Chapter 16
I stuff my iron ring back on my finger, moving up the twisting staircase toward the thickening light, three words echoing in my head to the beat of Kaan’s following footsteps.
Keep him alive.
Keep him alive.
Keep him alive.
Suddenly, everything else feels insignificant, the notion so blaring I know in my heart it’s been there for longer than I want to admit.
Since … before.
Now that I’ve noticed it, I can’t believe I ever saw another path forward. That I ever believed distancing myself from Kaan was the right choice.
No. I must guard him; do everything in my power to protect him from falling into the same fate that took my Fallon.
My Essi.
Savage determination simmers in my chest like an icy ember, and deep inside, something rumbles—awake and watching.
Keep him alive.
Keep him alive.
Keep him alive.
I step through an arched opening that meets with a giant hole in the ground, as if Bulder staked a spear in the world, then ripped it right out again, the opening capped with a rusty grate that does nothing to catch the sprinkling sleet.
Peering over the edge of the ice-crusted stairway coiled around the circumference, I’m buffeted by a wind that smells like sulfur, failing to see the bottom …
Wonder how many folk have lost their footing and fallen to their doom, left to tumble for eternity.
I look at Pyrok, arms crossed while he chews the inside of his cheek, his hair resembling a frayed mop—every one of his piercings gone, leaving only the holes. Probably in the hopes of being discreet.
He dips his head.
I frown, decide he’s being facetious, and return the gesture with extra flourish.
He clears his throat, then jerks his chin at the slight male bunched on the stairs, his discarded shackles on the step beneath.
“My brother, Roan.” He digs into the breast pocket of his robe, pulls out a flask, and gives it a shake.
“Hard to believe, given the current state of things, but he got all the brains. And this is fucking empty,” he sighs, nipping a glance at the sky above while tucking the flask away.
Roan gives an awkward wave, watching me as though he’s looking at a ghost—spectacles askew, cheek pressed against the wall beside a crimson spray.
The sort of blood spillage that happens when an artery is abruptly severed.
Too much blood to have come from him, despite the wounds on his wrists and ankles and the many abrasions on his face.
“I see things got messy up here. How many folk got tossed down the hole?”
“Eight or so.” Pyrok shrugs. “None were on high alert, though I’m guessing that’ll change once the Tri-Council realizes they’re missing Wardens.”
He’s not wrong.
A shrill screech pierces down from above.
I look up past falling sleet, through the distant grate as a pink-and-blue-feathered Moltenmaw cuts across the sky, just above the arches. Another follows, banking sideways, garnering us a perfect view of the armored soldier clinging to its saddle.
It wouldn’t be so alarming, were it not for the momentary glimpse of five other Moltenmaws pounding through the clouds much farther above, in the shape of a perfect V.
Battle formation.
“I assume that’s the rapidly evolving problem?” Kaan murmurs from right behind me, his voice a tumble of warm boulders. So close my skin pebbles, every one of my muscles aching to lean into his atmosphere. To touch him. Hold him. Reassure myself that he’s okay.
But he’s not. None of us are.
We’re holed up in the fucking Citadel.
“I mean, it sure fuckin’ looks like one to me.” Pyrok pulls out a second flask he’s quick to unstopper, tossing back a glug. “The Tri-Council’s entire battalion is up there, swarming like they’re about to fight off an army.”
“Not an army. The city’s folk.” My words are chased by an eerie silence only battered by the distant sound of beating wings. “News of the impending moonfalls has descended on Bothaim, and it seems everyone believes the arches are runed to protect against them.”
Roan winces while Pyrok straightens, slamming the heel of his hand against the cork and jamming it back in place. “How’d you know that?”
Plucked a parchment lark from the sky and battled it until it bared its scrawled secrets.
“Not important.”
Roan straightens his glasses, squinting at me through the cracks. “She probably read someone else’s lark …”
I frown, cheeks burning. Unsure if I should be annoyed or impressed. “Uncomfortably accurate.”
“You’ll get used to him,” Pyrok mutters, looking up at the circling dragons. A Moltenmaw roars so loud I swear the stone shudders. “Plan, anyone?”
Kaan dumps a pile of scavenged white robes on the ground at our feet, probably wrestled off the folk they tossed down the hole prior to said tossing. “We get to the surface, then work it out from there.”
We reach a pair of large ornate doors bracketed by twin urns I suspect are stuffed with dead guards, based on the waft of excrement and the small blood smear on the ground.
