She hadn’t fallen. Jerani hadn’t died.
There had been a battle. Yes, he could remember she had swept in with a pyramid of light. It had blasted through the Bright Palms. She had pitched them into the pit. The mantis claws of the man-monster had lopped off one of their heads. And, Jerani, what had happened to him?
He gripped his arm where the skin was rough and bunched together. A Bright Palm had chopped through someone’s arm. It might’ve been Jerani’s. The toothy black sword of obsidian had sliced through the bone. No, Jerani couldn’t have lost the limb. He had all his. Jerani’s guts heaved. A greasy sharpness burned up his throat. He rolled and spat, coughed and sputtered and collapsed.
If his arm had been cut off, he should hurt more. Waves of heat throbbed outward from his shoulder, but it wasn’t agony. The gem on his chest was cold to the touch. Its light shone between his fingers.
The woman had placed it there. She had saved him. The lord had called her the Lady of Gems. Yes, she was that.
The two stood together at the edge of the pit. Jerani lifted up his head high enough to see. She wore a backless dress. Blue jewels that he had thought were stars gleamed around her spine. Their lights swam and knocked into each other, but that could’ve just been him and his smack-rattled skull.
He wasn’t right. Jerani had to keep his mouth clamped shut or he would start giggling or weeping.
No, he was right enough. He lived.
A gem floated above the lady’s hands. Unlike all the others, it was lightless.
The lord rested his spindly sharp fingers on her shoulder. “The diamond is false, my heart?”
“Zircon.” She closed her hand over it with a cracking sound. “An abomination carved by the jewel duper.”
“He did warn me he’d copied the stone while bedbound. The thief owes us a favor.”
“He owes us his death.” The lady opened her hand, and shards of a broken gemstone fell in a glittering shower.
Jerani had held up his neck too long looking. A whiteness buzzed across his vision and he rested his head back down.
The lady’s voice was precise and cutting. “I knew the jewel was wrong at the first instant, yet I wanted to believe. My true diamond is near.”
“Is it below?” The lord’s voice was dry like dead grass in the wind.
“The Bright Palms must’ve dropped the genuine jewel into the sinkhole, keeping the false one in hand to taunt me. Painfully sensible of them.”
“What can we depend on these days if not stupidity?”
“Very little,” the lady said. “Except possibly each other.”
“Shall we descend together?”
“We always seem to.”
Jerani blinked and tilted his head to the side for a look. The lord and lady were holding hands in front of the black nothingness.
She turned to him, and in the light from her gemstones, her face lit violet. Her cheek bones were sharp angles, her chin a point. She had nothing soft about her. There couldn’t have been, or she would’ve shriveled away from the lord. She would never have matched his gaze. The corner of her eye couldn’t have wrinkled with fondness.
Jerani had seen her face before, somewhere. But he couldn’t have met her on his travels. He never would’ve forgotten the Lady of Gems. What could her real name be?
The lady and lord stepped off together into the chasm.
Hiresha flew down. Night air washed over her, a nip on her bare feet, a thrill up her legs, a cool flow along her back, and crisp pressure against her face. Tingling waves ran along her arm with which she held Tethiel.
His hand bit into hers. Her power grasped him tighter.
The limestone walls rotated around them as they fell deeper. The world moved. They were still. Time resonated, fluttering forward and back along her spine.
She had the sense she had been here before. Or she would again soon. In her other dream, in her other facet of reality, she had saved a young man who had fallen into the sinkhole. This time, he was safe above. She would rescue her red diamond. Or she would find it broken. Gems were more fragile than people.
Their depth increased, and the air warmed. It thickened with a sulfur stench.
“If this cave is a deity,” Tethiel said, “we must be entering the wrong end.”
“If we descend into a god,” she said, “it would pay to be politic.”
Hiresha sent her blue paragon ahead. The pyramid-shaped diamond dropped to illuminate an underground lake. Bodies bobbed. The waters churned with the hunger of cave scavengers. Eyeless fish dashed in to bite, and knobby legs of half-seen things skittered about with clicking pinchers.
