Chapter Thirty-Five
Another legend tells of a hallowed grove on the island. In this grove is a pool of clearest teal. Its waters are said to be the very life’s blood of the island itself.
It is not difficult to trace the origins of this story. Teal is often cited as the goddess’s favorite color. And it is not unusual for the natives to refer to the island as if it is a living thing.
I have searched Akeisa thoroughly, but there is no evidence this grove or pool ever existed.
Fallen Goddess: An Analysis of Primitive Belief
by Guildmaster Klement
The final Terror had just crumbled into dust when something pierced Einar’s heart, a pain so abrupt and so terrible that he fell out of the sky.
He crashed into the ground, panting, a screaming pain inside him that was not his own. The island vibrated beneath his outspread fingers, pulsing with the demand to hurry—
Cool fingers touched his cheek. He lifted his head and found Petya staring down at him, face tight with worry.
“One of them is hurt,” Einar ground out, knowing it without knowing how he knew it. “I have to—”
“Go,” she told him. “We’re safe.”
The wind whipped around him again as he rose to his feet, pushing back those who had gathered too close to him. He was the storm—and a storm was not constrained by inconsequential details like mortal forms.
Lightning cracked down, meeting his upraised fist, and the power of it flooded through him. He chased that power back into the sky and became the clouds, riding the wind to the place where the island screamed for him.
He crashed to the ground in another bolt of lightning, his boots landing on packed earth that had been drenched in more blood than he had ever seen. A pool of blood, an ocean of blood—
And, at its heart, Aleksi.
Naia knelt at his side, her dress now stained with even more blood, and pressed frantically to his chest, as if she could stem the terrible flow of his life’s blood.
As if there was enough left in Aleksi to save him.
She looked up, her face streaked with tears, her words nearly unintelligible through her hoarse sobs. “Help me.”
Hurry, the island whispered, and Einar stepped over Sorin’s lifeless body and fell to his knees in that terrifying lake of blood. He laid his hands on top of Naia’s—
The world twisted out from beneath them, plunging them into darkness that lasted a moment and forever. Then there was hard rock beneath his knees, and a sultry warmth wrapping around them, humid air laced with the scent of flowers that no longer grew on the island.
This time, Einar remembered the spring. He remembered the first time Naia had brought Theron to it, wrapping him in her power and carrying him to this place that their love had created, a sanctuary for just the two of them.
Their sanctuary had become a nightmare.
Aleksi lay on the wet stone that edged the pool, pale and still. Naia tugged at his blood-soaked shirt, then slipped into the water and resumed her efforts. “Einar, we need to get him into the pool.”
He was too stunned to argue, too afraid that if he parted his lips, all that would come out was a feral scream of loss.
He slid his hands under Aleksi’s shoulders and lifted that too-still body.
Even when he had hovered on the edge of death before, Aleksi hadn’t felt so light—it was if he’d left whatever made him Aleksi back on that beach with a river of blood.
The pool closed around them both, the water a warm embrace that couldn’t soothe the chill inside him. Naia closed her hands around Aleksi’s shoulders and pushed him down, until he was fully submerged.
If he wasn’t already dead, he would surely drown. “Naia—”
“It’s all right.” She stroked Aleksi’s face beneath the water.
Aleksi’s hair floated in a current that couldn’t exist, and grief tore Einar in half.
Memories overlapped, with Aleksi’s pale face giving way to Theron’s memory of laying Naia to rest in the sea.
Colors were different in the deep. The reds of her hair had turned to shadowed blue, and the ocean itself had swallowed his screams as he tried to let her go.
But he couldn’t. Not then, and not now.
He would not survive this again.
Naia gripped Einar’s hand and squeezed until he met her eyes. And then, as if she knew what he’d been thinking, she shook her head. “We’re not burying him.”
She sounded so sure. He held her gaze as if clinging to a lifeline. “What are we doing?”
“The island still holds him,” she whispered. “We just need to help it bring him back.”
Hope was such a fragile thing. If he wrapped his hands around it, he would crush it. So he held on to his lovers instead, the hand twined with Naia’s a reminder that death could not stop love, and the one that clung to Aleksi’s shoulder—
Hope might have been as much a stranger to Theron as it was to Einar, but Theron’s relentless obsession and protective fury had found fertile soil in Einar’s heart. He would follow Aleksi anywhere. Even into death, if that was what it took.
Einar held tight to Naia’s hand as they followed Aleksi beneath the water, submerging themselves in the hot spring that existed and didn’t exist, this magical part of the island that had been born from the power of love—just like the man they held in their arms.
Bring him back to us, he whispered to the island.
A distant thrumming was his only answer. The beating heart of the island, pounding in time with his own.
Einar listened to it. And hoped.