Chapter 48 Meryn
MERYN
Darkness. I’m not moving, no longer falling.
But I’m separated from myself, as if Meryn Sturmfrost is a stranger. One I don’t envy.
And then I hear him. He’s whispering words I can’t make out, his breath uneven on my cheek. His arms are around me, shaking. His entire body, shaking.
Stark. Stark.
I’m alive. I’m alive, and so is he.
I slam back to full consciousness.
There’s a disorienting spinning sensation for a moment and an agonizing pain in my chest. I curl my fingers, testing them. There’s hot liquid under my hand. My blood, I realize. Finally, I get my lungs working.
When I open my eyes, my surroundings are blurry.
I blink rapidly. Slowly, Stark comes into focus. He’s still holding me, face close. And the anguish in his features makes me feel as if I’m dying all over again.
“Hi,” I say weakly.
He rears back as if he’s been slapped, searching my face with pure shock. The pain from moments ago slips into something disbelieving. His mouth drops open.
Stark’s hands, sticky with my blood, come to my cheeks—so gentle, as if I’ll disappear if he touches me too hard. “You’re here?” His voice is wondering.
“I’m here,” I say, reaching out to touch his own stubbled cheek.
He rips his face away from my touch, anger blazing across his expression.
That his emotions are so clear is a little threatening, actually—when someone normally so steady breaks, you’ve really fucked up.
“What was that?!” he roars.
I wince, and his grip on me gentles instantly. His voice doesn’t, though. The contrast between the two makes me dizzy again.
“You were dead, Meryn! How could you do that to me—to us? We all saw it. Even Anassa—she fell. She—” His voice chokes off.
I manage to turn my head to the side, and I see Cratos standing over Anassa protectively, eyes wild, lips curled back in a snarl.
Stark gets so angry, he stops talking entirely. His hands are still shaking as he helps me sit up.
I was dead.
Or I thought I was.
Or, I must have been for the magic to accept my sacrifice?
What happened in that shadow realm? What brought me back?
Stark lets me go and steps away, pacing over to his wolf. He puts a hand on Cratos’s snout, murmurs something to him. Cratos’s ears come forward, just a little.
They both stare at me, naked emotion still swirling in dark eyes.
I shy away from it, too disoriented to engage.
I look for my friends. Venna and Noemi are nearby with their wolves. Both stand far enough away that their boots don’t touch the pool of my blood. And we’re not…
We’re not in the chamber with the altar any longer.
We aren’t even underground, I realize. Light is coming in the tall, thin windows high above us.
Yet my blood still stains the floor so… this is where I fell. Somehow.
“Where… are we?”
When Venna steps forward, my attention is entirely on her. “That’s it?” Her glaring eyes are red-rimmed, her hands in fists.
“What?” I croak.
“What you did was shitty, Meryn!” she shouts. “We thought we lost you!”
I flinch and press my hand over my chest. The wound has healed completely, but there’s still a tear in my shirt and my entire front is bloodstained and damp.
“I…” I start, but I don’t know what to say. I did what I had to do. It was what the chamber required, and judging by our surroundings, it was the right thing.
“It worked, though?” My voice falls flat.
“No, you…” Venna shakes her head. Her voice breaks and becomes pained. Vulnerable. “We all thought you were dead.” She wipes at a tear before it can fall. “Dead. Again. I can’t… N-not…”
Izabel. She’s thinking about Izabel. Of course, she is. She just watched me die. I mean, I didn’t die. Or at least, not for long?
But that doesn’t make her grief any less of a maelstrom. She’s caught up in it, and it’s my fault. I brought it back, fresh as the first hour of Izabel’s death.
I can see it written all over her face.
“I’m sorry,” I manage, even though I’d do it again.
I would. To save their lives. To destroy Killian.
Anassa slowly stands and shakes herself. She pads over to where I’m still sitting in my blood. Her muzzle nudges closer, and I reach up to hold her. Her huge white paws are staining red with all the gore that spilled out of me.
Did she die, too? Did she see what I did?
I’ll ask her later, when… once this is over.
I bury my face in Anassa’s fur and find solace in the familiar warmth and scent. Her touch reassures me. It reminds me of the convictions that drove my actions.
