2. Maren
Maren
Ibalked at his response, but I didn’t have time to argue as he waved his fingertips.
My feet lifted from the surface-less place I stood, my body jolting as I tilted up.
And though the world around me hadn’t yet changed, I could feel myself leaving his realm, his house, as I was sent somewhere above.
Toward the watery bottom of the lake, which rippled against the vibration of my movement.
Kye.
Three days.
I could never make it to Brána Do Podsvetia without help. The forbidden channel lay across half the mountainside. Weeks of travel from where I’d left the Naiads at the edge of Sylus Lake.
“No! No!” I gasped, feet running in midair as I struggled to evade his grasp.
Fire ignited in my chest, a bolt of anger through my veins.
“I’m not done, I’m not done, I’mnotdone!
” My voice punctured my own thoughts, hard and sharp as I ascended, groping for something to hold onto.
A corner of rock or a shred of air from which I could steal water.
My heart beat a wicked drum, blood crashing in a frantic surge.
The Breath of Safiro glowed brightly, illuminating the nothingness around me.
The rippling water above grew nearer. “Darkness!” I shouted, “You coward. You pathetic little”—I thrust a hand out, calling to the black liquid. It didn’t heed me. But electricity snapped between my fingers. “CAECUS!”
A sharp white crack blinded my vision. Thunder vibrated down the wall-less cavern. My body halted.
Sideways. Suspended as though I lay on a bed. My legs and arms churned slowly, my glare fixed above. Blood clattered through my thoughts, louder than the panting from my mouth. I angrily blinked away the brightness behind my eyes, unearthing the sting of hot moisture between my lashes.
Shadows swirled in front of my face, oozing from the corners of my vision and gathering over the top of me.
Just beyond my reach, they formed the shape of a man.
He drifted closer. Close enough that the glow of my stone sent his shadows scattering.
Close enough to make out his shoulders, his jaw, his eyes.
He wore a tunic of gleaming black, the material thin but not delicate.
It slipped around him like water, as though he’d captured a calm pool in luxe swells of fabric, flooding and receding with each stretch of his limbs.
The arcane markings traveled his skin beyond the boundaries of his clothes, around his neck and into his hair.
“Caecus.” His voice came as a whisper, but it shook me somewhere at my core, crackling down the walls of my mind. “You may think that is my name. But that is merely what they call me when they curse my existence.”
I’d never seen darker skin, though somehow it shone bright and luminous under his fading tendrils. I gasped at his beauty. A proud nose, a strong chin, eyes a cold stone gray that somehow grew crystallic at the center. I froze as he inched closer, reaching a hand for me. For my chest.
The image of him blurred through my glossy eyes. I blinked back furious tears, waiting for him to reach through my flesh. To cleave apart my ribs, to grasp my heart, to suffocate the life from me. But his fingers curled around the Scale of Safiro.
“Where did you get this?”
I cleared my throat of the raw anger that had clogged it, ordering my heart to slow after he’d almost banished me from his house.
Darkness gripped the stone firmly in his fingers.
Its light seemed to burn into his skin. I watched, breathless as his palm simmered and flaked in thin patches only to float away, like delicate paper used for tinder in a fire.
Ash sailed aimlessly away from us, though he made no indication that the slow charring of his flesh bothered him.
Silver ink beaded underneath, shimmery like molten steel.
His blood, I realized. The ichor of a god.
He continued to stare at the stone, a blue glow scattered across his face, a desolation in his eyes I hadn’t expected.
“I found it,” I answered.
“Where?”
“The bottom of Nahli. The volcano. On Neris Island.”
He didn’t move. But I became aware that my body stood upright once again, my feet pressed into the nothing that held me erect.
“You retrieved it?”
I bit down the urge to remind him he’d claimed the ability to see into my past. “Yes.”
“Do you know what this is?”
My mouth opened to answer him. Did I know what it was?
Was this stone more than a powerful tool through which Theia had punished Sidra and Thaan?
Darkness released the stone. The last of his ashes simmered as he reached for me, and I stiffened as his fingers slid over the shell of my ear, tucking a wayward lock of hair away, then pressed his fingers into the side of my jaw, turning my head to face him again.
The cold drip of his fingers didn’t meet my skin.
His touch was warm instead, though it only lasted a moment.
“You remind me of another Naiad,” he said. “One who refused to give me a certain name. I won’t make that mistake twice.”
“I am Maren of Leihani.” I ignored the twist of my stomach, slowly unraveling the longer he gazed at me. “You will grant me passage to the sea monster so that I can reclaim what I’ve lost. So that I may return to find Thaan of Safiro and restore the world from his grasp.”
“Impertinent as her as well,” Darkness muttered under his breath.
I faltered slightly, wondering what that meant, though he didn’t give me time to ponder it as he flicked the stone between his fingers.
“You haven’t worn this long enough to kill the Abyssi.