In three-eighths of second, Hiresha predicted, she and Tethiel would plunge into black water and nibbling teeth. Yet a lucid dreamer need only fall as far as she wished
Hiresha dreamed a dream of power and magic. Awake or asleep, reality or whimsy, she didn’t waste time deliberating, not when she could fly.
Her dream inversion had given her mastery over gravity, of the forces pulling objects together and apart. She had only to think it to Lighten herself and Tethiel. Their descent slowed until they were swimming in the air.
“How reassuring,” he said, looking down, “that the dark and deep places of the world are full of terrors.”
“I’ll be reassured when my red paragon is found unbroken.” She tightened her amethyst grip around his fingers. “Hold your breath.”
She allowed gravity to tow them into the watery blackness. It slurped around them, warm and thick with filth, almost gelatinous. She waved away the skitterers. She Repulsed the grime. Her blue paragon illuminated the way while towing Tethiel and herself deeper with the force of Attraction.
A figure glowed to their left, a woman. One of the Bright Palms had survived the backbreaking fall, as Hiresha had hoped. Her mercy was taxed when the luminous woman floundered toward them with a knife. The survivor would have to take them unawares to have any chance of success, and Bright Palms were about as stealthy as fireworks.
Hiresha raced out of reach, past sludge, beyond the clutter of bones, between stalagmites, down to the god’s treasure. Devotees must have tossed wealth here for centuries.
The gold nuggets shimmered blue in her light. When she reached to sift through the trove with a hand, the precious metals darkened to hues of violet. None of the treasure was in coins. Silver axe heads flashed. A jawbone was full of turquoise teeth. Broken knives of alabaster shone with turquoise-skull hilts. Jade frogs were everywhere. Some shattered, some crudely carved, some as big as toads, some blackened, some still pale, the frog effigies thrived at the bottom of the underground pool.
Her red paragon diamond was not here, and yet its nearness itched against her skin. She would find it somewhere else in the drowned cavern.
Tethiel squeezed her fingers. Yes, he had to breathe, and she ought to as well. She opened her other hand, and her amethyst piercings flashed. Water transformed into gas, and she held a bubble of air. She lifted it to her face and inhaled. It tasted of ancient rottenness, of death and forgotten lifetimes.
Hiresha kissed Tethiel and shared her air with him. His lips shocked her as if with static. He cupped her face, and chills crisscrossed down her neck. Despite all the foulness around them, she was smiling. Bubbles escaped the sharp corners of his smirk.
The treasure twinkled beneath them. What wonders she could build with such wealth. She might enchant the hoard with enough magic to dazzle the continent.
If only she were willing to pry a fortune out of a god.
The Bright Palm tried to ambush them with her knife again. They were whisked to safety, Attracted to the blue paragon. The diamond pyramid spun, each of its four sides frosted with an intricacy of facets. Hiresha cast the paragon before her, and it drew her and Tethiel to the surface and above. Rivulets of blackness drained from their clothes.
“My red paragon is elsewhere.” She lifted her hand, and dream-shine glistened over the cavern’s walls. “I suspect something carried it o
ut of the water.”
“Why, that’s writing.” Tethiel pointed to the limestone, where black lines crossed each other in patterns like crazed hieroglyphs. “Someone must have been trapped down here, and he etched the walls with his madness. Or devotion. The two are so hard to tell apart.”
“No human made this.” Hiresha pressed her palm against the wall’s slime. Her hand sank to the wrist. The markings appeared as if worms had crawled into the stone then died.
“What monster then?”
“Many small ones. This cavern is afflicted with pestilence.”
Her world stretched and spun. She was above ground, in a village stricken with death. People wept, as did their ulcers. Hiresha pressed a purple garnet into each pockmarked hand, and her magic fought back the plague.