“Guess a path’s already been paved,” I say, scowling over the rim of one as my suspicions are confirmed.
Could’ve left some for me.
Kaan presses his ear to the door. “On our way through, yes.”
“You’ll struggle to find an empty urn,” Pyrok tacks on.
I stuff my blade away with a little extra gusto, sharpening my scowl on him. “No need to rub it in.”
He frowns. “That’s not what I—”
“We’ll still have to be quiet,” Kaan interjects, then jerks his chin and shoves through the door.
We follow into a circular chamber so vast and white it’s like we’re caught in a cloud, every step across the polished floor a hollow thud, lost to the hungry atmosphere.
Shivers scuttle over my skin as I take it all in through wide eyes, breath caught.
The swooping wall boasts hundreds of duplicate doors, each bracketed with glass drips of captured moonlight hanging from coiled hooks of Bothaimian ore.
“Is this the—”
“High Treasury,” Pyrok murmurs, then takes a swig from his flask—the words a punch to my chest.
It’s hard to breathe in the wake of them.
Essi often spoke about this place, wishing she could explore it. Being here without her is another painful reminder that I failed to keep her safe.
I push down the thought and force my lungs full, casting my mind to our conversations …
Essi said many of the world’s most precious and powerful relics are hidden here, locked safely away.
But what she was most taken with was the story of a male fae who’s been around for eons.
The first to tame a dragon, his skin now etched in so many runes he’s become something … other, kept behind one of these doors.
Apparently.
Pyrok corks his flask, then smacks his palm against Roan’s chest, making him grunt. “This is the place that got this idiot tossed to the anthe.”
Kaan presses his finger to his lips again, turning just as Roan’s staggered steps slow, gaze cast on a pair of doors bearing the only thread of color in the room—an etch of silver ribbons that shine like the aurora, moving gently.
As though someone sliced them from the sky and stitched them across the wood.
Pyrok rolls his eyes, takes Roan by the arm, and steers him toward the open-arched exit on the other side. I follow, pausing when something glints in my peripheral.
My skin prickles as a silver shimmer gathers midair before the doors Roan was so taken with. A too familiar silver shimmer.
If that Fate-fucker is herding me again, I will rage.
It coalesces into a metallic smear that sluices through the thin gap between the doors, disappearing.
My eyes narrow. What if there’s something in there that could help me protect Kaan? Something powerful? Creators, I owe it to Essi to at least look …
I move forward and grab a handle. Pull the left door open a smidge, eyes widening at the small domed chamber on the other side—all polished obsidian dented with specks of luminescence that make it appear as the sky in The Shade. Like I could step over the threshold and just … fall.
That silver sheen coils around a black plinth in the center of the room, as if the Fate Herder just tucked around itself and readied for slumber.
Except it doesn’t appear. Instead, a small silver book no bigger than my hand manifests into existence—thicker than the height of my thumb, the uneven stack of pages so white they gleam like captured moonlight.
My breath catches, something within urging me to move closer and inspect. As though a ribbon just knotted around my spine and tugged. Even the muscles under my tongue tingle, innately aware that I just stumbled across something plump.
Something powerful.
“Hold up,” I call to the others. “I’m going to take a look at this book real quick.”
There’s a pause. Just enough time for me to step through the doorway and into the chilly tomb before Kaan roars my name so loud it’s as though he just stuck me with a serrated shiv.
I turn to see him dominating the doorway, his eyes all-consuming, packed with a churn of dragonflame. “I thought we were being quiet?” I whisper-hiss, throwing both hands out in a silent what in the Creators-damn fuck?
He continues to stare, unbreathing, all the color gone from his painfully beautiful face. Pyrok and Roan push up behind him, equally ashen.
“H— Wh— How did you do that?” Roan sputters, looking at my legs. Like he’s surprised they’re still connected to my body.
“Do what?”
“Walk straight past those.” He dashes his hand toward a shimmer of runes etched along the threshold—tricky to see, but obvious now that he’s pointed them out.
My gaze follows the line.
It circles the entire room, then branches up in places, mimicking the bars of a cage—all meeting in the middle, directly above the plinth.
“Is it supposed to be hard?”
“It’s supposed to be lethal,” Kaan growls, his graveled voice a sawtooth blade dragging through the air.
Lethal …
Meaning the Fate Herder was trying to kill me again, the conniving asshole.
I glare at the air around the plinth, hoping the creature feels my seething wrath. “Oh.”
The book shimmers.