by Elise Kova
“Yes, your highness.” He paused, right before putting his mask back over his face. “Perhaps you can return the favor by putting in a good word with Ellene to dance with me at the winter solstice? She still has yet to give me a response.” There was the boyish grin she remembered.
“Consider it done.” He turned to leave and Vi stopped him. “And Darrus, don’t worry so much about Ellene. She’s crazy about you.” They shared a small smile.
“That’s good to hear.” Just as Vi turned to leave, he caught her by her shoulder. “One last thing…” His voice had dropped low and was tense.
“What?” Vi whispered in reply.
“I could’ve sworn I saw someone following you. I thought it may have been Jayme but…”
“I’m alone,” Vi insisted. She wasn’t sure if she was informing him, or saying it out of hope that the fact remained true.
“Keep your hood up, and be careful, okay?”
“I will.”
They parted ways, then, and she slipped into the night on her hasty path.
At the edge of the city was a ruin so ancient it was nearly taboo. Everyone had always been hushed about the worn and ominous structure. But with Martis’s lesson, Vi now knew why. If she was right, and this was the place her mother had retrieved an axe that had changed the course of history… then she could understand why it was willingly being expunged from memory. Expunged, just like her parents had decreed the dangerous Crystal Caverns following the Mad King’s uprising.
She scrambled up a hill and into the trees that surrounded the city. A shadow began to loom against the starlight winking through the leafy canopy. Vi paused to look up at the tall, pyramid-like ruins that towered above her. She didn’t know if it could be called a tomb, but she would say based on the embellishments that it was made by the same people who had crafted the underground ruins she’d discovered—just far worse for wear, having been exposed to the elements.
It couldn’t be coincidence that Taavin had used the word tomb, then Martis, and it all added up to this particular place. Looking around for any who might be watching, and finding none, Vi dared to hold out her hand.
“Repeat the process,” she whispered. Only one way to find out if this was her next apex of fate…
Fire ignited in her hand. Vi stared, and waited for the sensations of future sight to overtake her.
Chapter Eighteen
No visions came.
“Why?” Vi whispered, as though the fire would answer. It didn’t, and she extinguished it, looking around. “This has to be the place…” She looked up at the ruins, hoping they would give her the answer, and was surprisingly rewarded.
“Repeat the process—I have to be inside,” Vi mumbled. Of course it wouldn’t be as easy as standing at its base. She had to be inside the last set of ruins and assumed this to be the same. “Now… how to get in?”
Vi took a lap around the structure, then doubled back to where the remnants of an old cave-in could be found. Time had taken its toll on the collapsed rubble, as with the rest of the weather-worn ruins. Roots and vines pulled it apart, creating an opening barely large enough for her to wiggle through.
Taking a deep breath, Vi debated if she was extremely brave or stupid to go into something so dangerous-looking, and began to clamor over the rubble anyway. Just as she suspected, it was barely large enough for her to fit through. A narrower portion dug into her wide hips and made her twist and contort her legs to get her thighs through. But get through they did, and with a small tumble she landed in a hollowed alcove eerily similar to what she’d seen in the jungle.
Shards of what looked like obsidian scattered around her, leaving Vi to pick a few from indents in her hands with small winces. Miraculously, they did not draw blood. She stared at the glass-like stones, lifting up a larger piece for inspection.
Martis had said that following the fall of the Mad King Victor, the blight of the Crystal Caverns had been put to an end, once and for all, on the Main Continent. According to his telling, the crystals, once illuminated with their strange and twisted magic, had gone dark, fractured, and broken.
“This will work,” Vi whispered into the darkness, letting the shard fall from her hands.
Readying herself once more, she held out her hand. Already, the atmosphere around her felt vastly different than it had outside. The feeling of sinking into the flame, of being consumed by it, of not being able to tear her eyes away even if she tried, was already on the edge of her consciousness.