Her actions, too. She was with me until the end. Ready to die for me, for our friends.
“Help me,” I tell her, the words laced with layered meaning.
She nudges her nose under my arm and anchors me as I push myself shakily to my feet. My toes are still a little numb, but I can stand if I lean on her. Stark takes a half step forward as if to help and then stops, staring down at my blood.
I take a deep breath and speak. “I know you think I was being reckless or selfish. But I just knew this was the only way. For Strategos, it was asking me to demonstrate my ability to act like a leader and sacrifice for others when necessary. Otherwise, we would have all perished.”
Stark looks up abruptly. “You couldn’t have talked to us? Let us work through it together? Damn it, Meryn!”
“I should have let you asphyxiate, breathing in gas while I explained?” I snap, defensive.
Cratos rumbles, and Anassa shows him her teeth.
“Stark,” I say, trying to calm myself. And I look directly into his eyes. “If I had taken that moment to discuss, if we’d all talked it out. Would you ever have let me drive a dagger into myself?”
He shuts his eyes, jaw tight.
I look at the others. “Would any of you?”
The answer hangs unspoken between us. Of course they wouldn’t have.
I did what I had to do.
“Just…” I sigh. “Tell me how we got here? What happened?”
They’re all silent for a long moment, then Noemi finally speaks. “When you fell, it was like we fell with you. It was strange… like we were… falling up. And when I hit the ground, we were in this room. We were here, and you were bleeding—”
Her voice cuts out abruptly.
I rub at my healed chest. “Let’s look around. Find the Tear. Get this done, and get out of here,” I say, stepping forward.
I’m eager to leave this behind. The emotion in this room is stifling, and I don’t blame them for it. I’d probably feel the same in their position. But it’s making me sick.
“We’re atop the tower now,” Stark adds, voice flat as if he’s placing a report in the command tent. “You can see the sky.”
I’ve noticed that. The rows of horizontal-slit windows high above us circle the round room, letting in a dim glow of sunlight. The air here is fresh, too. We’re no longer being pressed in by stone, like in that underground nightmare.
“We need to search this room,” I say, moving my eyes over the space.
There’s no one in here but the four of us and our wolves.
Something sinks in my chest at that realization. It’s probably delusional, but a part of me hoped we might find the goddess at the end of all this, here to guide us and help us. Ideally, waiting atop a shrine with her Tear cradled in her outstretched hand.
But all I see are dust motes swirling in the air.
Was she ever even here? Or did I read into that song too much?
My gaze drops to the floor, and my brow furrows. In the vision… I saw the Tear. It was in a circular room, like this one, but there was tile on the floor. A beautiful mosaic.
I pace to a part of the floor not drenched in my blood and scrub at it with my sleeve.
Slowly, dust and dirt start to come away, revealing a swirling tile pattern just like the one in my vision.
So it is here. Or I am where the vision showed me, at least. But where’s the Tear?
“I saw something like this when I used my foresight,” I tell them, words halting. “There was a room with beautiful tilework. And the Goddess Tear was in the center of it, waiting.”
This doesn’t look like the vision, though. The floor is so dirty. And the blood. There’s so much blood, more than I thought my body could possibly hold.
My stomach lurches as I get a small taste of what it must have been like for Stark and the others to watch me die and bleed out.
I shut that image away.
Stark, Venna, and Noemi all have their eyes on me, as if I know what to do next.
“The Tear should be here. It should be…”
I walk to the very center of the room, where my congealing blood still obscures the floor beneath.
Ripping a long strip of fabric from the bottom of my tunic, I swipe at the blood, searching. Where the fuck is it?
I look up at everyone, still crouching on the floor.
“I don’t understand…”
Noemi looks at me helplessly. Venna’s features are shuttered, distant. Stark just stares steadily at me.
Waiting. Waiting for me to do something. But what more can I fucking do?!
I died for this Tear, for fuck’s sake!
I sit and then lie back, not caring that I’m getting blood all over my hair and clothes again.
I stare up at the ceiling high above, heart racing.
Was it all for nothing? Or… did Killian get here first, somehow? Does he have it?
