When I looked up, I nearly fainted. A hunchbacked crone stared down at me, draped in robes as gray as her thinning hair. Her eye sockets were still empty, but the eyes covering her body were buried in folds of decaying flesh. “You’ve brought the pretty beast,” the mystic said, voice muffled by her rotting windpipe.
“Please. He’s infected with a bog adder’s venom. I have to save him.”
Her colorless lips split into a smile, revealing corroded shards of teeth. “You must make an offering in exchange for his life. What will you give the Fallen Ones?”
I stared at Reyker, dying in my lap. I didn’t care if he was a weapon, a savior. I cared only that he was my friend. My wolf.
“Whatever the gods want, I will give.” Fingers. Eyes. I’d cut out my heart if they asked.
The mystic cocked her head toward the loch, as if listening to the whisper of the waters, the wishes of the fallen gods swimming underneath. “Blood. They desire to drink of your veins.”
Grabbing my knife, I hurried to the loch’s edge. Bones and various organs bobbed atop the coppery waters. Noxious gas bubbled up, stinking of carrion. The loch expanded, contracted—a shifting, horrifying entity.
I pressed the blade into my wrist, just below the skoldar. The blood flowed over the water’s rust-colored surface. I knew what this meant: The Fallen Ones owned a piece of me. They could ask for more. I could run to the ends of the earth, and they would still find me.
It was a small price to pay.
A dark slick of my blood pooled atop the water. A mouthless tongue drifted by, lapping at it. Disembodied eyes—one brown, one green—floated to the murky surface, staring at me.
“Enough,” the mystic said. “The gods are sated for now.” She peered at Reyker with her numerous eyes. “Put the boy in the water. The gods must touch him to heal him.”
“What?” I’d paid the gods’ price so Reyker wouldn’t have to, and they wanted to take from him anyway, to touch him with their decay.
“Be quick. He’s fading.”
There was no time to pause, no time to think. I removed Reyker’s cloak, his boots. I lifted the silver medallion from around my neck and slipped it over his. “To keep you safe,” I whispered. “To bring you back to me.”
With my arms locked around his chest, I pushed him off the bank into the water, feetfirst. I lowered him up to his waist, hesitating. “Let go,” the mystic said.
This was wrong. Everything about it was wrong.
There was no other choice.
I unclasped my hands. Reyker sank beneath the water, vanishing into its opaque depths. I held my breath, waiting. Waiting.
Waiting … Sucking in air.
“Where is he? How long does it take?” I watched the surface for a sign, a ripple or wake to prove something was happening.
“The gods cannot be rushed. They will take care of him.”
I glared at the mystic. “Will the gods give him gills?” My heart was an animal, howling, clawing at my ribs. He’d been under too long. He would drown. How could I have placed my faith in a mystical madwoman and her disgraced gods?
I looked back at the water.
“Don’t be a fool, girl! If you dare disturb their work, the gods won’t look kindly on it.”
What if she was wrong? What if Reyker was drowning at the bottom of the loch? He’d trusted me, and I’d dumped him unconscious into a slime-filled sinkhole.
What have I done?
A cold certainty gripped me. I didn’t trust the fallen gods, or any others. All they did was smash and burn and destroy. We mortals were nothing more than toys to them. I wouldn’t leave Reyker’s life in their hands.
Ignoring the mystic’s cries, I leaped from the embankment and dove into the loch.
The water was darker than pitch, thicker than stew, so dense I couldn’t swim—my arms flailed, my legs kicked, but I sank straight down. Things touched me: spongy, cold, sticky, sharp. Eyes and bones, mucus and blood, tongues and teeth. They skimmed over me, lapped at me, tangled themselves in my hair.
Hands grabbed me—drifting, skeletal hands, lopped off at elbow or shoulder. Bony fingers latched on to me, too many to count. Pulling. Dragging me deeper.
My toes touched the bottom, only to feel it split open. Swallowing me. There was no bottom. The loch was the wide mouth of a monster, disguising itself. Its throat was an endless trench cut through the heart of the earth.