As if drawn from her by an invisible string, her spark rushed forth the moment Vi allowed it freedom. It hazed into the air over her palm, condensing into an open flame. When Vi looked at it, the world went white; like last time, she was quickly overcome.
Shapes were slowly drawn into existence.
While white threads of magic continued to blur at the edges of her vision, the scene she was presented with was one of night.
A man stood atop a dais, a curving silver blade with runes etched along its flat side was gripped in a fist. In the other he held a hand up to the full moon overhead, blood streaming down his palm. It mingled with blood from a secondary source—on an altar behind him was a figure, distinctly human and wrapped in what looked like burlap, whose blood was soaking through the fabrics covering them and dripping into a channel that ran down to a symbol painted on the ground.
She tried to make out who the sacrificial person on the altar could be. But they were wrapped tightly and immobile. Dead, more likely, given that she couldn’t see them breathing. For some reason, Vi couldn’t move; she was positioned in one location in the vision and no matter how she tried, she couldn’t change her vantage.
Ignoring the body, altar, and bleeding man, Vi followed the channel of blood that was flowing down to a symbol Vi recognized near instantly.
It was a dragon, curled in on itself to form a perfect circle. A line had been drawn through the middle, cleaving it in two, off-setting the halves. It was the broken moon of the Tower of Sorcerers. But Vi had never heard of a place like this in any sorcerer lore she knew. She certainly knew there were no sacrificial rituals codified at the Tower.
Men and women were bowed around the outer edge of the glyph. They rose in unison, slowly, chanting under their breath in time with the louder calls of the man bleeding at the dais. At least, what she assumed were louder calls, based on the red of his face and the gulping breaths he took before opening his lips wide for each chant. To her, the world was silent, just like the last time; she could observe only but not interact further.
She couldn’t gasp in her bodiless state. But Vi felt the shock ripple through her as she saw more clearly the faces of the men and women beneath the large black hoods. Most possessed sharply angular features—not unlike the queen she had seen in her last vision—but their skin was ghostly pale and they had bright red eyes that glowed in the darkness.
Whatever they were, Vi had the distinct feeling it was not human.
There were some who had snouts like a lizard—identical to the man she had seen carrying the cage before her father. More, still, looked like normal humans, but with no eyebrows. Instead, glowing dots lined their foreheads.
It was a mix of races Vi had never seen before—never even imagined—and only further cemented that what she was looking at couldn’t be some secret Tower ritual in the South. This felt like a different world entirely.
They turned their eyes skyward, lifting their arms up. The man slowly descended from the dais, his unnaturally glowing crimson eyes gaining in brightness till they were nearly white. The moment he reached the center of the symbol, everything reached a crescendo in a bolt of blood-red lightning.
It struck the man, sparking off and sending the other men and women around him flying back. Their bodies, dead, littered the ground. Magic arced through the air like the rebirth of a cosmos, all condensing on a glowing figure slowly rising from where the leader of this dark ritual had once stood.
It was the same man, but changed. He wore
the red light as a second skin, seeming to grow in size before Vi’s eyes. She knew she was witnessing true, but Vi couldn’t fashion words or sounds. He turned; Vi could all but feel his sightless white eyes on her. They were like the noru. They were worse than death.
A scream—her scream—broke the trance of the vision.
Vi collapsed back, scrambling away, as though there was something physical she could distance herself from. She pressed her eyes closed, but all she saw were the scattered bodies, and the nightmarish figure emerging from the collection of their sacrificial essence. Vi shook her head, as though she could dispel the images.
She let out another yelp of startled surprise when a hand landed on hers.
Opening her eyes, Vi locked gazes with Taavin. He was there, closer, sharper. His hand was on hers with a warmth that was not quite real—as if he was touching her soul, housed under her skin, more than the skin itself.
“You actually found it… So you’re not totally worthless like most on the Dark Isle.” Suddenly, as if realizing he’d reached for her, his hand lifted and the sensation of the ghostly touch vanished.
