“How is that possible?” Joya wondered.
“I don't know. There's a lot of fighting, a lot of division. Very little semblance of rulership.” Uthia stood from her task of gathering the graveyard dirt. She gestured that everyone should fill their pockets. The hecklin were still at the fence, their barking and howling starting to diminish, knowing they wouldn't get to the humans while they were inside the Haunted Graveyard. Angelica worried about what would happen when they left. Would the hecklin's bloodlust get the better of them and render the dirt useless?
“Isn't there any kind of stewardship?” Joya wondered.
“I really couldn't tell you. The Shadow Realm is a world of its own. Logic would say that yes, there is some kind of ruler in place when there isn't a Realm Guardian, but it obviously isn't working from what I've heard from my sister dryads who call these woods home.”
Joya looked around, uncertain.
“But how?” Angelica asked. “I still don't understand how you know these things.”
“Angelica,” Joya said. “You and Jovian have had so many strange occurrences with psychic powers; isn't it possible that mine are starting to bloom?”
Angelica shrugged.
“But something strange is happening here, Joya,” Jovian said to her. “Ours started as dreams, fanciful daydreams. We had to take a drug-induced trip to see Baba Yaga. Our things never manifest like this, except in the Mirror of the Moon.”
“Well, maybe this place is strong like the Mirror of the Moon,” Joya argued. “Maybe you are right that this is the heart.”
“But I don't think we would have had any visions in the Mirror of the Moon if it hadn't been because of some interference from Amber's lingering energy,” Angelica pointed out.
“And what about your palms?” Jovian asked.
“And what you did with those shadows back there?” Angelica asked quietly. She hated being confronted with the strangeness of her family. Why couldn't they just be normal?
“I don't know how to answer that,” Joya said, casting her eyes to her feet.
“Maybe it's just the power of the anakim, like you said before.” Angelica hoped that's all it was. If the anakim had psychic powers, then wouldn't all of them have that to some degree?
“Maybe,” Joya said. She looked back at the mausoleum in the center of the graveyard, shining like a holy beacon. “I still would like to see what’s inside there.”
“Maybe you already know,” Jovian encouraged. “You know so much already. What is your head telling you is inside it?”
“Answers? And, strangely, home?” Joya tried to smile it away, but couldn't.
“What do you mean ‘home’?” Angelica asked. Her skin prickled with goose bumps.
“Angie, I really don't know. I just feel that inside there is a way out of here, maybe answers, and maybe home.”
“Like it will lead us out of the Shadow Realm and back to the plantation?” Jovian asked.
“Maybe?” She didn't know.
“What is the voice telling you?” Angelica asked.
“It isn't a voice, just a sense of knowing. And it's confusing. Not the plantation, but I get a strong feeling of finding home inside.”
“Then we should investigate,” Jovian said.
“Put it from your mind,” Uthia said. “You had all best stuff your pockets with this dirt. It will take us another week at most to traverse to the Holy Realm.”
“But what about what Joya is feeling?” Angelica asked.
“Likely it is nothing more than a trap, a bewyrdment of the Shadow Realm. A defense of the Haunted Graveyard leading you to death.” Uthia crossed her arms and leaned against a headstone.
“We’ve all seen that more than once,” Joya agreed. “She's right. It's probably just wishful thinking, or a wyrding. Maybe too much time on the road has some ill effect on me, making me miss home more with every step.”
Angelica didn't believe that, but she bent to work, not sure if the dirt would lose some of its potency over the week. Angelica shoved as much as she could into any free pocket she could find.
“Do you think this will stay strong for the entire week?” Angelica asked. “Do you think the dirt will keep the hecklin at bay all that time?”
“Yes, I do,” Uthia said.
“Well, it did sit on Rosalee’s shelves for a while, and then Grace carried it with her for weeks,” Jovian told Angelica. “It was still effective when we had to use it last time.”
“What if it sifts out?”
