Chapter 14
Pillars Of The Cosmos
LYRA
“Don’t move,” Boone whispers.
All ten Titans and Titanesses are gone, and the Pandemonium—whatever they are—are coming. Something even Titans fear.
“I want to make sure they’re gone before we move,” Boone says. “Okay?”
I nod. “Aren’t you worried about whatever they are afraid of?”
“If they can’t see us or feel us, whatever it is can’t, either.” He sounds so confident that I roll my eyes. “Trust me.”
I don’t hesitate. I’ve always trusted him. “With my life.”
But…nothing comes.
Boone doesn’t move. Doesn’t speak.
I can sense him turning his head slowly, scanning for a threat.
I glance from one side to the other, also searching.
It’s been a minute or two, and still nothing comes, and I start to lower my guard.
The longer we stand like this, the stranger it feels to be in a world painted all shades of gray. It’s disorienting.
“We can’t stay here forever,” I point out. “Can you teleport?”
“I’ve tried. I don’t think this place allows it.”
“Oh.” Makes sense. It’s a prison.
“So we’ll have to pick a tunnel and walk out.” His grip on me tightens. “Ready?”
Not really. We start walking, and I find myself cringing at the tiny sounds our feet make with each step. But nothing comes at us, so we keep going.
“How are you already so good at this?”
“Haven’t you learned yet?” That cocksure grin is rife in his voice. “I’m good at everything.”
Good grief.
A scream pierces the air, and Boone’s grip on me tightens.
The sound shoots down one of the tunnels to the left of where we stand—one of the Titanesses, by the timbre.
She sounds as if she’s being ripped to shreds.
Then the pitch abruptly changes, and instead of screams, animalistic snarls roll toward us.
But the growling isn’t stopping, and it’s getting louder. “It’s coming our way.”
“I know.”
It’s coming faster than we’re moving, and he speeds us up. He’d better be right that nothing can see us, but now the hushed sound of our steps is more obvious.
We’re not quite to the tunnel we’re aiming at when someone…something…shoots into the chamber from a different tunnel.
Boone stops us, keeping us preternaturally still. This time I do hold my breath as I stare at something that was a Titaness only minutes ago. Theia, I think, Titaness of insight and healing, mother of the original gods and goddesses of the moon, sun, and dawn. She’s supposed to glow.
She almost doesn’t look real now.
With light hair and flowy robes along the ancient lines, she’s hunched over, her curls wild around her face. Fangs flash bright and deadly in her open, panting mouth, and her hands are dagger-sharp claws.
What did Tartarus do to her? Or is this the result of the Pandemonium that we still haven’t seen a trace of?
Boone has us take a single, careful step closer to our escape.
She doesn’t seem to notice as she grunts and snarls and paws the ground while she searches the room, like a rabid wolf hunting prey.
Yet another step.
I can see light slipping out between her claws, coming from her palms.
Another step.
We’re so close.
Two more, and she disappears from view, blocked by the wall of the tunnel we’re in now.
But we still move slowly and carefully down the arched passageway carved into the natural rock leading us well away from the chamber.
Once we turn a bend, it’s so dark that Boone has to feel along the wall as he tugs me after him.
I pull my axe in closer. A clank of metal on rock will definitely have whatever the Pandemonium is coming for us.
Theia, too, for that matter, or whatever monster she turned into.
Light forms a small arch ahead. One that grows larger as we near it until we come out of the tunnel into…
Wow.
Maybe I whisper that aloud, because Boone nods along as we both crane our necks to look up, and up, and up, forgetting for a second the danger at our backs.
We’re standing in a semicircle of mountainside that opens up into what looks like a nightmarish land of burning.
This is the image so many mortals think of when they picture various hells.
Dark rocks, the hazy undulations of lava and fire, everything jagged and blasted with heat.
The lands stretch long beyond the horizon as far as I can tell.
But that’s not what we’re looking at.
Rising between the tunnel-riddled, underground mountain we came out of and the burning lands in the distance are four massive, free-standing pillars that shoot upward so high, I can’t see the tops. Only they aren’t pillars, really. They’re more like wildly different-looking tree trunks or…roots.
Oh my gods.
I once heard a quote from an ancient text describing Tartarus as a void beneath the foundations of everything where the earth, sea, sky, and fire have their roots.
It’s true.
Boone lets go of me. Instantly, like an old-fashioned movie being remastered in Technicolor, the world is painted in bright hues again, and I gasp at the violent beauty of the pillars.
The earthen pillar closest to where we stand, though still a good distance away, looks exactly like tree roots wrapped in vines of greenery and flowers every color imaginable all the way up. The sweet scent in the air is so heavy it’s cloying.
The sky’s pillar, to the right and even farther away, doesn’t look like roots but like a swirl of color.
The swirl reminds me of soft-serve ice cream, but the colors are brilliant.
At first glance, there are bands of pristine blue, then white, then various shades of gray from light to dark, followed by large bands of black that seem to glitter, and then narrower bands in yellows, peaches, purples.
All the phases of the skies? Day and night.
Sunset and sunrise. Glittering stars, but also fluffy white clouds and roiling storms. And those swirling bands are moving up the sky pillar, like they are feeding into the world.
The ocean pillar to the left, even with the sky, is comprised of waves.
They defy gravity, climbing sideways up the column, spraying mist down to where we stand.
The colors of the oceans don’t move in bands like the skies but instead have…
lanes, I guess I’d call them. Some are a fathomless deep blue, some crystal-clear turquoise, some a muddier brownish blue, some black.
All with cresting white as the waves climb and climb.
And finally, farthest from us and smaller in the distance, is the pillar of fire. It looks like a tornado, but in a perfect cylinder that doesn’t move and doesn’t produce any smoke. And the heat has turned the flames more blueish purple than red and gold.
Another scream sets off, this time from overhead, and Boone and I both crane our necks to realize that the way we got here isn’t the only way. Tunnels pockmark the sheer face of the mountain at our backs.
“Hide quickly,” a soft, familiar female voice says.
Boone snatches my hand, and color disappears again just as Rhea peeks out from a tunnel off to our right. I know she can’t see us, but that doesn’t seem to bother her.
“I thought Theia might have driven you this way,” she whispers.
So that was Theia. That feral thing in the chamber near Hestia’s Lock.
Rhea steps fully out of the tunnel, then waves a hand, and color slams back into the world. With a mere thought, she stopped Boone’s power to make us invisible.
“I have a place I can hide you that the others won’t find quickly,” Rhea whispers before we can run or fight. “But we need to hurry.” She beckons us to follow.
I glance at Boone, questioning, and he shrugs. But we don’t speak. Do we have a choice? This place is too foreign and too filled with dangers we don’t know yet. It’s worth at least a look. Boone gives a tiny whistle, and I nod.
When Rhea runs…this time, we run, too.