Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
SOFIA
S ofia didn’t even bother to look back at Ocon as the entire cavern came to life under the colorful light of the lanterns. The stained glass cast rainbows across the floor and walls, highlighting the intricately painted designs that had faded away with time. Even the ceiling was painted the color of the sky in the heart of the cold season.
She’d been impressed with the resistance’s base the first time she’d seen it, with its dirt floors and torches. But now she realized that the cenotes they’d moved between were decaying things, long dead and nearly forgotten. This one though, no matter how forgotten it appeared, wasn’t dead. The light that the lanterns cast danced across the walls and they breathed . She felt the ghosts of her ancestors even now taking up space.
She ducked her head into the first hall she came across and saw that the lanterns continued at regular intervals. The light from the main room lit just enough to see a line of intricately carved doors disappearing into the shadowed darkness.
“Ocon!” she called. “I need your monkey arms.”
She waited, trying not to be annoyed when he didn’t even answer her.
“Ocon,” she said, not bothering to hide her frustration as she came back into the main room. He was standing a few yards away now, along the edge of the cavern, newly lit with the candle he was holding.
When he turned, his expression sent ice down her spine and she walked forward with rigid steps. Only once she was closer and able to look past him where the candlelight chased away the shadows on the ground did she see what had caught his attention.
Human remains, clothes turned nearly to dust and bones picked clean by centuries of decay, were scattered across the back wall.
“Oh,” she said, a hand covering her mouth. The longer she looked, the more her stomach turned, but she couldn’t turn away. There were so many bones—so many people had died here—and some of the skulls she saw were so small. These weren’t the bodies of warriors scattered from a battle. These were families, lined up and slaughtered.
Her eyes burned and she felt the tears welling hot. She turned away before Ocon could notice. Bile was sharp on her tongue, the water she had overindulged in earlier crawling up her throat. She had found the ghosts.
“Can you light me a candle so I can look through the halls,” she said once she knew her voice wouldn’t crack.
“Yeah—yes,” he said, turning away from the bones after another moment. She couldn’t quite tell in the dim light, but his face was a shade too pale and his eyes a fraction too wide. He turned and walked away before she could try to read his expression, grabbing a candle from an unlit lantern. He handed her the candle, lit with his own.
Although the arched doorways down the closet hallway drew her attention, she walked back to the previous hall, wanting to follow some type of pattern with her exploring. She also wanted some space from Ocon to pull herself back together. He didn’t deserve to see her grief and pain over the horrors done to her people.
The first room she entered was small, a sitting mat nearly decayed into nothing lying along the back wall. A doorway to the right led into what had once been a bedroom. The wood and clay base of the bed was obvious, although the pad and blankets that had once sat on it were long gone, eaten away by age and exposure. The next three doors held the same remnants of a family’s life, one bed in one, three beds in another. Proof of the people that had once lived and loved here.
Most anything of use—blankets, clothes, or food—had long ago rotted away, although she found a few clay bowls still in one piece. They would make drinking water easier, at least.
She almost turned away, knowing that the other doors likely held similar remnants of living quarters behind them, each patterned the same. But she noticed some of the doors farther down the hall were broken away, the thresholds gaping like lost teeth and her feet moved of their own accord. At the first doorway, she saw that even the frame had been broken away, dirt falling from the ceiling for lack of support. She didn’t even need to step over the collapsed doorway to see what waited inside. Another pile of bones, these ones intertwined together in the corner of the room, the fear of their ghosts heavy in the air. She wondered if it was the raw pain that had happened here or her own connection to her ancestors that had her almost hearing the cries of the family as they had died.
Still nauseated with hunger, she turned away quickly and left the living quarters behind. She didn’t need to see the other rooms that had been broken into to know what was on the other side.
She found the hall with the arched doorways and saw the rotted remnants of large kitchens and a bathhouse. The water left behind in the baths had allowed the twisting roots and fallen seeds from the earth above to flourish, turning the bathhouse into a small rainforest, the plants somehow thriving here with the barest hint of light from the cracked ceiling above.
An echoing sound from a few rooms away drew her attention, and she followed the flickering light of Ocon’s candle through another arch. He stood across a large room, the shadows and light dancing with every shiver of the flame in his hands. He was silent, looking up at the mural that stretched across the wall. Even in the dim light, Sofia saw that the mural wrapped around the entire room, a never-ending landscape of Wueco, from the sea to the mountains. But it wasn’t the land that had drawn Ocon’s eye. He was staring in wonder up at the large cenote dragon that wrapped around itself, the painting so detailed she thought she saw its wings moving and a sparkle in its blue eyes.
She turned and saw she was standing next to the long tail of another dragon, spiraling up toward the ceiling. She stepped to the left, moving her own candle along the mural to study it closer. Her dragon stood proudly along the wall, the sharp claw-like talons clutching the snowcapped mountain beneath it, each one the length of her hand. Even faded and covered in dust and dirt, the black and silver scales of the dragon were a stark contrast to the white snow. The feathers at the dragon’s neck almost gleamed in the candlelight, as if painted with real silver.
Beneath where its claws dug into the mountain peak, a low altar was just visible beneath the detritus of time. She ran a hand along the stone ledge, sweeping away some of the leaves and dirt, uncovering the small candles and gold basin still waiting for their prayer.
A few feet from where her dragon ended, she saw the tail of Ocon’s dragon wrapping around a tree, its blue feathers contrasting against brown and green. Its scales gleamed a pale silver that she realized with a small jolt matched Ocon’s own eyes. He was still standing below the dragon’s head, his hand running along the wall where its mouth was opened in a scream, water pouring forth from it in frothy waves. Looking past him at the other wall, she could just see the white-and blue-painted sea dragon, twisting through the air above a roiling ocean.
