34. Ophelia, The Amber Sunburst

34. Ophelia

OPHELIA

Ophelia is really starting to wish she hadn’t found a way to sneak out of the Sun Temple.

Somehow she’d convinced herself that all of the pipes leading her to the Temple of All Forms would be above ground. But, no. They just had to be in the sewers.

So here she is, trudging through swampy water like a sludge monster.

She can’t help but be jealous of Arete, enjoying Ophelia’s favorite curry in a little Priestess outfit and watching the sunset. Eudoxia just barely agreed to let her come at all, but eventually she acknowledged that this was the only way.

Dinner is the single instance where everyone in the Temple is in one place, and if Ophelia’s seat was empty, her absence would trigger a search protocol. That meant filling her spot with someone who would go unnoticed. Someone young and little who could still serve as a placeholder.

Then, once mealtime ends, Eudoxia will sneak in to retrieve Arete and take her back to the dorm. It’s not ideal, but it covers their bases.

She would much rather be part of that plan than down here.

The sewer is on a slight downward incline, like she’s descending the cliff from the inside.

She just hopes the pipes will remain in sight until she actually gets to the Temple entrance.

She’ll probably combust in anger if she makes it all the way to the bottom of this muck only to lose the pipes she’s been following.

After what feels like an hour of walking, her dainty Priestess shoes are covered in mud, and it’s a miracle she hasn’t slipped and fallen on her face.

The tunnel floor evens out eventually, meaning she must have reached the bottom of… somewhere. She relaxes a bit now that she can walk on level ground—but she tenses right back up again when a droplet of water hits her shoulder.

Her eyes shoot up, and water is dripping from every crack in the cobblestone ceiling of the sewer. It’s not until she turns the next corner that she realizes why.

“Oh,” she exhales. Glass walls against blue water make it very clear where she is: the bottom of the sea.

She’s tempted to demand the Priestesses down here tell her who constructed this impossible glass tunnel that withstands the astronomical pressure from the ocean. She’d really love to shake their hand. And then beg them for their secrets.

She hasn’t even thought about inventing or tinkering since her girls were taken from her. The inspiration just never struck. But now? Now she’s feeling inspired.

She speeds up in excitement, running down the glass hallway and expecting the entrance to the secret Temple to appear any second. She has to skid to a stop when she reaches a glass wall closing off the tunnel.

Which means it leads nowhere. Which means this whole stupid journey was for nothing.

But why would someone build this amazing thing if it isn’t meant for more than sitting alone in the sea?

Or, perhaps, not totally alone. Short columns stretch in either direction under the sea. They look exactly like the ones surrounding the Republic—the ones that Alexander claims hid the city from view until he stepped through them.

She sizes up the glass in front of her, then the columns one more time, then charges right through before she can lose her nerve.

She expects to get a concussion from banging into the glass like a betta fish, but instead a static shock whispers through her body and she falls into a dark marble hallway.

Whoa.

She pushes herself off the floor and looks around. Fresco and mosaic cover the walls and the occasional window reveals dark blue water.

It’s a stunning place, but there’s something distinctly… off about it. Something that simultaneously makes her want to stay forever and also hit her head against the wall until she dies so she doesn’t have to spend one more second here.

But she can’t let it get to her. She needs to focus on what she’s here for: finding the room where the Trials are planned.

It’ll be tough to locate, she’s sure, but somewhere in this mysterious underwater complex there must be plans and maps and things. She’s about to take off searching when she notices a door just down the hall. Was that there before?

There’s a plaque on it, shimmering in gold, that reads ‘Trials.’

Satisfaction rushes through her before it’s replaced by suspicion.

Too easy, a voice in her head screams.

But maybe she’s reading into it. Why not just let things be easy for once? The Forms could be watching over her, granting her luck to stumble right upon the exact thing that she needs.

“Alright, Ophelia,” she mumbles to herself, reaching for the handle, “moment of truth.”

She’s prepared to knock out some Priestesses with the fighting training that Zeno and Eudoxia have been giving her, but instead she enters an empty room.

A worktable sits in the center with a few organized papers on it, but the rest of the room is cloaked in a strange stillness. She slowly approaches the table.

The Labyrinth of Theseus, Trial III/III, reads the top paper.

Below it is a map outlining a maze with forty-seven small circles in the center—probably representing the remaining participants of the Trials. The key on the side tells her what the other symbols spread around the maze stand for: ‘Booby Traps,’ ‘Advantages,’ and the ever-ominous ‘Other.’

There are also two red lines on opposite walls of the labyrinth that aren’t labeled on the key, but have an emergency symbol next to them. A small room attached to another wall of the maze is labeled ‘KO zone’ and has the same marking inside. She can only assume they’re the exits Bios talked about.

She kind of wants to scribble some critiques down for the Priestesses. It’s nonsensical to have a ‘labyrinth’ where getting out or reaching a checkpoint isn’t your goal. As designed, the challenge is an aimless battleground with lots of turns more than anything else.

