Chapter 21
Chapter Twenty-One
Nova
The city felt even more massive and difficult to comprehend as Kaelen and I took our time walking through it.
We wound through streets paved with shadowy stones that glistened as if wet—even though there had been no rain, as far as I knew.
Did it ever rain in this realm?
I looked to what I could see of the violent-colored clouds above, pondering the question. But any expanse of sky was difficult to see, given the city’s jagged roofline, its towering black spires, and the banners hanging from many of the houses. Almost all of those banners featured the same thing: A golden stag with a torch burning between its vine-wrapped antlers.
We eventually came to a corner where stalls were set up, strange wares on display for the countless wandering wraiths making their way through the area.
I stared the longest at a table containing neat rows of diamond-shaped containers, each with a swirling mass of some sort of cloudy grey substance inside. The merchant who stood behind this table had eyes that danced restlessly between shades of orange and red, like the flickering flames of candles. They fixed in my direction, and he beckoned me over with a curl of his long fingers—but Kaelen placed a hand on my shoulder before I could even consider taking a step.
“Memories of our living world,” he explained, nodding at the diamond-shaped containers. “You break them and breathe in the mist, and it’s like being back there for a bit.”
I gaped, barely resisting the urge to run over and grab one to try for myself.
Kaelen’s grip on my shoulder tightened, as if he could sense my desire. Annoying, at first, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized he was probably right to protect me from myself; dropping into a clear memory of the living world right now would do nothing to settle the vexation I felt after everything that had happened today. I was working hard to bury the part of me that wanted to abandon my mission and run back to the world above; tempting myself with visions of that world would be foolish.
My gaze fell instead to the table beside the memories, where small vials in several different sizes and colors were lined up in equally orderly rows.
“And those are strong emotions, bottled up for consumption,” Kaelen said under his breath, his tone suggesting he didn’t fully agree with them being displayed so prominently.
“How?” I asked. “And why?”
“The how is by way of relatively simple magic. The why …” He hesitated. “It’s easy to forget the sensations these spells create, even here in the protective walls of my city. I see to it that my citizens never have to fully forget. Some get more addicted to the spells than others, though, and would ruin themselves chasing down an emotion if they could—so it’s an important commodity, but one that must be regulated.”
My curiosity fully piqued, I watched the colorful fluids shining, bubbling, rising up and tumbling down in their vials. It was likely similar to what Orin would have called parlor-trick magic—generic spells that anyone with the right ingredients and a bit of knowledge could pull off. Nothing that would leave any lasting impact, in other words.
I wanted to experiment with these things, anyway—to experience what such common magic tricks might be like in this realm. But I also had no money to buy any of said tricks; coins had not been on the list of things I’d thought I would need for the Underworld, after all.
There didn’t seem to be much exchanging of money or goods going on, anyway. Although, one transaction did catch my eye: A squat little woman with pale violet hair was holding up her wrist to one of the merchants across from the memory dealer, affording him a good look at the caged flame dangling from her bracelet. They were speaking in quick, hushed tones; the lady seemed distraught about something.
My eyes jumped from the flame around her wrist to another one around the wrist of the merchant assisting her, and then to all the other fires on all the other beings around us.
They were everywhere .
I hadn’t imagined it during my initial walk through this city—all of the citizens of Erebos carried flames on them in some manner. Some hung from bandoliers, others were fashioned into necklaces or rings, while a few simply carried them in small metal lanterns.
“What are all these blue fires for?” I asked Kaelen.
“ Vivaris flames,” he replied. “They draw from the greater concentrations of similar fires you might have noticed scattered around the city.”
I nodded, remembering the sapphire wisps gathered along the base of his manor and elsewhere. “What do they do?”
“It’s…rather difficult to explain.”
“Thalia said the ones in this city are more alive than the shades outside of its walls,” I pressed, refusing to accept his evasive answer.
“She’s right.”
“Do these flames have something to do with that?” I asked. “I can sense magic in them.” My hand absently went to the bracelet of turquoise beads my father had given me. It kept happening whenever we drew close to a concentrated pool of fire—or even just a large group of flame-carrying wraiths—the vibrations, the humming.
But I still had no idea what any of it meant .
“It’s very old magic,” Kaelen confirmed, “put in place by powerful beings back when this city first became what it is today. I’m a descendant of those beings—the only one left after all this time. I’ve been tending to the flames and the wraiths here since I was ten years old.”
Powerful beings…
More necromancers, like the ones who had built up the barrier where we’d first encountered Thalia?
“You’re the only living being within these city walls, normally?”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve been here since you were a child…so you’ve aged and changed, while I assume the wraiths stay the same?” It was a theory I’d been piecing together while trying to understand the vision I’d had when I’d touched Red; if she hadn’t changed since her death, then perhaps the woman I’d seen—the one who looked like me—was merely a distant ancestor of mine who had known the child when she was alive. Maybe that’s why she’d been drawn to me; because she thought I was someone else.