She blinked and was back in the cavern. She was in both places. Lucid dream and reality spun around each other like a flipped mirror. Too fast to tell them apart. On this side, on this facet of being, the stone walls were diseased, not thousands of people. Tethiel held her hand. He hadn’t made a nation suffer for her sake.
She had no reason to hate him, here. Even if the skin of her hand squirmed under his touch, she should not let him fall into water’s blackness. It would be wrong to leave him in this cavernous oubliette, to let him fight the Bright Palm and the skitterers over cold meat. Only in her other reality had he disappointed her.
Of course, if she tried to abandon him in these depths, he could lash out at her sanity with a storm of fangs. He wouldn’t, though. He loved her. Enough to sicken a nation.
“I’m sorry I was cold to you earlier this evening,” she said. “In my other facet, you deliberately disseminated a plague.”
“A plague?” He faced her. They stood on the water, their feet dimpling the surface. “Whyever would I have done something so messy?”
“For me. Only a dying empire would welcome me back.” She would not tell him how they had planned to marry in the city of her birth. He hadn’t proposed to her in this facet yet. “You tried to hide your involvement with the plague bearers. I found out.”
“How could you think so little of me?” He tapped his chest with his needle-shard fingers. “That I’d spread plagues in your dream. And get caught.”
Her vision rippled then flexed back into focus. “Don’t call it a dream. Both facets have equal probability of being real.”
“Some dreams are more real—”
“Tethiel, never try to prove one facet false. The power of my dream inversion depends on my uncertainty.”
He inclined his head. Behind him, the water erupted from the Bright Palm surfacing. Again, she attacked. Hiresha speculated that fearlessness inhibited learning. The bronze blade belonging to the woman stabbed downward in a spray of glinting droplets.
Hiresha flicked her fingers, and the paragon diamond thumped into the Bright Palm. It Burdened her into the pool’s depths.
“My heart,” Tethiel said to Hiresha, “there’s no greater force in this world than ignorance. I promise to respect the strength of yours.”
“I hope you’re being serious in that jest.” Smiling was a strain.
His lips spiked up in the corners with inhuman barbs. “I am always most serious in my contradictions, but you have to understand it ruffles my coat to be called a figment of imagination. Even one as impressive as yours.”
“I didn’t say that you were a dream, only that you might be.”
“It feels much the same. Call me a nightmare if you wish, but never a dream.”
“Very well. I shall treat you as real.”
“And I’ll give you the same courtesy.” He offered his arm. “Though you are incredible.”
They lunged together across the water. An itch in her chest meant she was nearing her lost diamond. The cavern narrowed to a slimy chokepoint. Bristling legs scuttled in and out.
“My heart,” he said, “is there any way you’d forgive me, in your other dimension?”
“No.” Her hand broke from his.
She cast her blue paragon forward, and it propelled a skitterer out of the way. She squeezed through the sphincter of the crawlspace. The stone constricted her. It oozed over her back. The vileness coated her gems. She couldn’t breathe, and when she wriggled into the next cavern, she didn’t want to. There was no air, only poison.
Hiresha’s blue paragon reforged the gases into vital essence, enough for her to gasp and live. Sulfur dusted down from the pyramid diamond.
“Tethiel,” she called behind her, “you may not wish to follow. This passage is a torment.”
Infection units had covered the cavern with sludge. It did not drip so much as stretch. The slime had drained all the air and spewed out toxins that stung Hiresha’s nose and eyes. She Repulsed the foulness from her.
She could die in this isolation. Even if she didn’t breathe in the poisons, they would seep through her skin. Her gemstone light faded. She would be alone and in the dark, a pile of nameless bones.
Her faceting of reality had brought her here. Few people could follow. Even fewer could understand. Tethiel might be the only one, and in her other life she had sworn to never speak to him again.
“Torment, you say?” Tethiel appeared to saunter through the cave wall. “Hardships aren’t half so lethal as comforts. And with you …”
He coughed and gagged. Hiresha floated to him, kept him safe from the worst of the poisons.
