared, mate!" Then, to me, she said, "Did you see anything in there, Skye?"
I just shook my head. "I searched his mind. He was right. His memories...they really are gone! Anything that was left in there was all scrambled. There wasn't a single clue about why he tried to murder Blackburne or how to stop the behemoth. If there was a path to the other city somewhere, all I saw was blackness-"
"I saw my mother's face again."
We all shut up and snapped our attention to the slumped man. His eyes were still hidden behind his messy hair, but he had a soft smile. "All these years. I forgot my mother. I forgot..." he traced the horrid scar on his forearm. His smile vanished. "I forgot...my life. Everything."
"Crow," I whispered. "You had your sight when you were alive. And when you died."
"Yes..." He touched a finger to his face and traced underneath his star-filled eyes. "What happened?"
"There used to be a sun in the afterlife," I explained to my friends. "Crow and I both saw it. What did happen?"
What else did Blackburne lie to us about?
Vale crossed her arms. "And that's what we'll find out. Alright, you lot. Let's pack up. We need to gather some lux for Elizabeth and head out. Time's running out for After and we have a monster to kill. Our last bet is in those ruins, and we'll find them on our own, one way or another."
"No, you will not."
We froze in our tracks when the older hollow spoke up. He had risen from his seat, and he glowered in our direction. His crows clacked their beaks again.
I reached for my spear. We'd found After's enemy and left him alive, something no other scavenger would ever do. I'd been hoping to leave him that way.
"You will never get there alone," said the prince. "But I will take you there."
Am I home? Hmm
Oh, Am I, am I, am I?
Hello? Am I, am I, am I?
You are home. You are home, hmm