“Holes in your pocket?” Jovian asked. Angelica smirked.
“Joya, don't go near there!” Uthia said. Joya had used the time the dryad had been distracted to sidle closer to the mausoleum.
At some point the hecklin had calmed down, and instead of barking and growling they only milled about, sniffing the air and looking behind them as if they waited for something.
Joya bent to the task of filling her pockets.
“Dear Goddess,” Joya said.
“What is it?” Jovian asked.
“The dirt is the only thing to ease the burning in my palms.” Joya dug her hands deeper into the dirt and smiled.
What the Otherworld is going on with her? Did the verax-acis damage her more than we thought? Angelica asked Jovian.
Who knows, but something weird really is happening. The way her stigmata has changed color concerns me. It isn't just dirt, Angie — her dots are gray now.
Angelica didn't know what to think of that. Joya was from the Holy Realm; her stigmata should be white. No one's stigmata changed color like that. Besides, there wasn't any realm denoted by gray stigmata.
A sudden commotion in the ranks of hecklin brought Angelica back from her musing. Angelica saw her sister's back go rigid, and Joya sat down in the dirt, a perplexed look on her face.
“Something is coming,” Joya whispered, a note of panic in her voice.
“What?” Uthia said. “What do you sense?”
“The hecklin are calling to something that isn't put off by the Haunted Graveyard.” Joya started to stand and made her way toward the glowing mausoleum in the center of the graveyard.
“Stop!” Uthia tried to restrain her, but Joya shrugged her off.
“I know what I’m doing. Follow me,” she told them.
“Here we go.” Jovian raised an eyebrow at Angelica, who sighed, shrugged, and fell in line with her sister. Angelica brushed the dirt off her hands onto her pants and drew her aunt's lapis-hilted shin-buto. Jovian followed suit with his own blade.
There was no denying Uthia thought there would be a battle, and she let Cataresh grow out of her arm again until she gripped the pommel of the wicked wooden blade in her stick-like fingers.
The ground dipped down as they neared the center building of the Haunted Graveyard, like the ground was soft and the building heavy, causing the area to sink in. The light of the sunflowers covering the building was so bright that Angelica was having a hard time seeing anything, and she thought if the gargoyle was to come alive she would have the element of surprise on them. Angelica could barely make out the outline of the moss-covered statue crouching on the altar, bat-like wings spread high and menacingly open above her head.
But Angelica was wrong; when the gargoyle started to wake, she was aware of it. It sounded like stones tumbling against one another, grating together in a way that put her teeth on edge. One wing fell heavily to the altar, the stone sloughing off onto the ground, leaving a wing that stood out inky black in the pure light of the mausoleum.
Joya strode toward the gargoyle while the rest of them readied their attack, but there wouldn't be one. Joya touched the statue's cloven foot.
“Be still, Guardian of the Dead,” she whispered.
The statue seemed to nod, a simple dipping of its large stone head. As if they were watching a lake suddenly freeze, the gray of stone rapidly spread across the black of her wing until it was stone once more.
Joya left the statue and headed straight for the mausoleum
.
“I've already checked, it's locked,” Uthia said.
Joya frowned and reached for the door. When her hand touched the handle the double doors swung open, as if in response to her flesh.
“Everyone grab a bunch of the flowers,” Joya said, taking a bundle for herself, not bothering to comment on why the door opened for her. Once separated from the rest of the bush, the flowers in her hand dimmed, but still produced enough light to be used in place of a torch.
Without question, they grabbed bundles of their own and followed Joya into the dark mausoleum. The eerie white light of the flowers ebbed and flowed over the interior of the tomb like ghost lights. Angelica shivered.
There was one stone casket inside; it rested against the right-hand wall, in disrepair and covered in dust. Heavy cobwebs dangled from the ceiling. Angelica would have hated to see the spiders that made them.
“What now?” Uthia asked. Besides the casket, a north-facing barred window, and a small table with a vase of dead flowers in the back, there was nothing inside.