I’d damned Reyker by bringing him here. I’d damned myself by jumping in after him.
An unearthly chorus erupted, speaking in long-forgotten tongues. The words sewed themselves together into skeins of meaning: “why is she here?” “look what she’s done!” “what shall we do with her?”
The black depths collapsed my lungs, crushed my skull to dust. Everything inside me shattered and dissolved. The gods dug their claws into me, tearing off my skin.
I was a broken doll, a rotting skeleton. Empty.
The water receded. The throat-chasm was empty too, and the void closed around me, folding me into itself, until I didn’t exist. I was nowhere, and nothing, and there was no one left to care that I’d ever lived. I suffocated on oblivion. I was oblivion.
A voice cut the infinite silence: “lira.”
Other voices joined it, calling my name. Some I recognized. My parents. My brothers. Madoc. Quinlan. Reyker.
Draki.
I fell through space. My body was gone. I was a glowing spark, a violet sphere of flame, brushing along the threads of my own life. The past and the may-come-to-pass. The possibilities sang as I touched them, but they were cobwebs and mist, shapeless, barely tangible. I might have fallen forever, but something reached out, plucked me from the chasm, held me close.
“at last.” His voice was stars blazing across the sky, silver drops of death raining down. “long have we waited for one such as you to come.”
Veronis. The Great Betrayer.
During the Birth of Summer ritual, I’d seen him in a mortal body, through Aillira’s eyes. There was little left of that man. Here he was a dark, twisted form—molded by eons of isolation, filled with an infinite well of rage. I was a speck of dust in his hands.
“you belong to us now.” The drumming of a thousand heartbeats. “you will break our cage.” The thunder of a thousand beating wings. “you will bring her back to me.” The crack of the earth splitting in two.
Far away, someone was singing—a melody I vaguely recognized, though I couldn’t hear the words. I strained, listening, feeling as if it was important, but then Veronis let me go, the song faded, and I was falling again.
“we will come for you soon.”
I opened my eyes with his voice still vibrating painfully through me. I was the same violet spark, once more encased by bones and flesh, as I was meant to be.
When I tried to breathe, I vomited up the loch. Water and pulp, bile and viscera. The taste tainted my tongue. I coughed and spit until my mouth was clear.
I lay on my side. Underneath me was damp soil. It was too dark to see, the air muggy and stifling. When I put my hands out, they touched cool stone above me, beside me. I pushed on it, but it didn’t budge. I was in a prison of rock.
No. I was in a grave. I felt the bones beneath me, digging into my skin.
“Let me out!” I pounded my fists on the stone lid. “I’m not dead!”
A sliver of light peeked through. I braced my hands near it, pushed with all my strength, and the gap widened. I slid my fingers into the small space, grunting and shoving at the slab until it scraped open enough for me to fit through.
Slipping out of the heavy darkness, I sprawled onto the ground under the bright rays of midday. It had been dusk when I dove into the loch. Had an entire day passed?
I sat up, expecting to see putrefied trees, to hear the blind mystic scolding, but I wasn’t in the grove. I turned slo
wly, taking in the landscape. It was a valley, enclosed by green mountains dusted with snow. Around me was an old burial yard perched on the slope of a hill, pocked with tombs like the one I’d climbed out of, the names on them too faded to read. Beyond the burial yard were the somber ruins of an ancient kingdom—the remains of several manors, great halls, a once-magnificent palace. Walls, arches, pillars, towers. Some still stood, but most had crumbled. The glass and wood of windows and doors had long since broken and rotted. Ivy and moss clung to the outer shells. Trees burst from inside the ruins, their thick roots snaking over the stones.
I’d never been here before, yet it stirred a torrent of emotions in me. Comfort. Passion. Grief. Terror. The ruins were almost-but-not-quite familiar, like the ghost of a memory.
I descended the slope, drifting deeper into the valley. “Is anyone here?”
The only answer was the chirrup of songbirds perched on a sunken archway. What was this place? How had I gotten here? And where was Reyker?