But no one cares about her awesome, correct opinions, so she just rolls her eyes and commits the map to memory. It only takes her a glance or two. She’s always been abnormally good at memorizing.

When she knows she has it down, she sifts through the other papers.

One details the exact process for triggering the emergency exits, so she gives it a focused read too. Another just says ‘Weapons,’ accompanied by hundreds of images of guns, swords, and knives, most crossed out. The last is…

Goosebumps prickle up her arms, and her spine goes ramrod straight.

Ophelia, it reads, do come outside, would you?

Oh, Forms. Oh no.

She knew it was too easy.

She doesn’t go to the trouble of reorganizing the papers the way she found them. Instead, she forces herself to approach the dark wood door a few steps away. It’s an out-of-body experience, reaching for the handle.

When she opens the door, the room she enters is not the hallway she came from.

Instead she’s faced with a circular room under a low, domed ceiling covered entirely in shimmering mosaics of blue and gold and pink and silver.

There’s no source of light in the room, but everything is gleaming like the sun when it dances on waves.

Is this magic? she thinks.

“Not quite,” a voice answers, reverberating around the room, and Ophelia snaps her head to the source.

In the center of the circular room stands the most gorgeous woman Ophelia has ever seen in her life.

But her beauty does nothing to disguise the purely sinister energy that she’s emitting. Ophelia instinctively turns to run, but when she does, she finds that the door she came through is no longer there.

“Hello, Ophelia,” the woman says, her voice both tinkling bells and nails on a chalkboard.

It’s an ancient kind of sound, despite the woman looking no older than thirty in a timeless white dress.

Her hair is so red it almost looks like fire and her doe eyes are deep brown.

Something in them is so familiar that Ophelia’s heart aches, though she doesn’t know why.

A semicircular scar adorns her forehead, around where a brand might be, sliced with mechanical precision. Inside the scar sits a smaller, blue, circular tattoo.

Seconds go by in silence before Ophelia finally responds.

“Hello.”

The woman smiles, and it’s nothing but teeth.

“You’ve come a long way from home, haven’t you? It almost makes us wonder—”

Us?

“—what wouldn’t you do to leave this place?”

“What do you mean ‘leave’?”

“Leave the Republic with those sweet little friends of yours.”

“How do you know our plan?” Ophelia blurts, then realizes she just confirmed everything like a fool.

The woman ignores her interruption. “You’re bored, aren’t you, Ophelia? Of all of the ignorance and routine. It strangles you. But the thing about strangling, darling, is that it doesn’t stop until you’ve escaped the strangler. And you can never escape yourself.”

“You’re wrong,” she says, but is she? Ophelia is the only one this restless, this unsatisfied. Has it been her own hand around her neck this whole time?

“Right and wrong. One would think that humans might have escaped the illusion of dichotomy by now,” the woman muses, stalking closer. There’s an evil here Ophelia can’t explain.

“You are wrong,” she repeats.

The woman smiles at her with the pity of someone who thinks they’re above it all. “Alright.”

Eerie silence settles over the room again, so quiet it’s deafening.

“Are you going to kill me?” Ophelia asks, just to make the room less stifling.

“We should,” she says, the soft perpetual smile on her lips not faltering. “You and your friends are a danger to the delicate balance of the Republic. But my sisters and I have grown soft in our old age—”

“Old?” she asks.

“—We will allow you to attempt your little plan. But hear me, Ophelia,” the woman says quietly, but even from a distance Ophelia can feel the words as if they were whispered in her ear, “mercy will not be granted in the face of failure. You will either sail into the sea or die at the bottom of it.”

“Who are you?” Ophelia asks, even though she’s not sure she wants to know.

“Oh, dear, I thought you were smarter than that,” she sighs. Her placid smile doesn’t fall even when she puts her palms to her face and pulls her skin down until the reds of her eyes are showing.

Ophelia wants to ask what she’s talking about—why she’s staring at Ophelia like that, waiting for something to click. But before she can, recognition flashes like lightning.

Those eyes. Those brown, doe eyes. They do not belong to this woman.

“Aika?” she asks, quiet enough that she hardly hears it herself.

A too-wide smile spreads on the woman’s face. She’s still clinging to her skin, dragging it down like she wants to rip it off.

“Run along, dear,” she says, motioning to the entrance of a tunnel. Ophelia didn’t notice it appear—like it was there the whole time on the periphery of her vision but never in sight. But she does not feel surprised. She can only be devastated.

No, no, no.

“Aika?” Her voice cracks. Her face is so numb she hardly even feels her tears.

“She did have very pretty eyes.” The woman releases her own face to grab Ophelia’s chin, somehow standing directly in front of Ophelia without having moved at all. “So, it seems, do you.”

Ophelia doesn’t hesitate. She sprints.