He answered her question before she even asked, with a short verse:
Far from the shores where other dragons be,
Where moonlight shines upon the blackened sea,
Spill stalker’s blood with ancient tooth,
To summon forth the court of Sonakshi.
“Ancient tooth,” Jennifer repeated. “You mean, my tooth. The tooth of the Ancient Furnace.”
“That’s right.”
“And stalker’s blood?”
A quick cough escaped Xavier. “That’s where I think we might run out of luck. Beaststalkers aren’t exactly plentiful anymore. I was thinking you could just, you know, take a bite out of me. Maybe my blood will do.”
She stared at him, and he misinterpreted her look.
“Dammit, Jennifer, we don’t have a lot of choices! If you know where we can go to find a nice, juicy beaststalker, now would be a good time to—”
“It’s okay, Xavier.” She began to laugh. “I’m a beaststalker.”
“You’re a—” He almost fell out of the air. “Is that a joke?”
“What, you have a problem with that?” A memory reemerged of Xavier Longtail in Blaze, smashing rock with his tail and proclaiming her an abomination to all who could hear.
“Hell, no!” he shouted. “Jennifer, if I could find twenty beaststalkers to join us, I would! We could have used them as friends, before the end came.”
“You get one,” she told him. “That’s going to have to be enough.”
“Let’s get out a little farther and try our luck!”
As it always seemed to be for adult men who were in charge of driving during a trip, “a little farther” meant about three hours. Jennifer could see no difference in the black, sparkling surface that stretched out beneath them now, and the one in which they had practiced meteor diving.
“We should try it here,” he called out to her as they gently descended into hovering position about twenty feet above the calm, rippling expanse. “So if you’ll just, um. Bite yourself.”
She rolled her eyes as she scanned herself for a good spot to take a chomp. Tail? Too narrow. Wing? Need it to fly. Flank? Too painful…
Finally, after Xavier began clicking his tongue impatiently, she decided upon the fleshy part of her hind leg, above the knee. She arched her neck down, opened her jaws, and—
“YEOUCH!” she bellowed into her thigh.
With a mix of satisfaction and irritation, she noticed right away that she had really nailed an artery. Blood streamed down her leg and dribbled into the water.
“Nice job!” Xavier encouraged her. “Now I can initiate the ritual call!”
“Terrific. Everyone has a role to play.”
But he wasn’t listening to her. He was flapping his wings hard and calling out to the ocean. “Sonakshi! Sonakshi!”
“That’s the ritual call?” she asked, trying to staunch the flow of her blood. “‘Sonakshi, Sonakshi?’ Cripes, I could have done that, while you gnawed on your own leg, old man…”
“Sonakshi! Sonakshi!”
Somewhere in the distance, a silent flash of lightning burst from underneath an indigo thunderhead. And before the noise of the bolt could reach them, the endless water rumbled with its own answer.
The ocean, which to this point had resembled nothing more than an endless swarm of sparks bouncing off each other, took on a more definite shape below them. The infinite reflections of moonlight organized into an enormous swirl, and steam began to lace the water’s churn. Like fleets of racing sails, long rows of triangular shapes emerged on the edges of this circle.
“I’ll be damned,” she heard Xavier whisper next to her.
The triangles grew taller, and then seawater washed off of them and onto vast, reptilian coils. Jennifer could not tell at first if it was one large serpent, or several smaller ones. “Smaller” being a relative term here, since even the shortest coil was longer than Pine Street back home.
Home, she mused as the thunderhead raced toward them, darkening the twilight and sprinkling rain upon nearby waves. How quiet it must be for them, in their home far below. Did anything change for them at all?
The ocean suddenly swelled, washing the writhing coils below with a surge. The thunderhead settled above their position…and opened up with a single, massive firework that lit the sky brighter than a beaststalker’s cry, and pounded them with a force that knocked them several feet down out of the sky.
“Are you sure about this?” she shouted at him as the storm unleashed. The wind whipped up the waves to meet the sheets of water cascading from above, making it not only difficult to fly, but to tell where the rain ended and the ocean began.
“Sure we’ve found the right place? Yes,” he answered, before a gust of wind took him. Then, from some distance: “Sure we’ll live through this? No.”
The coils with the triangular plates rose higher in the maelstrom, swirling around their position like a birthing tornado. Enormous strings of kelp trailed off their snakelike bodies. Jennifer guessed from counting heads through the watery chaos that there were four of them, their features grim—dark hues laced with silvery streaks. Two of the heads were dragonlike, with distinctly human shaping around the eyes and ears. The other two heads were best described as a cross between a seal and an elephant—long, whiskered snouts leading large, floppy ears.
“Which one is Sonakshi?” she asked.
“None of them,” he replied, peering into the sea’s waves. He struggled to point a wing claw downward, against the burst of air that rushed up from the surface.
What emerged from the depths of the watery vortex made Jennifer scream. The tentacles were first. Eight were the thickness and height of moon elms, and they splayed around the two dragons as though seeking to capture them. Two more tentacles were even longer—the height of redwoods, perhaps, though they did not stand still long enough to measure. They were thinner than the other eight, but still substantial enough to slap either of them from the sky without a second thought. Covered with severe spikes, they extended far above, and then descended along with the other eight appendages.
