What Lies Beyond the Veil (Of Flesh & Bone, #1)(114)

He lay with his back against the tree, nestling me against him so that his breath tickled my neck.

I never fell back asleep, too busy staring into the shadows around us, waiting for the evil I could feel circling to find me.





36





I walked at Caelum’s side with Beck and Melian ahead of us as we approached the river at the top of Calfalls. A quick glance over the edge of the cliff showed the remnants of a prosperous city, with nothing but a pile of rubble in place of what had once been gleaming towers of white and silver. The metal and stone of the buildings were twisted or shattered, giving us a perfect, panoramic view of the destruction below. It was covered in a thin dusting of snow, masking the horrors from centuries ago as the sun reflected off of it.

“What could have done this?” I asked, even though deep down I already knew the answer. I’d heard the legends.

Heard his name whispered as a cautionary tale of the monsters beyond the Veil.

He was the worst of the Fae. The worst of the creatures who could kill without thought and bring entire cities to their knees. Just as he’d done with what had once been a shining city.

“Caldris. The God of the Dead,” Melian answered mockingly. She spat on the ground at her feet as she approached the river feeding the enormous waterfall that flowed through the Ruined City. “God, my ass. There’s nothing holy about a monster who could do something like this.”

“But…how? Why?” I asked, thinking of the rage it must have taken to do something so horrific. Caelum was silent at my side as he stared down at the evidence of the carnage from centuries prior, something like hatred burning in his eyes.

I understood that emotion well.

“This was his city,” Melian explained, approaching a pathway laid out across the river. Boulders jutted up from the current, leaving Beck to take the lead as he jumped to the first one while Melian turned back to face me. “He lived here, letting the people who lived here worship him like the God he claimed to be. When King Bellham revealed the truth about what they were, most of the Fae fled back to Alfheimr until tensions settled down. According to the texts written by our ancestors, Caldris chose to remain in the human realm, in his precious city where the humans cared for him,” she explained, jumping to the first stone as Beck moved forward across the river. “But Calfalls turned on him, and the people who’d once worshiped him attacked him. They stabbed him with iron, hanging him from the gallows above the city to wave their triumph.”

“But how did he survive if they stabbed him with iron?” I asked, jumping to the first stone as she moved forward. I focused on my balance, trying to deny my interest in her words as Caelum hovered behind me, making sure I didn’t fall and get lost to the deadly drop of the falls.

“The knowledge that iron could be used against them was new, and it wasn’t clearly known that he needed to be stabbed in the heart. they weakened him with the blades they left in his body, so that he lost consciousness for hours while they mutilated what they believed to be his corpse. But he awoke again that night and managed to get free, crawling to a dark corner to heal the worst of his injuries and knit his flesh back together. They discovered him missing the next morning, and he sought his revenge for what they’d done by laying waste to the entire city and everyone in it.”

I ignored the sympathy that thrummed through my chest, shoving down the moment of wondering what I would have done in that situation. It was impossible to know if he was a cruel God before they’d turned their backs on him, but to wake to a mutilated body…

I shuddered as I jumped to the next stone. “But why did they turn on him in the first place? Was he cruel to them?”

“He allowed them to worship him, even knowing that he was not worthy of such a thing. The Fae allowing us to lay sacrifices at their feet? To prostate ourselves before them; it was a deception. They may be the children of the Primordials, but we were created by a Primordial just the same. Why should they be above us?” Melian said.

I ignored the clear imbalance of power that must have led to centuries of building tension. “What did they do to him?” I asked, swallowing past the nausea swirling in my gut.

“Perhaps some things are better left in the past, my star,” Caelum said gently, jumping onto the stone behind me as I navigated the dozen that created the path across the river.

“Aside from hanging him up like a piece of meat?” Melian asked with a bitter chuckle as she gladly continued on with the story she clearly believed all of humanity should take pride in.

The time they’d bested the God of the Dead, but at what cost?

“They pulled his legs from his body and sawed through the cock he loved so much and fed it to the pigs. They disemboweled him, letting his guts hang down to the ground from where he hung, and tore his piercing blue eyes from his skull before they let the birds peck at his eye sockets.”

“That’s horrible,” I said, holding steady against the glare that she aimed at me.

“How could you think that a man capable of this deserved anything less?” she asked, jumping from the last stone to the shore on the other side of the river. I followed after her, wondering if Melian and I had as much in common as I’d initially hoped. No matter that the Fae were my enemy, no matter what they had in store for me, I was not and would never be capable of cruelty like that. “He is the reason we now burn our dead. He raised them from their graves and ordered them to attack the living. His army only grew more and more with every death, and when there was no one living left, he had them destroy entire buildings. They buried themselves in rubble, one by one, and made the city a tomb.”