Frantic to know what’s happening, I open both my Mind’s Eye and my Inner Eye, layering them over each other to form my Third Eye.
The dirt and rocks on the face of the door suddenly vanish. I watch with my Third Eye as the gears melt and spread, running through the outlining seam as the whole section of wall recedes into the earth. A blinding light emits from the opening, forcing me to shield my eyes with my grimy palms.
My guards remove their helmets and shake out their hair. They peel me off the wall and drag me to the vault door set about three feet off the ground. At the lip I shrink back, gripped by apoplectic terror.
The first maiden has stepped up and out onto nothing.
She stands there, several feet above where we stare up at her from the tunnel floor, suspended in mid air over a seemingly bottomless pit. She offers her hand with an invitation burning in her amber eyes.
“It’s dark and cramped, but perfectly safe, Lady,” she whispers, almost reverent. “The ground is solid, observe.” She bounces on the balls of her booted feet, demonstrating.
Dark and cramped? Is she joking? It’s small, yeah, but the space is neon bright and glowing.
Hesitant, I inch my head into the opening. Every surface is lined in glistening black glass. The omnipresent light doesn’t reflect from the glass, nor is it being absorbed. Instead, I watch individual photons zipping about—diving, soaring, curving, and passing straight through the shimmering black glass floor…
…passing through to where?
Propelled by extreme curiosity, I climb up over the lip of earth from the tunnel into the chamber. My attention mimics the enthusiastic light, speeding from one thought to another until somehow, despite my non-existent understanding of physics, I conclude with absolute certainty that the lambent radiation I’m experiencing as light is actually refracting groups of microscopic sentient beings. They’re not just reacting to their surroundings, they’re interacting with it—with my skin, my cells, the macula in my physical eyes—with everything they contact as they scatter purposefully throughout the chamber.
My fear vanishes.
The beings beckon me, welcoming, and I follow, wanting nothing more than to bathe in their glow.
The particles pass through my skin, enlivening me. Muck and filth shed from my body like dross, along with Kaillen’s jacket and the stupid evening gown. I stretch my arms wide and throw back my head, exulting in the cleansing quantum flow.
“Emma, no!” Claire’s cry is distant, but intense. “What’s happening to her? Make it stop!”
What? No! Don’t make it stop! NEVER make it stop! I glance back at the tunnel to see Aidan and Claire wrestling to get away from their guards.
Why are they being restrained? Why aren’t they all up in here with me experiencing this bliss?
“Help her!” Aidan shouts. “She’s having a seizure. Help me get her out of there!”
A seizure? “Stop being dorks, you guys. Come on, hurry up and crawl in! It’s AMAZEBALLS in here.”
Aidan stops struggling at the sound of my voice. His burst of manic energy recedes to tiny scarlet coins on his cheeks, but doubt still twitches at the corners of his mouth. The maidens back away from him, regarding me warily. Claire peeks out from behind her fingers, tears in her eyes. Every person in the tunnel stares at me as if I’ve started foaming at the mouth.
Every person except Ava.
“Your Third Eye, Sister,” she calls. “Is it open?”
I nod.
“Close it.”
“Why?” I ask, suspicious, not wanting to obey. “What’s going on? Why is everyone so spooked?”
I search the face of my maiden guard, the one with ash-blonde hair and amber eyes who first invited me inside the chamber. The muscles of her jaw flex with unease. “This is where I’m supposed to be, right?” I ask her. “The Queen told you to bring us to the War Room.”
“This isn’t the War Room, Lady.” Her voice is soft. “This is the Crypt.”
Chapter Fifteen
Oh, bother.
“Crypt, mausoleum, catacombs, who cares? It’s incredible in here!” I twirl again. “Does it really matter what it’s called? ‘A rose by any other name would still smell as sweet,’” I say, quoting Willie Shakespeare, as my 10th grade Broadway-bound teacher often did.
