The door closed at my back, and I peered around Tascius’s wings.
There was a young woman kneeling in the middle of the new hallway of marble columns. She wore plain white robes that puddled around her knees as she leaned forward and pressed her forehead to the ground, genuflecting before something we couldn’t see.
“Who is she?” I asked, brushing against Azazel’s shadows.
“Who knows?” he said, raising one shoulder in a shrug. “She’s long forgotten now.”
The woman sat up suddenly, crying out in a language I didn’t recognize. She held up a dagger and drew it across her own throat before anyone could react.
Blood spilled out in a torrent, then she vanished, blood and all.
A dark stain remained on the white floor, but it looked centuries old.
“Keep moving,” Azazel said, sounding amused. He walked right through the ancient bloodstain.
Nobody strayed behind, and the self-sacrificing woman was far from the last apparition we saw.
At one point we turned a corner and almost walked right into a seraph. Six wings spread wide, each one covered with blinking eyes of fire. The faceless metal helmet turned towards us, and the seraph struck out with a sword before crumpling into dust and vanishing entirely.
My stomach flipped at the sight of it, remembering my own reflection in the orb in Azazel’s library.
The hallways twisted and turned. Some of them doubled back into places that hadn’t been there before, and on occasion we took side halls I hadn’t noticed until Azazel pointed them out. Once, we walked up a wall to a door set in the ceiling overhead, and as we stepped through, the world shifted and righted itself again.
We walked between two oddly twisted columns into a room that looked like it’d once been part of an ancient temple.
A chorus of voices called out from above us. I looked up and saw several hundred people crawling on the ceiling of yet another antechamber, prostrating themselves before an upside-down god.
My breath caught in my throat. The god was nearly thirty feet tall, goat-headed, his horns brushing the ground behind us. They were the twisted columns we’d walked through.
He lifted one of his worshippers to his mouth and ate him alive.
At that point, my courage failed me for a moment. I tore ahead and almost ran full tilt into Azazel’s shadowy tornado.
“It’s only the past,” he said gently, several clawed hands reaching out to hold me. “The old times. They’re not real anymore, Melisande. Most of them are asleep or dead.”
“It looks real right now,” I whispered, my mouth dry. Only asleep? I’d rather have heard that all of them were dead.
If this goat-headed thing that’d eaten humans alive was sleeping, it’d better hope for its own sake that it never woke up.
“Just memories,” Azazel breathed. “Remember that.” He swept me along, keeping me within his shadows.
We turned a corner, mercifully leaving the ancient eater behind, and stepped into white sand dunes.
I blinked. There was darkness overhead, but there were stars, as well, and the air smelled of dry desert plants and dust. We were inside and outside at the same time.
A simple stone construction stuck out of the dunes in front of us. A human man stepped up to a roughly hewn altar and laid a pure white dove on it.
Then he buried a dagger in the bird’s heart, saying a familiar name along with an incantation.
Shadows rose from the stones, and a tall creature stepped out of the stone construct like it was a doorway, shrinking to become the size of a human as he emerged.
I knew him so well, and yet he was so different. Primal and savage, not the clipped, neat man I knew.
Tribal marks decorated Azazel’s face. His dark hair hung down his back in tangled locks, and a pair of black feathered wings rose behind him.
He reached out and caught a wisp of shadow rising from the dove’s corpse, then closed his hand. The shadow was gone when he opened it again.
The present Azazel pulled us toward the stone gate. As we passed the memory of the ancient Azazel, the memory looked at me, cocking his head.
I looked back, my heart hammering in my chest.
He stared, then turned back to the sacrificial dove, and I could suddenly breathe again.
Of course he hadn’t seen me. It was ridiculous to think a memory would be able to see us now, but his gaze had felt so knowing.
Before I could look back, the real Azazel pulled me through the stone arch. I had the slightest glimpse of a black-haired woman rising from a puddle of moonlight near the memory-Azazel, and then they were gone.
We were no longer in the desert, but in yet another corridor, this one lined with thousands of mirrors.
Haru finally snapped. “How many fucking hallways are there?”
I was rooted in place, still shaking from the feral look the ancient Azazel had given me. He’d been almost animalistic himself.
“Did you think this would be easy?” Azazel rounded on him. “We would walk right in, and out into Irkalla?”
Haru bared his sharp teeth. “We’ve been walking through this shit for hours. I’m tired of watching people get sacrificed and eaten.”
Azazel chuckled, the sound bouncing off the walls in an eerie way. “This is the territory of the gods, idiot fox. You’ll see what they saw, and what they wanted the most- which was usually sacrifices.”
Michael made a low, pained noise in his throat.
We all stepped aside as a beautiful female archangel walked out of thin air, striding down the corridor with her snowy wings held high… and into the waiting arms of a demon god of pure night. They wrapped around each other, kissing almost violently and whispering desperate words of love.
“Lailah,” Michael said, looking after her sadly. “Gabriel never forgave her for that.”
Dark claws wove through Lailah’s long gold hair, stroked through her white feathers, and as her demon lover pressed her against a wall, they faded out of existence.
“Did he kill her?” I asked hollowly, still staring at the spot where they’d been. She’d looked like she’d loved her dark god as much as I loved mine, and kissed him like she knew it was the last time she’d ever get to be in his arms.
Michael nodded grimly, meeting Azazel’s eyes for only a brief moment before looking away. “She was the first archangel, made from the stars. Of course she loved the night. It’s what she was made for.”
“He killed Lailah.” Azazel’s voice was short. “Not Nakir. That was someone else.”
It was hard to wrap my mind around the fact that some of these memories were eons old, but they also belonged to the same people I was here with now.
I’d never felt so young and inexperienced before, just a tiny blip on the cosmic scale. There were millennia of memories stored in this awful place.
“Let’s go. The longer we remain in one spot, the more active the memories will become.” Azazel stared at Haru. “You will see many more terrible things, but you can’t stop now. Just think of Irkalla.”
Haru was looking where I was, at the place where Lailah and Nakir had vanished. “I won’t stop.” He sounded cool and collected now, straightening his shoulders.
I wondered if he was thinking of Vyra when he saw the two dead lovers, and had realized there were far worse things than old memories to contend with.