But before Jennifer could even flinch, the tentacles had receded and splashed back in the stormy water. Then the eye shone.
It was large enough that Jennifer was pretty sure she could have parked Catherine’s Mustang convertible on it. An unfathomable disk of obsidian was surrounded by a golden iris that shone with a glow powerful enough to pierce the unsettled sky like a searchlight.
“Sonakshi,” she heard Xavier exclaim in reverence. It was difficult to tell if the droplets covering his black, reptilian face were tears or the spray from below. “Sonakshi!”
The serpentine beasts riding the surging vortex around them continued to circle, but with open mouths they began to swallow seawater, and sound, and even darkness. It became quieter, and the starlight shone more brightly. The massive eye of the squid below them glided from one visitor to the other. Then the pupil settled upon Jennifer, and a voice with the low, mysterious pitch of whale song crooned in answer.
You come far, ancient girl, to return to the sea;
Destiny’s tides pull at you, you yearn for the sea.
Ancient girl, have you forgotten your ocean kin?
Your kin that died on land used to burn for the sea.
What you left behind does not drown or drift away,
Ocean depths stay faithful, though you may spurn the sea.
Daughter of fire, daughter of water, fly true
And when air and earth betray, return to the sea.
Great, Jennifer thought as she chewed her tongue. The gargantuan squid likes poems.
Hoping she didn’t have to respond in kind, she called out over the swirling waters, “We’re lost. The universe has changed. We need to put things back where they belong. Can you help?”
For a few moments, she thought Sonakshi had not heard her, or didn’t want to answer. But before she could repeat herself, perhaps in some sort of metered rhyme, he contin
ued:
Sorcery spins on the surface, never deeper;
Swim beneath it, unravel it, ever deeper;
Where the crescent moon lights the ocean on fire;
Lies Seraphina’s Isle, however deeper;
Strength she will give you, to stand grimly by your side;
Then you must find strength within, endeavor deeper;
Heal the world, ancient girl, and poison the poison;
Set the moon elm’s roots in stone, forever deeper.
Aw, shit, it’s a poem and a riddle, she almost screamed. He can’t just give me a map and a gun?
“Thanks,” she said instead, and looked up to Xavier. “Anything else you want a really long, undecipherable answer to?”
Xavier stared at the giant squid for a long while, his lips tight and face full of grief. He didn’t seem to know how to say anything, but then the words poured out.
“Where were you?” he finally screamed. “We came out here, years ago, and called for you! We needed your help, and you ignored us! We were dying, and you ignored us! We buried the last of our dead, and flew alone for years, and you ignored us! Why didn’t you come?! What have you been doing out here all this time?!”
The golden searchlight slid dispassionately to consider the dasher, and a last answer came, more slowly than the first two:
The fight you fought years ago, outside of water,
Carries on, beneath these waves, in hidden slaughter.
Do not waste any more time here, friends. Hurry, before it is too late.
And with that, the giant squid and the host of sea serpents submerged, leaving a chaotic residue of foam behind on the surface.
“Hey, that last line had too many syllables,” Jennifer protested. “He had to—”
“We’re going,” Xavier spat bitterly into the ocean. He ascended into the skies, leaving Jennifer to rush after him.
She tried to recall the pieces of the poem. “Where are we going to find where the crescent moon lights the ocean on fire?”
He did not turn to look at her. “I’ve been out this way many times, and I’ve never seen anything like that. So I’d guess farther out.”
“My wings are a little tired.”
“Yeah, well, my friends and family are dead.”
“Hey.” She flew up close to him and nudged him, not in an entirely friendly way. “So are mine. I’m just saying.”
“We don’t have time to float around like ducks.” His voice held barely restrained anger.
“We could at least swim for a while, and exercise a different set of muscles.”
“You want to swim, swim. I’m flying.”
“Okay, smiley. You win. We’ll keep flying.”
If she thought the concession would earn her an apology for his rotten attitude, she was wrong.
It was six more hours before either of them said a word to each other again. By that time, Jennifer’s wings felt like they were going to fall off. The only thing that might have changed was the crescent moon: It seemed larger than it usually did, but that could have been her eyes playing tricks on her after virtually an entire day of staring at a twilit horizon.
“Xavier!”
He did not turn. He was quite a distance ahead by now, with his profile quite small and Goodwin just a barely visible crown on the dasher’s silhouette against the moonlight.
“Xavier! Aw, screw you. I’m going for a swim.”
“We’re almost there,” he called out.
“Sure we are. What does that mean—another three, four hours? No thanks. I need to rest.” She was already turning over and dumping the air out of her tired wings; her limbs embraced the change of position.
“Jennifer, if you just—”
“You lost your nagging privileges when you turned back into a bitter old turd,” she called up to him. Her altitude continued to decrease. “For almost a whole day, I thought you might be different from the guy I left in the other universe. That Xavier Longtail was a snarky slice of toe cheese, too. Why I thought you’d be different, I have no idea.” She was almost touching the water now; the velvety surface offered liquid comfort.
