Chapter 15 #2
“We no longer believe this. When Gavril mentioned Raja and the Nushtonia, we began to do more research, another reason you all are still here. “
Kara frowned. “Then what exactly do you believe?”
The Troll King turned, slow and deliberate, toward the black veins spreading through the stone. The glow from the minerals caught along the planes of his face and threw the hard lines of his expression into sharp relief. For the first time since she’d met him, uncertainty bled through.
“That your child is the only reason it has not reached us sooner.”
The chamber plunged into silence.
Kara stared at him.
Behind her, Zara inhaled sharply. Wadim muttered something she couldn’t understand. Gavril was growling, and Rachel pressed closer to Kara’s side. She didn’t know where Aphid had gone but figured he could handle himself.
Honestly, everybody breathed dramatically in this realm. It was getting difficult to track.
“I’m sorry,” Kara said after several long seconds.
“Could you repeat the part where my unborn daughter is apparently the only thing standing between your realm and magical doom? Because I feel like I hallucinated that. Also, that’s kind of a lot of pressure when she hasn’t even made it onto her first little league team yet. ”
The king’s gaze returned to hers. “This darkness is older than Raja.”
That got everyone’s attention.
Even the warriors along the bridges shifted uneasily at the name. One of the elders, a smaller male with skin the color of weathered granite, made a quiet sign in the air with two fingers.
Nick frowned. “That seems a bit unlikely.”
“Nothing is impossible, wolf, you should know this,” the Troll King said quietly. “It’s been buried.”
The blue mineral veins overhead flickered violently, light stuttering across the chamber in a sharp, uneven pulse. Several of the warriors flinched. Kara’s stomach tightened hard enough to make her suck in a breath, one hand pressing instinctively beneath the cloak.
The baby moved again. Not kicking this time. It felt like she was reaching.
The sensation rolled through her body so suddenly and so wrongly placed that her knees nearly buckled. It was as though something inside her had stretched outward toward something deep beneath the floor, and the air between them had answered.
Nick caught her instantly, one arm bracing across her back, the other cupped beneath her elbow.
“Kara—”
Her fingers fisted in the front of his shirt. “Something’s down there.”
The entire chamber went silent.
The Troll King stepped toward her, slowly, the heavy fall of his boots the only sound in the cavern. “What do you sense?”
Fear crawled up Kara’s spine.
Not her fear, but something else’s.
Ancient. Sleeping. Hurting.
The words escaped her before she could decide whether to say them. “It’s trapped.”
The corruption spread across the chamber floor convulsed.
Troll warriors shouted. Several lifted weapons.
The black veins recoiled backward several inches through the stone, flinching away like living things retreating from flame.
Blue light surged through the mineral lines beneath the floor bright enough to illuminate the entire cavern in silver fire, washing the bridges, the walls, the upturned faces of every troll in the chamber in pale, blinding light.
Rachel gasped softly behind her. Aphid took a sharp step backward, his hand half-raised as if to ward off something he couldn’t see, the perpetual smirk wiped clean off his face for the first time since they’d entered the mountain.
And Kara felt her daughter move sharply beneath her heart.
The darkness retreated again, another inch, another, the convulsion shuddering outward through the stone like ripples on a pond.
Every troll in the chamber froze.
The silver-braided elder lowered herself slowly to one knee. The cloak pooled around her like dark water.
Then another elder.
Then another.
Oh no.
Absolutely not.
Kara stared at them in genuine horror. “Please don’t start worshipping me. I do not have the emotional stability for that kind of responsibility.”
Shockingly, nobody laughed.
The Troll King looked, if anything, more unsettled than reassured. His amber gaze tracked from the kneeling elders to Kara’s stomach and back to her face.
“That has never happened before,” he said quietly.
Nick’s hand spread fully across Kara’s stomach again, fingers wide, his wolf surging so hard against the bond that she could feel it like static along the back of her neck.
“What exactly are you guarding down there?” he demanded. The growl was still riding the edges of his voice.
The Troll King held his gaze for several long seconds before answering. The chamber held its breath with him. “The foundations.”
A cold chill slid down Kara’s spine despite the heat radiating up through the stone. “The foundations of what?”