“Is that supposed to be a compliment?” Vi muttered. There was another retort in her mind, but it vanished when his other hand rose, hovering just above her face, as though he was about to tuck a stray piece of hair behind her ear. Vi quickly did it herself, and he ignored the motion entirely.
“Are you all right?”
The question was surprisingly sincere. Vi blinked at him, swallowing, and gave a nod. The vision still lingered on her, uncomfortably heavy. Was she all right? Likely not. Her world had been shaking at its foundations for weeks now. But the only option was to press forward. She was in too deep.
“Tell me what you saw.”
“A ritual, men and women with red eyes, a sacrifice, a man made of lightning… I think he saw me.” Vi shook her head, trying to rattle her thoughts back into place, trying to make her words make sense. But there was no sense to be found. The whole thing felt impossible and she felt insane the second she vocalized it. Despite the fact, she tried to recall as much detail as she could for him.
“Elfin’ra.” The man cursed when she’d finished her more detailed recounting, and shook his head.
“What are elfin’ra?”
“Those men and women you saw with red eyes worshipping the evil god Raspian. They should be sealed away, but with the barrier that had been holding Raspian broken…” He cursed softly under his breath again, this time in a language Vi didn’t recognize. As Taavin shook his head, his hair shifted, and Vi noticed something she hadn’t before.
She shifted back involuntary. “You… are you one of them?”
“Do I look like one of them?”
“You have pointed ears like they did.” Sure enough, the pointed tips of his ears extended out from the waves of his hair. How had she never noticed it before? Likely because there were about a thousand things she needed to focus on and she’d only seen him twice… but still…
“But do I have pale skin and red eyes?” Taavin asked dumbly.
“Well, no, but—”
He explained as though she were a child. “I am elfin. They are elfin’ra.”
“And that means nothing to me,” Vi stated, deadpan. She was pleased that, despite his general look of frustration and tedium, a small smile graced his lips at the remark. But it was quickly abandoned.
“The elfin’ra are a splinter of elfin… their worship of Raspian has twisted them, changed their magic, their bodies. For it, they were banished to Salvidia over a thousand years ago.”
“Salvidia…” Vi repeated. Her mind instantly summoned the map Sehra had shown her. “An island, far off to the south?”
“I’m impressed you know that, being on the—”
“Dark Isle. Yes, I get it. I’m very impressive for an uncultured swine,” Vi said hastily, trying to keep them on track. “This ritual they are performing… what is it?”
“To give their god a mortal casing, and bring about the end of the world when he walks among us once more.”
All she had wanted was a little bit of magic, and a little bit of control over it. She had wanted that magic to ensure that she could be reunited with her family without issue. Simple, clean, easy.
Yet, somehow, she was facing a man with glowing green eyes, in the middle of ruins, discussing the end of the world.
“Do you understand the severity of what’s at stake now?” Vi studied his face. His frown caused the crescent-shaped scar that ran along his cheek to shift. His eyes were serious, tired, more tired than she had last seen him. “Will you help me find the apexes without question? I need your visions to know what path we’re on, and what the future will hold, so I can prevent the elfin’ra from achieving their dark goals.”
“The deal still stands,” Vi whispered softly. “Help me learn how to control my magic, and I’ll find your apexes.” She didn’t want a place in all of this. She just wanted to be reunited with her family.
“Yes, you have your deal.” He gave a small nod. “Because you will need the full power of Yargen as her champion when the end of the world comes.”
Chapter Nineteen
It was almost as if the Mother herself had conspired with Ellene the night before, for Vi couldn’t imagine a more perfect day for preliminary noru races leading up to the winter solstice. The weather was good enough that Vi didn’t even feel exhausted waking early with very little sleep.
The North was always so warm that, even in winter, the trees never lost their evergreen leafy boughs. But the heat did relent, some. The nearly perpetual stickiness of the air vanished, and there was almost something that Vi would dare call cool on the front end of every breeze.
