Chapter 14 #2
I let my eyelids close and focused on the stone beneath my palm.
In the darkness of my mind, nine points of glowing light appeared.
They floated in a line, beckoning me forward until a wall rose before me.
I gazed up at its towering height and infinite stretch, and I pressed my palm to its bricks—the same hand clutching the heartstone.
Free me, I spoke into the ether. Tear down this wall, and let it never rise again. Let this island be open to all who wish to come.
Heat intensified beneath my touch. My blood felt as if it was boiling under my skin. I ground my jaws against the pain, fighting the instinct to pull away. A web of cracks splintered from my hand, and hunks of stone began to fall.
“Don’t let go,” a voice reminded me. “Whatever happens, Diem, do not let go.”
Crumbling bricks rained down on me, and though I knew it was all in my mind, the pain was very, very real.
The sizzling burn of the heartstone, the crush of being buried alive under debris.
The world gave another groan, and I felt the pull into the beyond, tugging so hard it might rip me in half.
Everything was chaos, and everything hurt.
I held fast to the heartstone, and I screamed. My throat was raw and bleeding when the feeling of warmth began to swirl away, like a door left ajar on a cold winter’s day. I forced my eyes open to see the Kindred stepping backward toward their arches.
“Wait,” I pleaded. “You haven’t told me what to do.”
“We’ve told you what we can,” Sophos said.
“The only thing you’ve given me are stories and riddles. I need answers.”
“If we reveal too much, the fates will shift—and when they do, it is never for the better.” His voice faded with his silhouette. “You have the clues you need. You must be brave enough to look, and braver still to see the answer.”
Darkness closed in at the corners of my vision. My body collapsed against the pedestal, my fingers barely touching the heartstone’s rough edge. My words slurred with labored breaths. “What . . . what if I can’t . . . change him? How do I kill . . .”
Sophos’s answer was too far, too muffled to hear. As the veil passed over his archway, he vanished with a silvery flash.
One by one, the Kindred drew back into their arches and disappeared. My head lolled toward Lumnos, pleading with the desperate words I couldn’t speak. But as with all my prayers, her answer never came. She pressed a palm to her heart, offered the last of her sad, sweet smiles, and vanished.
Once again, only Umbros remained. He knelt and slid his arms beneath Yrselle’s body, cradling her against his chest. He bowed his head and pressed a kiss to her forehead.
The veil surged forward, and he was gone.
I opened my eyes and immediately regretted it.
My head had its own painful heartbeat at the brightness of the maliciously sunny day. My stomach lurched with a wave of nausea, a familiar consequence of the morning after a night too well spent.
I pushed myself upright with a miserable groan. I was sprawled on the grass beside Perthe’s grave. Aside from the grime of weeks with nowhere to bathe, my hands were unmarred—no blood, no wounds, no blistered flesh.
I twisted to look over my shoulder. At the center of the island, the Kindred’s Temple was imposing as ever. The cauldrons still burned, the heartstone still sat on its pedestal, and Yrselle’s lifeless body still lay in the Umbros arch.
I scrubbed at my face. I’d sampled enough wild mushrooms while foraging to recognize what had happened. The rosebane I’d swallowed had apparently done its job. The Kindred, the heartstone—none of it had been real. Just the imaginings of a delirious, drug-addled woman.
“Never again, Perthe,” I muttered as I climbed to my feet. “I don’t care how bored I get. Let’s never, ever do that ag—”
I froze.
With no one but me to disturb it, I’d come to know this island so well that even the smallest change to its landscape caught my eye.
And this was no small change.
Stabbed deep into the sandy soil, less than a foot from the Lumnos pier, was the gilded handle of a sword. My head whipped around, my vision lagging slightly behind. “Hello?” I called out. “Is anyone here?”
No sound but the wind through the brush.
I crept closer to the blade. “Hello?” I yelled again.
Silence.
I crouched beside the blade. Was I still under the rosebane’s effects? Was this another delusion? Sunlight gleamed off the golden scrollwork etched up and down its glittering black blade, and a glassy stone was embedded at the center of its shank.
The Kindred’s sword.
The one I’d fought with in Sophos after Stuart had fetched it from the archives—the same one I’d seen in the visions of me and Luther on a battlefield. I took a nervous glance around, then grabbed its handle and pulled it free. A whisper of ancient, powerful words carried to me on the breeze.
An older voice. Feminine and wise. Maternal.
Not the Kindred’s sword, I realized. Their mother’s.
Sorrow’s Edge—the weapon she’d forged to kill her son, only to die by its blade instead.
I squinted again at the Temple, and my heart dropped to my feet. It wasn’t Yrselle’s body at the foot of the Umbros arch—it was her clothing. A discarded dress, nothing more. A gust of wind caught the fabric and sent it whirling into the air and out of the Temple.
My heart pounded a frantic beat as I turned back to the Lumnos pier and slowly brought my feet to its edge. If the Kindred’s visit had been a delusion, one step further would kill me. But if it was real . . .
One step would set me free.
I tightened my grip on the sword and pressed my other hand to my mating mark. My boot slid forward past the shore and onto the wooden dock.
Nothing changed.
No flash of lethal light, no instant death.
I held my breath and took another step.
Then everything changed.
It crashed into me at once. The howl of my writhing godhood, enraged and tearing at my chest to get out. My gryvern bond, overwhelming me with waves of panic and confusion and sadness and fury.
And the mating bond.
I’d never felt its effects uninhibited by the island’s power. What I had felt had been a misery to endure, but I wondered now if that had been my own pathetic loneliness. As the full weight expanded through my chest, it hit me that this . . . gods, this was the bond.
My skin was aflame, crawling with an itch only his touch would soothe. I staggered forward another few steps, pulled by an unexplainable draw toward the Lumnos coast that I knew, in my heart, was a call to him—to my mate, to the man that I loved.
In my stupor, my foot caught on a plank, and I tumbled to my knees. The sword clattered over the side of the dock, splashing into the Sacred Sea’s cerulean depths.
I swore and crawled to the edge—then drew in a sudden breath.
In the reflection of the water’s surface, a glowing, nine-peaked Crown hovered over my head.
The circlet was woven with dark thorny vines curled around blooming flowers and shards of ice.
Flames danced among smoke and crashing waves, while sparks flickered over veins tangled with writhing snakes.
All of Emarion’s realms—or at least all its Descended—were represented in its chaotic beauty.
All but one.
My focus shifted to my face. My features were sunken and dark, my sallow skin as stained with dirt as my tattered clothes. Dried blood and grime had turned my matted hair a sickly beige. But my eyes . . .
Beneath their smoke-grey hue, a fire raged.
As if stoked from within, flames engulfed me.
I curled a hand around my golden pendant to protect it as my clothes blackened and fell to ash.
Water rose from the sea and swept over my body, refreshingly cool, then combed like fingers through my hair.
What lingering filth the fire’s cleansing heat had not burned, the salt from the waves scrubbed away.
When my magic subsided, I was fully bare, but I was clean for the first time in weeks.
And I was ready.
I held my hands over the sea. From the dark abyss, my fallen sword floated to the surface, now mysteriously sheathed inside its gleaming golden scabbard. Icy limbs took shape and lifted the blade from the water, carefully placing it in my waiting palms.
I walked to the end of the pier, lifted my chin, and issued my first command as Queen of Emarion.
“Sorae, come.”