Bonded Ever After (The Royal Gold Keepers #3)

Chapter 17

SEVENTEEN

Elora

We hold hands as we stare at the barrier to the Ash Realm, which moves in front of us like a translucent bubble. Only, we can’t see what’s on the other side. It whispers of danger and uncertainty, and I try to fight my nerves as Callum nods in my direction.

It’s time.

I part my lips and repeat what my father said in the journal, “The Ash Realm is dangerous. Pack lots of food and water. Dress for warm weather. Do not touch the lava, the hot liquid. Eat the Lava Spiders, Iron Snails, and Lava Snakes; they will keep you alive. Do it. Drink the brown plant with water. Eat the red berries. Trade or you will die. Be respectful. Bow often. Do not hold eye contact. Do not go far from the path and trust nothing that flies in the Ash Ecosystem. It’s unlike anything you’ve experienced before.”

Callum nods. “We’ve dressed lightly.”

Our capes are stowed away at the cabin, along with our heavier layers. We’re both wearing t-shirts and the shorts we go to bed in, paired with the swords we were given for this realm. We’d both decided that having a weapon would make us feel more confident.

Callum pats my backpack. “And we have as much food and water as we can possibly carry.”

I hope the weight wouldn’t be too much. Goldarium isn’t very heavy, but Callum is carrying the entire crystal chest strapped to the outside of his backpack. It’s not a light thing to carry. And that along with all the extra food and water, well, it’s heavy.

And we have a long way to go.

He hadn’t wanted me to carry anything beyond what I needed to carry, but I’d convinced him that we needed to fill everything up with food and water, based on what we’d heard about the Ash Realm. Eating red berries, dried berries, jerky, and trail mix seems a lot better than Lava Spiders, Iron Snails, and Lava Snakes. Plus, there’s the whole brown water thing… I prefer our clean water over that, and I haven’t even tried it.

“Have we forgotten anything?”

He shakes his head. “No, we’re ready. Let’s do this.”

I take a deep breath. “Here we go.”

Callum grips my hand more tightly. “Here we go.”

We step through together, and there’s a minute where we’re disorientated, where it feels like we’re being stretched and squeezed, and then we pop out into the kind of heat that sucks your breath from your lungs and makes your face burn. I try to take a breath, and the air burns down my lungs. My eyes flash open, and I see the strangest realm I could ever imagine…

The landscape is mostly barren and filled with rolling hills. The ground is mostly black, but between the black there seems to be little rivers of pale orange that flow at a slow pace. There isn’t much in the way of plants and trees, with the exception of some squat brown trees that dot the landscape, and not much else.

It’s ugly, ugly and barren, but the miserable-looking place is nowhere near as miserable as the way I feel with the heat that scorches my flesh. How long is this realm? It can’t be too long. We won’t make it more than five or six days with the supplies we have, and there doesn’t seem to be anything to eat or drink in any direction.

Callum looks at me, his expression unreadable. “Are you sure we shouldn’t turn back?”

I hesitate. Up ahead, we might find our fathers. We might find the source of goldarium. Up ahead is filled with possibility, and behind us, with only limitations. We need to go forward. It’s what’s best for our baby.

“No, we should keep going. We can always go back. Besides, there’s brown water and lava spiders to eat if we get desperate.” I smile. He squeezes my hand tighter, then lets go.

“We should get moving. Becoming dehydrated from this heat is probably our number one worry.”

We start moving. At random, little orange rivers cross through our path. I stop and kneel beside one of them. “Do you think this is the lava my dad spoke about?”

“Yes,” he says without hesitation.

I reach out.

“He said not to touch it!”

I smirk at the concern in his face. “I wasn’t going to. I just wanted to feel above it to see if it’s really that hot.” As I draw my hand closer, I feel the heat. “Yeah, we definitely don’t want to touch this.”

We step over the lava rivers and keep going, staring out around us. The heat on my skin is almost unbearable. I can practically feel my skin becoming chapped. Never in my life have I felt heat like this. In Paradise Falls, they always kept the temperature fairly nice, and the Forest Realm and Mist Realm were on the cooler side.

I hope coming here wasn’t a mistake.

There’s movement on the landscape near us. A dark shape. I move forward slowly and see something black emerging from one of the lava rivers. It seems to unfold itself into a black shape with long legs. As it fully lifts out of the lava, I realize that it’s a spider. A spider the size of a bird.

“Look!” I say, pointing.

Callum comes to stand beside. “Whoa. We’re expected to eat those things?”

I shudder. “Only if we run out of food.”

“Let’s hope we don’t run out of food.”

Right?

We keep going, and I ask, “How do you think we’d go about killing one of those things?”

He points to his sword. “We’d have to be fast… and deadly.”

I nod.

Hours pass before we spot red on the landscape, a striking color when everything other than the lava is so dark. We come closer and find a black bush not far from our path, covered in red berries. Lots of red berries.

“Should we…?” I ask.

Our fathers had said to collect the red berries.

“Yeah, let’s fill up our shirts and eat them as we travel. Then we won’t have to dig into our supplies just yet.”

Looking all around us, we carefully step off the path and make our way to the bush, stepping over lava rivers as we do so. We each pull one berry off the bush and pop it in our mouths. It’s a bit bitter, but it’s edible. We instantly lift our shirts like aprons and start to fill them up.

We’re mostly done when I see movements in the lower branches of the bush. Kneeling, I spot huge snails, about the size of my fist, with shells that look like they’re made of metal.

I pluck one off the branch and hold it up to Callum. “Should we eat them?”

He wrinkles his nose. “Not yet.”

“Agreed.” I laugh, putting it back.