“Besides, Aidan, I don’t for one minute believe you’re nervous about coming in here just because it’s a crypt. You’re practically immune to the entire horror genre!” It’s true. Whenever the boys and I watch scary movies, Jacob and I plug our ears and cover our eyes almost the entire time. But not Aidan. He’d probably be stoked if there were ever a zombie attack IRL. I even gifted him a so-called zombie-decapitating katana for his birthday last year. Who knew you could buy an actual sword from Amazon and have it delivered to your house all for the low-low shipping cost of free if your absentee mother is a Prime member? In my defense, I thought the sword was fake when I ordered it. But yeah, I still gave it to him when I found out it wasn’t. #sisteroftheyear.
Claire, on the other hand, has always been skittish, always flatly refusing to participate in anything scary. It makes sense that she’s less than eager to traipse through an underground crypt, but Aidan being all freaked out just doesn’t add up. Something else must be going on, something I’m not seeing.
“Trust me, you guys,” I try again in my most persuasive tone. “This is hands-down the swankest crypt I’ve ever been in. And these zippy little firefly guys are extremely trippy. I’m pretty sure they’re in love with me!”
“That’s the worrisome part.” Aidan stares up at me. “It’s pitch black in there and silent as—well, a grave, but you’re twirling around like you’re high-as-a-kite flinging sludge everywhere. Also, you’re talking like a fangirl.”
“I tOtEs ReSpeCt yOuR cOnCeRn, AiDaN.” I’m too kumbaya and giggly to argue. “But can you guys please just trust me this once? I promise there’s nothing scary in here.”
“What about your claustrophobia?” A buzzing wasp of panic stings Claire’s voice.
At the sound of her name, Claustrophobia rears her Gorgon head again in my brain. She has a plastic bag ready to slip over me to vacuum-seal my airways.
“Quiet down.” I tell her. She startles in surprise. This is the first time I’ve ever talked back to Claustrophobia since the night she appeared when I was nine years old and got stuck at the bottom of my sleeping bag during a rambunctious slumber party game of caterpillars and butterflies. She was suddenly there with me, compressing my chest in the downy cocoon.
But that was then and this is now. “You know the lights won’t let anything bad happen to us, Phobia,” I tell her. “Leave.”
She shrinks, slinking away.
I’m so saturated with Blaze and Keen right now, I could punch a hole straight through the center of the planet. Nothing could hold me, not even miles of the earth’s compressed crust.
“I’m okay, Bug,” I tell Claire. “Can you breathe all right?”
She nods with a gulp.
She and Aidan are so wide-eyed with uncertainty—fear, even—I’m almost tempted to close my Third Eye just to see what’s got their panties in such a twist. Almost. But that would be stupid. No one would trade this luminous reality for a pitch-black, creepy, silent-as-a-grave crypt.
“Excuse me…um, Your Guardship,” I address the ash-blonde maiden. “Why did you tell me to come in here if this isn’t where I’m supposed to be… Sorry, what’s your name?”
“My name is Chloe, Lady, and I am simply a guide, not a guard.”
Oh, geez. I’d hate to meet an actual guard.
“Okay, Chloe. Why did you tell me to come in here if this isn’t where I’m supposed to be?” I repeat.
“It is where you’re supposed to be, Lady,” she answers, chagrined. “We must pass through the Crypt to reach the War Room. It’s your behavior, Lady…” Her glance flickers briefly to the other guard/guide, who nods back with dark, startled eyes like she knows exactly what Chloe’s about to say an
d agrees one hundred percent. “It unsettles us.”
Unsettles? Lol. “Well, I’m sorry for unsettling you.” I drop my arms to my side and fix contrition on my face. “I won’t twirl anymore, I promise.”
But they can’t stop me from twirling on the inside, floating higher and higher.
“The Crypt is sacred, Lady,” Chloe says. “It is a holy place.”
It’s obvious none of them are aware of the zillion zipping fireflies that are, perhaps, a tad too giddy to be strictly holy. I say nothing, but I guaran-damn-tee you, if anyone else could See what I’m Seeing—could feel what I’m feeling—they’d be twirling with me in this silent disco of cut-crystal liquid light.
While the Fae queue to climb up into the crypt, I scan my body. I’m head-to-toe healed. More than that. I’m LIT. My teensy light friends have scoured away every impurity inside me, and out.
