Chapter 36
Chapter Thirty-Six
Emmeline
The interior of the mausoleum was simple. Empty except for the cobwebs stringing the corners and the remnants of broken glass turning to dust along the base.
But its presence hummed down Emmeline’s skin, reminiscent of when they’d visited the Storyteller’s Lair on Alvan, or even the history in the arena.
Frescos covered three walls, but they’d lost their vibrancy over time, the colors faded together.
The hints of moonlight that shone through the round, twelve-paned window sitting above the door didn’t illuminate enough detail, nor did the scant, aged mystlight lanterns flickering dully around the room.
Emmeline followed Roremar to the back wall, her skirt swirling up a dust storm with each step. She squinted at the image inlaid in the plaster. Silver hair and swirling clouds around a female form.
“It’s Valyrie,” she whispered, chills skittering down her arms. The clouds—that was the Angel’s ether, and the wings were slightly visible beneath years of dust.
“In the center, yes,” Roremar said. “Who’s with her?”
Emmeline studied the two other women, one on either side. Their faces were obscured. On one, the paint had been scratched away entirely. “I don’t know. It’s hard to tell with the dirt and age.”
“Clearly no art restoration team around here,” Roremar muttered, brushing his fingers over the dull works.
“Perhaps we should tell Lola.” Emmeline scanned the rest of the room. The paintings on the side walls each contained six forms angled toward the back fresco. “The Fates.”
Roremar turned from Valyrie’s image, and Emmeline knew the moment he saw it. His entire demeanor shifted—shoulders stiffened, jaw tightening as he drifted to the furthest corner.
The facial features of the Fates were indeterminable, but the last one stood with his back to the others, as if he was gazing across the room. A silver chalice dangled between his fingers, and a black panther sat at his feet, tail wrapped around one ankle.
Emmeline approached Roremar, and because agony was rolling off him and there was no one here but them, she dared to slide her fingers between his.
Roremar swallowed. “I’ve never hated anyone as much as I hate him,” he whispered tersely, so much emotion in that one sentence. He squeezed Emmeline’s hand like she was his lifeline. “And he’s a part of me.”
“He’s not you, though,” she whispered softly, pressing closer to his side.
Roremar looked down at her. “I’m cursed with him. No matter what, he’ll always be here.”
Though she knew she shouldn’t be allowing them to nurture the need for one another, she cupped Roremar’s cheek.
He dropped his forehead to hers, their eyes closing, and for a moment, she thought they were both pretending the outside realm didn’t exist. The Fates, the Angel, the tournament… none of it mattered.
All there was was them.
“You’re good, Roremar. He doesn’t get to change that.”
“Good, but not good for you,” Roremar whispered, and it broke Emmeline’s heart.
“No, I—”
“It’s okay, Huntress,” he said, pressing a kiss to her forehead and stepping back. Taking half of her with him. “I understand.”
Spell broken, Emmeline retreated, too, trying to figure out how she could explain it to him without revealing that Rocarri was holding his safety over her head. It was her magic that made her so valuable after all, that made everyone want her. That made them all hate him even more.
“Just so you know,” Emmeline whispered, needing to say something to wipe that sorrow from his eyes. “I meant it’s me that’s not good for you.”
Roremar’s mouth opened as if to argue, but Emmeline backed away, needing distance before she did something truly reckless.
As she retreated, the heel of her boot sank into the stone.
The ground rumbled, and the floor beneath Valyrie’s portrait parted.
“A trip step,” Roremar said.
Emmeline looked from the gap looming in the floor to the spot where it had been triggered. Before the fresco of the masked Fate.
“Serchus,” she breathed.
Roremar grabbed a lantern from the wall, holding it over Emmeline’s head as she crouched beside the descent.
“Is it a crypt?” he asked.
“No,” Emmeline said as she leaned over it, no coffin or urn inside. Instead, there were— “It’s a staircase. Like the tunnels I found in the Ninth District when I thought I was following clues about my sister.”
That invisible presence buzzed fiercer along her skin, the drop below summoning her like hands of ancient magic.
“A staircase hidden beneath a mausoleum,” Roremar said.
“Feels very safe,” Emmeline agreed.
Roremar hummed. “Who first, then?”