“Is this what they thought dragons looked like?” Ocon said, acknowledging Sofia’s presence for the first time.
“The people that painted these didn’t think ,” she said, the words softer than she expected, but it felt wrong to curse and yell in a room like this. “They knew.”
She lowered her candle and placed it on the small altar that stretched across the front wall in front of the cenote dragon. It was as dirty as the other one, but she began to brush leaves and debris aside, uncovering the stone below.
At one point, there would have been food and trinkets of gold and silver left, but these likely had been stolen by the tribe—the king’s men—that had invaded this cenote. Still, there were remnants of weavings, carvings, and small children’s toys left to honor the cenote dragons.
A bright flash of blue beneath a thick layer of soil caught her eye. She pushed Ocon aside without a word and began cleaning away the dirt there. Her fingers brushed against something hot and she carefully pulled out an iridescent blue feather. It was soft as clouds and hot to the touch, as if it had been sitting in the sun, and as she set it back against the altar, it stretched up to nearly her head.
Her mind was spinning. She was touching something that proved the dragons were real—something that had belonged to the gods.
“What is that?” Ocon asked, looking over her shoulder with something between awe and fear.
“A dragon feather,” she said, continuing to clean the altar until only the few offerings that had withstood the test of time remained—two small, but intricately carved stone figurines, a tiny wooden doll, and a stained bowl.
She placed her candle at the center and kneeled, eyes gazing up at the painting. Her ancestors had kneeled in this very spot hundreds of cycles ago, praying to the gods, not as childish myths, but known truths. She remembered her thoughts back in the city when Sari was being executed.
It would take the gods to take down the false god that the king believed himself to be. If she could bring them back, prove that they hadn’t been killed off by the great king, perhaps her people stood a chance against the Dereyans.
“What are you doing?”
“Praying.”
“Even if you think they existed at some point, the dragons are long gone,” he said with the slightest bit of sneer to his tone.
“The dragons were murdered by the great king,” she said, not looking over her shoulder at him. “But plenty of historical accounts note that not all the dragons died and plenty escaped, chased out of Wueco to protect themselves. There are books?—”
She stopped. She’d almost told him the truth. There were books in his chief commander’s own office that debated if the dragons were truly gone—books that discussed the possibility that they survived somewhere far from Wueco and Suvi. Things he didn’t need to know.
He let out a snort, telling her exactly what he thought of these historical accounts and a few moments later, she heard his footfalls fading behind her. A sigh escaped her lips at finally being alone.
Yet now that she was, she felt frozen, looking up into the bright knowing eyes of the mural, as if it knew she didn’t belong here. She’d said prayers to the dragons before, from the first night she read about them and kneeled at her window, praying to the sky as if they might return then and there because she asked. But now she was here, in front of a true altar to the gods with a dragon feather gleaming in the candlelight, and she felt so insignificant.
Brushing off her insecurities, if only for the moment, Sofia took her dagger and dug the tip into the pad of her finger until she drew blood. She wasn’t squeamish about such things, but getting an infection while lost in the rainforest wasn’t going to be a good move, so she was careful as she dripped her blood into the small wooden bowl in the center of the altar. And then she spoke words she’d never actually heard out loud, in a tongue she barely knew, reciting the traditional invocation she’d seen in a book when she was eleven and had memorized that same day.
She held her breath, as if something might shift, as if the dragon in front of her might pull itself from the wall and fly away, answering her call for help. But all that followed was silence and she felt the hope she didn’t know she was holding on to drift away with her next breath.
* * *
When she walked out a few minutes later, she tried not to let the hopelessness overwhelm her. If she could get Ocon to help her break into the military quarter and into the chief commander’s house once more, she could get the books she needed. There was a way to bring back the dragons and she would find it.
She was still thinking about how to convince Ocon to help her as she turned the corner to the sight of him standing in the shallows of the lake, wet and completely naked. He hadn’t noticed her, his back on full display. He was dabbing at the three long gashes along his side where the wolfshifter had managed to catch him with his claws and she grimaced in empathy, knowing all too well the pain of cleaning one’s own wounds out. He was just deep enough to cover his lower half, but the water lapping at his waist showed a hint of the curve of his ass disappearing beneath the lake surface and she bit her lip. He had the body of a soldier, chiseled from cycles of training.
Against her better judgment, she let her eyes wander over the rest of his back. It truly wasn’t fair for such a vile man to possess such a perfect body, and she hated that she noticed. She’d barely glanced at another boy or man since Gabriel.
She bit her mind off, focusing instead on the ink that painted his body. She’d seen the dagger on his forearm and gotten glimpses of the viper that twisted around his neck and shoulder. Now she saw that a large tattoo of a feline-like beast stretched across nearly his entire back, a thick halo of hair wrapped around his head as it roared. The creature rippled with the movement of Ocon’s muscles, as if it might jump from his skin and attack at the first provocation.
Beneath the ink were remnants of scars, ridges of lighter skin that she was plenty familiar with on her own back. She couldn’t stop the hiss of something feral escaping her throat at the thought of her scars and Ocon jerked, turning to notice her at last.
She wasn’t sure what he saw in her expression, but his initial smirk dropped quickly from his face.
“You can wash off, too,” he said, face serious. “I can go somewhere else while you?—”
She didn’t let him finish, knowing she wouldn’t feel comfortable bathing with him here, in a separate room or not. “I’m fine.”
“I promise, I won’t?—”
“I said, I’m fine. We should prepare for staying here tonight. I’ll go hunt.”
She turned before he could say anything otherwise, grabbed her bow and arrows, and marched toward the crumbling staircase that would lead her out. She needed a break from the ghosts that haunted this place so loudly she could almost hear them. Food might do her some good.