Chapter 17 #2
It looked like something out of a fairy tale. The city was built into a caldera in the mountain range. It must have been a volcano at one point, Amelia thought. She assumed it would be extinct for them to build their entire city within it.
Structures protruded from its base, while others were hollowed out of the mountain’s rock face.
As they descended towards the entrance, other guards came to meet them. They were escorted through the city streets towards the towers rising at its centre.
Amelia gazed at the people on the street. Most went about their day, but some stopped to stare. She noticed that none of them wore weapons.
Women walked freely. She’d only seen Danae at the fortress.
They were breathtaking. Danae was beautiful herself, but she was hard.
She’d been moulded into a weapon, her muscles sculpted onto her frame.
She was dangerous. These females appeared softer.
Where Danae wore leather trousers and armour and a tight braid, they wore long dresses and cloaks and had their hair down.
They were adorned with jewels and accessories like those that women had worn back in Amelia’s world.
A woman standing beneath one of the stone archways caught Amelia’s attention. She wore a cloak of dark green, her hair heavily braided away from her delicately pointed ears. Unlike the others, she watched Amelia not with curiosity, but with something closer to grief.
A strange sensation stirred at the edge of Amelia’s memory.
“What is it?” Danae asked.
“Nothing.” Amelia frowned. “One of them was staring.”
“Everyone is staring,” Danae replied.
She glanced around the street. She must have been a spectacle. When she looked back, the woman had disappeared.
She shook her head.
“What made you abandon Tiryn?” Amelia asked Danae quietly.
“I’ve always been praised for my power and how much devastation I can cause, but it was always in battle against other bloodthirsty warriors. It wasn’t just soldiers I killed in those cities. They didn’t deserve that.”
They continued in silence until they arrived at the heart of the High City.
The city’s core was dominated by rising towers. They were ringed with walls, but the gates stood open.
The guards dismounted, waited for them to do the same and then tried to escort them into the towers by force.
“We come peacefully,” Ruven snarled. “If you don’t want to lose your hands, I’d take them off of us.”
The guards backed off. Ruven had a reputation.
The enormous doors opened, revealing a room of polished stone.
Amelia gazed up. The height of the room was dizzying. The tower appeared much larger from the inside.
It was mostly empty as their steps echoed throughout the stone room. At the other end, a man stood by an arch overlooking a beautifully planted formal garden. He turned around, unsurprised by their presence. He must have been forewarned.
“Ah, Ruven, Danae,” he greeted them as if they knew each other.
“Elthar,” Ruven replied.
Amelia paused at his name. This was the king, the ruler of the High City. The meeting felt informal compared to her first audience with King Tiryn.
“And the human, I presume?” the king said, looking her up and down.
She returned his gaze. He was bulkier, but similar in appearance to the other king, tall with long silver hair that fell down his back. His eyes were the same colour as Casyl’s, but not as intense.
“Amelia,” Ruven replied.
“Let’s cut to it, shall we? Why are you here?” he asked. “You won the battle with your dirty magic and forced us back. What more do you want?”
“You were right,” Danae said. “Tiryn is mad.”
Elthar turned his head slightly, regarding her, his brows furrowed together.
“What has he done?”
Danae took a deep breath.
“He opened the rift.”
The king’s eyes flickered to Amelia and then back to Danae.
“And?” he asked, nodding to himself as if confirming what he’d already suspected. “Is he going after the Lifesource?”
“Yes, but he’s wiped out two human cities to get it, killing most of the humans and enslaving the rest to mine it.”
Elthar raised his brow at that. “Harsh, even for him. And your people support this?”
“Some do. Some just follow their orders.”
“And you?”
Danae did not look away. “I burned them all.” She glanced at Amelia.
“Then why should I trust you?”
“Because I will not burn anything else for him.”
Silence filled the room.
“There’s more,” she said, pausing. “Once we walked through that rift, everything changed. I expected it to feel different, being closer to the hub of the Lifesource, but it felt wrong. We felt wrong. We didn’t understand it until we attacked the capital city.
They’ve been mining the Lifesource, using its power. They made a bomb.”
The king’s mouth fell open as she continued.
“We felt the power of it, the pain it caused, but it didn’t stop us. We became something monstrous. Undying.”
Her own jaw had gone slack. She’d wondered why they hadn’t died when they’d attacked the city. How? It made no sense. They could be killed. She’d watched as these two fae armies had fought each other and killed each other.
If immortality existed, then everything she thought she knew about the world was wrong.
“You’re telling me you became immortal?” the king said slowly. His eyes scanned Ruven and Danae. “Are you still immortal?”
“No, at least we don’t think so. It only seems to be when we enter the human world. When we came back through the rift, we felt… different, almost normal again.”
“How could that be?”
“We hoped that you’d know. You and Tiryn are two of the elders. When we were in that land, the land we shared with the humans, were we immortal then?”
“No,” he whispered and leaned heavily on the table beside him.
“How will he be stopped if he’s immortal?” the king asked. “He was dangerous enough before becoming immortal. His foul magic will be even more powerful if he gets his hands on the Lifesource. What about Casyl? Does he have no sway with him, or has he fallen as deeply as his father?”
Ruven and Danae looked at each other and then at Amelia.
“The king has him under his complete control,” Danae said.
“That’s not possible!” Elthar said. “A Mind Warper’s control is temporary.” His eyes found Amelia, and she remembered the bitter taste of Zandhro’s blood in her mouth. “What you’re talking about is an indefinite control over another being. It’s unheard of.”
“Perhaps it would be impossible with a stranger, but Tiryn has entered Casyl’s mind since he was a child. He knows every defence Casyl has. He shaped them. Their shared blood gives him a direct path no one else possesses.”
“What do you mean?” Amelia asked Danae.
“What I mean is the king has taken over Casyl’s body and is using it for his own ends. You’ve seen how he controls the beast. That’s what he is doing to Casyl—using him like he’s a thing, a weapon, with no regard for him,” Danae said.
“His own son,” Elthar muttered.
Amelia clutched at her chest. “But he stopped. He told me to run.”
“You must have blocked the king’s control when you tried to block him,” Danae said.
The memory replayed in her mind. Casyl’s sword falling to the ground. Him sinking to his knees.
“But I left him there. We left him there! Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” she cried.
“Because if we told you, you wouldn’t have left him, and we couldn’t have taken him with us,” Danae said, her eyes shining.
“We couldn’t be sure that the king wouldn’t see our plan through his eyes and try to stop us.
You couldn’t block him continuously. Tharos will be with him.
We’ll save him if we can, but this is about more than just Casyl.
This is about all our people, and yours too. ”
For so long, she had believed she’d lost the one place where she hadn’t felt like an outsider.
She choked back a sob. He hadn’t betrayed her.