THE USURPERS| 2021

CHAPTER 11: THE WOODS

XI.
CHAPTER 11
The Woods
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The history books told the same story.
Albeit different than the one Aerves recounted to me. They all depicted my father as a man who somehow braved a battle against demigods. There was no tower and no sword to be spoken of. Only the tale of how the crown prince led an army of a thousand men to the Illiyan capital and slayed their kings.

Early afternoon that next day, I found myself prying through the books that we'd gotten from the library. I finished them all in a matter of hours and ended up asking Maelle to accompany me to the library to see if there were anymore to read.

"Those are the four standard ones." She'd pointed out as we sat on my bed and looked down at the last page of the last history book I'd read. "You won't find any new information from any others."

"Do you think there are forbidden texts?" I asked, remembering how part of the top floor of the library was restricted with a stone railing. Only royal family members were allowed on that floor, and even then that small part of the library was off limits.

"I'm sure of it." Maelle tossed me a questioning look, as if she were trying to gauge why I'd ask such a thing. After I'd emerged out of the woods I told her that I'd seen Aurora and the Prince. It was true, except for the part where I'd lied and said that I saw them at the edge of the woods and trailed them inside. That part needed to be added so she didn't think I was a madwoman.

Last night I had been plagued with memories of Aerves's spindly fingers digging into my arms, his black and pitiless eyes looking like yawning voids as he laughed manically. You are the key to our salvation or our destruction. You are divine.

The sickening thing that kept me unable to sleep was the fact that Aerves's words had sounded so much like the monster that lived inside me. You are divine. The words haunted me like a curse. Divinity was supposed to be a blessed state. Gods and miracles were divine. But me? Someone who could steal a life with nothing more than a touch?

The Illiyans were cruel, yet they considered themselves divine. But their obsession with becoming full gods brought their own downfall. The books contained little about Illiya prior to the Battle of Vintera. Most of what I'd read had been almost too horrible to be true.

My hand pressed against the last page. "Is it true that the Illiyans ate human flesh?" The last book had detailed how in their search for god-like immortality, many of the Illiyans turned to secret cannibalistic rituals where they would consume what they called 'life's blood'. There was a particularly grotesque image of the imagined ritual on that page, showing finely dressed figures dancing amongst fallen corpses.

"Nobody truly knows." Maelle explained, slipping the book from underneath my palm. She flipped back to the cover and frowned as she read the title. "Well, the author of this one was a known conspiracist."

"So it's not true? They weren't so cruel?"

"They were practically gods amongst men. Of course they were cruel." She gave me a pointed look. "But nobody knows the true inner workings of Illiya's nobility. Perhaps they're even more horrible than imagined."

I didn't know how they could be more terrible than cannibals, but the horrors of the world never ceased to surprise me. The Illiyans, like me, had been touched by the unnatural. When I looked at the depictions of Illiya's capital, Vintera, I was struck with an odd feeling. These people—these demigods, had considered themselves divinely chosen by the gods. They acted as if their powers were a blessing and lived like deities amongst mortals. Honestly, they might have had the right idea. Illiya's cities were sprawling with unimaginable structures, looking exactly like what I would imagine the heavens to be like.