Blaze free-flows through me from my wings. Heedless of my audience, I shrug off Kaillen’s jacket, unfurling them with the same ‘you have no idea who you’re dealing with’ Diana Prince-flare when she unfastens her bun for her Wonder Woman spin.
A glimpse of pure knowledge illustrates an act of organic creation on the stage of my mind. With a teaspoon of Blaze from my wings I mimic the impossibly intricate weave, secreting glossy thread from my glands as if I’m a human-silkworm hybrid. From the thread, I knit a silk-soft shift dress like the one I’d once drooled over in some haute couture magazine in the dentist’s office. The kind I’ve always been sure I’d never be able to pull off in a million years because A.) I’m not a stick thin model with a shaved head, enormous eyes, and needle-long lashes, and B.) Hahahahahahahaha!
But insecurity is no match for this kind of power. Besides, the dress in the magazine was only boring old gray. Mine is the color of fire opals. And right now there’s zero doubt in my mind: I look hot.
As I weave the shift with Blaze, I’m using Keen to absorb particles from the space around me, gathering them in my chakras along the shortest mean-free path. My interior attenuation plummets, plunging from a soprano’s coloratura to the deepest-deep contrabass rumble as I charge the amassed particles. With the vibration of a supermassive black hole, I pulse syncopated calidity through my pores, incinerating what’s left of the hateful sparkling evening gown in kickass percussion.
Goddamn. I’m en fuego.
A poke at my elbow snaps me back from euphoria.
“Omg,Emma,PleaseWillYouMakeMeOneToo?”
“Of course I will, Bug. I’ll make one for anyone who wants one. Pick a color.”
Aidan approaches us slowly, eyes swimming with awe and reluctance, almost as if he’s afraid to get too close. Huddled around the cave entrance, the rest of our group gawks open-mouthed.
Chloe gasps.
“Who taught you to do that, Lady?” Her eyes are wide with apprehension.
I giggle at the stupefied wonder on their faces before remembering I’m supposed to be reverent. I wipe the smile from my lips and open my mouth to answer, and then close it again.
Because I don’t know the answer.
Where did all this knowing come from if I was never taught it?
My brain asserts herself, paranoid: Should we really be so open and trusting of the unknown? What if these lights are bad? What if this knowledge is a trick?
Absolutely not. I deep-body know the source of these wonders isn’t evil.
As I cast about for an answer, the darting molecules continue their dance around and through me with tingling affection.
“I don’t know,” I finally admit. “These diagrams of the weaves appeared in my Mind’s Eye…”
Except, that isn’t exactly right. It wasn’t like reading instructions. It was more of a hands-on demonstration, like someone was working the weaves with me. Someone who really REALLY thinks I’m amazing.
My lips seal themselves shut, because in the wake of their loving warmth, the dancing lights communicate a warning, cautioning me to silence.
I shrug. “I don’t know,” I repeat lamely.
Chloe and the other maiden move to take their places at my elbows again, ready to assist. But I’m fully recharged. Not only can I walk, I can probably fly.
“I’m okay,” I say, gently shooing their hands away.
They leave me be but call for torches from the corridor and walk ahead of me a little. I follow them deeper into the crypt with Aidan and Claire by my sides. Quince, Ava, and Twist are right behind us.
Claire squeezes my hand. “I don’t like it in here,” she whimpers. “It’s even darker than the tunnel.”
To my Third Eye, the cramped opening has expanded into a cavern the size of my high school auditorium. Bright deposits of minerals glint in the lights’ radiance. Veins of ore ignite and flare like fuses touched with fire, flowing in rivers of molten gold across the ceiling’s inky vault, reflecting as a galaxy of shooting stars off the black glass floor.
I squeeze Claire’s hand back. “Hold up your other hand,” I prompt. “Open it flat. Good.” Without questioning how I do it, I weave a heatless flame and transfer it to her palm.
“Don’t look right at it,” I instruct. “It could blind you.” I make one for Aidan, too, who accepts it cautiously. Claire holds hers close to her chest, but she doesn’t let go of my hand. Aidan thrusts his into the black, lighting the path in front of his shoes, but doesn’t explore any further.
