13. Maren
Maren
Isaw myself first.
A lone woman in a canoe, garbed in hau bark and tapa, dark cynicism in her eyes. But then I seemed to melt. The waves in my hair ironed straight. My eyes blinked, and suddenly they were blue. My mouth tightened, my muscles shrank, my body lengthened. Cebrinne took my place.
I shifted, trying to pull my arm from the hole.
But she changed again. A young woman, not unlike Selena, standing in front of a crumbling, white-washed house overlooking the ocean.
Images flashed in my mind, slow at first but gaining in speed, pages flicking in a book.
Too quick to study, though they were all female, and almost all Naiad.
The shape of their bodies morphed little by little. Their skin changed. Their hair changed.
The environment around them changed as well. Most of them gazed up at me from the sea, though some perched on a shore, some sat amongst rocks, some stared through heavy mist. Their faces evolved slowly. On and on and on. Until it stopped.
Stopped on a woman with deep, luminous skin, a wicker basket of flowers on her hip. She studied me, eyes as bright and silver as the sand of the moon.
“Maren of Leihani,” she said, hiking her basket a bit higher. “You’ve made it. You’ve reached the apex of the mountain. The heart of Truth. You may ask me one question.”
The heart of Truth?
My brows tightened. Did that mean whatever I asked, she’d answer truthfully?
I didn’t waste my one question with clarifying. I’m not sure I trusted her anyway, after the assault I’d endured to reach her. My mind sifted through my thoughts, searching for what to ask. The mountain had shown me at least a thousand faces.
My ancestry? The women I’d descended from? Leading all the way back to Theia?
Because I held little doubt that was who gazed at me now. Her dress was clean, soft linen. Pretty but simple. And her hair wasn’t polished and sleek but thick and tameless. Youth lingered in her eyes rather than that smooth, imperial gaze she’d fixed me with in her garden.
But there was no mistaking the height of her cheekbones or the grand curve of her jaw, the way her upper lip bowed in a half-moon or the feminine arch of her hips.
Theia stood before me in a world of misty white.
I transferred my weight between my feet, considering what to say. Like she’d been in her garden, she was in no hurry. I suppose that, blessed with eternal life, I wouldn’t have been either.
My fidgeting feet turned into steps. I paced through mist, turning around to walk back, my stone banging quietly over my chest.
How the stones would kill Thaan?
As if it heard me, the frosty prism glowed softly against my skin.
No.
No, I trusted myself enough to believe I’d figure that out on my own.
Was there another way to recordae?
I scoffed at myself in silence, the question surfacing without my summoning it.
Born from something foolish and childish.
Perhaps even selfish. Some need to fill a fear I’d never quite been able to acknowledge.
Love had promised I could recordae Kye with a life preserved.
But that involved a life risked. I wasn’t willing to chance Kye’s life just to bond with him again.
Besides, it didn’t matter whether or not we could recordae.
Not if Kye’s life ended centuries before my own.
Maybe, in some ways, it was a gift that Love had broken our bond.
Cruel, but also kind. A gift that I wouldn’t have to endure that earth-shattering pain once more.
That I could lose him, mourn him, and live the rest of my days peacefully.
I’d never again endure the torture of my voice shrieking alone in that unending void.
No. I was grateful, even if I was heartbroken, with what Love had given me.
If you return from Perpetuum, it will only be because you’ve made bargains with us all.
The Fates. Theia. Myself. Gods who do not care what happens to you or your soul.
Gods who will take from you more than they will give.
Gods who would use you for their own means. As a message, as a weapon, as a tool.
I glanced over my shoulder at Theia. The goddess hadn’t moved. She watched unblinking, as still as ancient stone.
We’re nothing more than cards in their hands, Leihani. Which card are you?
“What’s your stake in sending us back to the mortal realm?”
The goddess blinked. “Ending Thaan’s life will free thousands—”
“Let me clarify,” I cut in. “What does Theia, goddess of the moon and sea, ruler of Perpetuum, seer and secret-keeper, gain from our success?”
Theia’s jaw firmed. She lifted her chin, tilting her head just slightly, the glow over her cheekbones a stark contrast to the shallow hollow of her cheeks. “The divine tellings of the future would matter little to your mortal soul.”
I raised my chin. “And yet I asked anyway.”
She exhaled tightly, waiting for me to change my mind.
When I didn’t, she plucked a silver bloom from her basket, watching its closed petals turn as she rotated it within her fingers.
“Thaan of Safiro has amassed the largest Naiad army the world has ever seen. Yet they have no home, no colony, no base. He uses them as invaders, raiding one small siren society at a time.”
I already knew that, and opened my mouth to tell her she was again evading my question, when her luminous eyes flicked to me.