The Troll King turned his head, slowly, toward the darkness pooling beneath the stone bridges, toward the endless cavern depths that disappeared below them into shadow and the slow, steady pulse of something far older than any of them. “The realms.”
Silence settled heavily over the chamber.
Behind Kara, even Aphid had stopped fidgeting.
“I’m sorry, but is there ever going to be a time when we stop getting new revelations that a certain supernatural species is in charge of that no one else knows about?” Zara asked, her voice calm, but a tad annoyed.
“There’s a reason we don’t allow people into the troll realm,” the Troll King told them.
“And here we thought you wanted to eat us,” Kara said with a small chuckle.
“We did,” a young troll said as he pushed through a couple of warriors. “But papa said you’re friends, not food.”
Another troll child pushed through the crowd to stand beside the first. “You still smell like food to us. But we won’t bite you to find out, or we’ll have to take baths for a month.”
“Like, every day,” the other one finished.
Kara took a deep breath and nodded. “Well, good to know that fish are friends, not food.”
“Oh, fish are definitely food. If you make friends with a fish you’re bonkers.”
“Good to know,” Kara pointed at the boys with a smile. Then turned back to the king. “So while we’re on the topic of ‘things we’re disclosing,’ would you mind explaining this?” She parted her robe and pointed to her rounding stomach. “Because, by my calculations, I should not be this round yet.”
The king stared at her and then smiled. “Yes, I imagine that you might be confused about that.”
“Well,” Kara said, her smile no doubt sacrine sweet. “I’m so glad that you find my confusion a tad humorous, but could you please explain before I lose my ever-loving, hormone-induced mind on your royal ass?”
A few of the female elder trolls chuckled as they finally stood and quit making Kara feel like the “chosen one.” The silver haired with the long braid said, “My name is Verna. I am the female leader of our council, and that one’s mother.” She pointed to the king.
“Verna?” Wadim asked. “Really? Not Maliki, or Sundra, or Zesa? Just . . . Verna?”
“Can’t you put a muzzle on him?” Rachel asked Zara.
The old woman smiled, the wrinkles in her face rolling up and her eyes brightening a bit. “It’s actually LaVerna, but I find the little ones are able to say Verna a little more easily.”
“Huh,” Wadim nodded, his eyes narrowed in confusion. “I just expected something more, I don’t know, trollish.”
“And what is your name, young one?” Verna asked him.
“Wadim.” He said it proudly, puffing his chest out a bit.
“Interesting,” Verna told him. Then she turned back to Kara.
“Wait,” Wadim called quickly. “Why is that interesting? That didn’t sound like a ‘good’ interesting, that sounded like a ‘weird’ interesting.”
“Oh, well,” Verna said conversationally. “It’s just that your name is the same as what we call the manure of a morion.”
Kara glanced at Wadim.
His face looked a whole lot less interested and a bit greyish. “What is a morion?”
“It’s a type of worm,” Verna said with a jovial smile.
“So my name in the troll realm means worm poop? Seriously?” Wadim looked as if he’d just found out that his entire library had burned to the ground.
Verna’s smile dropped to a frown. “No, not seriously, but that will teach you to criticize somebody’s name now, won’t it?”
Wadim nodded, “Yes ma’am.”
“Excellent,” Verna rubbed her hands together. “Now, let’s get Kara and baby more food. Discuss the awakened darkness, this over-bloated ego Raja, and the business of the Nushtonia.”
“Now we’re talking,” Wadim clapped. “I’m starving.”
“Sit down worm poop,” Verna waved him away, “females eat first in this realm, children eat second.”
“Guess that means we eat last boys,” Wadim said, looking at Gavril, Nick, and Aphid.
Verna raised a brow at him. “I said children eat second. Torvik?”
“Yes, Grams?” The little troll child Kara had healed hurried out from between a group of males.
“Show Wadim where the children’s table is.”
Torvik’s face turned into a huge grin. “Oh, awesome. A wolf warrior of old gets to sit with us!”
“He’s actually a hist—” Gavril started but Wadim cut him off.
“I can regale you with dangerous battles and secret missions, fighting every kind of foe you can imagine,” the Romania historian said with a wink, his spirits renewed apparently after being called worm poop.
Kara had to give it to Wadim, he was hard to keep down.
“Because he’s read it all,” Gavril said so low that Wadim either didn’t hear it or chose to ignore it.