Chapter 73
Our journey through the dark, dusty tunnels and caverns is plagued with too much silence, buffed only by our muffled steps. Such unfortunate, necessary silence that there’s not much else to do but walk, blink, breathe, and … think.
Too many times, my thoughts turn to Essi and her big, miraculous mind. Of how she spoke of these tunnels with the unsettling familiarity of someone who’d made too much peace with the darkness.
Too many times, I push those squirming thoughts away. Refocus on the placement of my feet, my steady breaths, and quietly wrestle through each honed slice Sereme graces me with—the persistent bitch.
We pass through a lofty chamber knobbed with fossilized dragon bones protruding from the walls, presumably a flush of bloodstone once.
The resting place of a perished beast who didn’t make it into the sky—didn’t have the chance to so much as curl up and solidify—its ancient remains so heavily mined the cavern resembles a tooth cavity riddled with nooks and crannies.
Thousands of hiding spots for nesting predators.
And though I can’t see more than the odd glint of eyes peering out from the dark, I feel their attention like soft scratches on my skin.
They don’t advance. Not one creature prowls down from the shadows or shows any sign of intention to hunt us. Something I’d find strange, were it not for the volcanic energy rolling off the large, formidable male constantly three steps behind me, carrying Ahvi on his back.
These creatures are survivors. I have no doubt most of them are hungry, but survivors know what to spend their energy on.
Know the difference between a potential meal and a definite death.
As someone who’s come face-to-face with many of the beasts that dwell this side of the wall, I’ve seen that decision weighed more times than I have the energy to count.
We move down the throat of a tight tunnel threaded with a brisk, south-born breeze that nettles my skin and turns our breaths milky.
The tunnel begins to lighten.
I slow, hand poised on the hilt of a dagger as we round a corner, coming to a cavern flooded with moonlight shafting down through the collapsed ceiling.
Snow sprinkles through the jagged clefts above our heads, tilled by the twisting wind that plays with my hair and tousles the filthy hem of my cloak.
My heart kicks hard and fast as I scan the familiar surroundings in all its frosty detail.
The path ends here. Perhaps a skybridge that once stretched from one side to the other, swallowed by the collapse.
My gaze plunges all the way down a tumble of snow-covered boulders and old shattered dragon bones to the bottom of the gaping cavity, a dark hollow wedged between the stones, shaped a bit like a crisscross that lost an arm.
Entrance to a lower shaft that weaves beneath the collapse like the stretching roots of a tree.
Though the angular hole looks small from way up here, I know from experience that it’s big enough to climb through without a single command to Bulder.
“This is the right place.” Clode takes my voice and bounces it around the cavern’s many jagged edges. “That gap between the stones right there,” I say, pointing, “that’s where we need to be.”
From just behind me, Kaan mumbles a series of familiar and unfamiliar words in Bulder’s busty language, and in a sequence I wouldn’t have thought of.
Rocks shift and soften into a staircase fit for a palace, woven between the dragon’s ancient remains like a shrine, each step appearing to be of equal height.
Seems I’ve still got a lot to learn …
“What were you doing all the way out here, Moonbeam?”
Kaan’s deep voice rattles the silence again; my entire body responding to the words. Like I’m a Creator; his voice, a baritone key to my chest cavity.
My heart.
I swallow. Unbunch my fists and tuck loose tendrils of hair behind my ears. “I’d escaped from someplace,” I murmur, moving down the stairs, drowning thoughts of a snow hut I shaped with a shard of ice and bloody hands. Of waking from a frosty sleep to find Fallon cold and stiff beside me.
Gone.
“After making my way across the Ergor Plains, I climbed down through that hole right there,” I say, pointing above our heads. “It was storming so bad I was forced to find refuge in the lower shaft.”
“A carter dropped you here? In the middle of a storm?”
The outrage underscoring his tone is palpable. Like he’s preparing to murder some poor folk who doesn’t even exist.
“Of course not. That’d be bad for business,” I say, scanning for any sign of predators. The collapse is just big enough for an adolescent dragon to claw through. We might survive a chatterling attack, but a wild Moonplume seeking shelter … well.
We’d be dead before we had a chance to react.
“So you weren’t with a carter?”
“No.”
“Then how did you get across the plains?”
“I walked.”
His steps halt.
“Moonbeam, that would’ve taken—”
“A while,” I finish for him. So long, that by the time I clambered all the way down to the bottom of this cavern, I could barely lift a limb.
Not that I say that.
Nor do I tell him the first time I saw my own reflection was in one of the shop windows in Gore, just daes after Sereme saved my life.
