4. Kaelor #4
We cross to the right. The platform locks still beneath us. The markings dim and then brighten — some mechanism turning over inside the stone. Something shifts in the walls. A pressure releasing that I didn't know was building.
Behind us the chamber is still moving. I hear it without looking. Syrox repositioning. Varketh's steady footsteps. And then I see it — Syrox angling toward the gas concentration near where we just stood. Varketh pushing a surge toward the center platform. Both of them aimed at the same point.
Neither of them sees the other doing it.
I see it.
I don't finish the thought. "Move," I say to Olivia. "Forward. Fast."
She goes. I stay one step behind her and slightly to her right. I'm still turning when the explosion comes. The shockwave hits the back of my shoulders and shoves me forward two steps. The center platform cracks — I hear the stone scream and then the whole chamber rings with it.
I find my footing. I stand still for a moment and let my balance settle.
Then I locate Syrox .
He's off-balance. His concentration broke. He's reaching for the nearest surface with both hands, fingers spread, looking for something to hold. The platform under him is still trembling from the fracture. He finds the edge with one hand and I watch him start to recover.
I move before he finishes.
Three steps back across the stone. I don't think. I let my instincts take control. I strike him across the throat. His eyes bulge and his hands fly up to grasp at his throat. It knocks him off balance. I shove him, and he loses his legs. He falls sideways. Shifts his weight in the opposite direction to compensate. Too far. He waves his arms but it’s too late.
His claws grasp at the air for purchase but nothing’s there, and he falls backward into the lava.
His screams will forever haunt my dreams. He has some hear resistance as it takes him a while to melt. It’s not enough to save him, only prolong his agony.
I immediately leap back. The chamber goes quiet save for the slow pull of the well.
I turn back to Olivia.
She's standing on solid stone on the far side. She watches me cross toward her. Her expression doesn't move but when I reach her she exhales — just once, just slightly — and her chin drops a degree. Something in her posture changes. Not relief exactly. More like a held thing setting down.
"Are you hurt?" she asks.
"No."
Her eyes move to my back. "Your back."
I reach around. Dust and heat. No blood. "It held."
She looks at me for a moment longer than necessary. Then she looks past me at the two creatures that remain.
Varketh and Khaedren are on opposite sides of the fracture, still making their way across. With any luck, they’ll fall in too.
But we won’t be here to witness it.
“Come on,” I tell her. “With any luck, we’ll end this before they cross.”
And we step over the threshold and into the next, and final, challenge.
The corridor opens and we're still moving.
I take in what I can while my feet are still carrying me forward — wide, circular, a ring of lava turning at the outer edge. Red light coming down through a fractured dome above. Ash drifting through the gaps.
I slow to a stop.
Olivia comes up beside me. Her shoulder is close to mine. She's breathing a little harder than usual from the descent.
"What is it?" she asks.
I don't answer right away. I'm still reading the room. The walls. The floor. The platform at the center — raised, black stone, perfectly circular. The lava ring surrounding it, slow and even. The two basins carved into opposing sides of the altar.
No magma veins threading through the stone. No corruption in the carvings.
Everything intact. Everything undisturbed.
It could almost be the real thing. Maybe it is.
She's looking at the same things I am. The stillness of it. The ash coming down through the ceiling in slow, weightless lines. The way the red light hits the stone and doesn't reflect .
"What is this place?" she asks.
Its name appears from somewhere I haven't visited in a long time. My chest tightens.
I keep walking. Slower now. Toward the platform.
"The Sanctum of Oaths," I say, hearing the reverence in my own voice.
“What is it?”
We reach the platform. I stop at the edge and look at the two basins. Shallow. Perfectly symmetrical. The glyphs around them are clean — every line sharp, nothing worn, nothing touched by what's been happening to the rest of this place.
I glance back at the entrance. The others aren’t here yet. We have time. Some at least.
I crouch beside the nearest basin. I read the glyphs without meaning to. The words come up automatically.
I stand.
"The rite requires two people," I say. "Only two, inside the boundary at the same time." I point to the seam in the floor where the platform begins. "That's the line. Both cross it together. Each stands at one basin. We sacrifice blood in the same moment."
She turns pale. “Blood?”
“To symbolize our union. Our bond.”