The changing seasons—fall to winter—brought out new smells and animals. Birds that migrated up from the south flitted between the railings of the walkways Vi traversed as she headed down to the stables. There was the usual fresh scent of greenery, mingling with the earthy aromas of wood, but as new flowers bloomed, so too did they give up their perfumes to the bouquet of the atmosphere.
Vi worked to put her lessons and magic behind her. She’d promised Ellene she’d be present in the moment during their final weeks together, and Vi would do her best to honor that promise despite all that was going on. She also, admittedly, needed a break after the night she’d had. While there had been no issue sneaking back into the fortress, her vision and encounter with Taavin had left its mental mark on her already exhausted mind.
“Why are you following me?” Vi asked dryly. Andru hastily caught up with her.
“It is my job to observe you.”
“In my lessons.”
“In general.”
Vi sighed heavily. “I am too tired to argue with you today.”
“Are we arguing?”
“Banter, then.” Stupid semantics.
“That’s what Romulin would’ve called it,” he said mostly to himself with a soft chuckle. “I hear you are going to partake in noru races this afternoon.” Andru took a step behind her, allowing Vi to lead them down one of the spiraling wooden stairwells as she made her way to the stables.
“Where did you hear that from?” Vi glanced over her shoulder.
“I have my ways.” He looked out the windows as they strolled.
She was too tired to pry. Even though she’d made haste after her lessons, she was still the last one to arrive at the stables.
“Sorry, I tried to get out as fast as I could,” Vi called over to her friends the moment her feet met the packed earth.
“Apparently you still have yet to escape.” Ellene shot Andru a look.
Vi fought a smirk and failed. But she made sure it was off her cheeks when he could see her face.
“Escape? Am I truly so terrible?” He looked to each of them.
“Of course not. We’d merely planned this to be a girls’ outing.”
“Oh, like last time.” He smiled, once again ignorant of the dismissal.
“How are you feeling?” Vi asked Jayme quickly, eager to change the topic. Her friend looked as she always did—brown hair tied back in a bun, straight posture, sword on her hip, usual Eastern golden-tan skin, nothing betraying any cause for concern on her face.
“Much better.” Jayme gave a small nod, recognizing the source of Vi’s concerns. “I don’t know what did me in, but I’m pleased to report that it will not keep me from performing my duty as your guard today.”
The formality brought laughter to Vi’s lips, amusement that was mirrored by a quirk of Jayme’s own. “I am lucky to have one so loyal in my service.”
“Now, ladies, you both know the plan for today.” Ellene clapped her hands and brought them to task.
They both gave a nod, leaving Andru in the dark.
“One small deviation,” Jayme started hesitantly. “After the position it put me in yesterday… I have no interest in returning to the market.” She turned to the saddled noru. “And while this beast is nimble, perhaps not nimble enough to go through the market. So I’m thinking that I’ll take it out on the main road, and meet you both on the outer circle.”
“We can go with you,” Vi offered.
“Don’t you want to see the market?” Ellene linked her arm with Vi’s. “A caravan arrived from the West two days ago. All the way from Norin, so there’s a whole host of unique goods to peruse.”
That thought hadn’t crossed Vi’s mind. Just because it was near impossible to get in and out of the southern capital didn’t mean the rest of the world was shut off.
“Just agree.” Jayme tried to fight a laugh and failed. “We all know how much you love Western spices.”
“Fine, fine.” Vi held up her hands in agreement. “You two know me far too well and I concede.” She looked to Jayme. “You’re sure you don’t mind? And that you can handle Gormon? A noru is a lot different than a horse.”
“I think I’ll be fine. Yours is far better trained than the one we met in the jungle.” That much was certainly true. Jayme turned to Ellene. “I’ll help build suspense for you. Talk about what a shame it is that you decided not to race this year, to allow our Crown Princess to shine.”