“You’re going to want to—”
“Save it, Toe Cheese. Yes, that is my new name for you: Toe Cheese. As in, ‘Toe Cheese is something I don’t enjoy spending time with.’ Or ‘Excuse me, sir, but could you please remove this Toe Cheese? It displeases me.’”
She gently lit into the water and relaxed all of her limbs, spreading out her wings on her back and forming a sort of shallow boat. “You spend twenty years alone with no one but a crappy little lizard for company—no offense, Goodwin—and then the Ancient Furnace shows up. The Ancient Furnace! I’m a big deal, pal. You could at least—Hey, this water’s kinda warm.”
“I should think so,” Xavier replied. He was hovering now, staring off into the distance.
She ignored him. “Kinda like a Jacuzzi, but with saltwater. Wow, that feels nice. You should really come down here and feel this, Toe Cheese. Not that I care if you do.”
“And you should really come up here and see this.”
“Okay, I’ll turn my head. But that’s it.”
That was enough. The glow from the far east was unmistakable.
“Is that fire?”
“It sure is.”
“On the ocean?”
“Yes.”
“Wow. No wonder the water’s warm. So, this is where Seraphina’s Isle is, huh?”
“I don’t see it. We’ll have to look around.”
“Hmmph.” She wiggled her wing claws. “I suppose that means I’m going to have to get up out of the water.”
“No, please, don’t let me interrupt your bath. I’ll do it myself. After all, it’s not like I was up all night doing reconnaissance while you snored up a storm.”
“I do not—Hey! Flying away while I’m talking is not proof of snoring!”
He was out of sight for ten minutes or so. When he came back, he lowered himself into the water next to her with a sigh.
She kept staring up at the sky as they drifted in circles around each other. “So. How’d it go?”
“The fire looks pretty spectacular,” he replied with an exhausted voice. “But there’s no island anywhere near here.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. Where else would an ocean be on fire? Look at those flames!” She pointed lamely with a wing claw at the distant, floating inferno. “They must be, like, thirty-feet high.”
“More than a hundred, actually. You want to go up and take a look, feel free.” He lapsed into silence. Then, “We’re not looking at this the right way. Why is the ocean on fire?”
“Hell if I know. Oil slick?” The air around them was getting stuffier, and Jennifer noticed the current was carrying them closer to the flames. They were still a distance away, but the seawater was shifting from warm to hot. “Xavier, I think we might need to—”
“The only other thing that catches fire around here is the crescent moon,” he said. “Or it did, back when the venerables served as host to Crescent Valley. But I haven’t seen that signal since…”
“How did the werachnids manage that?” Jennifer asked. “I mean, venerables are already dead, right? Why wouldn’t they stick around?”
Xavier’s voice was soft in thought. “They left right before the last stand. We saw the streak of fire leave the crescent moon and disappear over the eastern horizon, and we despaired. We thought they had abandoned us for the heavens. But we were wrong. They came out to the sea…”
He lifted himself out of the water and pointed at the inferno, which raged only a few hundred yards away now.
“…and dove through this spot…”
Now Jennifer got up and hovered next to Xavier, suddenly understanding.
“…and went deeper,” they finished together.
And without any hesitation at all, they plunged into the depths.
CHAPTER 13
Friday Night
The portal through the ocean was m
uch deeper and took much longer than the lake portal had. The column of fire extended into the depths, providing them with light, warmth, and a path to follow. Holding her breath wasn’t much of an issue, and Jennifer passed the time deep in excited thought.
Were they crossing back into the correct universe? Skip had told her that wasn’t possible—but again, that had been Skip. If he was wrong (or lying), how would they reconcile the two worlds? Would they even have to? If she got back into a Crescent Valley and outside world where her parents were alive and all was right, who cared if she ever went back to this crappy, spider-infested one? Let it rot where it was.
Their emergence into the new world was sudden. The column of fire washed out all of the visual signals they would normally have seen upon a surface approach. For a moment, Jennifer thought they must have gotten turned around, for the ocean here looked pretty much like the ocean they had left, and the fire raged on next to them. Then she saw two spectacular differences.
First, the crescent moon was twice the size of the moon they had left behind. It almost appeared as though they could reach out, grab its hooked end, and pull themselves out of the water.
Second, behind them was a break in the water—a volcanic isle that loomed tall above them. Its sides near the water were barren rock, though there might have been something growing higher up. At the top of the island, where the volcanic crater crested, there was a single, shimmering point. While it was impossible to tell exactly what it was, it was clear to Jennifer that it was shifting, and that it was their destination.
“Jennifer, look!” Xavier pulled himself out of the water and pointed with a wing claw. “Around the moon!”
She squinted, looked hard, and gasped. Against the surface of the massive crescent, she could make out thin trails of flying shapes. Like tiny ants working a trail across a shiny plate, they all moved loosely—but surely—in the same direction.
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