Chapter Twenty-Six
“Man cannot be in two places at once. Likewise, he cannot split his soul in two. He must choose. To follow the Geist or to follow the ways of man. One path leads to righteousness, the other to ruin. And yet, temptation will always steer you toward the latter.”
Our beloved spectators heralded us into the tunnel with screams of adulation and rhythmic chants of support. But inside this tunnel, deep within the darkness, it was only Dante and I, left alone to face whatever task was coming.
We stepped into our metal tubes in silence, masters at keeping our limbs tucked tight and accepting the harsh suction. When we were finally dropped unceremoniously onto the ground, I took a moment to run the coarse sand beneath my feet through my fingers. Dante did the same.
“He turned to the open vista around us, stretching on for miles. “A desert.”
Every other Trial had taken us to a chamber of some sort, an intricately designed room with specific items placed purposefully throughout.
None had dropped us in the middle of some strange land.
There was nothing in sight as far as I could see and, given my enhanced sight, that was quite far.
Nothing but sand and rocks and blue skies stretching on for an eternity.
I'd never known such a place could exist.
“Should we…walk?” I asked.
“In which direction?”
I didn’t answer because I had no answer to give him. I peered around again. “Maybe that rock formation has something to do with it?”
I pointed to a small dot on the horizon, a few small, misshapen rocks huddled together forming a natural mass.
He shrugged. With no other suggestions, we strolled toward the rocks.
The heat was brutal. The sun beat down on our necks, already burning us before we’d even made it halfway, and the air was dry. It was like breathing dust. It left me parched, longing for my next glass of cool, refreshing water.
Do you want to tell me why you were warning yourself not to cry at the party last night? He asked in my mind.
My fists clenched at my sides. No.
Adrian—
Later. Maybe. We need to focus now.
He sighed but didn’t bring it up again as we made our way across the sand.
Finally, after what felt like an eternity, we made it to the rocks, but there was nothing special about them. In desperation, Dante used his tremendous strength to lift up a particularly massive boulder.
Something shifted then. The whole world blurred and shook. Dante yelped and dropped a now dripping wet boulder—onto the lush grass below.
The hot desert rock had become a smooth river rock, and we stood on the bank of the river itself. The roaring rush of water filled my ears as we both gaped around at our surroundings. I dropped to my knees and gulped as much water as I was able.
“What just happened?” Dante asked from above me, still gazing around uneasily.
“I don’t know.” I gasped for air once I’d quenched my thirst. Wiping excess water from my lips on my sleeve, I stood back up. “Something you did with that boulder…changed things. Brought us here.”
“But I don’t even know how I—”
Everything blurred and shifted again, and we stood at the foot of a volcano as lava rolled freely down the side of a scorched mountain, tumbling directly toward us.
Eyes wide and frantic, we turned and ran.
“Adrian!” Dante screamed as we sped away from the encroaching wave.
“Just keep running! Wait for the shift!”
“Is that a village?” He pointed ahead.
I looked forward. A settlement of wooden huts, poorly constructed but standing tall among the long blades of grass which surrounded them, drew nearer.
A small ceramic lantern hung on a post at the entrance to the village.
Dante and I exchanged a glance and pushed our legs harder, sprinting right for it.
Another blur, another shift. I stumbled in the chaos, tripping over my own feet and rolling head over heels into a busy, modern marketplace.
I leaped back up, blinking around at all of the strange looking people shopping at the stalls where merchants sold their wares.
None of them paid any attention to us, despite having just barreled into the market at full speed.
“Excuse me, sir?” Dante attempted to talk to a nearby merchant.
But he couldn’t hear him. He simply continued to speak to the woman he was trying to tempt into buying his clearly fake jewelry.
Dante cast a frenzied glance to me. “How are we ever going to figure this out if everything keeps changing?”
I studied the market again. Stall after stall, merchant after merchant.
Children ran rampant down the thoroughfare while women called after them and men shoved them out of the way.
It was busy, loud, distracting. But at the very end of the lane, almost a hundred yards away, rested a small ceramic lantern.
Everything shifted again, and cold, hard flecks of snow bit into my face. My feet were instantly soaked through to the bone, freezing more and more by the moment. I held my arm up to shield my eyes, but I couldn’t see Dante where he stood only a few feet away in the blizzard.