Emmeline shared a grin with him. “Me.”
And she scampered down the stairs.
Magic hummed louder in her veins the lower she descended, Fates whirling to the surface, pushing her forward. Emmeline kept one eye on them, and with every step they took down the damp tunnel, their enthusiasm mounted.
She could taste their excitement, sweet and addictive on her tongue. Invisible hands plucked at each of her Fate ties as if they were strings on a harp, pulling and testing and encouraging them to sing haunted melodies in the stone maze work of tunnels.
“Do you feel that?” Emmeline asked as her Fates pressed against her skin.
“No?” Roremar asked, assessing her in his familiar way. “What is it?”
“It feels like my magic is being pulled to the surface. Almost like…” She didn’t want to say it, didn’t dare admit it, but there had only been one other time she’d felt this cascade of power.
“The seeing chamber,” Roremar guessed.
She met his eyes, the horror from that night flashing in the silvers. “I’m okay,” she insisted. “It doesn’t hurt. It’s…euphoric.” Like her magic had been begging her to come here for so long and was finally getting the release it needed.
It hungered for more, her skin sensitive.
“Let’s keep going,” she said.
Roremar fell into step with her as they took turns at the insistence of her magic. His wariness burrowed into her spine with every tunnel they ventured down, but he didn’t ask her to stop, didn’t cage her power.
The air was damp and stale. If Emmeline had to guess, no one had been down here in centuries. Stone peeked through the moss covering the walls. On some paths, jagged veins glimmered, like lightning bolts cutting through the rock. On others they swirled like cresting waves.
“We have to have traveled at least a mile,” Roremar speculated aloud. “How far do you think these tunnels go?”
“I don’t know,” Emmeline answered. “The ones I followed before could have led anywhere.”
“Did they feel like these?”
She nodded, every thought rushed and dizzying. “This is more powerful, but my magic was insistent down there, too. Like the Fates were louder underground.” She eyed Roremar. “Still hear nothing?”
“Nothing,” he said, his jaw popping as they took one final turn—
And emerged into a towering cavern, a glass-carved dome stretching impossibly high with a crack running through one side.
“Woah,” Roremar breathed, awe deepening his voice. “How far beneath the city are we?”
“I don’t know.”
Emmeline slowly ventured forward beneath the domed ceiling.
A mosaic sat at the peak, a silver telescope surrounded by swirling blue and purple patterns that resembled star-dusted cosmos.
The designs stretched all the way around the circular walls, reaching to the floor, veins of silver embedded throughout.
Around the room, archways framed hollowed out alcoves in the walls, holding statues and artifacts. Vases and busts in an array of marble and silver, dusty but retaining the kind of beauty only historic antiques bore.
Two tunnels stretched in the opposite direction of the one they’d taken, and around the telescope in the center of the ceiling, markings were carved into the glass.
No, not markings.
Words. In Endasi.
Emmeline’s skin prickled at the language of the Angels, the same one in the scroll she’d been gifted.
And she knew, by Fates or by fortune, she’d been meant to find this place.
Emmeline took slow, uncertain steps toward the center of the room, each strike of her heels against the veined silver floor echoing around them. When she stood in the heart below the telescope, Emmeline lifted her gaze to the sky, and a reading slammed into her.
She had a foot in each realm, both fully visible and real. As real as Serchus had been the other day.
In the reading, she stood in the center of this very cavern, saw all the same things before her now, but…
It wasn’t her.
She was within someone else’s mind, seeing through their eyes. An unfamiliar power hummed around her, rippling off her fingertips, and something pulled heavily at her back.
Emmeline looked over her shoulder, finding white feathered wings.
“Valyrie,” she gasped.
“Huntress?” Panic pitched Roremar’s voice outside the reading. Hands gripped her shoulders. Squeezed her wrists. “Talk to me, Huntress.”
“She was here. I’m…I’m in Valyrie’s mind.
I’m seeing what she sees, but…” The cavern was so much newer, more cared for.
The tiles on the telescope mosaic shone, a few of the alcoves empty like the perfect art pieces hadn’t been selected yet, and there was no crack down the wall. “I think I’m seeing the past.”
Typically, the Fates showed Starsearchers future fortunes, but Emmeline had long since stopped believing her sessions followed any predetermined rules.