I came upon a small waterfall spilling down over a bank of jutting rocks, splashing into a glassy pond. Clovers and moonflowers sprouted across the land like a dense carpet. In the center of the valley stood an enormous tree, its bark a deep blushing red, its myriad limbs curved downward, adorned with long white thorn-needles that looked sharp enough to pierce straight through flesh. The same thorntree that was carved into my mother’s medallion.
I had been here before. I knew this place—it was Aillira’s Temple, except the ruins at the temple were nearly dust, and there were classrooms, libraries, dormitories, and monuments surrounding the grounds. But those things weren’t here. I was in a realm where Aillira’s Temple hadn’t yet been built.
I was in the ruins of Aillira and Veronis’s kingdom, as it must have looked centuries ago.
This was Veronis’s doing.
I wanted to explore the ruins and search for Reyker, but the need to wash away every filthy trace of the loch took precedence. Peeling off my soiled gown, I waded into the pond’s cool, clear water, swimming to the waterfall, letting it drench me, opening my mouth to rinse the rancid taste from my tongue.
A shape blurred on the edge of my vision, and I rubbed my eyes. He stood at the rim of the pond, coated from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet in the loch’s dredges. Staring at me like I might be an illusion.
I stared back, feeling the same.
Reyker stepped into the water. I was already moving toward him. We met in the middle of the pond, standing silently in front of each other. I pressed my palm to his chest; his heart pulsed steadily, its rhythm strong and familiar. His soul, when I opened myself to it, held darkness and brightness, like sunlight on the ocean.
I threw my arms around his neck. He tipped my head back and kissed me hard—the kiss of a man who’d beaten death.
Reyker and I lay curled together beside the pond, dozing beneath the warmth of the sun in our undergarments. My gown and his trousers dried on the rocks. Our hands wandered over each other’s skin. “Do you remember being in the loch?” I asked.
“I remember being cold and wet. Darkness everywhere. Things tearing at me, screaming inside my head.” He started to say something, stopped himself.
“What is it?”
“Nothing. Then I woke in the ruins.”
“I thought I’d lost you, Reyker. I thought I’d killed you, putting you into the loch.”
I traced the thin white scar where the venomous arrow had pierced him. He kissed the raised line of flesh where I’d cut my wrist and offered my blood to the Fallen Ones. Our injuries were nearly healed, as if we’d sustained them weeks ago instead of hours.
“You saved me, Lira. With your blood. And with this.” He took off the medallion and put it around my neck. “The things in the loch. I felt them touch the necklace. They were careful with me because I wore it.”
I glanced between the carving of the thorntree on my medallion and the real thing, sprouting up from the valley floor. “I wish I knew what it all meant. This place. The thorntree. The differing stories of Aillira and Veronis.”
“Maybe we can find answers.” Reyker stood up, offering me his hand.
Together we wandered the ruins, from one fallen structure to the next. Up close, I saw the scorch marks on the stones. Once, this had been a beautiful fortress. Gwylor and his army had razed it to the ground. I ran my finger through soot and ashes, shuddering.
Reyker circled the ruin, caught up in his own thoughts. He motioned to the piles of broken stone. “For love.”
“Where do you see love in all this destruction?”
“I’ve seen this before. Men fighting over a woman. One to protect her. One to take her.”
His words stirred something within me. I removed my knife from its sheath and pulled out the slip of parchment hidden there; it had survived the loch unharmed, likely Veronis’s doing, as all of our current circumstances seemed to be. “Eathalin gave me this. It’s a page from the Forbidden Scriptures.”
I read it aloud.
“Look,” he said. “There’s more.”
I turned the page over and saw another verse, though I’d have sworn it was blank before.
The flaming gates fell aside, the screaming masses streamed through.
Men. Gods. A host of destruction, riding upon the wings of Death.
The last kiss. Two bodies separating, two hearts torn asunder. Love became a wound.
Veronis raised his mortal sword. Gwylor raised his immortal fist. The earth shook. The sky fell.
Alone, Aillira watched and wept as the world burned.
“For love,” I repeated. Reyker was right.