“Correct,” said Kaelen. “Typically, only the ones with Shadowblood in their veins can survive in this realm these days. Though, we are aging at a more rapid rate than before, and our magic is becoming less and less potent.”
“Shadowblood…” The term struck me as somewhat familiar.
He read the curious look on my face, and he moved to answer it with a demonstration; he rolled up his sleeve and reached out a hand toward a nearby concentration of vivaris fire—a gathering of it inside a large metal bowl held by a regal-looking man carved from marbled stone.
I watched as the veins on Kaelen’s arm darkened. As the twisting strands of fire within the bowl did, too, the mass of them turning almost black before he began to pull some of that darkness out, siphoning it into his own body.
Once he was finished, the flames held by the statue were a much brighter blue than before, though the size of their collective mass had decreased.
Several of the meandering souls around us began to move with more purpose, funneling toward the brightened flames. They took the personal fires they carried and held them closer to the metal bowl, and one by one, those personal lights flickered and briefly burned with more intensity than before.
My turquoise bracelet shivered. I clenched it tightly as I studied the man beside me more closely, realization settling over me. “The way you drew that darkness in…you’re a necromancer. Like Thalia. Like me.”
His eyes returned to the road ahead, and he trudged onward through his city, guiding me underneath an arching black-iron gate as he said, “Yes. For whatever that’s worth anymore.”
“So, all of those with our blood can move freely through this dead realm.”
“That’s right—though the ones traveling with you seem to be managing it, too, Thalia tells me. The Light King’s magic must be very powerful and protective, indeed, for them to have lived and aged relatively normally in the seven years they’ve spent here.”
I nearly stumbled to a stop.
What else had Thalia told him? And why? She’d seemed furious with him earlier…why trust him with any of our secrets? What sort of relationship did the two of them truly share?
The longer I spent in this city, the more questions I seemed to have.
I tried not to let my nervousness show, attempting to steer the conversation away from myself and the ones I traveled with, as I said, “You tend to the flames here, then?”
“With some help from the more sentient wraiths that I can guide with my magic.”
A chilling prospect occurred to me. “What happens when you’re gone, if you’re the last living Keeper of Erebos? What becomes of the flames—and the ones they give sentience to—if there’s no one left to tend them?”
He didn’t answer.
“Why are you keeping them to begin with?”
Again—no answer. The silence stretched into a heavy, crushing thing, settling over us and slowing our steps.
Finally, he said, “The explanation for that isn’t covered on this introductory tour, I’m afraid.”
The dismissive reply sent a rush of indignant heat through me. My magic stirred dangerously in response. I considered letting it loose, using my shadows to intimidate him into giving me an actual answer.
But then I glanced around at all the hooded eyes watching us pass by—all the wraiths that he apparently controlled in some way.
The numbers were not in my favor.
I held my tongue.
I continued trying to sort through all the other questions in my head as we walked on, eventually coming to a center square. Here, a series of metal bowls stood like a strange art display, each one tipped at a different angle. The centermost bowl was enormous, yet the flame within it was puny in comparison.
Had fire filled the entire thing at some point?
There were seven other bowls scattered around the large one; nothing burned within them, now, but I had a feeling that hadn’t always been the case.
Curiosity getting the better of me, I ran my fingertips over the rim of the one closest to me.
As expected, my woven-diamond bracelet twitched as soon as I touched the cold metal, and a blinding vision of blue flames struck through my mind—a vision of the past, when such flames burned brightly.
Blinking, I stumbled back, bumping into Kaelen.
He hardly seemed to notice me; he was too busy staring into the largest bowl, his eyes haunted and distant as they reflected what remained of the fire.
“The people of Erebos are survivors,” he told me, his voice low, as if he didn’t want any of those people to overhear. “But the magic—the fire—that once protected them fades more and more by the day. Many other cities like ours have already fallen. And their citizens have been… erased. ”
“Survivors?”
“The word is unexpected to you?”
“I expected nothing but death in this realm. I was prepared to face death. Not…this.”
His expression was grim. “And for the most part, death is what you will find if you continue to journey outside of the safety of our fair city.”
“But that’s not what’s here.”
“Not yet.”
I hugged my arms around myself, overtaken by a sudden surge of cold. “Can the flames be rekindled?”
The silence grew heavy once more. Burdened—like the kind that came before bad news. A buzz of warning skittered through me as I recalled my conversation with Zayn from earlier.
I fixed Kaelen with a hard stare. “Why did you truly bring me into this city?”
He didn’t take his eyes off the dwindling fire as he said, “To give you a tour of it, as I told you earlier. To help you understand it.”
“Is that really all?”
“Is that not the hospitable thing to do? They do such things in the living world you call home, too, if I’m not mistaken.”
“In my experience, people are more forthcoming with their hospitality when they need something in return.”
His teeth bared in a not-quite-smile. His fist clenched, and I would have sworn the flame in the bowl flickered, as if suffocated by his closing hand.
He still didn’t look at me as he said, “So maybe I do have a favor to ask of you.”