Chapter 3: Psycho Gods: Part 1 – Chapter 2

Lugubrious (adjective): dismal.

“On the Creature Classification Scale—a one-to-five ranking system, with five being the danger level of certain gods—the ungodly are ranked a four,” Dick said harshly, his expression bleak.

My ears echoed with the phantom screams of the dying and ripping flesh, and I shuddered.

What kind of monster would a five look like?

I couldn’t even imagine it.

In the chair in front of me, Jinx shivered and slumped lower in her seat like she was also horrified. I smirked smugly because something had finally scared the haughty know-it-all.

You’re smiling because a child is terrified. Nice one, Aran.

I grimaced.

It was hard growing up to be the villain, but here I was, sitting in a room, getting lectured about war while I fantasized about making a youth miserable.

Life comes at you fast.

We’d relocated to Planet 003FX—the realm infested with ungodly—and were in the newly constructed strategy room, getting lectured at by the High Court, aka Dick.

As Dick spoke, a figure in a black cloak with glowing blue eyes stood in the corner with their features obscured. From the person’s towering height and width, they were a man.

I knew him well.

It was the same cloaked figure who’d taken Sadie to the war camp in the shifter realm. The same person who’d helped me escape the fae realm. The last time we’d seen him was at the ball in the beast realm.

Now he watched us silently, cloaked in shadows and darkness.

Another sycophant of the High Court lording over soldiers in the isolated valley of a war camp.

I ran my tongue across my teeth and tasted the power that stained the air. Goose bumps erupted down the back of my neck.

We were the champions of absent gods. Pawns for slaughter or icons of victory? Only time would tell.

Jinx and the demons were in the front row.

Twins to my right.

Sadie and her men to my left.

Devils in the back row. Orion leaned his head against Malum’s shoulder, and the leader of the kings played with his blond hair with one hand and had his other hand draped over Scorpius’s shoulder protectively.

A strange feeling flipped over in my stomach because they were obviously perfect together.

I didn’t fit in with them.

It was a cruel joke that I was their Revered.

I resumed studying my surroundings. Concrete walls glowed blue with the remnants of construction enchantments, and the space stank of frost, dirt, and leaves.

There were no windows.

A small orb in the corner was the only source of light.

Oversize wingback chairs faced the chalkboard, and a long table with an enchanted tablet built into its surface spanned the front of the room. Shelves lined the walls, filled with binders overflowing with information on the ungodly, the realm, and war strategies.

Binders were open on our laps.

Dick stood unnaturally still in front of the chalkboard as he lectured.

I slumped low in my leather chair.

This was our twenty-something-eth strategy meeting in the past week, and I was tired of being talked at; any adrenaline from surviving the Legionnaire Games had dissipated, and my attention span was ten minutes. Max.

Dick’s lips were moving, but I only heard every third word.

He flashed a tray of gas canisters, put them in a drawer, then ranted about not using anything in the drawers because you would face criminal consequences.

He went on and on about prohibited weapons.

If they were prohibited, then why would they have them on hand? What idiot would actually pay attention to this deranged presentation?

I picked at the leather cushion beneath my thigh and concentrated on mimicking a rock: hear nothing, see nothing, sit still all day, and sometimes fall over and crush people to death.

Goals.

Next to me, John raised his eyebrow, dark eyes questioning, and I sank lower with boredom. He nodded in understanding as he absent-mindedly played with one of my curls.

Beside him, Luka leaned forward and looked back and forth between the two of us with his brow furrowed. His fingers were wrapped around John’s wrist in a vise.

I’d noticed lately that the three of us were always connected.

One twin looked down at me with intense dark eyes, while the other flashed dimples, and a tendril of warmth flowered in my stomach.

Pain streaked down my spine.

I winced.

John wrapped my curl tighter around his finger, and Luka’s olive knuckles turned white as he gripped his twin fiercely.

I sank back with a sigh.

On my other side, Sadie was sleeping in a seated position with her eyes wide open. Equal parts envious and creeped out, I poked at her side.

She slowly turned her head in my direction—red eyes wide and unseeing as she stared at me for a long minute—then she slowly turned her head back forward.

I made a mental note to unfriend her immediately.

“Don’t you dare wake her up,” Cobra mouthed next to her.

I rolled my eyes.

Blah, blah, blah. I’d rather be at Elite Academy, drowning in the black sea, than sit through another of Dick’s sanctimonious explanations on battle strategy.

But here I was.

Time plodded forward.

When I was three seconds away from a self-induced coma, Dick said, “Please close your binders.”

Thank the sun god.

I unrolled my hunched spine and patted the already closed binder on my lap. I hadn’t bothered to flip through the summarized list of policies and strategies, because I’d memorized it the first time he’d covered it:

I’d crossed out the drug policy because I didn’t follow bad laws.

My new life motto: stand for something or fall for everything. Yes, I was standing for drug use.