A sudden whim wormed its way through my thoughts. Curious, I pressed my palm to a stone, opening my mind as if the ruins were a soul. The change was instant—I was pulled forward, and then my vision faded briefly before brightening again.
Two shapes entwined—a man and woman, smiling and singing to each other, whispering of their undying love, in this very room. I feel their affection, clear and true.
The image shifts and the woman is on her knees, sobbing at the feet of an imposing figure who wears the skin of a man awkwardly, as if it’s a coat that doesn’t quite fit. “You will never see him again,” the man says. “Not in life, nor in death. I will make sure of it.”
Through her tears, she glares defiantly. “He will come for me. He will find a way.”
My hand dropped from the stone.
“Gwylor defeated Veronis, locked him away, and took Aillira,” I said. “When she died, she couldn’t join him in the otherworlds. Not while he’s imprisoned. They’ve been separated thousands of years. Veronis wanted me to see this. He thinks I can free him so they can be together again.” I touched the medallion. “The thorntree. Eathalin said Aillira planted it herself, that it’s the symbol of their love.”
I spun on my heel and ran from the ruins, bounding across the valley. I didn’t stop until I reached the thorntree. Ivory blossoms circled its roots, the moonflowers’ petals just beginning to open now that the sun embraced the horizon.
I put my palm against the trunk.
Aillira digs her hands into the soil, planting the seed of a thorntree, watering it with her tears. She hums a haunting melody, the same song she and Veronis used to sing to each other.
She spies the creature slithering toward her. A bog adder, scaled in rippling blue-black patterns. She snatches it by the head, pinning its jaws shut, and gazes at the ruins of the home she once shared with Veronis. “I will wait for you in the otherworlds, my love. I will never stop waiting.” She loosens her grip on the adder, holding it to her breast.
Aillira and the adder lock eyes, and there’s a strange sentience in the creature’s black-slit pupils. “I see you, goddess,” Aillira says. “I know what you did. Open wide. Devour my soul if you dare.”
The serpent’s jaws s
nap, its fangs sinking deep into the flesh over Aillira’s heart.
I let go, stumbling backward. Reyker was there to catch me.
The verse from the scriptures, etched on the back of my medallion—Burn brightly. Love fiercely. For all else is dust. They were not Aillira’s final words. They were a pretty lie, poured over an ugly truth.
What had Aillira’s words to the adder meant? Who was the goddess she saw in the serpent’s eyes?
“I felt her pain, Aillira’s pain, being separated from Veronis. It was the same way I felt when you were dying, Reyker.” Behind us, I saw the graves crowding the hillside. Everyone who stood with Veronis to protect Aillira had suffered—the mortals were dead, the immortals imprisoned in a dark netherworld. The same thing had happened to Reyker’s village—Draki took Reyker’s mother, killed his father and all the men who’d fought with him.
“Don’t fight Draki,” I said. “If you do, you’ll die. I’ll lose you, like Aillira lost Veronis.”
“You will not lose me. Look at me, Lira.” I raised my eyes to his. “Jai elskar thu.” He placed my palm on his chest. “I love you.”
For a moment, I couldn’t breathe or speak or think.
Reyker waited, anxious. As if he didn’t know what I would say.
“Jai elskar thu.” I’d sensed it growing between us all along, no matter how much I tried to deny it; I’d known it when I gave my blood to the fallen gods beneath the loch. “Of course I love you, stupid boy.”
His mouth crashed into mine, shattering my thoughts, scattering them to the wind.
We lay down in a patch of moonflowers, my hands traveling up his ribs, his fingers tracing patterns across my flesh. He nudged my shift up, kissing his way down my stomach.
My body clenched with anticipation. “I’m not yours until you’ve had all of me,” I said.
Reyker stilled. “All?”
I tugged my shift over my head, tossing it aside. I fumbled with my breeches, and Reyker nearly ripped them off. Then his were gone, and we were nothing but skin on skin, scent and heat mingling. Fingers twined, feeding each other’s hunger, breathing each other’s names—we unraveled even as we held each other together, burning fierce and bright. Like sparks to kindling.
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