We finish filling up our shirts and turn to go. I stretch out a hand, stopping Callum from going forward. He looks at me with a question on his face, when the ground seems to move and a long black snake moves across our path, its belly shimmering like metal. We wait until it passes, then hurry back to the path.

“Do you think the snakes are poisonous?” he asks.

“Let’s not find out, okay?” I laugh.

We continue walking, eating the berries slowly. Sweat mists my skin, and I feel like reaching for my water, but I don’t. Instead, I try to focus on drinking the juice from the berries. However long we’re stuck here, we need to ration our food and water carefully. That’s one thing Xarex and our fathers had made clear.

What if our dads never made it out of the Ash Realm? I swallow the berry in my mouth roughly. We can’t think that way. I can’t. Callum is already unsure about our plan, so I have to be confident for the both of us. Me picturing the two of us stumbling across our fathers’ bodies is the last thing I should be doing.

Still, I think back to the Mist Realm with more fondness. It wasn’t a bad place to be. We might have been able to make it a home. It just didn’t feel like the right place to me. Something inside of me is just pulling me forward, and I feel like I need to listen to that instinct.

“At least we can see trouble coming, for the most part,” Callum says.

It’s hilly in all directions, but there are so few trees and bushes that the landscape doesn’t hide much. If something dangerous were to come over one of the hills, we’d likely see it approaching long before it reached us, unlike with the Forest and Mist Realms.

I guess that’s something to be grateful for.

“Callum?”

“Yes?” he asks, a little amusement in his voice.

“Is there some small part of you that feels like continuing forward is the right decision? That there’s something waiting for us at the end of the Phoenix Trail?”

He seems to think for a minute. “In my experience, the thing I can trust most is your instincts. My feeling is that if you think continuing forward is the right move, then it’s the right move.”

I smile at him. “And you know no matter what we find, it’s probably going to just be you and me at the end of this.”

He returns my smile. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

“You won’t get too lonely?”

He shakes his head. “I was lonely in Paradise Falls. With you, I’m never lonely.”

Ah, that’s sweet.

“I was lonely too,” I confess.

“Well, you never will be again,” he declares, and it sounds like a promise.

We start climbing the bottom of a hill. “Can I say something?” I say.

Callum nods.

“I’m kind of surprised that in the end my stepmom was the one to betray us, and your mom was the one who tried to save us.”

He doesn’t hesitate. “I was surprised too. I was honestly never sure if my mom actually loved me, but I guess she loved me in her own way. She was just a woman who cared about power nearly as much as her own child, but chose her child in the end.”

“What do you think she’s doing now?”

He runs his hand through his blond hair. “She’ll want to continue having power any way she can. She’ll be left with a choice: make Paradise Falls into something that can work without goldarium, or abandon it all, taking whatever power and wealth she can with her as she does so.”

“What do you think will happen to the people?”

“It depends on whether or not she wants to use them as a tool to create her new Paradise Falls, or if she’s going to discard them like broken toys.”

The truth is, I have no idea what she’ll do. I just hope our people are alright.

He takes my hand again. “We can’t waste our energy thinking about them. We need to focus on ourselves and our new life. We need to be smart about every single thing that we do.” His gaze slides to my stomach, and I know he’s thinking about our Little Bean again.

When we get to the top of the hill, we both stiffen. There’s a child floating near the path up ahead, a little girl who seems transparent, glowing with a pale blue light. She has long blonde ringlets, big eyes, and a little dress.

She starts flying toward us. “Please, I’m lost. Can you help me?”

Callum releases my hand and starts toward her, but I grab his backpack and haul him backward. He turns to me with a frown, and I know he’s bewildered by how little I care about the girl.

“They said not to trust anything that flies.”

“But it’s a child,” he says, as if I’m crazy.

“Callum, we don’t know anything about this world. How do you know that’s an actual child? Our dads said anything that flies is dangerous. Shouldn’t we trust them over some strange creature?”

He seems to calm. “You’re right. I was just thinking about our child, and then this appears, and I wasn’t thinking, but you’re right.”

I turn back to the child. “I’m sorry. We can’t help.”

Her eyes seem to get bigger as she floats toward us, but she never crosses the path. If she was really some innocent little girl, wouldn’t she be able to cross the path? Her inability to must mean she means us harm, right?

She stops when she’s just feet from us. “Please, help me. Help me find my daddy.”

Callum’s jaw clenches, and he folds his arms in front of his chest. I know he wants to help. I know some instinct was born inside of him the moment he found out I was pregnant, and now he wants to help this “child.” But every instinct inside of me is screaming that this isn’t a little girl, and that this creature means us harm.

“No,” I say. “Go away.”

“Please,” she begs, tears rolling down her chubby cheeks.

Callum looks away and squeezes his eyes shut.

“Not a chance,” I say.

“But I’m little and all alone.” Her voice is just above a whisper.

“You also can’t cross onto the path because you mean us harm,” I say.

She stares at me, and her innocent expression shifts into something more intense. Something creepy. Her mouth opens, and she flashes teeth. Teeth that slowly sharpen.

I grip Callum’s shoulder, and his eyes flash open. Before our eyes, the child stretches into some long, human-like being with no legs, just a flowing gown. Her eyes are pits of black, and she opens and closes her mouth—which is filled with the sharpened teeth—like a fish in the water. It sends a chill right down my spine and leaves goosebumps raising up and down my skin.

Then, she’s gone.

“What the hell was that?” Callum asks in a hushed voice.

“I don’t know, but the flying things here are tricky. We need to never forget that.”

He nods, looking pale.

We keep going on the path. Everything around us whispers of danger, and nothing but my faith leads us into the unknown.