"I see you called my bluff," the king said as I approached him.
I cocked my head. "Your Highness, we had no choice. My apologies for..."
The king raised his hand. "No need for apologies. It is I who should apologize for not being as forthright as I could have been."
"You mean that you kidnapped an infant wyrm from the void?" I asked.
The king winced. Titus looked at him, wide-eyed.
"Where did you get that idea?" the king asked.
"Tell me, Your Highness. When exactly did you visit Julie Brown? And how did she tell you to go about opening the void?"
The look on Titus' face shifted from curious to shocked in a split second. It was one thing to hear his king accused of kidnapping a baby wyrm. It was another thing entirely to hear that he might have been responsible for the whole thing.
"I had no choice," the king said. "And to answer your question, it happened shortly after you left Fomoria the first time."
"What do you mean you had no choice?" Titus asked.
The king looked back at his over-sized general. "The only thing more frightening than what might come from the void are those who demanded I open it. But I've accounted for the contingencies. And evidently, Miss Campbell, I underestimated you."
I nodded. "Big mistake. Don't mess with southern girls. We bite."
Titus cracked a smile. I'm not sure he had much experience with southern girls since he'd likely spent his entire life underwater. But I was feeling spunky and, apparently, he found it amusing.
"Tell me, Miss Campbell," King Conand said, handing Titus his trident and floating as if pacing back and forth in front of me. "If I had not forbidden you to leave Fomoria, would we be in the position we are now?"
I shrugged. "Agwe knew we needed to consult with Marie Laveau to discover what happened."
King Conand nodded. "But had I not forbidden it, you would have returned to shore freely. Instead, you found a need to ally yourself with the wyrm."
I bit my lip. He was right on that account. If he hadn't forbidden my departure, if we weren't trying to avoid detection by the beacons, I wouldn't have been in a position to heal Nammu's husband. She wouldn't be prepared to trust me to help recover her child. "You have a point," I said, "but..."
"But what?" King Conand said. "Like it or not, the Fomorian Wyrmriders have ascended. And you are my creation!"
I snorted. I wasn't about to let the king's arrogance silence what needed to be said. "But you kidnapped a baby to do it, Your Highness. I don't give two hoots and a holler what the result was. You crossed a line."
"Miss Campbell, or perhaps I should now call you La Sirene, it might be true that the ends don't justify the means in common ethics. But for kings and queens, who have so many lives and even the world itself in their hands, as the case may be, difficult choices must be made even at the expense of what's right or wrong for the sake of the greater good."
"You don't realize what you've done," I said.
The king smiled. "I brought the merlegion to you that they, too, might join you. Perhaps, they will become Wyrmriders themselves when more wyrms are born. I've brought your destiny to fruition."
Something struck me hard. It was like the wind was knocked out of me. But nothing had happened. None of the merman legionaries had attacked. The wyrm hadn't moved. King Conand and Titus still stood there, silently. But it felt like the wind had been knocked out of me.
Then the sensation, the emptiness...
La Sirene! It was Nammu speaking to me. Look! We must hurry!
Something dark—massive, larger than the entire city of Fomoria, lurked over the city.
"The voidbringer is already here," I pointed at the king. "And you unleashed it!"
King Conand turned and, while he was pale already, whatever color he had flushed out of his face in an instant.
"Miss Campbell. Please! You and the wyrm, the legions are under your command. There's no other way."
I nodded. "First, tell me where the baby is."
"The baby isn't going to make it..."
"If you want the wyrm to help, we need to find the baby wyrm. Where is he, Conand?"
"I... he's..." the king turned, and abject horror fell across his face as the shadow encroached on Fomoria. The voidbringer didn't look like much. Pure darkness. Nothingness. Not shaped like anything in particular. A giant cloud of non-existence.
"Now!" I shouted.
"Beneath the castle. There's a chamber..." the king stammered. "The wyrm is there."
I nodded and motioned toward Nammu.
Nammu... I know where your baby is...
She moved like lightning. I barely managed to grab onto her and fix my hands beneath her scales as she darted past me.
Under the king's castle, I said to Nammu.
We were heading directly into Fomoria even as the voidbringer started to envelop the firmament.
24
THE MOMENT I told Namuu which spire was the king's castle, the one under which where her baby was supposed to be held, she flew through the water single of mind.
She wasn't about to be stopped.
And I didn't dare speak.
This was her moment, and I was, quite literally, along for the ride.
I drew in whatever magic I could as we charged through Fomoria's firmament, spires crashing around as she forced her way between them. It was the only way she could get through... if I siphoned enough magic from a spot on the firmament to make it temporarily vulnerable.
The other side of the firmament was enveloped entirely in black.
The voidbringer wasn't getting through. The firmament protected the city. And the weak spot we passed through had already recharged itself.
Screams echoed all around us as we flew through the city
Mermaids and mermen terrified... by the presence of a wyrm in the city... and by the voidbringer.