I look at the room behind us. Still empty. "If more than two are inside the boundary, the mechanism locks." I turn back to the basins. "It won't activate with an unbalanced number."
Olivia is quiet. I can hear her working through it.
"So we go in together," she says.
"Yes."
She looks at the boundary line. She doesn't move immediately. She just stands there looking at it .
She nods her head, coming to a decision. She steps forward and I step with her.
My foot crosses the seam and the stone answers immediately. A vibration through the sole of my boot, up into my leg. Steady. Low. Olivia crosses beside me and I hear the small sound she makes. Not quite a breath but she feels it too.
We separate. As she moves toward the far basin, I approach the near one.
I stop at the basin's edge and peer down into it. The stone inside is dry. I read the glyphs around the rim once. Then again.
Much of the ceremony is unknown to me. I wasn’t of age when the Malquarans attacked and I’m learning of it now for the first time.
“It isn't only blood in stone,” I tell her, reading the glyphs. “My culture doesn't have a word that translates cleanly, but the closest is covenant. Witnessed by flame. Recorded in the rock. If we complete this, you are bound to me by every tradition I was raised inside. Permanently.”
Somehow, she turns even whiter. “Permanently?”
Across the platform, Olivia is looking at the glyphs on her side. Her finger traces the air above them without touching the stone. Trying to read them.
I watch her.
She moves her finger slowly along the line of figures.
Her head tilts slightly. She steps left to follow the sequence and then steps back, checking something.
She doesn't know I'm watching. She's completely inside the problem — the same way she was in the corridor, the same way she is whenever something catches her attention. She doesn't do anything halfway .
I look at the basins. I look at the glyphs around the rim. I look back at her.
She mouths something. Testing a word. She shakes her head slightly and moves her finger back to an earlier figure and starts again.
I have been in this arena for two levels. I have fought three rivals and read every surface in every chamber and made every calculation I know how to make. I am good at knowing what things are.
I don't know what to do with this.
I look at the basin in front of me. I look at my own hands. I look at the glyphs and I read them again even though I already know what they say. I give myself something to do with my eyes that isn't her.
It doesn't work.
Then I hear the footsteps.
Heavy. Fast. I turn to find. Varketh racing across the platform. There’s no more time.
“Now!” I yell.
I plunge my hands into the fire. She does likelike and…
nothing happens. I look back to find Varketh standing with one foot inside the boundary line, a sneer of victory on his face.
Like shoving your foot inside a slamming door.
The vibration under my feet changes — a second pulse, discordant, cutting across the first. Before I can speak, Khaedren follows.
The vibration stops. The ceremony ends before it even began.
The glyphs dim. All of them. Not gradually. Between one moment and the next they just go flat. The basins go cold. The light leaves the stone.
Olivia looks at me from across the platform, desperation in her eyes. "Why isn't it working? "
"There must be only two inside the circle," I say simply. I look at Varketh. Then Khaedren.
Nobody moves.
Varketh looks at the basins and growls, stepping further into the boundary circle now.
Khaedren hisses, taking position on the other side of the platform. He shifts his weight into a fighting stance. Settles lower. He's not looking at me. He's looking at the space around me.
Ash drifts silently through the ceiling. The lava ring at the outer edge brightens slightly. The red light shifts.
I take one step to the right. Not toward either of them. I'm placing myself. I want Olivia behind my right shoulder with the basin within her reach. I want clear stone under my feet.
Varketh watches me move. He smiles.
Khaedren doesn't smile. He just watches.
I look at the ground between us, at the edge of the lava ring and how close Varketh is standing to it. At the way Khaedren's weight sits on his left foot.
Olivia hasn't moved from her basin. "Kaelor."
"I know."
"What do we do?"
I narrow my eyes, not looking away from them. "I clear the circle."
A pause.
"Both of them?"
"Yes."
The lava ring pulses. Ash settles on the stone. Nobody has moved yet. The sanctum stays locked and silent and waiting.
But they won’t wait long.
The platform divides us naturally—three points of a triangle, equal distance between, as if we've rehearsed this before.
We haven't. This is instinct. Predator instinct.
I know it because I feel it in my own body, the way my muscles have already mapped the space, already calculated the angles of attack and retreat before my mind has caught up.