Chapter Twenty-Eight Zephyra #2
“Hm.” Amaya bends down, snatches the cursed skull from the floor, and sweeps past us.
Out of the brig. Up the stairs. She doesn’t speak.
Doesn’t explain herself. I glance at Arion in confusion, but he’s already moving, following her step for step.
Amaya reaches the deck, barking orders for four dozen soldiers to adjust the sails and steer us south.
My stomach plummets. This can’t be good.
I rush after them with Gavriall and Vesper behind me.
Brutal winds—magical winds—whip my hair around my face.
My knees slacken at the sight of how high we are.
Thousands of feet in the air. My head swims. I’m going to puke. I’m—
“An interesting story, Warlock Stone,” Amaya calls over her shoulder. “However, Vasiliev did not discover ‘some sort of rock.’ He discovered adamant flecked with amber. And not just any amber, but a sort that glowed as if it had a pulse of its own.”
I suck in a harsh breath. Amber. Blood roars in my ears, and bile stings the back of my throat. But it’s—it’s vertigo. Just vertigo.
“Run,” the High Sorcerer rasps.
So I do. After hours—after hundreds of shallow slices all over my flesh—I manage to throw myself against a door.
Inside a room. The topmost point of the sorcerer’s castle, the tower illuminates itself with light from a single gilded window, and I hurl myself around a bed carved out of a massive oyster shell.
I crouch behind the beastly thing, trying desperately to catch my breath.
To forget about everything today. Blood under my nails. Blood in my hair.
Jacin screaming for help.
A sob betrays me, and I crumple against an adamant wall, waiting for the sorcerer to enter.
Waiting for the horrors to begin. But the door clicks shut, and a lock turns.
“Sleep well, dear,” the sorcerer whispers—the preternatural amber light of the tower’s window flickers out.
I am trapped in the pitch-black for two days.
My cuts never fully heal. They leave me covered in silver scars.
“How do you know that?” Arion asks.
“Because”—Amaya grins—“it was my great-great-great-grandmother who funded the expedition.” The breeze whips faster, a brutal pummeling, until we’re riding through the center of a storm.
I hardly feel it. I hardly feel anything right now.
There is only the memory of glowing amber shuddering into darkness.
I want her to be wrong. She has to be wrong.
“Your great-great…” Gavriall trails off, staring hard at the skull cradled between Amaya’s hands. “You mean—”
“Yes, historian. I mean Queen Emilia.” Amaya kisses the temple of the skull.
“Dima Vasiliev was tossed out of Mortia. They treated him as if he’d lost his mind.
But Emilia knew there was a chance he was right.
She brought him to Tempest and had him show her the proof.
He said the size and shape of the adamant was too intricate, intentional.
He thought it was the tallest tip of a spire.
An underwater castle. But no one in that part of the ocean had ever seen a castle before. ”
Arion shakes his head. “I don’t understand.”
The skull chitters, “A trench in ruthless blue. A lie in crimson red. Adamant, amber, magic, and pain. Vasiliev never returned again. An expedition lost. Abysses forgotten. The end of the road did dishearten.”
No.
A trench in ruthless blue.
No, no, no.
Adamant, amber, magic, and pain.
I stare at my feet as the world tilts sickeningly around me. This can’t be happening. I can’t… I can’t…
“The S-Sol,” I stutter, unable to look up. Unable to look. “Abysses is in the Sol.”
No one seems to hear me. They’re all looking at Amaya as she raises her arms and commands the wind faster still.
Heavy gray clouds shudder with lightning and thunder.
All around us now. We are surrounded. We are…
we are headed south. I feel cold, pale, slick with sweat and rain, and I can’t breathe.
“This is why you needed merrow.” Amaya turns to Arion. “You wanted help navigating the sea.”
“Yes,” he says. “And if you help us, you can have whatever treasure awaits within those ruins. You can excavate it all, take credit for it, bring glory to your kingdom and people and join your ancestors in greatness—so long as the heart is mine.”
Amaya smiles. The cunning and clever smile of a demigoddess. And I think I might be sick. “That’s all well and good, Warlock Stone,” she says evenly, “but the ruins are not in the Sol.”
My wrists ache with phantom burns. I reach out for anything to steady myself because I know—I know what’s coming before she says it.
I’ve been dreading it all along. And once it’s said…
it’s over. There will be no turning back.
All this will come crashing down, and there will be nothing I can do to stop it.
I finally wrench my gaze upward, pleading silently for Amaya to stop speaking, but she ignores me.
“Queen Emilia sent Vasiliev on an expedition through the Syl,” Amaya explains. “If those are, indeed, the Abysses ruins, they lie within something he called the Sceleratus Trench.”