The shadows seemed deeper here than anywhere he ever walked before. And for a man raised on the edge of Hades, it sent a shiver down Cyrus’s spine.
He knew he wasn’t still inside Marilyn’s apartment, but where the strange spectres took him he could not guess. He lost consciousness shortly after they knocked Marilyn out. He awoke still held fast against a wall, but now his wrists, ankles and neck were secured to the wall by cold iron. It was far too strong for him to break by hand, nor did his sonic vibrations seem to work upon it. He suspected the metal carried some curse, perhaps designed to destroy creatures with a mystic origin, but it clearly worked just as well against his own abilities.
Cyrus cursed under his breath as he tried to see any of the limits of the room again. Shrouded in darkness, only a single light shone down on him and the floor a few feet in front of him. It illuminated the stone wall he rested it against and seemed to hint at more stone to his left and right. But those walls were just far enough out of the light to only be grim shadows. The far wall—and he suspected—the door rested on the other side of the weak light, buried in the darkness.
Outside the single bulb above him, the only sight he could see before him was the shifting blob of human skin and hair before him. It was a bulbous mass of flesh, wrinkled and damp. Hair jutted out at strange intervals, of every color possible on a human being and a few that weren’t. The patches of hair and skin undulated as the boneless mass shifted and moved like some kind of massive jellyfish on the ground. It was a repulsive sight, even for a man that knew the tortures of his father’s kingdom.
And he somehow knew it was Marilyn.
Cyrus couldn’t being what this meant the spectres did to her. Nor was he sure the woman he once knew was even inside that mass somewhere. But he knew he had no choice but to watch it and wait. He would get his chance to escape. He would get his chance to free her and perhaps help her. All he had to do was wait.
And a god had nothing if not time.
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