Chapter 41
“ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT to do this?” Aven asked me as we stood outside the silver eye that led to the invisible realm.
I took a breath. The Elder Beast’s horn lay across my palms. “Yes. We can’t allow this to fall into anyone else’s possession.”
“I agree, but we could protect it at the castle.”
I rolled my eyes. “Until the descendants of one of your cousins uses it to usurp the throne. I’ve heard that ballad, Aven. Rylan’s sung it for us.”
“That’s fictional.” Aven crossed their arms. “They didn’t use a horn, anyway. It was a different magical artifact.”
“Come on, we agreed.”
“If you two would like to hurry up,” Dave grumbled, “I would like to find a mountain goat to snack on while you’re in there. I’m hungry.”
“Yes, Dave! We’re going.”
Aven and I had agreed that the Elder Beast’s horn was too dangerous to exist in the outside world.
Forto and Quip were still out there, and rumor was they were on the hunt for it.
As well as a real council of mages who had heard about the debacle.
We couldn’t protect the horn and continue with our other quests.
It was determined that Aven, Dave, and I would be the ones to return the horn. That way, only the three of us would know where the invisible realm existed. And when we died, the secret would die with us.
We’d even burned the map Farrah had used to track our progress across the kingdom. It might not have had the Elder Beast’s location noted, but it did mark where the Hydra lived. And we all knew it was best to leave that particular primordial alone.
Stepping through the shimmering eye was as weird as it had been the first time. The silver slid over me, and suddenly I once again stood on blue grass, this time beneath a light-purple sky.
“Huh,” I said, bending down and retrieving the cloth with the clues. “It hasn’t moved.”
Aven popped through beside me. They shook their head, then ran their hands through their black hair. “Ancients, that’s weird,” they said, glaring at the eye.
“Okay. Where should we put it?” I asked, holding up the horn. “I don’t want to leave it right next to the entrance, just in case.”
Aven hummed. “Maybe we throw it in the river?”
“Perfect.”
Amazingly, I remembered the way through the meadow, past the oddly colored bushes and trees, to the river. The world around us was silent, our footsteps the only sound. And there was no way the Elder Beast didn’t know we were here.
Once we reached the river, I took a calming breath. Part of me couldn’t believe that I had gone through so much trouble for this horn and that I was going to toss it into the river. Another part of me couldn’t wait until it was gone.
Aven touched my fingers where they wrapped around the horn, my knuckles white. “It’s okay,” they said. “You’re right. It’s too powerful and too dangerous for our world. But the good news is, we can always retrieve it. If we have to. I hope we never have to, but you know what I mean.”
I nodded. “I do.” I swallowed, took one last glance at the ridges of bone, and tossed it in. It didn’t even splash in this strange realm, merely sank to the bottom of the riverbed and blended in with the rocks. I tossed the cloth of clues as well, and it drifted downstream, out of sight.
“Okay. It’s done.” I tore my gaze away from it, only to find the Elder Beast staring at us from the other bank. I startled and grasped Aven’s arm.
They inhaled a quick breath.
The Elder Beast didn’t speak to us, merely eyed us, then turned and jumped away, hiding in between the trees.
“What do you think—”
“Nope,” I said, cutting Aven off. “We are not pondering that interaction. We are leaving.”
“Yeah. Okay.”
We scampered out of there without looking back.
On the other side of the eye, the early afternoon had turned into the early hours of the morning. Dave slept soundly, a small fire flickering by him, providing warmth and light. The stars winked brightly, and the three sister moons all shone.
“Should we wake Dave?” Aven asked. “Farrah and Zig wanted to get an early start tomorrow. They want me to take them to the gnome village outside of the castle.”
“Rylan wants me to help him with the song.” I grimaced. “I’m bad at rhyming. I don’t know why he keeps asking. He lived the quest. He knows what happened.”
Aven chuckled. They grabbed their saddlebags and sat down by the fire, adding a log Dave had gathered for us. “Isn’t that what you wanted, though? To tell your story in your own words?”
“Theoretically,” I said, settling down beside them. “Writing is difficult, though.”
Aven draped their arm over my shoulders. “And to think, that was supposed to be your last quest ever. But as Farrah would say, it turned into the best quest ever.”
I laid my head on Aven’s shoulder and snuggled close. “I don’t know. Maybe our best quest ever is still before us.”
“That’s surprisingly profound.”
I elbowed them in the ribs. “If we really think about it, all my previous quests were supposedly completed by Ellinore the Brave. That means the quest for the Elder Beast was my first quest ever as just Ellinore.”
Aven smiled, their blue eyes shining in the firelight. “I like just Ellinore. She’s pretty great.”
“She is,” I agreed.
And for the first time in a long time, I believed it.