Someone had to.

And the next person who reminded me not to eat food from the realm was getting stabbed in the throat. I was tempted to eat a leaf off a tree just for fun, bonus points if it killed me.

Also, whoever had written the last bullet point deserved to be institutionalized.

Who the fuck would voluntarily eat the eggs of a parasitic monster with pincers?

Controversial take—that person deserved to be infected.

“Write what I’m about to say down.” Dick pointed to the pens attached to our binders.

I unclicked the pen and doodled a dying stick figure shooting a rifle at another dying stick figure.

Art imitated life.

Dick frowned. “This information is crucial.”

Apparently, he was incapable of getting to the freaking point.

Sadie snored softly.

Dick’s posture was rigid as he said, “You’re probably wondering why we’ve had so many meetings.”

“No one cares!” I shouted and made an obscene hand gesture…in my head.

“Your role”—Dick’s ruddy complexion flushed as he glared at each of us—“is more important than you know.”

No one blinked.

Where Lothaire would yell and smack a baton, Dick spoke with zero inflection, which was somehow ten times more terrifying.

There was a strange intensity around the High Court leader that no one, not even the kings, dared to challenge. With his wings retracted, I’d never have guessed that Dick was an angel. He didn’t have the poise and aura of arrogance they all seemed to possess.

He looked too ordinary.

Although…I’d never thought I was an angel, and now I was one that couldn’t fly.

Current life plan: throw myself off a cliff as soon as possible.

If I flew, I flew.

If I didn’t—slay (in the slaughter sense).

Dick lowered his head and said, “What I’m about to say will change everything you thought you knew about this war.”

I have syphilis.

I barely stopped myself from laughing aloud at my joke.

As far as I was concerned, he didn’t deserve anyone’s respect.

First, he was a man.

Second, he’d taken me from the fae realm as a child and beaten Sadie into her powers as he masqueraded as a beta shifter. He’d stood beside me in a gladiator arena when I’d consumed my mother’s beating heart. He’d spread angel wings wide in the beast realm and represented the gods in the Legionnaire Games.

Dick was always there when our lives hit rock bottom.

His nostrils flared as he enunciated each syllable. “The reason we’ve been lecturing you continuously—”

He paused.

I drew another dead stick figure on my palm.

“—the Official Peace Accords, otherwise known as the OPA, doesn’t just ban the involvement of gods in war as you’ve been told.”

Déjà vu skittered down my scarred spine.

A lifetime ago, I’d learned about the OPA in the fae palace, but the memory was sand, and it dripped through my fingers.

Dick’s eyes flashed. “The OPA also bans the involvement of the High Court in any battles or strategy.”

I drew another dead figure.

So we were alone? Nice.

Dick inhaled deeply. “The OPA also bans the realms within the High Court from establishing an independent militia of greater than one hundred soldiers.”

The room was dead silent.

There would be no sprawling army fighting against the ungodly, just one hundred people versus a planet of parasitic monsters.

We were doomed.

Dick seemed to grow taller as he said, “The OPA were enacted as an ignorant reaction to the last major war.” He flung his arms wide, and the movement was startlingly violent compared to his usual stillness. “Just because there were some—unexpected casualties in the previous war led by the High Court, everyone panicked. Cowards.”

What?

I couldn’t breathe.

One. Hundred.

I honored those who’d panicked in the past by panicking in the present.

Dick’s face flushed and twisted with disgust as he continued, “The High Court needed a scapegoat in the last war, so they blamed the god who saved them and the soldiers who died for them. They enacted the OPA as a cowardly way to restore faith in governance and absolve themselves of guilt in future wars. The High Court and gods bound themselves with enchantments that cannot be broken.”

Only one hundred soldiers, repeated in my head.

“Now the time has come for that future war, and you must pay the consequences of past failures.” He didn’t sound apologetic. “We kept this from you, so you would focus on our lessons and not panic about the task ahead.”

What a great plan—save the upsetting information for three seconds before a war starts.

Why was he looking at me?

Why was he pointing at me?

Click. I stabbed the pen into my hand and made a hole in the forehead of the stick figure.

He said, “We have given you every tool we can to help you, but victory is up to you—study everything you’ve learned over the next week and prepare to adapt.” He nodded. “The angel scouting party is identifying the location of the first settlement. When it is time for battle, you will be notified—good luck.”

He stalked out of the room, and the cloaked man followed.

The door slammed shut behind them.

Fugue was too mild a word to describe what came next.

Paranoia devoured me.

John threw his arm around my shoulder, and Sadie sleepily leaned against my side as we left the strategy room. The kings followed behind me like unwanted shadows or looming specters of death.

Physically, I went with the group to the cafeteria, but mentally, I disappeared.

I’d learned about the peace accords before, and it was imperative that I remembered. So I threw myself into the dark recesses of memory.

