Chapter Twenty-Two
The tunnel narrowed before it opened into a chamber just as grand as the one we’d left behind. The air shifted from dried earth to something cooler, damper, not unbearable but enough to raise the hair on my arms.
Though there were no torches here, the surface glowed, a faint blue light bleeding up from the stream in the distance, rippling across the rocky walls like a living thing.
How is this possible?
A soft waterfall fell from somewhere high above into a pool that fed a stream. At the base, white and pale as something that had never once seen sun, was the creature, its back under the surface, its skin catching the blue glow of the water.
Nam had drawn one once, when she told us stories about the deep sea, and called it an eel.
But it was nothing like the ones Nam had sketched.
This one was nearly as long as an oclego, its head as wide as the boarox, its body rippling in slow, sinuous coils as it swam toward us the moment we crossed the threshold.
No fins, no legs, no scales. Just that long, boneless body cutting through the water, moving as one long muscle.
“What is that thing?” Ranis’s boots crunched against the pebbled ground and he froze.
The five soldiers behind us and the lead did the same, weapons half-raised.
Jina murmured, her voice barely a breath, “The one from Nam’s drawing. Hers were small things that couldn’t survive out of water. But this is… much more dangerous.”
Minha said nothing, her eyes tracking the eel’s movements the way she tracked an opponent before a fight.
“Don’t move.” I put my hand up, palm out.
“Get the pure stones. Move!” The lead soldier shoved me forward, then directed his men toward the other side.
The eel launched before the echo of his voice died, impossibly fast for a creature that size. I shoved Jina behind me and braced against the rocky wall.
The bite never came. At the last second it veered, head swinging toward the sound of boots, and the running soldiers never made it ten steps before it swallowed them whole, one after the next.
Then silence, except for my heart pounding in my ears.
The eel’s head turned back toward us. Ranis and Minha had their daggers out, useless as they were against an anomaly that size. Jina’s fingers dug into my arm hard enough to bruise.
“Don’t move,” I whispered.
Its giant head stopped inches from us and stilled, smelling the air.
When it finally turned away, I gestured for the others to follow.
We moved in short bursts, twelve feet at a time, pressing flat against the wall whenever its head swung back toward the sound of our footsteps, hissing, baring teeth that caught the blue light like splintered stones.
We reached the waterfall and pressed ourselves into the shadow of a large boulder, the mist from the falls cold against my skin. The eel slid back into the stream with a splash and coiled at the entrance, patient, guarding.
“Now what?” Ranis whispered.
“Going anywhere near that water is suicide.” Jina shook her head.
Minha’s mouth curved. “I say we swim.”
I arched an eyebrow. Sometimes I worried about her.
Think. The creature was enormous and fast, but it relied on sound to find us. Every time we’d moved, it had swung toward the noise, not the sight of us. Then Sable’s words surfaced through the fear. The creature at Mount Kael knows what you are. It won’t harm you.
“Wait here,” I said.
“Don’t go alone.” Jina grabbed my wrist.
“Do you trust me?”
She nodded.
“Then let me go.”
“Sis.” Minha furrowed her brow, her finger coiling around my arm.
“Remember the arena and the boarox.” I held her stern gaze. “I’m going to do the same.”
Minha’s expression shifted, understanding replacing worry as she released her hold.
I moved one step at a time, pulse loud in my ears, each footfall feeling like it took a lifetime. The eel’s head lifted as I drew closer but didn’t swing away. It was listening. Waiting.
I pulled my dagger and drew the blade across my palm.
The pain bit sharp but I pushed the thought away.
What mattered was the blood, catching the light of the stream as it dripped onto the dirt.
A few drops fell into the water at the eel’s head, and instead of clouding the surface, they dissolved into it, the same color, the same blue.
The eel went still.
Its head turned toward me, then lowered the whole impossible length of its body, sinking down into the depths, and stayed there.
Bowing.
My plan worked.
Behind me came the soft footsteps of the three people I trusted most in the world. We crossed a narrow bridge, nearly invisible from a distance, and passed behind the waterfall into another cavern, smaller than the one we’d left behind.
The rock had been carved—by a pick or something sharper—into figures worn soft by age, stretched across the wall.