“Dante!” I screamed.
“Adrian,” he cried back, but he sounded even further away than I remembered.
“The lantern,” I shouted. “Find the lantern!”
“What?”
The la—
Another shift, and I fell sideways onto a forest floor, enormous trees standing sentry hundreds of feet above me. My lips parted in surprise as I gazed up at their magnificence, having never seen such a thing before.
“There you are.” Dante grabbed my arm and lifted me. “What were you trying to tell me before?”
“The lantern.”
“Lantern?” He frowned.
“The one from the village. Didn’t you see it?”
“I was a bit preoccupied by the lava.”
Another blur and a shift, and we stood on a tropical beach, waves lapping over the hot sand toward our toes.
“I’m getting sick of this,” Dante growled in frustration.
“There’s a lantern,” I told him, turning and frantically searching our surroundings. It had to be here somewhere. It wasn’t merely a coincidence that it had already been in two of the places we’d been sent so far. “Small, ceramic thing. White. It was lit.”
“But that was back in the village. What are you—”
“It was in the market too. I saw it.”
Dante’s lips parted in surprise as he slowly understood. “A constant. Brilliant.”
We both starting looking for the lantern.
“There!” He shouted, A boat sailed toward the shore, and at its helm, a small ceramic lantern lit the way.
We sprinted for it but only made it a quarter of the way there before the next shift occurred, and we landed in an abandoned mine shaft, dark walls of hard stone reinforced with wooden beams looming up on either side of us.
We searched for a light and found a dim one emanating from the tunnel nearest us. We made a run for it.
The world shifted again, and we cried out in frustration, then set about our task of finding that simple, small lantern again in what was now a meadow covered in beautiful yellow daisies.
One more shift brought us closer to the lantern than we’d ever been before. The top of a mountain, the wind blew hard against us as we fought it on our climb to the top where the lantern sat, glowing softly in the fog.
Dante slipped but scrambled to his feet and dove, clinging to the side of the mountain. I forced my legs to push onward. I was so close to the lantern, the warmth of its fire kissed my fingertips. I stretched out my arm and touched it.
The world spun away again and reappeared. A jungle of some sort. The wind was replaced by a deep, suffocating humidity. Dante shoved vines aside and reached out to the lantern himself.
I’d expected something to happen. I assumed the moment we touched the lantern, it would stop.
The foreign, shifting surroundings would fade away, and we’d be standing in front of those glowing blue rings.
Instead, absolutely nothing happened. We clung to the lantern for a moment, then another. Slowly, Dante dropped his hand away.
We were thrown to the ground as the shifts returned. This time, I hardly even had time to register my surroundings past the gravel beneath my feet before Dante screamed.
“It’s gone!” he cried, whirling around desperately in search of our constant. “It disappeared!”
Shoulders slumped in equal parts irritation and exhaustion, I rose. “Well, we’ll have to find it again.”
I wiped rocks from where they were embedded in my knees.
“But where do we even look?” He asked, irritated. “It was here, it was just here. How could it have—”
I scanned our new environment. Some gravel road leading up to a beautiful white house amid a simple farmland. I squinted when I spotted movement. A scrap of an apron and swill of skirts as someone darted behind the house.
“Dante,” I said, silencing his ranting.
He met my gaze. I held a finger up to my lips and bid him to follow me as I creeped forward toward the house.
I set a steady pace, wanting to solve the mystery before we spun away again, somehow feeling like this was important in some way. As we reached the corner of the house from behind which the girl had vanished, though, someone spoke from behind us.
“Follow me.”
Dante and I both jumped and spun around. A little girl stood on the gravel road we’d just left. She wore an apron over a plain gray dress and her dull hair was tied up in a simple bonnet. But she looked right at us, and her voice seemed to come from all around and yet nowhere at the same time.
A chill rippled through me.
“She can see us,” Dante whispered, stunned. “Adrian, none of the others—”
“I know.”
“What do we do?”
“I guess…follow her?”
The little girl turned slowly away, and the ground fell out from beneath our feet again.
We were on a boat being thrown side to side by the tumultuous waves beneath us. Hanging above us, high upon a post, was the lantern. I looked to Dante, then moved toward it.
“Leave it,” the girl’s voice rang out, thundering over the waves.