Page 109 of Incoronate
Sanguinarium.
We were in Sanguinarium.
I was going to be sick.
I'd read about it. I'd heard it described in voices that flattened out as the person speaking tried to keep the fear out of them. I had looked at those mountains of bodies from a distance without fully believing what I was seeing, had let mymind offer the kinder explanation of hills, rock formations, geography. The mind was remarkable in how long it would insist on the comfortable lie.
But I’d looked harder. And now I couldn’t stop seeing it.
This was the place Revenants went to die. The place they were banished to when there was nowhere left for them to go. A place that existed for the sole purpose of eternally torturing creatures who could otherwise exist forever. A place that would make them suffer for it. I knew only what I’d been told about it; what I had read that in textbooks and grimoires so old the pages had gone translucent at the edges, and I’d processed it the way you processed any piece of information too large and too terrible to fully hold: at a distance, intellectually, as a fact about a world that would never touch mine.
But it was touching mine now.
I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth and held it there until the nausea passed. Wiping my hands against my thighs, I looked down at Trace and Dominic as they lay on the ground absolutely still, their skin the color of old melted wax, their faces slack and their chests empty of any movement. The stakes were still there, wooden and ugly and deeply, obscenely wrong, lodged in the centers of their chests.
I needed to pull them out. I needed to bring them back to me.
Oh, god…
What if they didn’t come back? What if they couldn’t be brought back? What if the laws of Sanguinarium were different than the laws of our mortal Realm?
I yanked my hands back and wrapped them around my waist, the fear of finding out suddenly worse than not knowing. The panic was rising again, climbing up the back of my throat, and I knew if I let it crest I'd be useless. I squeezedmy eyes shut, dug my fingers into my hair, and forced myself to count.
One breath in. One breath out. Again.
It didn’t really help, but it gave my hands something to do besides shake. I opened my eyes and stared out at the landscape instead, fixing my gaze on anything that wasn’t them. If I looked at them I would fall apart, and I couldn’t fall apart yet.
The ground was the color of dried rust, cracked into irregular plates stretching in every direction under that bleeding sky, flat and featureless except for those shapes rising in the distance. No trees. No water. No sound. Just the broken earth and the silence pressing against my eardrums as though it had physical weight.
I was still staring at it, still counting breaths, when the sky moved.
A seam tore open above the piles of bodies, ragged at the edges, dark behind the red. It lasted only long enough for a body to fall through it before closing again. The body hit the top of the nearest pile and the pile gave to receive it before everything went still again.
I stared at it, the counting forgotten entirely.
What in the fuck?
Cinderdust…That had to be it. It was the only plausible explanation for what I had just seen; for how those piles came to be in the first place. Every time it was used to vanquish a Revenant, this was where they ended up. Another body on an endless pile of bodies, and it was clear by the endless mountains of it that the Order had been filling this place for centuries. I’d sent a few here myself, once upon a time, not knowing what I was doing. At least not completely.
And now I was on the other side of it.
We’re going to die here, said the part of my brain I was trying very hard not to listen to.There’s no way out of this.
I looked back at Trace and Dominic. At my lifelines. My anchors. I didn’t know if this place played by the same rules as ours. I didn’t know if pulling those stakes would do what it was supposed to do, or if the physics of death and revival worked differently here. But either way, I had no way of knowing until I tried. And the not knowing was the most terrifying part, because once I reached for those stakes there was no taking it back. I would either bring them back or I wouldn’t, and I would have to live with whichever one it was.
I shuffled forward on my knees, the packed ground scraping against my skin as I repositioned myself so that I had both of them within reach. My hands had steadied some. Not much, but enough. I gripped both stakes at once, one in each fist, took a single calming breath and pulled them free in one fell swoop.
Both stakes came out easily, and I quickly tossed them into the dirt behind me without looking at them. For a handful of seconds, nothing happened. Panic and dread rushed into my blood as I held my breath and kept my eyes on their faces, waiting, silently praying they’d come back to me. It took every bit of strength I had not to scream out, because I knew that if I started, I wasn’t going to be able to stop.
And then the color came back. Slow at first and then all at once, like watching a bruise run backward, the gray and white of them warming and flushing until they looked like themselves again. I hadn’t realized how tightly I’d been holding myself together until I felt it start to come undone.
Trace’s eyes snapped open first. His whole body drew in a sharp breath like he’d been held underwater, his hands going to his chest on instinct, and he blinked at the sky above himwith the dazed, disoriented focus of someone who’d just come back from very far away.
Dominic sat up before the breath had even finished leaving him, his body moving as though being still was physically offensive, already taking stock of the terrain before he was fully upright.
AndIwas crying.
I hadn’t known I was until Trace turned his head and looked at me and I felt the wet on my face and registered that it had been there for a while. My throat ached with it, that specific kind of ache that comes from crying without sound, from swallowing it and refusing it and having it come out of you anyway.