Your blood still oxygenates through your lungs.
Come back to me when you have reached the height of your power.
When gills have fully severed tunnels to your bloodstream. ”
“I can’t wait. Theia said I only had three days.”
Darkness laughed, the sound a cold penetration into the borders of my mind. “Three days to reach Brána Do Podsvetia and kill the Abyssi.”
“And to cross the sea of stars to Perpetuum.”
“This is a favor too heavy, sweet wraithling, should you fail. You are asking me to interfere with the whims of The Fates. If I do what you ask, even if you uphold your end and return to this world with your Triad, you will become a servant of mine the day your mortal life ends. No eternity in Perpetuum. You will exist much as the Abyssi exists, after your death. Fail to make your crossing in three days, and you will fall through the stars and find yourself back here, in my house of shadow. A wraithling for my collection.”
Darkness exhaled through his nose. “Even if I get you there,” he said softly, “even if you succeed in killing my creature, the Guardians would never let you pass without taking their own payment from you. And their toll will be steeper than mine.” He continued surveying me.
My jaw firmed. “You have much to live for, in the world of light above. Even without your bond. Be certain, darling, that there is nothing you would refuse to trade in the name of a moon that sends you to your death. Be certain there is nothing worth returning home to protect.”
I’ll come for you.
“I’m certain.” I didn’t even pause to consider my answer.
Darkness gazed at me almost sadly. “Nothing?”
The question enveloped me in a rush of cold. My nerves stretched under my skin, tight ropes through my body, fragile as I pondered an existence as a monster. Alone for an eternity, guarding a cavern to the stars I could never cross.
But that empty void echoed in my mind as I murmured Kye’s name.
The cordae.
It broke. It broke. It broke.
“Well?”
“I have love for many things.” My voice hardened as I nocked my chin towards the ceiling. “Up there. None that I would not trade.”
Darkness tilted his head. “And what about the things in here,” he asked, pointing to my chest.
My jaw firmed. “Take them.” The words doused me in bitter, chopping waves of wintry sea. My chin quivered in the chill, my muscles hardening to ward off the shiver that fell through my spine. But my anger was enough to keep me warm.
He sighed softly, taking my hand in his and gently drawing a line across the fleshy pad of my palm. A sharp slice followed, blood peering through the fresh sear. “Go on,” he said. “Swear it.”
“Take me to the bottom of Brána Do Podsvetia now so that I may reach Perpetuum within three days,” I whispered, watching a single drop of my precious siren blood scour the curve of my hand and drip to the floorless expanse below.
“If I fail to cross, I will become your wraithling. If I succeed, I will still forfeit my soul to you the day I die.”
The hot sear of my blood never came. Instead, a faint light floated from my throat as I said the last word, pulled by a lazy invisible string.
It flexed and curled the way his shadows moved, though it was no larger than a finger bone, and when it reached his outstretched hand, it sank into the grooves of his palm.
Darkness’s sad eyes wavered before mine, thinning into the black.
Smoke curled around me, tucking me in. “Hold onto me,” he said, lifting me in his arms. He stepped, and the world blurred.
Light and shadow, shapes and wind, water and fire and rock and rain.
He stepped through the world, and emerged under the pale winter sun, bleak red cliffs hanging over a wide channel.
His skin seared and burned, silver ichor dripping like pearls from his body.
His shadows withered and coiled in pain, and he flexed his jaw, bearing the sun’s burn to carry me.
Pulling Kye’s knife from its sheath, I sliced a silk swatch from my dress as he placed my feet onto the cliff ledge, pressing it to his deepest wound.
Darkness hissed, either in pain or insult, I couldn’t tell.
His hands folded into the empty air, shadows swallowing him away with a crack. And I was suddenly alone. I glanced around, shaking off the eeriness of his disappearance, and the icy flat of a hand slapped me sideways. Not a hand—a wave.
“DARKNESS,” I bellowed into the cold. But he’d left.
Abandoned me exactly where I asked him to. Surrounded by eerie depths. By black night and jagged stone, sharp and porous, lit only by the blue glow from my stone, stealing across cliffside walls. Water shifted over my feet, striking me from behind, its riptide as angry as fingers clawing me in.
“Swim fast,” he said, voice echoing inside my thoughts.
The words sent a jolt through my bones. Three days.
The timer had reignited, the passing seconds like sand slipping through the throat of an hourglass.
Fingers trembling, I shoved knife and soiled swatch back into the sheath and dove, choking as water filled my mouth.
Cold, unforgiving water. Black and chilled.
My arms stroked without my commanding them to, and a weight sank around me, full-bodied and heavy.
Pounding returned to my head, either from my heart or the underwater sounds of sea. Until I found a vein of dreamy warmth sliding along the icy water, letting myself slip inside it to the deep chasm of the channel.
There, in the dark, I felt the water stir as softly as a breath blown over a candle flame.
Click. Click. Click.