Page 52 of Dark Fae's Destiny

“Why not?” I ask, even as Quinn opens his mouth to say we need to get to the Gold Eyes’ heart. I hold a hand up, forestalling him as I stand in this sudden heartfelt space with her. She’s more uncertain than I’ve ever felt her. And that’s not good, as Quinn finally feels it and relents on his mission.

Cuddling her in his arms as he moulds to her back.

“Forgive me, Ariana. I am too preoccupied with the blood-oath I made to the Gold Eyes.” Quinn heaves a hard sigh by her cheek. “Speak to us; tell us what your deepest truth-reading power is saying about this place.”

“I feel like… like it’s not just something evil that lives here.” Ariana gazes off through the hidden archway toward the golden city we glimpsed. “It’s something… unending. Even the ancient Ascendants themselves could not undo the calamity that happened here; neither could they cleanse it from this place, Quinn—and it’s that very detail which scares me now. They left a warning to anyone with Light in their power to never come back to this place, and put a powerful failsafe mechanism here to stop them, too. The mist protects us from whatever lies here. Something Staphylogenes used to hide his heart… in a place no one with a single drop of Light in their magic could ever reach.”

“So why can he not reach it, either?” I am confused as I mull Ariana’s words over. “Does he still have Light in his power?”

“I think we can all safely say he doesn’t,” Quinn says, shaking his head. “But for whatever reason, when Staphylogenes braved this location initially, to place his heart here, he did it so no one with Light in their power could ever get it.”

“A failsafe from having his wife Iris get it, perhaps?” I say, still confused to the max and trying to sort it all out.

“Perhaps,” Quinn says.

Though Ariana suddenly shakes her head.

“Staphylogenes was a renegade among his kind,” she says decisively, as she looks at us. I can feel her listening to her truth-reading power as she thinks all this over, using it to point us in the right direction as we ferret all this out. “Somehow, he was their black sheep—a true innovator. He did something none of his kind ever did when he tore his heart out and stashed it beneath Florence. But he still did it in the place he was most comfortable, where he lived, loved, and lost. Here; somehow, this entire realm is connected to Florence. Our maps of the city have lines of Light crisscrossing them—Staphylogenes didn’t just use this place to hide his heart, somehow this place is Florence. Maybe even the original city of Florence… before it all fell into ruins and was broken.”

“My gods…!” Quinn goggles as he holds Ariana, even as the same shock fills me. “Ariana! You’re right! Our Florence in the Twilight Realm must not have been the original Florence! This place, this countryside, these creatures… all of it is so strikingly similar to Florence in the Twilight Realm, even in the human world, that they could be close cousins. What if Staphylogenes and Iris did not Fall to earth in either of our Realms, but here, first? What if this was the first Earth they created… and they ruined it somehow. And Iris only remembers the path to the First City of Florence… the place her husband was most likely to hide his heart. Here.”

“So it’s not a labyrinth, not like we originally thought.” I glance around, seeing more arcane items float by in the mist, then disappear. “It’s a broken world. The first world of Earth… broken beyond repair by whatever happened here. Before the ancient Ascendants even came to the Twilight Realm.”

“But they Fell in Rome.” Ariana frowns.

“They Fell in Rome in the Twilight Realm.” Quinn corrects as he stares off through the mist, in the direction of the golden city. “But perhaps their original Fall was here… in this most ancient City of Florence. Which Staphylogenes and his wife never left, though the others went elsewhere.”

“The rest were too traumatized by what happened to stay in their original city and rebuild, even in the Twilight Realm,” I say now as I get it. “They went to Rome instead, when they came through to our Realm. But the Gold Eyes and his wife gave their original city another shot.”

“They loved it too much to leave,” Ariana says as tears fill her eyes. “They could not abandon it, so they tried to rebuild… and it was their undoing.”

“Whatever darkness pervades this place must have infected Staphylogenes,” Quinn says now as he takes a deep breath. “Something about the original creation of this place put darkness in his heart. It made him dark in his ego, torturing his only daughter with the Music when she wasn’t what he thought she should be.”

“She wasn’t what he wanted,” Ariana says with sadness as she looks at us. “And his darkness, his hate towards her, tore their family apart. Then made him tear himself apart.”

“To never be put back right as he stashed his heart here, in the original Florence,” I finish. “Forever.”

As we stare through the mist, a terrible sense of foreboding fills us, though even I know we have to continue on to find Staphylogenes’ heart.

In this original Florence, that was ruined for all time.

Which even the Ascendants themselves never dare visit.

19

VOID

Afeeling of recognition goes off inside me as Lucca, Ariana, and I step through the arch and find ourselves in the city of Florence. But this is Florence like I’ve never seen it; though much of the city is the same as my home in the Twilight Realm, the entire place is luminous and strange.

Its Renaissance and Gothic-Baroque architecture, its cobbled streets and sprawling parkways, all of it is nearly the same, yet almost none of it is recognizable, since it’s all made from the same gold-infused, luminous white stone as the road.

It’s a city that would inhabit no normal plane of existence; as those golden sigils and script scroll through with millions of Ascendant phrases, I see that the magic which once gave this place its beauty and light is mostly broken, just like the road was.

Turrets are toppled; domes are sundered. The streets are upheaved and fountains are smashed. A wild greenery grows here now, swamping the city parks and devouring broken buildings with vivid leaves that flutter gold one way and silver the other, like sunlight and starlight combined.

But the order that was once here has given over to chaos.

It makes a feeling of doom take me now, as I am careful to keep my power free of any Light. Though nothing looks dark here, only fractured and broken, despite the mist that curls through the city, a feeling of intense darkness lingers over everything in sight.

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