Our herded footsteps echo as we shuffle across open space, like a damply muttered conversation filling the void where our voices would be if any of us dared to speak. A flock of questions flap their wings in my mouth, but I hold them back. All around me the Fae peer anemically ahead into what for them must be total darkness, casting the occasional frightened glance at the empty space enveloping them.
Only I can See that the space is far from empty with my Third Eye.
Around the perimeter of the cave, larger-than-life sculptures of knights stand sentinel in full armor…at least, I hope they’re larger-than-life and not the actual size of knights in the First Realm. They rank shoulder-to-shoulder four rows deep.
The front row soldiers hold steady with their feet shoulder width apart in sparring stance, short swords angled to thrust, shields raised to parry. Behind them, the guards grip spears in one hand, and giant tower shields in the other. The third row men-at-arms wield two-handed broadswords, the tips piercing the glittering onyx surface of the ground between their feet. The final row is archers with bows raised, arrows pointing to rain down a wide soaring arc of destruction.
There must be thousands of them. Like buried Terracotta warriors of China’s first emperor—an entire underground army just a breath away from battle.
On the cavern’s far side, huge granite columns support an ornately carved triangular pediment etched into rock. The tympanum depicts a triumphant knight with sword raised, his foot resting on the severed head of an enormous vanquished dragon.
“Oh, wow,” I can’t help but exclaim. “That’s so beast!”
“What’s so beast?” Aidan holds his woven light higher, squinting ahead blindly.
I can’t even answer I’m so spellbound. With every step we take towards the temple-like structure, the lights shine brighter and their movement grows livelier. To me the walls, the ceiling, and the floor all gleam as though composed entirely of precious gems.
The lights begin singing my name, an effulgent choir.
Emily, Emily, Emileeeee.
Now I See long boxes made of warped-wavy crystal glowing behind the granite columns.
“Ava,” I gasp, reaching behind me to grab her hand. “Look! They’re like your box from the Second Realm, when you were small!”
Her eyes regard me, searching for a moment. She shakes her head. “It’s too dark for me to see, Sister.”
How is it possible that even Ava can’t See? It’s brighter than noon on Mercury.
But again, I say nothing, entranced.
The boxes are sarcophagi. There are seven on each side of a narrow center a
isle leading to a raised dais. Like Ava’s box in the Second Realm, the crystal is too wavy to make out details from this far away, but I can discern that six coffins on each side of the aisle contain bodies, while one on each side does not, making a total of fourteen caskets: twelve occupied and two empty.
Strike that. Fifteen caskets. On the dais a single sarcophagus stands upright unsupported, like a bishop addressing his quorum.
Ropes of undulating brilliance flow from the twelve occupied boxes to the raised casket on the platform, twining around it, a network of arteries pumping Blaze and Keen. They knot together at the crystal crown, mad-rush blasting straight up through the cave ceiling in a beam of matter-displacing plasma.
Surely, the Fae can See this? If the maidens’ wings are re-growing they would be able to See the Blaze, just as the elves would be able to See Keen. But no one says a word, not even our guides.
Abruptly, I understand: the standing crystal casket is the source of my light friends, the wellspring of my new knowing, and the origin of the effusive love that’s enveloped me since entering the Crypt.
As we pass under the portico and into the temple proper, tendrils of light from the twelve occupied boxes peel off from the rope leading to the dais, dipping in graceful greeting, flowing toward me…Ambassadors of Welcome.
Salutations, Emma.
You are welcome here, Emma.
Welcome Princess. This is your home.
With each touch, a new greeting radiates through me. Power surges in and around my body.
Yet still the Fae can’t seem to See that I’ve gone supernova.
Claire clings to my arm. “Here, Emma. You can have your light back,” she whispers, pressing her worried face into the side of my shift.
“What’s wrong, Bug?” I keep my voice low, but it’s hard to stifle the blissed-out joy fizzing inside me.
“The coffins. They’re so creepy.” Her words tremble with frightened tears. “I can see the skeletons through the shiny lids.”
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Aidan murmurs on my other side, shocked revulsion in his voice as he waves his light around like a torch. “Some of them are still decaying. Why would they make a transparent sepulcher? Gross.”
Secret Keeper (My Myth Trilogy - Book 2): Young Adult Fantasy Novel Page 11