Chapter 10
The portal spits me out hard on Wynmire soil.
I dust off my knees and take stock of the situation.
The crossing point shimmers behind me and then folds in on itself, the light thinning to nothing.
Kaelren's last order echoes in my skull: hold the line, watch the others, keep things stable.
Simple enough instructions from a man who's about to do something profoundly stupid on the other side of a dimensional barrier.
I don't look back. Looking back is for people who have the luxury of doubt.
The camp is quieter than I left it. The fire pit has burned down to embers, and someone has reorganized the supply stores, which means Vashael's been busy. Good. Idle hands in a former courtesan usually lead to politics, and I've had enough politics for one lifetime.
I find Vashael first, predictably awake despite the hour, sitting near the map table with her legs crossed and her pollen cloud dimmed to almost nothing. She looks up when I approach, amber eyes sharp.
"Back so soon?"
"Kaelren's orders. I'm to keep Wynmire from falling apart while he plays hero."
"How generous of him to delegate the impossible." She studies me. "What's happening on the other side?"
I give her the short version. Kaelren at the elm tree, the locket, the gate ritual. I leave out the part where Kaelren looked like he was barely holding himself together, because Vashael doesn't need that picture in her head right now. Neither do I.
"And Elle?"
"Still dispersed. Kaelren's trying to pull her back through the bond." I sit down across from her, feeling the weight of the last several hours settle into my bones. "If anyone can do it, he can. But I don't know what happens next."
Vashael is quiet for a moment. "Nimor felt the tremors. Two of them, both while you were gone. The second one cracked the foundation of the eastern watchtower."
That gets my attention. "How bad?"
"Bad enough that the settlements are asking questions we don't have answers to.
" She leans forward, dropping her voice even though there's nobody close enough to hear.
"Sarnyx, something is wrong with the ground.
Nimor says he can feel it when he phases.
A pulling, like something is opening underneath us. "
Wonderful.
"Where's Nimor now?"
"Scouting the eastern border. He should be back by morning." She pauses. "Where's Eltrien?"
"That's what I need to find out."
Nimor returns before dawn, solidifying from shadow at the camp's edge with an expression that makes my thorns prickle.
"It's worse than the tremors suggest," he says without preamble. His form is steady tonight. Whatever instability once plagued him has settled, but the look on his face says he'd trade that stability for better news.
"There's a chasm forming east of the river colony, about two miles past the new blooms. It wasn't there three days ago."
"How big?"
"Fifty feet across."
Vashael and I exchange a look.
"When I phased down to look at the structure, I couldn't find a bottom. I went deeper than I've ever gone, deeper than the Root network, and it just kept going. Like the realm itself is being pulled apart from underneath."
Damn it. It sounds like what we found when we went through the portal. I inform them of the similar chasm at the border.
"We need Eltrien," I say.
They both nod. Eltrien is the one who carries knowledge that the rest of us can't access. If anyone can tell us what's happening beneath Wynmire's surface, it's him.
The problem is finding him.
Eltrien didn't stay at camp with the rest of us. Kaelren sent him on a mission to find information on how to bring Elle back. We hadn't seen him in weeks, and I never asked where he was.
Now I wish I had.
"He mentioned the Athervault," Vashael says, pulling a location from her memory that I'd half-forgotten. "Weeks ago, when we were searching for information on temporal dispersal. He said there were texts there that even the Sage didn't have access to."
"The Athervault." I turn the name over. I've heard of it, an ancient, underground archive. It's known for not allowing visitors and has the means to enforce that preference. "That's three days' travel."
"Two if we push," Nimor responds.
"Then we push."
We leave within the hour. Vashael sends word to Thessara at Willowmere to manage the settlements in our absence, and I leave instructions with the patrol scouts to monitor the chasm and send runners if it grows past a hundred feet. I honestly don't know what else to do.
The Athervault sits at the base of the Skystone Mountains. The entrance is cut into the rock face, a narrow opening barely wide enough for two people abreast, marked with symbols so old they've worn smooth in places. What's left of the carvings show a language that predates written fae.
"Welcoming," Vashael murmurs.
"It's a library, not an inn," I tell her.
