Chapter 16
Chapter
Sixteen
LYRIANA
The seraphim barely had time to touch the sand upon landing, before Auriel flung open the carriage door, and leapt onto the beach. Sand sprayed out from the bottom of his boots and our seraphim squawked in annoyance.
I raced behind him, but he was heading to the seraphim’s face, stroking its beak, cooing in High Lumerian to calm it down.
He’d yelled at the poor bird the whole flight to keep up a brutal pace.
But it was necessary. We were going to be surrounded in minutes.
And this seraphim was our only way to escape. We needed her to stay.
“Go! To the tomb!” Auriel yelled, one hand resting between the seraphim’s eyes. She closed them, starting to look more content.
I turned. The Guardian of Bamaria wasn’t far.
The black onyx stone shone in the sunlight. Its head was still missing, probably lost to the ocean by now. I felt guilty about that—especially now that I knew what it was.
I reached the front of the tomb, standing between the gryphon’s massive front claws, and stared up at its taut muscles, leading to a neck without a head.
Auriel joined me a moment later, his face drawn as he looked up at the statue he’d created. At the place he’d chosen to make his final resting place a thousand years ago.
I placed my hand on Auriel’s shoulder. He startled, as if he’d fallen into a trance. Then he shook his head, like he was attempting to clear his mind. “I didn’t recognize it at first. When I had you—” he looked away, embarrassed. “When I had you pressed against it.”
“Too dazzled by my beauty?” I teased, trying to keep things light.
He chuckled. “I was. But, also in my defense it was dark and raining for the most part. I can feel it now. I feel this void, the absence of where my soul once dwelt. I didn’t feel it before, everything was too muddled.”
“You can feel that now?” I asked. “The void?”
Auriel nodded. “I would have known immediately if I felt it that first night.” He coughed uncomfortably.
“But also, and perhaps most importantly, I wasn’t expecting the gryphon to be headless.
” His eyebrows lifted. “The tomb was made to be indestructible. Of course, leave it to you, the newest one, to rip its head off.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and I meant it. My hand slid down his arm, taking his hand in mine again.
“I carved this myself, you know. It took days.” He turned to me, one side of his lips lifting into a chagrined smile. “I really should be keeping a list of the ways you’ve offended me, Meka.”
“Auriel, you know I didn’t mean to—”
He laughed. “Don’t worry about it.” He leaned in closer, our foreheads almost touching again. “I have an eternity to get back at you.” He winked. Then he stepped back, surveying the tomb, and holding up his hand above his eyes, blocking the sun. “And truth be told, you did us both a favor.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, you’ve already taken care of step one. Removing the head.”
“Removing the head?”
Auriel nodded. “Very few could have done it. I’m not sure if I would have had the strength in the end.
” His eyes dipped to my chest. “But you did. The head is what sealed it together, kept the tomb from ever being opened.” He swallowed.
“On Asherah’s tomb,” his voice cracked, “I left the keyhole exposed. That was a mistake. So I did things differently the second time. Though I must say, you seem to have a real talent for breaking into impenetrable tombs.”
“Well everyone needs a hobby.”
Auriel chuckled, but I could see beneath the surface what this was—a distraction.
He was struggling, trying to build his own courage.
It might have been a thousand years since the construction of the Guardian—since his death.
He might have been in the Celestial Realms with his immortal body for a thousand years, spending all of his eternity with Asherah.
But he was alive once. Mortal. And attached to this life.
To this earth. This land. This was hard for him.
And for me. No amount of time would heal the wound. The forced separation of death. Even if we were successful with this, with the Moon Queen, with Rhyan—I wasn’t sure if anything would fully heal me. Losing him. Watching him die.
My stomach was starting to twist. A new sensation washing over me. I hadn’t been here when Auriel came to his final rest. I’d died first.
But suddenly, that no longer mattered. A memory washed over me. Quick, and bright. Like a flash of light.
“You were crying,” I said, though I hadn’t planned to say it out loud. “You thought you’d failed me. That you failed the cause. But you didn’t. You never did. Not once. Not in my eyes, Rakame.”
Auriel stilled, his eyes watering. “Asherah?”
I stepped back, suddenly shaky. “I-I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. I don’t know—” I’d felt that line blur before. Brief moments, where I wasn’t sure if I was her or myself.
A shadow crossed the sky. A seraphim.