Joya held up a finger, hushing Uthia.
“Do you see the name and date here?” Angelica asked. “This person was very old when she died.”
“Most likely a sorcerer,” Uthia answered. She came to Angelica's side and looked over the name.
“Beatrice Forester. She died twelve years ago…” The dryad read the copper plate inlaid on the wall behind the casket. She was looking for something, and evidently found it. Uthia looked out the window, understanding coming to her face.
“What is it?” Jovian asked.
“This is the resting place of the Realm Guardians.” She placed a bark-covered hand on the top of the dirty casket.
“How did she die?” Angelica asked.
“How else can a sorcerer die?” Jovian asked.
“Well, obviously I know she was beheaded, but why?” Angelica wondered.
Jovian leaned in to read the copper plate, but it was in a strange block-like language he couldn't decipher.
“Figures: the Realm of Shadow has a different language too.” Jovian grumbled.
“It says she died in the Frement Uprising. Apparently a battle of some note here,” Uthia said.
“What are the frement?” Angelica asked.
“A race of cat people,” Joya mumbled. “They are always at odds with the ooslebed.”
“And they are?” Jovian asked.
“Dark elves – those that fled with the first daughter from the Mountains of Nependier,” Joya answered.
“Alright, this is getting weird,” Angelica said.
“Getting?” Jovian asked. “You’re just now thinking it’s getting weird?”
“It's this place,” Joya said, looking around. “In here I feel this information just pouring into me. Like the Guardian residing here for all eternity is giving to me her knowledge of the realm.”
They were all too stunned to answer.
Joya started walking along the edges of the room, when necessary leaning over empty caskets without name plates so that she could touch the wall. Her hand was flat along the stones, rubbing and occasionally patting them with a solid slap of flesh on granite.
And then, in the back, behind a table, the slap of her hand on stone block sounded hollow instead of solid.
Joya set her bouquet of sunflowers down, slid the small table aside, and pressed one hand firmly on the back wall. Again, at the touch of her flesh, the mausoleum came to life. The stone wall slid back and to the right. Beyond the wall was a winding tunnel. The light from torches set into sconces flickered cheerily off the moisture clinging to the walls and floor. It wasn't a rough tunnel, chiseled out of the stone, but instead a corridor that certainly led to some place much more civilized than one would expect to find the entrance to in a place of the dead.
“Are we ready?” Joya asked them, and all they could do was swallow hard before stepping into the dank hallway.
When Jovian thought of tunnels in the earth he often thought of the one they’d taken from the Temple of Badock — a rough tunnel appearing to have been shoveled out in haste, used only for emergencies. But this tunnel put even the stairway to the underground dwarven city of Dellenbore to shame in its expert craftsmanship.
Perfectly square, it was fashioned of equal-sized gray granite blocks, interlocking in geometrical patterns Jovian’s eyes could barely follow.
The most pleasing aspect of all was the natural color of the firelight on the gray stone. Golden light, flickering all around him. How long had it been since he had seen natural light? Something that reminded him that he wasn't in a world all that different than the realms he knew? It had only been a couple of days, but it seemed an eternity.
Benches were set here and there along the walls, as if this hallway had been used for leisure. A silent pilgrimage from a rich estate to the dwelling place of their fallen leaders? Jovian didn't know, but he felt immediately at ease inside the hallway, despite the strange circumstances that brought them here.
There was a probing sense that came to his mind, like the wyrd of the border when it was testing him. But this time there was no pain, no suffocation. The wyrd delved into his mind, and when it had apparently found that he meant no harm, it moved along.
He shook his head. This wasn’t a tomb of fallen family members, but of Realm Guardians. Whatever connected with the other end of this tunnel wasn’t going to be a rich estate.
Ahead, Joya walked with purpose, back straight, shoulders back in a commanding way he had never seen his older sister use.