The interior opens into a receiving chamber made of carved stone with high ceilings; the air is cool and dry and carries the faint smell of preserved parchment. There's a desk, and behind it sits a fae woman with paper-white skin and eyes that are entirely black.
"We need access to the lower stacks," I say. No point in pleasantries.
She doesn't look up from the ledger she's writing in. "The Athervault is not open to visitors."
"We're not visitors. We're looking for someone. A healer with mycelial markings. He would have arrived a few weeks ago."
Still nothing.
I sigh. "My name is Sarnyx, and I'm here on the orders of Prince Kaelren."
That gets a reaction. A small one, but there's a tightening at the corners of her mouth. "The one you speak of is in the deep archives. Level eight. The Keeper has granted him researcher status."
"Then grant us passage."
"The deep archives require a guided escort. The locking systems are sequential, each level has its own protections, and they must be navigated in order. If you attempt to bypass them, the Athervault will close."
"Close," Nimor repeats. "As in—"
"As in seal itself. Permanently. With everyone inside." She finally looks up, and those black eyes are completely flat. "The knowledge here is more valuable than any of you. The Athervault protects itself accordingly."
"We will wait for a guide," Nimor adds in a gentler tone than I've been using.
The woman gives us all a long look, then sighs, resigned to the fact that we won't be giving up.
"Wait here and touch nothing."
So we wait. She sends for a guide, who turns out to be a thin, nervous fae with seven fingers on each hand. He introduces himself as Corivel and leads us through a system of locks and passages that would make a siege engineer weep.
The first three levels are straightforward enough. Stone corridors, heavy doors, specialized keys that Corivel produces from his pockets. The shelves are organized by era, containing old texts that look to be in relatively good condition.
Level four introduces the first wards. They hum so loudly that the walls vibrate. Corivel presses his fingers against specific stones in a pattern that takes several minutes to complete, and the wards quiet long enough for us to pass through a door that wasn't there before he started.
Level five is where the layout stops following any clear pattern.
The corridors split and reconnect at sharp, inconsistent angles.
Doors open into rooms that feel misaligned with the structure above them.
I keep one hand on the wall and count my steps, because getting lost down here wouldn't be temporary.
By level seven, the shelves no longer hold books. They're lined with preserved objects, crystallized memory fragments, sealed containers labeled with recorded sounds, jars of contained light that change color when disturbed. The air is denser here, stale with the weight of long storage.
"How deep does this go?" Vashael asks, her voice hushed despite herself.
"Twelve levels," Corivel says. "Though no one has been to twelve in living memory. The locks reset themselves after a certain period, and the Keeper lost the sequence for the lowest levels three centuries ago."
"Comforting," I say.
We find Eltrien on level eight, exactly where the desk attendant said he'd be.
He's seated on the floor amid open texts, the mycelial marks along his skin pulsing in quick, uneven patterns.
His silver eyes move across the pages at an unnatural pace.
He doesn't look up when we enter, which tells me he already knows we're here.
"Let me guess. You're here about the chasms," he says.
"You know about them."
"I know what's causing them." He still doesn't look up. "I've been trying to find a way to stop it, and the answer isn't in any of these texts because it's not something any of us can stop."
I crouch in front of him, forcing myself into his line of sight. "Eltrien. Talk to me."
He finally meets my eyes, and what I see there puts a knot in my gut. Resignation. The look of someone who's run through every option and come up empty.
"When Elle dispersed herself across time, she stabilized the convergence. Stopped the cycle. Saved both realms." He speaks carefully, measuring each word. "But she also removed herself from the present. And without her—"
"Kaelren went after her," I say. "He's using the locket and the Elm Gate to pull her back."
Eltrien goes still. His marks stop pulsing. For a few seconds, he doesn't move at all, and that scares me more than anything else I've seen today.
"He opened the gate," he says. Not a question.
"Yes. Before I left. He was preparing to channel the bond through the locket, to reach her."
Eltrien closes his eyes. When he opens them again, the resignation has deepened into something worse.
"Then he's gone too."
The words hit hard enough to hollow out my chest.
"What do you mean, gone?"