“The time of sirens is dying. Humans populate the world now, and the number of Naiads shrinks every year. Thaan’s is not only a method of conquest. It is a slow and effective vanquish, whether he means it to be or not.
” She stepped forward. Stepped toward me.
“After an aeon of watching sirens grow weaker, smaller, less, I am ready to start anew.”
The silver bloom shone in her hand. A round little sphere, its petals pried apart at the top, thin and delicate. She held it out to me.
But I backed a step away. “What does that mean? Am I to mark the end of sirens?”
“No, child.” Theia’s eyes flashed. “You are the beginning.”
I didn’t like the light in her eyes, the way she almost smiled without stretching a single muscle in her face.
My one question exploded into a thousand more, but Theia’s face blurred and mottled.
The mist around us eddied in a slow circle, though it quickly became faster, catching my hair, clawing at my eyes.
“Wait,” I coughed, the air thick and sharp in my throat.
But Theia had fractured, distorted, a haze of color within the vortex. The only thing I could make out was that silver bloom, straight and unharmed by the wind.
I fought for my flying hair, catching my balance as the mist threw me to one side. “I’m not finished!”
Theia was finished. The bloom fully opened, a thousand petals yawning wide, the most beautiful flower I’d ever seen. A single petal fell, immediately snatched into the maelstrom, disappearing from sight. And something in me knew that taking the moon-damned thing was the only way out of here.
I shifted and fell forward against the push of the wind.
It rained against me with unseen talons, scratching at my face and neck, battering my eyes.
More petals fell, eaten by the cyclone. Hands and knees, I crawled to her, a mere shadow behind all the twisting haze, the stem and bloom caught in her fingers the center of the storm. Six petals left.
Two more ripped away.
I reached for it, fingers stretched, my arm shaking the further I extended. My hand closed around the bloom. And the wind stopped. Mist around me froze, mid-blur.
The sand opened below my feet. Silver stem in my hand, Theia watched me plummet. Free fall. A weightless body under the exigent pull of gravity.
My stomach floated somewhere in my throat, my limbs winding, fumbling, searching for solid ground.
The initial shock of falling wore away like the snap of teeth, fast and cruel.
I wasn’t dropping. I was hurtling toward a target.
Distant stars hung around me, constellations beyond my grasp.
I focused ahead. To the growing curve of a horizon, warm sunlight dusting over an expanding skyline.
Small mountains peppered its crust, snow-capped peaks just visible through clouds like tiny pebbles jutting just over the surface of a tide pool.
In my periphery, two other figures flashed forward with me. A dull huff of laughter cleaved my head. Theia had sent us up her stupid mountain just to send us back.
The flight back wreaked havoc on my eyes. I could barely open them, and when I did, they watered and stung. Somewhere along the rim of the atmosphere, the stars dimmed, the world brightening, the air less black and more blue.
A hammer bludgeoned against my chest, a sudden forceful crack.
A heartbeat.
A moment later, I coughed. Oxygen.
That silver in my skin ripened with sudden color.
The vestiges of mortality trickled in. Things that, in a very short matter of time, I’d forgotten. I was cold. Angry. Thirsty.
I did not let myself admit that I was afraid.
I knew what we were heading into.
At some point, I realized I was running.
Sprinting through cloud and ozone, the scent of it thick in my nose, like cold rain over iron.
Toward a blanket of snow down a heavy slope.
Black ants marching up the steep slant, one of them standing still as its neighbors continued up, facing a single dark speck at the bottom.
Go, I said. Move. Get ready.
But I just watched myself stand there like a fool, calling down the mountain at the figure staring back.
I pumped my legs and arms as though it would make me move faster. Somewhere just out of sight, a whoosh of air gusted behind me as Cebrinne and Kye followed, ready to land the moment I did.
Go, I all but screamed at myself, clearly in view now, though I simply stood there, unmoving. Go, go, go, go, go!
And through the thicket below, I saw them. Coats of red, bursting from the trees, advancing on Kye’s turned back.
My bare feet touched down, and in the final few strides toward myself, I crunched through the hardened shell of snow.
Collided with my own body in a violent crash that snapped my head back. Struck my mind with a brutal rupture of thought. Sent shock waves down my spine to my fingers. I threw myself forward. Me. Whole and alive and mortal.
I rolled, caught my balance, leapt to my feet.
And tore down the mountain.
“TURN AROUND.”
Kye’s expression of surprise ignited from behind his eyes. He twisted, though, obeying either the shout from my chest or the sudden fear in my eyes, reaching behind his head for his sword. But his baldric wasn’t strapped to his back.
It was strapped to mine.