I dove into my mind.

We left the cafeteria.

Time warped.

I blinked.

I sat on the floor of our tiny new shower, arms wrapped around my legs as the frigid water kept me focused on my task.

Someone banged on the bathroom door and told me to hurry up.

I didn’t respond.

On the outside, icy drops pelted skin.

Inside my mind’s eye, I reconstructed the fae library stacks spine by spine, and I rebuilt the towering mental shelves I’d once lived within.

It was painstaking work.

The first lesson a fae tutor had ever taught me was how to create a memory palace. Knowledge was useless if it had nowhere to go.

Step one: meditate.

As a child, I’d spent days, months, and years mentally building a library that mirrored the one on the top floor of the palace.

Step two: memorize.

Every day, my tutors would ask me about the contents of random pages in books I’d read. If I couldn’t remember, I’d read the book again and mentally reshelve it.

The one time I still couldn’t remember, my tutor had hit me. Hard.

I hadn’t cowered like a princess was supposed to; instead, I’d hit him back harder.

He’d beaten me bloody and dragged me to Mother, who’d gladly lit me on fire for hours.

I’d never forgotten a book since.

When I’d turned ten, recalling was no longer sufficient for my tutors, and they’d demanded I start applying what I’d read to hypothetical situations.

There was a reason I could expertly give a detailed examination of the elements of a problem.

It wasn’t nature.

It was nurture.

Brutal. Fucking. Nurture.

With me being tortured at night by cold flames, pushed to mental limits during the day by emotionless tutors, my childhood had been horrific.

But the lessons were effective.

Now, as an adult, inch by painstaking inch, I meditated and rebuilt my old memory palace under the spray of a cramped shower.

Time warped.

I blinked back into the present.

Luka cut up fruit and gave it to his twin as the kings glared at me in the dining hall. We were having another meal.

John hand-fed me fruit.

I tried to smile at him in thanks, but I was too deep in my mental library.

For some reason, the section I’d read at fourteen years old was blurry, the spines and words much fuzzier than the rest of the mind palace.

“Something is wrong with her,” Malum snarled. “We need to bring her to the medical room.”

Luka shifted in front of me protectively but didn’t respond.

John said, “She said she’s fine and that she just needs to think. Just let her do what she needs to do.”

“She’s not fine, she’s fucking catatonic,” Scorpius exploded. “She’s barely breathing.”

“Leave her alone,” John said harshly and shielded me with his body.

I blinked.

Time warped yet again.

I was lying on top of the covers in a narrow bunk bed that was cramped to discourage fraternization between soldiers. A distant part of me recognized that I was back in our new room, and it was night.

Mentally, I grabbed books off shelves and opened to their cover pages. I’d gone through thousands of books.

I opened The History of Rare Fae Beasts.

I closed it.

I opened How to Cultivate Plants.

I closed it.

I opened The Enactment of the Official Peace Accords.

I close—

Finally, I found what I’d been looking for. I flung open the book and devoured its contents. It read,

Narrow understanding expanded into a wide frame as context colored everything in shades of black and gray. The lack of human presence in the realms wasn’t because they were primitive and weak like everyone was taught.

A sinister false remembrance.

I stopped clinging to the spatial illusion, and books tumbled off shelves. Hundreds of stacks fell over as my mind palace crumbled into nothingness.

SNAP.

Consciousness returned.

Pain stabbed across my skull like a hot poker, and I sat up and heaved.

Luka’s arm was hanging over the side of his bunk, and I was gripping his hand.

My head throbbed.

My gasps were loud in the quiet room as the rest of the legion slept in their bunks.

I started to shake.

How had I forgotten such terrifying information about the sun god? It hadn’t been Jinx, because she’d said the memories she’d taken were unrecoverable.

Why were my memories from fourteen so shrouded in fog?

My bunk trembled from the force of my convulsions, and Luka’s thumb stroked against the back of my hand like he was soothing me in his sleep.

I pressed my quivering left palm into my eyes, then grabbed the diamond of death that hung heavy against my chest. It felt warm against my frozen fingers and vibrated at my touch.

I dropped it, and it went still.

Sweat dripped off my forehead and streaked down my sides, then stopped its trail as it froze to my skin.

Frost covered the bedsheet beneath me.

I felt sick.

After the Legionnaire Games, Lyla had spread her arms wide and said, “Every few millennia, a red giant explodes in the galaxy. It collapses in a solar system that contains a portal connecting it to realms within the jurisdiction of the High Court.”

My vision blurred.

History was repeating itself.

The last invasion had nearly destroyed us all, and now it was the ungodly’s turn, but there would be no sprawling army at our backs.

There would be no gods to save us.

We were sacrifices, fodder for slaughter, collateral.

I squeezed Luka’s callused hand until my fingers turned white.

Then I closed my eyes.

I didn’t want to be awake anymore.