Fuck. We were out of time.
“Auriel! We need to open it. Now!”
A sharp, salt-filled breeze blew icily against my back, and the water began to rush at my heels. The waves were growing higher, moving faster. Like a storm was coming. Another seraphim flew overhead.
“Can you give me light?” he asked. “The lines are faint after all this time, and difficult to see. My fault—I made it that way.”
I reached for the leather scabbard at my hip, and removed the stave inside, fully aware of how Auriel’s eyes tracked it— how they darkened. It was Asherah’s stave, and I knew he recognized it. Just as he’d recognized her chest plate. “Ani petrova vala.”
I leaned in, our shoulders touching. And right where the head had come off, there were a series of words in High Lumerian carved into the onyx, much as there had been on Asherah’s seraphim.
I began to read, parsing out the crafted letters, and translated, “None but I, none but Auriel who fell. Auriel who was a God named a Guardian. Auriel who represented the Green Ray. Auriel who took the secrets of the light and the Valalumir to his grave. None but I, none but Auriel alone.” Beneath the words was an imprint.
A hand.
Auriel laid his palm on top, then pressed down, his fingers fitting perfectly into the indentations.
Auriel, himself, was the key.
Green light—emerald green—the very green I would know with all of my soul at the end of eternity, began to emanate from his skin. The light pulsed and expanded, rising up Auriel’s golden arm, and then across what remained of the Guardian’s black stone body.
Squinting in the overwhelming brightness, I let the light of my stave flicker out, and stepped back.
The ground began to shake, and thunder clapped in the sky as lightning struck the ocean behind us.
A gale force wind blew against us and Auriel yelled out as he fought to keep his hand on the statue.
There was another clap, and Auriel fell, his back hitting the ground as I rushed to him, helping him to sit up. His eyes widened, and he pointed back at the tomb.
The Guardian’s body split in half, both parts sliding across the sand away from each other. I gasped, and stood up, my entire body aglow in green, and reached out a hand for Auriel. He stepped forward and the stones stilled, the light fading just enough to reveal what had been tucked inside.
Auriel. Himself.
Like with Asherah, there was a golden coffin, sculpted into his likeness.
The details were so exact, I had to look away.
He looked too real. He lay on his back, his hands folded together across his chest. Without any hint of coloring, the blond of his hair, the tan of his skin, his likeness to Rhyan was even more shocking.
Tears blurred my vision.
The carving of his body, much like Asherah’s, had a space open beneath his hands. In Asherah’s tomb, we’d found her stave in that spot, along with the indigo shard. Moriel’s shard.
My heart pounded as I spotted a cylindrical golden case, encrusted with sparkling gemstones of every color. It looked like the sort of ceremonial cases we used to house important scrolls in the temple.
“Auriel’s Valya.” He reached for the casing, pulling it out from his coffin’s hands.
“The secret for the cure,” I whispered.
Auriel nodded.
The ground seemed to groan, along with the thundering sound of the slabs of stone grinding against the sand as they retracted. Just as we’d seen in Asherah’s tomb, Auriel’s was resealing itself, until the stones were once more bound together.
The sound of waves filled my ears. Suddenly Auriel turned, and shouted in terror. “Get down!”
My back hit the ground, but gently. Auriel’s arm had wrapped around me, taking the brunt of my fall, his body like armor over mine as the ocean ejected the Guardian’s head. There was a cracking sound, like thunder, but the head was restored. The statue, the tomb, whole once more.
“Lyriana Batavia!” Turion Dairen had arrived.
Auriel raced past the Guardian, and I followed. Three seraphim touched down. Dairen led the charge with at least two dozen soturi behind him. Too many for us to take at once.
“You’re surrounded,” he yelled. “You have no chance of escape. You are under arrest by order of Emperor Avery for the murder—”
Auriel grabbed my hand, and we took off, running in the opposite direction.
“What’s your plan?” I yelled.
“Just keep running.”
I looked back. They were gaining on us. “Auriel!”
“No,” he said. “No! We’ve come too far.”
But I could hear them yelling, their boots in the sand, their taunts rising above the salty ocean wind, the sound of seraphim flying overhead.
The waves began to crash into our boots, soaking our heels. The water was becoming more violent. More storm like. Yet the sky remained clear.
“What’s going on?” I asked, just as Auriel steered us away from the water. But the water kept coming until I was soaked to my knees.