A woman with a fishtail for legs rested on a boulder, waves crashing below her.
A man with no shirt, black wings spread wide from his back, reached a hand toward her from above.
Beneath the carving were two names: Yeri and Calroy.
I didn’t know why my chest ached, my heart hollow. I didn’t know why some small, stupid part of me wanted to reach out and touch the wings. Touch him. Perhaps it was the torment etched onto his features, or the way his hand and hers seemed close enough to touch but never quite did.
“Look at this one,” Jina said, tracing the indent with a finger, Ranis beside her examining the same wall sculpting.
I followed where she pointed, and once I saw the first sketching, I couldn’t stop seeing the rest. The whole wall was a story, carved in sequence, the way Nam used to draw animals, flowers, and things we’d never seen, back at the cavern fire.
Seven figures stood evenly spaced, each cradling a different sea in their hands. I recognized Yeri at the center, her fishtail catching the carved current beneath her, and beside her, a man with wings spread wide.
The next panel showed only the kingdom of Caelum, its walls glittering with carved gems, its citizens winged. Barrels filled with gemstones of emerald, ruby, and sapphire.
Then the story turned.
A new figure entered. The Seelie queen I loathed with every fiber of my being. She bargained with the god of earth, and whatever she offered him, he gave her something in return, small enough to vanish in a closed fist. A blade, like the ones Minha made with an oyster shell.
The panel after that made my stomach drop. Five gods, their faces twisted into shapes that didn’t belong on anyone divine, turned on Yeri and Calroy—hands tearing at Yeri’s light, at Calroy’s wings—a violence the carving made unmistakable.
At last in that sequence, a figure, his face carved with sorrow, reaching toward Yeri and Calroy—not to hurt them, but to send them somewhere else as they fell.
“I think… the god of the afterlife sent the two gods away to be reborn,” Minha whispered. “He couldn’t just end them.”
“He still played a part in killing them,” I said.
The next panel was Caelum burning. Winged figures knelt, their wings struck from their backs. Many were bound, herded, marched toward the sea to drown.
Anger blazed through me.
The final panels showed gods seated at a long table in the cavern beyond this waterfall. The queen, smiling, poured a pale liquid into each cup. Then the etching showed the gods slumped, unconscious, the queen moving between them with the dagger the earth god had forged for her.
Each god’s chest was carved hollow where the shell’s calcium had taken root and stopped them cold. Then the queen, alone with the earth god—his hand against her face, his eyes admiring her—his own blade, turned back on him, driven into his chest by her hand.
The carving showed his power leaving him in jagged lines, flowing into the blade, then the blade dissolving into her open palm, as if it had never existed at all.
“That’s how,” I said, lowering my voice. “That’s where the Seelie queen’s power comes from. Not her blood. Not her crown. From him.”
“Him?” Jina’s brow furrowed, glancing between me and the carving.
“The god of earth.” Minha frowned. “He was tricked. Stupid male.”
“Let’s see if there’s more.” Ranis walked farther down, his hands on the wall. “Here.”
I’d thought it was a repeat of the slumped gods, but it was a continuation.
From the carved lines of their bodies, power poured out of the gods and into the water, into the stone gathering at the chamber floor behind us.
Five gods who’d died had become the pure stones the queen sent us down here to collect.
“Do you think the queen knows what these stones are?” Minha stepped toward the dark corner.
“These pure stones. They’re not just what’s left of the gods.” I knelt before the pile glowing faintly in the dark, no longer treasure, but far more dangerous. “I think they’re the only thing in this world that can kill her, and the only thing in this world that could give her more power.”
“Well, we can’t let her have more magic.” Jina picked one up, her face catching the light bouncing off it.
Ranis lifted another, about the size of an egg, turning it over in his palm. “So small but so deadly.” He held it up higher. “I wonder which god I’m holding.”
“Want me to make a weapon from it?” Minha winked at me.
“Best not to tamper with it,” I said, picking one up myself, light in my hand and cool to the touch.
The stone hummed. I went still, straining to catch it. There. A whisper, faint and layered, in a language I didn’t know, syllables that curled strange and ancient against the inside of my skull. I waited for someone to ask if they’d heard it too. No one did.