I’m exhausted. I can’t think. I can’t even make myself move.
Stark’s words come back to me then:
How could you do that to me?
Before I can stop myself, I start to cry. At first, it’s just a few tears pressing behind my eyes, but then, with a gasp, I start sobbing.
I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ve never known what I was doing. I just acted confident and expected the world to fall in place accordingly.
And now I’ve led them all here, far away from everyone who needs us.
For what? We’ve failed.
The sounds of my sobs echo in the round space, pathetic and embarrassing. Tears run down my cheeks.
My eyes are screwed closed, so I don’t notice it happening at first. Venna’s breath catches. “Meryn…”
Opening my eyes, I blink tears away, struggling to catch my breath, and push myself up into a seat.
At first, I don’t know what I’m seeing. It’s as if the room is rotating before my eyes, deep reds and purples falling away and new colors swirling together. Am I about to faint?
Then the image resolves in my mind.
The blood around me is dissipating. Each time a teardrop strikes it, more tiles clear, swirling around me and turning the floor into a shining rainbow of a colorful mosaic.
I suck in a breath, scrabbling to my feet.
More magic?
Another tear drips from my chin, down to the floor.
Wonderingly, I watch as the last of the blood clears, and the tiles around me spin back, like a flower opening. There, right at the center of the mosaic. Just like in my vision.
The opal.
My fingertips hover over it. Distantly, I hear the others saying something. But my senses are trapped, gazing into the Tear’s surface.
Reaching down, I hesitate, remembering the visions that accompanied both Tears in the crowns. I don’t have the strength to witness one of those right now.
Maybe after I’ve slept for about two days.
Resigned, I tear another strip from my clothing. Then I use it to cover my fingers as I close them down around the Tear.
I brace myself for a vision, but it doesn’t come.
So. Either it won’t for this one, or I was right, my skin has to come in contact with the gem.
I turn to face my friends, Tear in hand, and lift it up for them to see.
“It’s time to get the fuck out of here,” I tell them.
The reaction is muted. Noemi looks encouraged, a little. Venna just scowls at me. Stark turns away, mounting Cratos and starting toward the room’s single door.
We file out in silence. Even Anassa’s shoulders are slumped, her bloodied paws dragging.
The journey down the tower is confusingly mundane. We fought so hard to reach the top—by whatever strange magic lifted us into that chamber. I was expecting the descent to be equally mystical.
But as it turns out, all we really have to do is walk. There are even vertically slit windows in the stone periodically placed along the downward spiral so that we aren’t plunged back into darkness.
When we finally emerge onto the island’s rocky shore, everything is different.
The fog that shrouded the island has nearly cleared, and Lucien’s ship is sitting anchored in calm waters just offshore.
Its hull is completely intact save for the long scrape on its side inflicted by our initial brush with the rocks.
It looks as if it just sailed through perfectly still seas.
Elias leans over the railing on the uppermost deck, waving. “We thought you must have found something! About ten minutes ago, everything simply cleared up. The fog was gone, and the rocks became navigable. We were able to get through without any issue.”
Glancing at Noemi, I remember how the waves almost took her and feel a little bitter. I know the challenges we just endured were made specifically so that people like Killian couldn’t reach the Tear, but I hate that my people suffered so much for this.
I know my actions contributed to their suffering, too. I swallow down my guilt.
Lucien appears at the railing, draping himself over it like a big cat sunbathing. “How did the expedition go?”
Noemi scoffs. “Well, Meryn died, but otherwise fine.”
I clench my jaw briefly before lifting up the Goddess Tear for everyone to see, my hand still wrapped in cloth so it doesn’t contact my skin.
The gem catches the sunlight and sends rainbows dancing across the water.
“A success,” I say.
As we wade atop our direwolves into the surf and start our comparably pleasant swim back to the ship, my eyes lift and meet Lucien’s. He says nothing, just watches me, his expression placid.
But I can sense the Siphon king’s calculation behind his gaze and in the subtle tap-tapping of his finger against the railing.
With this additional Tear in my possession, I’m conscious the balance of power between us has shifted. I now have three of the seven Tears, and he has only two.
Is he going to let this imbalance stand?