I remember the fierce slap of shock. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting to see, but I’d pictured myself visually strong and capable. Sturdy.
What I saw was the opposite.
I reach the cleft between the rocks, dip my head, and edge through, leaping down into the sheltered tunnel. Heart in my throat, I wait for Kaan and Ahvi to follow as I scan my surroundings, seeing old blood still splashed all over the rough-hewn walls.
This is it.
The spot I thought I’d die.
I look left to the small ingress I recoiled within, then balled up like a dying dragon; starved, feet sliced up, body littered with wounds that had begun to fester.
Wounds in my heart that had done the same.
My thoughts delve toward the many carcasses I have strewn about the shore of my internal icy lake, stuffed under rocks or pushed in dark corners I so rarely glance in the direction of.
I exhume one from where it’s wedged between two rocks and examine it—the bones stripped so bare of emotion they’re chalky in my hands:
The masked guards came while I slumbered. Tried to capture and drag me back to Arkyn’s lair.
Part of me nearly got on my knees and begged for it. To go back to that small space where I existed with my beautiful Fallon. To be alone with her memory, rather than out here where she was so very absent.
I’d given up, I remember that vividly. The feeling of wanting to do nothing more than fall into the void. I knew it was wrong, but I was weak. Drained.
Most of all, I was so very fucking lonely.
I couldn’t understand the Creators then, despite how much they screamed. But I had … her.
My Other.
She’d taken over. Done terrible things I barely registered while I recoiled away. Took a blade to the gut in the process—something I noticed when she slipped back beneath my frosty lake, leaving my body so much colder than it was before she’d risen.
I’d emerged to find Sereme amidst the dark tunnel like a smear of color against the dim, tapping her fingernail against a jar dangling from a chain around her neck—much faster than my fading heart was beating.
I had the fleeting thought that Fallon would’ve loved her jacket in all its shapely purple elegance, with bursts of fluffy purple feathers poking out the trim.
Like a Moltenmaw. Was thinking about that when Sereme told me she could stop my heart from giving out, but that I first needed to drip my blood into the vial.
I told her to fuck off and leave me to die in peace, but then she spoke of revenge. Painted such a pretty picture that soon fell apart in my hands, like a sodden piece of parchment—
“Has this cavern changed much since you last entered?”
At Kaan’s voice, I jerk from the memory, spinning. Find both he and Ahvi have made their way through. “No. Why?”
While Ahvi wedges my satchel off my shoulder, taking its weight, Kaan scans our surroundings with fierce eyes, brows pinched as he scents.
“I’m trying to work out how someone who had the power and knowledge to stitch a blood bind discovered you all the way out here, where even the Underfolk don’t dwell. ”
I open my mouth, about to speak when his words sink deep enough to find proper purchase.
Actually, he’s got a point.
Frowning, I look down the dark tunnel, picturing Sereme in her perfect purple coat that bore not a single speck of dirt.
Her hair was coiffed—smooth and clean. Not at all like the Undercity residents, or even someone who frequents it.
Something I know now, but then … I didn’t think anything of it, given everything was new to me.
“I’ve never thought of that,” I hate to admit, rooting through my pocket for the unfolded lark I’d all but forgotten about. The pale-brown one I found in Sereme’s desk but didn’t finish reading.
I flatten it against my palm and skim the text by the crisp light seeping in through the hole we clambered through:
SEREME,
SHOULD SHE WANT TO SAVE A CLUTCH OF WOUNDED NULLS, SO BE IT. IT IS OF LITTLE POLITICAL INFLUENCE AND DOESN’T AFFECT MY PLANS. THE REQUIRED RESOURCES ARE TO BE PUT TO HER DISPOSAL.
I’VE BECOME AWARE THAT YOU’RE USING THE BIND TO MAIM HER MORE FREQUENTLY THAN WE DISCUSSED. THERE WILL COME A TIME TO POKE THE BEAST, BUT WE’RE NOT THERE YET.
YOU FORGET, YOU HAVE ONE JOB: KEEP HER UNDER CONTROL, PLUCKING THE POLITICAL WEEDS THAT POSE A THREAT TO MY RISE, UNTIL I’M READY TO brING HER HOME. SHOULD YOU FAIL ME ON THIS, I WILL BE MOST DISPLEASED.
ELDING.
My blood becomes a gushing torrent.
This correspondence … They’re talking about me.
My gut knots as I go back over specific lines until I feel like the tunnel’s tipping.
Kaan eases the lark from my grip, and I watch him read it, brows pinching into a deeper frown with each line he skims. “You found this in Sereme’s office?”