Chapter Thirty-Four #2
It was no different than pushing aside a curtain.
Something coiled uncomfortably between his ribs at the realisation of just how little effort it took.
He had expected a struggle. He had been braced for his muscles, his will, to be pressed to their limits.
Instead, it was as though the waters wanted to be moved.
The vaguest roll of his hand hollowed a clean path through the depths, and between Imogen and the team behind them, the rippling walls turned solid within mere moments.
Kai reached and reached, until the familiar lull beneath his pulse faded to nothing.
There was no water left to move. Slowly, he dropped his hand, braced for a tide to come crashing through the corridor they’d created.
There was nothing.
Nothing but silence, and a faint, faltering beam of soft, white light in the distance.
Kai allowed himself a breath and a glance at Imogen. She met his gaze, still fighting to keep her eyes in focus even as the same trepidation tugged her slim brows together.
“That was—” Kai began, but cut himself off at her nod.
“Too easy,” she agreed.
And yet, she took a swift step between the walls of freshly frozen waters, pausing only when Kai caught at her arm.
“Wait,” he said. “We don’t know if it’s safe.”
“And how are we to find out?”
When he could offer no response, she eased from his grip and swayed out of reach, turning once it became clear that Kai would not stop her.
He glanced back over his shoulder for someone who might; silhouettes crowded the dark little chamber beyond the cavern’s entrance, but the Wielders made no move to follow their Commander nor even call her back.
The gards seemed even less inclined, hovering somewhere in the back of the chamber, poised to sprint back through the tunnels and emerge above ground at the first sign of failure.
Cowards. Cursing inwardly, Kai shifted the cold burn of the pendant against his chest and strode into the Mother’s cavern.
In the shifting white light, he caught glimpses of rock wall, thick with ancient algae and distorted by the ripple of the ice on either side of him.
Stray droplets of water hung suspended in the air, the shimmer of them like dust motes caught in a stream of sunlight.
Kai glanced up and found stalactites wreathed in the same algae as the trapped walls, water sluicing from them, far too reminiscent of blood dripping from the teeth of a stone beast. And here they were, walking willingly into its open jaw, Imogen weaving a drunken path and bouncing off the walls of the parted waters.
He caught her up in a few long strides.
“You should take the pendant back—”
“No,” she said firmly, though her voice tripped over her tongue. “If my ice falters, you’re the only thing standing between us and a watery death. B’sides. I can fight it.”
“How?”
She shrugged as she walked, shoulders barely jerking. “Not as bad for me. The others slip in and out. Time skips around for them. I’m just a little disoriented.”
Kai cast a glance back over his shoulder, torn.
He had felt that too; that time was fluid, and his mind was dissipating into its tide, a swirl of ink in the water.
If that’s what the others were going through, it was no wonder they hadn’t had the will to follow Imogen’s final stumble into the cavern.
Would they wait there, then, sliding in and out of reality? Was that safe?
“S’alright,” said Imogen, reading his hesitance even through her struggle. “The gards aren’t affected. Just creeped out.”
She laughed, the sound low and dragging. Adhlas. She was slurring like a lush, and every time she spoke, the effort seemed to draw her entire focus, her steps swaying dangerously with each word. She staggered into him, and he steadied her with a hand beneath her elbow.
“You can’t take much more, Lady Imogen.”
“You don’t know what I can take,” she shot back, though she leaned into his supporting hand. “Let’s do this and have it over with. I just want it to be over. Don’t you?”
Kai had no good answer; dread and relief moved through him in equal measure.
Seeing that Pearl retrieved and placed in Avette’s marble hands was the culmination of a centuries-old nightmare.
It was an outcome so dire that even in his darkest years, trapped within this ice, it had never crossed his mind.
Yet here they were. All power resting in her icy palm, just as Eda had predicted.
The thought was too much to bear; that the prophecy had been realised.
That they had failed to stop it despite Eda losing her life, despite Kai abandoning his Court, despite them all following him across the world and wilting beneath the tunnels for weeks, only to fall at this last hurdle.