She recalled all the readings that had shown her feathers recently. Was this why? They wanted to send her here, to imply some connection with Valyrie?
The Angel’s power undulated off her in the reading. She sighed as it curled away, testing the air, as if it was too much and desperately sought somewhere else to go. Clouds of incense swirled around Emmeline’s—Valyrie’s—feet.
“She’s conducting a session,” Emmeline said.
In the past, images poured over the walls as if the glass mosaic was meant to be a mirror, reflecting whatever Valyrie saw in her mind because her magic was too powerful to contain it.
Within the Angel’s body, Emmeline watched as bloodied sword fights played out in a dirt arena, bodies falling one by one until the earth was painted crimson.
Then, the images rippling over the glass walls shifted. A row of silver chalices overflowed, and warriors grasped at their throats. Their skin mottled as they collapsed, eyes streaked red and veins bulging.
Poison.
They’d all been poisoned.
As each warrior drained their cups, a bead of starlight formed above them. They undulated in the air, wispy silver streaks ebbing outward, and collected in Valyrie’s palm, seeping into her skin.
The arena. The duels. Now poison.
Emmeline gasped. “She’s…she’s seeing her original tournament. I’m seeing the past when she devised it—or was told to hold it in the first place. This is her creating the Races so she could appoint her guard. And this place we’re in right now…it’s her personal seeing chamber.”
The next images flashed across the glass walls almost too quickly to memorize.
A helmeted man strung another up by his throat and turned to kneel at Valyrie’s feet.
A woman slipped a pinch of nightshade into an opponent’s cup and laughed as he went into delirium, convulsing.
Emmeline’s chest compressed as they sped and warped. Her lungs filled with dust, and ash coated her tongue. She coughed outside the reading, her body feeling every effect.
Valyrie gasped, a pained cry leaving her lips, and starlight splintered the air. One side of the glass dome cracked, and Emmeline’s skin burned.
Through the smoky aftermath, silhouetted figures rose in the glass, the twelve deemed worthy to protect the Angel. Kneeling, they swore fealty to their Prime Warrior.
One bore a helmet as he bowed at the Angel’s feet. Another presented her with a bag of coins. A third lifted a glass, wine sloshing over the edge.
The force of the magic around Valyrie had Emmeline’s already sensitive skin heating, her body begging for a release. Her head swam as readings collided within her. Knees buckling, Roremar caught her, his body against hers so inviting.
Her magic was volatile, stronger than she was, thanks to this ancient seeing chamber. She tried to pull herself from the reading, but it sucked her back in.
Roremar swore as if he felt the tug.
The reading shifted, pulling back high above Valyn so she could see the entire city, little spots in each district lit up with stars, before diving back underground.
“It’s somewhere else now,” Emmeline explained. “A different cavern.”
Similar to this one but even larger. This time, she wasn’t sure if she was Valyrie or herself. If she was in the past, present, or future. Everything was coated with a hazy mist like it was fighting to be revealed.
A blurry silver carving was set into the floor, glowing molten. Statues towered along either side, mouths stretched into eerie smiles, all pointing toward an altar where a shadowed form stood. Starfire surrounded the scene.
Fates, how much was buried in Valyn? Not only the humanity Emmeline sought as she was forced into a role she never wanted, but Valyrie’s own seeing chamber, and who knew what else.
And this city’s lawless games were being played right above it. Gambles of power and pride stomping on the hearts of the past. All because the current rulers in Valyn thought themselves more important than those who came before them. Thought they could control everything to benefit themselves.
Rage tunneled through Emmeline. Starfire crackled brighter, the mist thickening.
The reading imploded, starlight and stone and glass domed mosaics bursting as Emmeline gasped back to the present.
She was pressed against Roremar’s chest with her palm braced over his heart. The crazed thump mirrored her own. Straightening, she licked her dry lips, legs wobbling as she tried to unpack everything she’d seen.
A whistled tune drifted down one of the tunnels into their cavern. Light footsteps grew louder. Closer.
And though her mind was still spinning, she realized whose arms she was in.
“Roremar,” she breathed. “We can’t—”
We can’t be seen.
Fierce determination hardened his steel eyes. “Come on.”
And he pulled her into one of the alcoves.