Chapter Twenty-Six #2
Dante and I glanced around, wide eyed, but we didn’t see her. A moment later, I spotted the corner of an apron disappearing behind the helm. I took a step forward to follow the girl, but Dante stilled me with a hand on my arm.
“What are you doing?” I asked over the roaring waves.
“I think we should go for the lantern.”
“What? Why?”
“It’s the constant, Adrian. It’s the only thing that’s been here the whole time. It and us.”
“But she said—”
“She’s a distraction. She’s meant to pull us away, send us even deeper into these illusions. Adrian, it’s the lantern. We have to stay focused on the constant.”
“We already grabbed it, Dante,” I reminded him, annoyed now. “We both held onto it and it just disappeared. What’s the point in chasing after it again?”
“I don’t know.” He shook his head. “But she isn’t real.”
“What?”
“Remember the second Trial? The voices? Listen to her. Listen closely.”
“I don’t underst—”
Another shift sent me sailing over the edge of the boat. But instead of meeting the waves, I landed with a thud on top of a puffy white cloud. Dante was on his own, just a few yards away from me. The girl was above us, looking down over the edge of her cloud.
“Follow me,” she repeated and disappeared.
That’s when I finally heard it. That faint, whining whistle. The same whistle I’d heard in the second Trial which had guided me to what was real and what wasn’t. I sighed and dropped my head back onto the cloud in frustration.
“You don’t have to tell me I was right.” Dante stood and tried his balance. “But it would be nice if you did.”
I snorted and rubbed my eyes. I was so tired. How long had we been doing this?
“There,” Dante said. He pointed over the edge of his cloud toward one far below. And upon it, the lantern.
“How do we—” I started but he’d already jumped.
I gasped and scrambled over to the edge of my cloud. Dante soared through the air, arms tucked at his sides as he barreled toward the lantern. With another sigh, I followed.
We landed on the soft pillow of cloud next to the lantern and reached out, but the world shifted again.
My head collided with hard stone. I groaned and rolled to a stop at the foot of some ancient, long forgotten temple.
“Adrian, come quickly.”
Dante was on his feet, one hand on the lantern that was set delicately on a small stone column. I leaped up and ran to him. I grabbed the lantern too and, just as before, nothing happened.
“Maybe we have to—” Dante started but before he could finish, it vanished, disappearing from our hands. And the world shifted again, taking us to a marble hall.
I roared in frustration and fell to my knees, slamming my fists into the floor.
A resounding crack echoed throughout the hall, and the marble beneath my hands shattered.
A spindly crack shot out from beneath my palms, running a jagged line down the length of the hall, growing as it climbed the wall on the opposite side.
Dante took a step back, preparing to run in case of a collapse, but I rose to my feet and took a step forward, eyes narrowing.
The crack leading up the wall wasn’t going straight up.
It curved inward, running above us as if we were under a dome.
But the ceilings didn’t appear to be curved.
Strange. When it passed us, another loud crack echoed in my ears and stone broke away.
Dante flinched, covering his head with his hands to shield himself from the falling rock, but no marble fell. Instead, daylight shone through, and the hall itself blinked and disappeared.
We stood in the center of an arena. Thousands of spectators sat in stands arranged in rising circles all around us. They gaped with open mouths as Dante and I stood back-to-back, spinning in slow circles.
“Can they see us?” he asked, voice trembling.
I made eye contact with a man directly across from me.
His section of seating was shaded from the scorching sun by an ornate awning.
He rose from his chair, lips parting. His bright blue eyes found mine and narrowed.
He almost seemed to glow, a golden aura emanating from his body as his blond hair fell into his face.
A woman rose behind him, placing one elegant hand on his shoulder.
He tensed. “How—”
The arena faded away, and we were left, gasping, on the muddy ground of a bog.
“What was that?” I asked, stunned.
“The lantern, Adrian,” Dante reminded me. He stood first and offered to help me up. “We have to find the lantern.”
I nodded and accepted his hand, casting my eyes about in search of our constant, but I struggled to focus. That last shift, when I’d cracked the marble and we’d been tossed into that arena, it had felt different somehow. Wrong. Like we weren’t meant to have been there.
Like it wasn’t a part of this.
“There,” Dante cried.
I snapped out of it; the lantern hung high up in a tree. He gripped the trunk and began to climb. I went around to the other side and hauled myself up it as well. Whatever it was that we needed to do with this lantern, it was probably something we needed to do together.
At the top of the tree, when we’d finally reached the branch the lantern rested on, I’d begun to wonder why the world hadn’t yet shifted. Then Dante snatched the constant—and tossed it to the ground.
“Dante!” I shouted.
The lantern shattered on the grass below, and a ball of fire, five times the size of anything the lantern could have possibly contained, ignited and shot upwards. We raised our arms to cover our eyes against the blaze.
The branch we sat on had gone cold, very cold. I looked down. The bark of the tree was gone. I was holding onto some contraption of metal instead.
Slowly, we slid to the ground. Black tile, shiny but plain.
Around us were metal contraptions that looked suspiciously like items we’d seen during the shifts.
The helm of a ship, which could double as a farmhouse in a pinch.
The tree had branches which could retract to form a simple post. Columns and makeshift tunnels littered the room, but in the center sat the rings, glowing with the same dim hue of the lantern. Not blue this time, but white.
We didn’t speak as we stepped forward and placed our arms through the rings.
Once we were branded, Dante gave me an exhausted nod of gratitude for a job well done, then turned to his metal tube to be transported home.
But I hesitated. Rooted in place, I scanned the room for anything that resembled the raised stands of an arena or a man with shining golden hair and piercing blue eyes whose voice had held no trace of a whistle.