Minha turned the stone over, testing its edges with her thumb.
“Take the other one too,” I said, tucking mine against my waist, beside the dagger, pearls, and the vial. “We need to get back anyway and free the people.”
“How?” Jina tucked an egg-sized stone into her pants pocket.
“The four of us fight the remaining soldiers.” Minha shoved hers inside her shirt.
“I have a better idea.” I looked at all of them. “Trust me?”
“Always,” Jina said.
Minha and Ranis gave a nod.
We crossed back over the narrow bridge, the stone heavy with the weight of the story it carried. I glanced once at the carved wall, at Yeri’s hand reaching for Calroy’s, frozen mid-distance for however many centuries this mountain had kept them. How tragic their love story.
I turned my back on the rest of the drawings, wondering who had spent countless hours carving this story so that one day someone would find it and, hopefully, bring peace back to their world.
The eel lay unmoving as we made our way to the mouth of the tunnel. I drew in a breath, steadied my voice, and shouted loud enough to carry.
“The creature is dead! Come help, there’s pure stone everywhere!”
Boots pounded, echoing inside the cavern, torchlight flickering ahead of the scrape of barrels being dragged, as the remaining soldiers came rushing past the threshold. They crowded the bank of the stream, eyes on the water where the stones supposedly waited.
“Where is it?” One barked at me.
“There.” I shoved hard between his shoulder blades, and he pitched forward with a shout that cut off the second he hit the water.
The eel surged up from beneath the falls so fast the spray hadn’t even settled before its jaws closed around him. Then it turned, and the rest of the soldiers didn’t even have time to draw their swords before the eel swallowed the sound of them too.
“Run,” I said.
We didn’t look back until the tunnel mouth opened to the women and children, all the soldiers swallowed by the creature that had bowed and killed for me in the same hour.
We were free.
Word spread before any of us said a thing.
Picks went still, one after another, as the workers realized the only sound left was their own.
Ranis was already moving among them, helping an older woman to her feet, lifting a girl who’d frozen mid-swing onto his shoulders so she could see over the crowd.
Minha moved through the chaos with her dagger still in hand, checking the tunnel mouth for any soldier who might’ve survived, while Jina knelt beside a girl too stunned to stand, murmuring in a low voice until the girl’s shaking eased.
“The soldiers are gone,” Ranis kept saying, careful with his words in front of the children. “All of them. You’re free.”
Hellena found me, her grip tight on my arm, disbelief breaking across her face. “All of them?”
“All of them,” I said.
She covered her face and sobbed, then wiped her tears. “Thank you. I knew you were here for a reason. Thank the goddess Yeri.”
A small voice cut through the noise. “Hope! Sunny! Did you hear?”
Hope came running, Faith and Sunny close behind her, the tallest and the smallest, dust streaked across their faces, beaming a smile.
“You came back.” Hope threw her arms around my waist.
“I told you not to forget,” I said, my voice thick and raw with emotion. “Now, can you do me a favor and help gather everyone so we can get out of here?”
Tears streamed down her face. I felt my own too.
“Yeri didn’t let us down.” She embraced me again. “I believe in her. She might not be here in our world, but I know she’s listening.”
I wanted to tell her the truth, that all the gods were dead, save the two the carving showed.
And I didn’t have the heart to tell her she was wrong about Yeri listening from some distant realm.
If the drawings were correct, the god of the afterlife had sent Yeri and Calroy away somewhere painless, together.
Best to believe in a miracle, I supposed, and I would never burst her bubble of joy.
We finally gathered the women and children and guided them up the slope. I let myself feel the weight of what we’d just done—freeing women and children from harsh labor, a place they didn’t belong.
Hope’s small fingers gripped mine, sticky with dirt. Behind us, Hellena murmured the tune to that same song Hope had sung earlier as she dabbed the corner of her eyes.
The stone sat warm against my waist, but I swore it hummed, soft as the space between breaths, a pressure building behind my ears, like it was waiting for me to understand.
I thought of Nam, of Bora and Sohee, still in Jeju. One mountain freed. So many more left to help. But tonight, for these people, it was enough.