Free The Skybound Sea by Samuel Sykes Page B

often.
    “Why?” she asked.
    “She spared my life,” Lenk said, looking at the earth as though his reasons lay in the sand. “She told me things that made me feel better.” He tried to ignore her stare. “She told me I could avoid this … this whole thing with the tome, with them, with … with her.”
    “And so you want to kill them, anyway? But
not
the demons? Lenk, how—”
    “
I AM BREATHING UNDERWATER
.” He scowled at her, heart pounding. “This is the
third
time this has happened to me. The
last
time involved a giant set of teeth in the
earth
that tried to argue with a voice in my head that’s kept me from trying to kill myself while also telling me to kill a woman I really want to talk to despite the fact that she left me for dead so she could cavort with a headhunting, hideskinning, green-skinned, long-eared son of a bitch, so
forgive me if this sounds a little complicated
.”
    He rubbed his temples. His head hurt. Suddenly, there was so much pressure. His mouth tasted of salt. The world, this world, began to move beneathhim while he stood still. He felt uncomfortably warm as her shadow shifted off of him.
    All this, though, he barely noticed.
    “I don’t want to do this anymore,” he said. “I don’t want to kill people, any people. I don’t want to feel naked without my sword. I don’t want to feel
right
when I’m covered in blood and I don’t want to live without—”
    The massive hole he only noticed when his heels went over the edge.
    He scrambled away from it, falling to hands and knees as he whirled about. The coral and its colors were far behind him. The sea floor was only barely beneath him. Before him, this world had simply stopped, disappearing into a vast and endless blue.
    “Where are we?” he asked.
    “Hell
,” someone replied. Was that her?
    “Why?”
    “You brought us here.”
    “No.” He rose to his feet, shakily. His head was spinning. His heart was thundering. His words drowned in his ears. “No more riddles. No more crypticisms. No more interpretations.
You
came to me.
You
brought me here.
You
have to tell me what to do.”
    “Jaga.”
    “What of it?”
    “Duty.”
    “What duty?”
    “What we do is not our choice. We weren’t born with that. We’re not lucky people, Lenk.”
    “People? Do you mean you and I or … are there more of us?” He clutched his head, trying to dig into the flesh of his scalp and extract the memories. “There was a man … man in ice. I remember … 
I
remember. It’s
me. My
memories,
my
friends,
my voice
 …”
    “Ours.”
    He was floating now, too. This world disappeared. His world was at the surface, far away. That world opened up beneath him. He was nowhere.
    No more heart, no more head with heavy thoughts to weigh him down. In their place grew something cold.
    “Our voice.”
    His head throbbed, pounded, swelled, expanded.
    “Our duty.”
    Erupted.
    He felt his eyelid twitch, then tremble, then bulge. Ice and skull cracked as a translucent, jagged spike formed where his mind had been and pushedsteadily outward. Something came loose within him, with the sound of his eye socket creaking, then shattering.
    He didn’t even notice it until his eyeball was floating out before him, staring back at him and the jagged icicle that blossomed from its socket.
    “Our death.”
    He felt the back of his head split apart as another frigid spike emerged like a horn. He felt his mouth fill with frost, felt the thin layer of his cheek’s flesh burst in a red flower. His fingertips split apart, spine snaked out of his back, shinbones shattered as the icicles grew out of him and continued to grow until they filled the ocean and froze it.
    Only when he had no voice did he think to cry out.
    The frog was still twitching when he brought it to his mouth. His canines sank into its flesh and he felt the dizzying rush of raw venom on his tongue. Lately, it only took a moment for the sensation to pass.
    Bones crunched behind his lips.