Requiem for an Aberrant Chapter 29: Chapter 29- The Trial of the Abyss

Read chapter 29 of Requiem for an Aberrant by TheJestersGambit on NovelPedia.

Cole lay sprawled across the cold stone floor. “One last push,” Aegis murmured beside him. “One last push… one last push…” Cole turned his head. “Have you lost it?” “Who knows?” Aegis stared at the ceiling. “Perhaps it’s just the weight of all this finally catching up to me.” “The fact that we might actually die?” Aegis nodded once. Cole forced himself upright, one hand pressing against the floor while the other wiped uselessly at the sweat gathering along his face. His back still burned where Exrase had once bloomed from it, and the exhaustion of the trial had permanently seeped into his body. “You’d think a prince would be used to death.” He held out a shaking hand. Aegis looked at it, sighed, and took it anyway. “And you’d think a lunatic would be used to it too.” Cole hauled him the rest of the way up. “Lunatic?” “What else are you?” Aegis gawked. “Who picks a fight with Exrase just for the fun of it?” “That’s a strong misunderstanding of my hobbies—” “Let’s go,” Filoa interrupted, appearing from an adjacent chamber as she walked toward the final spiral of the staircase. Ariana was already beside her, one hand resting lightly on her blade. The higher they went, the more alienating the tower seemed to become, the green ivy winding around the stone walls thickening. “Any sort of plan?” Cole asked. “I’ve got nothing else.” Filoa glanced back over her shoulder, though only briefly. “I’ll help where I can, but my mother comes first.” “I’ll stay with Filoa until Faith is secure,” Ariana supported. “After that, I’m cutting whatever needs cutting.” “So,” Cole said, already aware of the answer and still wanting to hear someone else say it. “At the start it’s me and Aegis against Exrase.” “It seems so,” Aegis replied. Cole looked ahead again, forcing himself to think through what he knew. Exrase made doppelgangers from the carcasses of failed loops, reflecting what had been left behind as he wore the memory of the forgotten. And now the doppelgangers were gone. Not very useful. By the time they reached the top of the staircase, Cole no longer had the energy to continue the thought. A single door waited for them, slices of wind slipping through the frame. He wanted to ask another question, perhaps one that might delay the moment by half a second more, but every thought in him had begun to feel equally pointless. Filoa pushed the door open as the roof of the tower unfolded before them. Black water stagnated high above like an inverted sea, and within its depth floated the silhouettes of the Gods, distorted by the dark current. At the centre of that black water, a white hexagonal halo radiated light over the entire roof, mirroring the exact same one above the head of the creature in front of them. Faith sat at the far edge upon a throne of bone. Cole’s eyes widened before he could stop them, understanding what the others had not. Beneath the writhing tendrils on the seat of that throne, she waited for them. No—he waited for them. Filoa’s lips trembled. “Mother…?” She took one step, sprinting on the next. “Filoa!” Cole lunged after her. “Wait—!” Too late. The skin of the figure beneath the tendrils peeled away in strips, revealing the cadaverous body beneath, that same desiccated frame Cole had seen before, the same dead thing animated by something that refused to accept death as an ending. Still seated, Exrase flicked a tendril outward. It punched through Filoa’s stomach and hurled her across the roof, causing her to crash into the wall beside the door. Exrase rose from his throne. “It is insufferable.” Cole grabbed onto his scythe and backed away with careful steps toward Ariana and Aegis. “I can only reflect,” Exrase said, its many hidden faces shifting on the cadaverous skin. “And in every reflection I discover the same truth, that reflection itself is unseen. So, tell me… if I am nothing but reflection, what am I?” His tendrils twitched. “And if you can answer that, perhaps you can answer this as well.” “What does it mean to exist?