For them, it was the apocalypse...
What would happen once the voidbringer overtook the whole city?
I didn't want to wait around to find out.
But these people... thousands of merfolk... what would happen to them? We couldn't save them all.
How does one value one life over another? Was the wyrm baby worth more than the lives of these innocent merfolk? It didn't matter. We needed the baby... if I was going to have Nammu's help and with it, the rest of the wyrms, to stop the voidbringer... her child had to be the priority.
My baby is here... I can feel him! But I can't find a way in!
I rubbed Nammu along the neck. Don't worry about finding a way... you can make a way...
Nammu charged the king's spire. But she didn't crash into it. She wrapped her body around the spire, and with a good grip, pulled it from the ground.
A massive cavern opened beneath where the spire was.
Uncurling her body, the spire fell and sank, crashing into other spires and hitting the ocean floor.
I can't get inside the cave... Nammu said. It's too small... I could force my way through, make it bigger, but we don't have time. Joni La Sirene, please help! He's in there. I can feel it.
"I'll go after him," I said out loud as I dismounted Nammu. Speaking psychically took too much focus. With merfolk freaking out and spires crashing down around us, I was too distracted. But I could still hear her... that took less effort. It was almost natural. Probably a part of the dragon's essence.
Be fast... if the voidbringer overtakes the city, the whole place will fall into the void...
I nodded and, with a swift kick of my tail, darted for the cave.
My trident, aglow with Fomorian magic, helped illuminate the way.
I had no idea this place existed. Chances were no one, not even Agwe, knew this cavern was here.
The place was riddled with shackles mounted to the walls.
The skeletons and partially desiccated bodies of mermen and mermaids hanging there...
From the looks of it, most of them had been dead quite a while.
But
a few of them... they looked fresh.
This was the king's doing.
Fomoria supposedly didn't incarcerate criminals...
Apparently, they weren't entirely averse to shackling them. If these mermen and mermaids had been criminals at all...
If the merfolk population only knew the truth.
I pushed the thought out of my mind.
I didn't have time to dwell on the apparent injustice of it all.
If we couldn't save the city, if I couldn't get out of this cave with Nammu's baby, it wouldn't matter anyway.
And the truth of it was... the whole city was pretty much damned anyway.
If I found the baby, even if we got out of there quickly... would we have enough time to rally the wyrms against the voidbringer?
I fluttered my tail as hard as I could. This cave was deep—much larger than anyone would think, particularly for something that no one other than the king even knew existed.
Or did they?
Was it possible for a monarch to be involved in a conspiracy that involved shackling people until they died if he didn't have any help?
No wonder he was so reluctant to say anything...
And from the look on his face when it came out that Conand had kidnapped a wyrm, Titus didn't likely know about it either...
I wasn't exactly a part of the Fomorian inner circle... I'd have to ask Agwe about it later.
If there ever was a later...
Facing death is scary enough. But when we die, we imagine there might be some kind of life after. We face death with trepidation, for sure. But if we have some sort of hope regarding the beyond... well... that helps us die more peacefully.
But what we were facing, what all of Fomoria was facing, wasn't merely death. It was nonexistence. Whatever was before anything was—the void itself.
I flipped my tail furiously as I swam through the cave.
More bodies... more than I could count...
What the hell was happening here? This many people, this many merfolk imprisoned here...
It didn't make sense.
How could this many people be shackled beneath the royal spire without people wondering why so many merfolk had gone missing?
If incarceration wasn't a thing... if criminals were assigned undesirable tasks...
I continued swimming.
Find the baby...
The cave started to wind... then it forked in three different directions. I chose one randomly... then it forked again.
Even if I made it out of here, how the hell would I make it out of here in time? I didn't know how long it would take the voidbringer to consume Fomoria... but at the rate he was going, I knew I didn't have much time left.
I had to focus. I didn't know if I could speak to the baby the same way I talked to Nammu... would it understand me at all? I mean, if wyrms are basically eternal creatures, born from a void where time and space don't actually exist... was a baby really a baby at all?
I wasn't sure how to deal with that sort of thing. Trying to imagine what any kind of existence might be in the void was mind-boggling.
But I had to try.
I reached out with my mind.
Hello?
Silence.
Nammu's baby had to be here somewhere... I didn't need him to understand me. He was just a baby wyrm, after all. But maybe he'd respond to my voice. Give me a cry, a scream, something.
I wished I'd asked Nammu her baby's name. Maybe he'd coo or make whatever noise wyrm babies make if I called to him by name.
I kept swimming.
The cave... as I went deeper... it reminded me of the cave I'd been trapped in before. The cave I'd visited again and again in my nightmares.
The time I'd been stuck in the in-between...
Then it hit me. My stomach sank.
The in-between... the cave where I'd been trapped... where Merlin was born...