He tried not to think about his sister right now. She was acting too strangely, and his family had gone through enough already. So many changes to all of them, and now this. Jovian wasn’t sure he could take it all in. Maybe when they got home, it would all be better.
But how? Life on the plantation never changed: people went about their routines, and things like this never happened. Maybe that was why he was having such an issue — he wasn’t used to change. But even so, all of this was so much!
Jovian frowned. He’d imagined going home would be a happy time, seeing his father and friends for the first time in ages, but now he thought that all of the changes would only be made that much more evident in contrast to the ease with which life flowed there. Would he ever fit in with that again? Would he be content with going home to the life of a farmer?
He took to studying the tapestries that covered portions of the wall now. They were unlike any tapestries he had ever seen before, and looked like still-life images rather than paintings. So real were the images that Jovian thought he was looking out a window at something actually happening outside the tunnel, but that was absurd.
“What are those metal…things?” he asked Uthia.
The dryad shrugged. “They look like some kind of machine,” she told him.
The same huge machines were in many other tapestries, billowing smoke out of a chimney affixed to the top. The group drew to a halt, and they studied the picture.
“Powered by…?” Jovian asked.
“Wyrd?” Angelica wondered.
“I don’t know,” Uthia said. “It would have to be, right?”
They looked to Joya, but she only shrugged.
Beside the metal monstrosity walked creatures easily seven feet in height, and oddly feline.
“These must be the frement,” Jovian said, rubbing fingertips over the fabric picture. They stood like men, were even shaped like men, if slightly thinner than was natural for a human, but their faces were odd. Their mouths were shaped like a cat’s, protruding slightly from the rest of their face, their lip split up toward the base of their nose. Long whiskers protruded from their cheeks, close to their mouths.
And their color. Not the colors one would see in humans, and none of them were really the same. Their fur was cut short, close to their skin, but in varying shades that marked each one of them as individual. They wore armor such as Jovian had never seen, each piece looking like a work of art, with carvings of symbo
ls and words he didn’t understand. He didn’t see any armor the same, either; some had cloaks fastened over shoulder pads that arched up like miniature wings, while others were fastened at the base of their shoulder blades, and some didn’t wear cloaks at all. If this was an army, Jovian didn’t know how they determined rank, because it didn’t seem to be depicted by any form of uniform.
“How strange,” Angelica mumbled.
“Look here,” Joya said from a distance farther down, studying another picture. They hastily moved to see what she had found.
“What in the realms?” Angelica asked.
“The ooslebed,” Uthia said, crossing her arms. The tone of her voice suggested the dryad didn’t care for the race.
“This must be First Daughter,” Joya said, eyes roaming over the wall hanging. At the mention of the First Daughter, Jovian remembered the tale he had heard while with the Elves of Nependier. First Daughter was filled with sin, and left her family of elves to make her way north, where she started the tribe of dark elves, or ooslebed, as they were called here.
The dark elf was the prettiest woman Jovian had ever seen. Her hair was long, black, and much more like silk than any hair he had ever seen, shining in some green light like satin. Her skin was dark blue, with bursts of green that (despite being in a picture) seemed to move along her skin in a constant blush, like hot breath blooming across cold glass.
She wore a regal outfit, most unlike anything Jovian would have imagined the Elves of Nependier wearing. The robes hugged her body tightly, in shades of red and purple. A long pipe was held in her hand, wafting pink smoke into the black air around her.
Her eyes were larger than her counterparts in the Holy Realm, and all pupil rather than iris; her ears were slightly stunted, turned down at the tips. She reclined on a large violet toadstool. On her lap rested a slender blade.
“This is such a strange place.” Angelica moved away from the tapestry. “Cat people with machines, dark elves living in some strange high society.”
“Much more fantastical than the realms we left,” Jovian agreed.
“And you think all other races should be uncivilized or uncultured, because they aren’t human?” Uthia mused.
A Guardian of Shadows (Revenant Wyrd Book 4) Page 6
