Page 54 of Dark Fae's Destiny

One devouringly dark—the other, annihilating and bright.

“This is where it all started. Where we all met in Florence… like the Pitti Palace, and the Palace of Light,” Ariana says now as she inhales in shock.

As I glance around, I see she is right. Because I recognize this hallway; this is the very same hall within the Palace of Light where Ariana spontaneously broke through Realms when her Dark Fae magic flared after encountering mine for the very first time.

Other than the black and white checkerboard floor, which doesn’t exist in either the human world Pitti Palace, or the Twilight Realm Palace of Light, the hall is the same. It was here that Ariana ran from me and found Lucca in the Twilight Realm on the opposite side of her divide.

It was here we all fought the Gold Eyes.

Where it brought us together for the very first time.

“But this hallway is nothing in the Palace of Light,” Lucca says now as he frowns. “It’s just a through-passage from the Palace of Dusk to the Palace of the Dawn, within the larger palace’s complex.”

“It is also nothing in the Pitti Palace in the human world, just a connector between larger structures of greater importance.” I muse now as I take in the hall we’ve entered. Though smashed fountains and ruined statuary grace its long niches, there is nothing here, except for the unique pattern on the floor. “Even though this hallway is nothing in our worlds, this is where our Music stops. It is here we will find something important. I know it.”

“This is the balance-point of the Realm,” Ariana says as I feel her use her deepest truth-reading power to figure out what is going on. She crouches, setting one palm on the floor and closing her eyes. “This is why the Gold Eyes brought us all together at this point in our Realms. Because it is like an anchor through all our worlds—I feel it, like a place the Music ceases to move. That is why the ancients made it a through-way. To the left lies the darkest places we could ever go from here. And to the right… the lightest.”

“So Staphylogenes hid his heart at this balance-point so he could access it in all other Realms?” Lucca asks, as he scowls now. “I suppose that makes sense.”

But Ariana is already moving forward with her eyes closed, her hands out as she explores the space. Surprised, I realize she’s making for the exact niche where the Gold Eyes once surfaced inside this very hall—the exact spot we all battled it.

As she walks forward, right on the bright seam between worlds her power created, I reach for her—too late. She shrieks; as Ariana’s balanced Animante Dark Fae power flares, she tumbles through a searingly bright, gold seam on the floor, which rips right through space anew from her power.

A seam which is also so very dark.

As Ariana falls through that blazing golden seam in the floor to I-don’t-know-where, I am thrust to the darkest end of the hall by a terrible gust of the most cacophonous Music I’ve ever heard.

At the same time, Lucca is thrust to the end of the hall with the brightest light. As a dark void devours me, and a scorching light devours Lucca, Ariana is swallowed by the golden seam in the floor. I feel it as our trio is sundered, broken apart by the power in this place.

A trap the Gold Eyes set for us long ago—or for any who might make it this far.

It takes us down in this city of death, ruin, and Night. As I’m sucked into a vortex of hell, one of countless hell dimensions I’ve heard about but never had the terrible chance to visit, I feel myself burned alive even as I’m frozen to death.

In an instant, everything inside me is shredding into annihilation as I scream and scream; a tortured sound, it rings in my ears, helpless, even as I make it.

Because this is far worse than being trapped in my Revenant state. This is true hell, where everything is torture, not just my inner demons seeking to make me hate myself until the end of time. Here, I will actually be in hell until the very end of time.

A madness I can never escape.

I only have moments until that happens. But I have weathered the extremes of torture before; I face it now, holding on to my very last shred of sanity as I feel my mind sharpen.

In this moment, I still have my faculties; I still have my thoughts and hard-won mind-control from all those endless years under my father’s unforgiving reign and Emiliana’s endless torture.

As I focus my thoughts like a lance now, sending them not into this space but beyond it, into that otherworld I can still access, I see the Ascendant Sigils waiting for me. I know I can raise the Music without my partners now; hurtling it up in a tirade, I take all the Music my Dark Fae power can pour through me and blast it into the otherworld beyond this hell Realm.

I firm my lance-bright intent to take me to the place I seek and bring my lovers there unscathed. It works. I don’t know how I did it, but I am suddenly hurtling out from that horror-plane, back to the ruined place that is the Ascendant’s version of Florence.

But I’m not stopping inside the checkerboard hall; I’m somehow rushing through it, as if that place is only a mirage, hiding greater things beneath.

As I drop now into an endless tomb of vaulted catacombs high as cathedrals, somewhere beneath where we were before, I feel Lucca torn from some angel-realm where he was tempted to stay forever. Ariana is summoned up from some endless, grey nothingness where she landed. We come together, as my power with the Music shoves us into that endless, vaulted place.

As a pure white tomb shimmers into being right before us now in this endless underground vault, I know to my heart of hearts it is what we seek.

Staphylogenes’ heart’s resting place.

We heave hard breaths as my Music blazes out, leaving us in this space of endless catacombs and vaults. I feel it as a fell air breathes all around us here; death is everywhere, as a slow, terrible sensation of countless beings haunts this nowhere space.

And yet, this place is still somehow beneath Florence; I feel it to my bones as an eerie, low light glows through the vaults. As if even the powerful mist of the ancients can’t penetrate this place, I sense we are completely alone down here, in this cavern of endless dark.

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