It was somewhere between the fabric of space and time, something beyond existence...
The cave was the void...
Where the bodies were chained to the walls... that was still in Fomoria...
I was beyond that, now.
But there was no sense turning around.
I couldn't go back.
The voidbringer had succeeded. He consumed the city...
And I was trapped.
25
I COULD ONLY pray Nammu's child was here... somewhere...
My heart raced as I swam as hard as I could through the caverns. My trident providing the only light I had.
A shadow caught my eye.
I kicked my fin hard and chased it... into a dead end.
What the...
Water has a strange effect on light and shadows.
I had to find Nammu's baby...
He wasn't the only way I might escape.
I could shift into dragon form and try to cast a portal... that's how I escaped this place before...
But if I did, I might use up all my magic.
And I'd made Nammu a promise.
How much had the voidbringer consumed... after Fomoria, what was next? The Caribbean... New Orleans... the whole gulf coast...
Eventually, the world.
The void is, by definition, non-existence...
But I felt myself. I sensed my own body. I was in non-existence, but I found it hard to believe I didn't exist, personally.
Who was it, Descartes, who said, "I think, therefore I am"?
I took an introductory elective in philosophy back in High School. That seemed right to me.
And if I understood it at all—who really understands what philosophers write—Descartes' insight meant I must also exist because I was thinking.
Made sense to me, anyway.
Whoever said you don't use crap like that after graduation?
It was philosophy, not some kind of math class.
Don't get me wrong. I suppose math can be helpful. But I never understood the word problems. If you're on a train moving at speed X and another train is on the same track moving in the opposite direction at speed Y. You are currently Z miles apart... how long until the trains collide? I don't know about you, but if I ever find myself in a situation like that, I'm getting the hell off of the train. Forget sitting down to solve the equation.
Then there was science...
Matter can neither be created nor destroyed.
One of Newton's laws, I think... was the same principle that explained why shapeshifting was such a bugaboo. You can't become something with more mass than what you already are without absorbing more mass. Made sense. But it seemed the same law applied here, too... even the void must be bound to certain principles.
Maybe. I wasn't sure.
But if Newton was right, and he hadn't just been hit over the head with too many apples, it made sense.
The void couldn't ever wipe out existence completely... it enveloped existence... but it couldn't erase it.
As for the rest of Fomoria... if I was swallowed by the void, and so was everyone else, wouldn't it follow that they were here somewhere?
Or was everyone in it stuck in their own personal caves?
If that was the case, there was a chance the wyrm baby wasn't here either...
My chest tightened.
It wasn't a good time to panic.
But is there ever a good time to panic?
The corridor I was following forked. I chose the right—no rhyme or reason to the choice.
Totally random.
But what else could I do? I had to keep moving.
I needed magic to use the dragon's essence to shift into dragon form.
But I didn't need magic to use the dragon's essence to speak...
It was worth another try.
But I had to calm down.
Deep breaths...
Still a strange sensation breathing underwater.
As a mermaid, I could breathe underwater. But it wasn't like taking in air. Water is thicker than air.
The sensation
of water filling my mer-lungs... then expelling it again.
Most of the time, I didn't notice the feeling.
But now that I was trying to calm my mind enough to speak to the wyrm...
When you meditate, they say one way to close out all the distractions is to focus on your breath.
Having been human the bulk of my life, a part of me instinctively wanted to hurl as I drew the water in.
I tried not to pay attention to the strangeness of it all.
Talking to Nammu before was reasonably straightforward. It didn't take much to focus my mind and connect.
But realizing where I was... freaking out on the inside... my mind was moving at light speed.
This was for Nammu's baby...
What if I needed her to save my baby...
I'd been in that position. When I depended on others, merfolk I barely knew, to save my baby.
I know how hard it must've been for her to trust me.
Sure, she didn't have a lot of options. She was desperate.
So was I.
But I couldn't let her down. I just couldn't...
A part of me felt like if I let her down, I'd be letting my baby down, too.
I ran my fingers through my hair and curled my tail beneath me as I allowed my body to sink to the floor of the cavern.
I closed my eyes.
I imagined myself back with Merlin... back home... in the nursery I'd prepared for him.
I imagined his father rocking him to sleep...
Be still... focus...
I was having those thoughts for my own sake.
I didn't expect...
Hello? Is someone there?
I hear you, I replied. I'm here to help...
Here... Come...
I uncurled my tail and gave it a hard flip. I don't know how I knew which way to go, but I did. I just felt it. Perhaps it was my connection to Nammu's baby. But I sensed him there... somewhere... and I knew I was going the right way.
I turned a corner. The corridor opened up into a massive cavern.
I waved my trident around.
I saw his scales...
It was a wyrm, but was it really a baby at all? It wasn't as large as Nammu, but it was still much bigger than I expected.
I'm here... is your mother Nammu?
Gates of Eden: Starter Library Page 42