“With you,” he said, “every misery becomes a thing of beauty.”
He waved his gloved hand, the one embroidered with dragons. The cavern transformed. The slime brightened into molten gold. The air rippled with heat. The place had lost none of its terror, but he had gilded it with joy. He swam with her through the air, moving around the dripping globs of gold. Tethiel caught one, and it turned into a nugget in his hand. He tossed it at Hiresha.
She veered away. The gold followed her in impossible loops. She laughed. “Master illusionist indeed.”
“They’re not illusions.” He winked at her. “Only different realities.”
When she touched a hanging tendril of orange brightness it cooled into a gold wire. She Attracted more together, forming hexagons, spheres, and ellipsoids that were perfect in form, for a moment. Then they melted.
“I admit,” Tethiel said, “to have hoped the cave would be more bathed in moonlight and less coated in grime.”
“Thus it was in my other face, yet this cave went deeper.” Hiresha turned toward the tug of her lost diamond. She needed it and also an explanation for how her red paragon had come so far up this poison chute.
“This is better.”
“Because of the danger?” Her jewel flickered red ahead of her. “There!”
A cavefish had died. Its catfish tendrils splayed white. Her diamond was inside it. When her hand neared, the fish’s belly flared crimson.
“It must’ve swallowed my gemstone as a digestive aid.”
“And I thought wealthy eating ruined digestion.”
The fish burst, and black eggs tumbled from its abdomen. The sightless creature had come here to spawn and die. It had carried the diamond as it would any other rock in its belly. Yet this stone was the teardrop of a god. A second deity had hardened it in her eight hands. The rarest of diamonds, the most divine of hues, the red paragon shone radiant.
“This is best,” Tethiel said, “to be here together, where no others could survive. To do what none would dare.”
Hiresha was one with the world as she closed her fingers on the diamond. She had never been closer to her gods. They had made this stone. She would perfect it. Her wrist bones stood out as splotches of darkness while the rest of her hand shone magenta.
She carved the diamond with mind and magic. A thousand and twenty-four Attraction spells pried off gem shards to leave a greater whole. Now it would capture the most light. She had refaceted it before, yet never in this reality. At last it was flawless in all her worlds.
Her hand opened, and the diamond floated above h
er palm. Trigonal in shape, a wine-grape in size, it was wholly hers. A ring of diamond dust orbited it. The glittering swath curved toward her. It slipped through the pores of her dress as she Attracted the shards into her skin. These new piercings would shine forever across her chest, and their enchantment would Repulse any blade that tried to strike her heart.
“Lady of Gems.” Tethiel enclosed her hand with his fingers, and for once they were wholly human: gloved in velvet and embroidered with monsters but still human. The red paragon was squeezed between their palms, shimmering. “My heart. Hiresha.”
At last he would say it. He would propose to her tonight. It had to happen. They would come closer in this facet at the same moment they severed all ties in the other.
He did not kneel. He stood as a lord. His gaze locked with hers, and his eyes could have been polished stones of onyx. Pure black without any whites, they reflected her and her jewels as if she were trapped inside them. His words resounded.
“Will you rule with me as my wife?”
Her lips began to part to answer. Telling him no would be cruel after all they had shared. Promising herself with a yes might spell her doom. If her other facet was a dream, it might be a prophetic one, a vision, a warning to be rid of this man forever.
Certainty was for fools. Hiresha collected gems and doubts, and the first thing she told him would be neither no nor yes.
“I’m flattered and all that is proper, certainly. You offer me your hand, and you assisted in finding this diamond. A jewel, I suspect, you could’ve stolen back from the Bright Palms weeks ago without all this fuss.”
“A man does want everything just so for his proposal.”
“You arranged for me to clash with your enemies.”
“I like to think of them as our enemies.”
If he had come to her at midnight with the jewel in hand, she might’ve sent him away. Even so, “You always drag me into your schemes.”
“What is a scheme but a hope with more ambition?”
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