A part of him, that part most influenced by the pendant burning beneath his gills, simply did not accept it.
He could not have this power rushing through his blood, the Mother’s influence whispering all around him, and find himself defeated.
They were so close. He could take the Pearl for himself if they found it. What was stopping him?
But beneath the raging lull of the pendant remained his true self, and Kai knew him better than ever now.
If there was one uncomfortable truth he had uncovered, it was that Os had been right about him all along. He was casting everything aside. He would, for Adeline, without hesitation and no matter how many others it might doom.
He would do nothing to risk her safety.
And he did not have it in himself to deny it.
“I want it to be over,” he told Imogen.
She gave a grim and stuttering nod, and with her arm in his, they forged ahead toward the distant beam of light.
The walls whispered, indiscernible but growing insistent.
Kai’s pendant pulsed like a second heart against his ribs, eager and encouraging.
But Lady Imogen was struggling; her eyes growing heavy, her slight frame sagging into him.
Knowing she would not hear of turning back, Kai grasped for a distraction.
“There’s an old story about the Mother’s Cavern,” he said. “Do you know it?”
Her lashes fluttered with effort, but she managed to look at him, her attention fixed.
“Whole reason we’re here,” she mumbled drowsily. “S’where She hid her Pearl.”
“It is,” said Kai. “But in Merrow legend, the cavern is the mouth of an ancient monster.”
Imogen’s brow twitched, perhaps a failed effort to raise them in interest. “Didn’t know that bit.”
Kai nodded, eyes on the looming beam of light.
It was brighter now, its shimmer washing out the entire back wall of the cavern so it was impossible to tell anything other than that they were close.
He knew it, too, by the way his pulse thundered in time with the pendant’s, his blood stinging his veins, caught in the storm of the Mother’s magic all around them.
Just a little farther. He just had to keep her conscious and on her feet a moment longer.
“Mother Adhlas hid her heart away to protect us all,” Kai gritted out, hoisting Imogen upright as she sagged once more.
“Though she loved us eternally, we’d become monsters in her eyes, and she feared the harm we’d do to ourselves.
So she created the only thing that could scare off the monsters; an even greater monster. ”
The light was blinding now, Kai’s vision nearly entirely white. He held Imogen’s faltering gaze through a squint as he dragged her toward the back wall, the whispers around them growing so frantic that it was all he could do to raise his voice.
“The great beast made a nest beneath the Laune,” he called, “and as it lay down for its long sleep, the Mother set her precious Pearl between its teeth. And as the story goes, once the Pearl was removed, the beast would awaken.”
Imogen stiffened against his arm, and Kai paused to let her stop walking. She only stared up at him, waiting, and very suddenly alert.
“And then what?”
Kai faltered, thrown by her sudden recovery.
“Well—then the beast would defend the Pearl and devour the intruder, before settling back down to sleep.”
Imogen dropped her grasp on his arm and glanced around, swaying only slightly. Her forehead was a map of concern, furrowed so deeply that Kai worried he’d scared her in his clumsy attempt to hold her attention.
“It’s only a story,” he said, gentle as he could while hollering over the indiscernible hush now ringing off the ice-walls. “The waters here were treacherous; deadly. To approach the cavern, even for a Merrow, was to risk death. The beast is just a metaphor.”
Imogen didn’t respond, nor look at him. Her gaze was still darting around, but she stopped and whipped around to face the blinding light of the back wall.
“What?” she whispered. “I can’t hear you.”
Something cold clawed its way up Kai’s spine. “I didn’t say anything.”
The pulse of his pendant was accelerating, beating so fast it sent vibrations through his bones.
Imogen took a step forward, and the discomfort in his bones eased; it took Kai a moment and a shifting glint of green light to understand why.
His pendant hung before him in the air, surging with magic.
The same undiluted power that had his blood burning, his head throbbing, his pores screaming with every step she took toward that blinding wall.
The hairs on the back of his neck rose beneath a non-existent breeze.
“Imogen,” he called, a hoarse warning.
She took another step into the light, raising her hand before her.
“Imogen, don’t—”