From the Earth to the Shadows

by Amanda Hocking

When we finally reached the top of the steps, we all should’ve been winded. We’d ascended hundreds of stairs, but I could breathe easier than I ever had before. My legs didn’t hurt, and even the ache from passing under the arches had passed. Just being here, so near to the citadel, had a restorative effect.

  The mezzanine was the highest level of the gardens. It was a lush plateau that extended the length of several city blocks. Pearlescent slabs lined the pathway, and marble benches and fountains dotted the periphery. Many beings—most of them beautiful or pleasing to the eye, all of them impeccably dressed—milled around the lawn, talking, laughing, reading, eating fruit. It all seemed so peaceful and happy.

  “That’s the entrance.” Lyra pointed to the far side of the mezzanine, to the last few steps that led into the round central hub of the palace.

  “Is this where you leave us, then?” Oona asked, her small voice sounding uneasy.

  “Yes, this is as far as I go.” Lyra nodded solemnly. “There are several orisha that work helping everyone navigate the citadel. They can help you the rest of your way.”

  “Thank you again for all your help,” I told her, wishing that I had a more meaningful way to show her how grateful I truly was.

  “It was no trouble.” She moved closer to me and took my hand in both of hers, holding it warmly but firmly. Her rich brown eyes locked on mine, and though she was smiling, there were tears swimming in her eyes. “Tell Sloane that I think of her every day, and that I love her so much.” She swallowed back her emotion. “Tell her that I’m sorry for what I did. Please.”

  “I will,” I promised her.

  She let go of my hand and wiped her eyes. “Thank you. I wish you only good fortune on the rest of your travels.” Lyra turned and started walking away, but Valeska called after her.

  “What are you going to do now?” Valeska asked.

  Lyra smiled demurely. “We all have business to attend to.”

  I watched her retreating figure for a few moments—her silken black hair swaying behind her as she headed back down the steps. But we had much to do, so I followed the pearlescent paths that wound around the benches.

  “Are you going to ask those orisha for help or whatever?” Valeska asked as she fell in step beside me.

  “No.”

  The orisha were helpful spirits, but I didn’t know how eager they would be to help us disturb the order of their world. In reality, we were only hoping to maintain it, but seeking out Odin’s son to get the spear he’d hidden would most probably seem like an intrusive disturbance to them.

  “What’s the plan, then?” Oona asked. “How are we going to find him?”

  I stopped beside rosebushes near the steps up to the palace for a bit of privacy. Valeska must’ve known what I was about, because she spread out her large black wings, shrouding us even further from any prying eyes.

  I quickly rummaged through my bag and pulled out the sólarsteinn.

  “There’s no sun here,” Oona pointed out, her voice tight with anxiety. “Is that a problem?”

  As I stared down at the translucent stone in the palm of my hand, I answered, “I think it only needs light, and there’s plenty of light around here.”

  Valeska stared at it with her arms folded over her chest, scrutinizing it before asking, “What does it do?”

  “You have to focus on what you want to find most, and this stone will show you where it is,” I explained.

  “And what is it that we want to find?” Valeska asked. “Are we going after Baldur, or straight for the spear?”

  “I’m afraid that the spear will be locked up or inaccessible to us, since Baldur took it to hide it from his father,” I said. “If we find Baldur, we can reason with him and tell him what Odin said and what’s happening up on earth.”

  Valeska scoffed. “You think he’ll hand it over?”

  “Odin said that Baldur was the most compassionate of his children,” I reasoned. “He’ll have to be sympathetic to our cause.”

  “And what if he’s not?” Valeska asked.

  “We’ll use the stone to find it,” I said firmly. “And then we’ll do whatever we have to do to get it. I’m not leaving Zianna without it.”

  Valeska smiled then. “What are you waiting for? Let’s get to it.”

  The sólarsteinn had worked for me before, so I tried to remember what I had done earlier. I closed my eyes and focused on Baldur, on every detail I knew about him. Then I started chanting in my head, Show me where Odin’s son Baldur is. Bring me to him.

  Then I opened my eyes and held up my palm, so the stone could catch the light. And we waited.

  I held my hand up even higher, as if I were offering the sólarsteinn to the gods. I could see the light hitting it—a bright beam shining through. Just when I thought all hope was lost, a prism of color shifted inside the stone.

  A rainbow of light shone out from it, pointing right toward the palace.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  It was busy inside the palace, and that worked both for and against us. We were easily lost in the crowd, but that left us with no privacy to use the stone.

  Inside the lavish rotunda, underneath the glittering glass dome, was a grand open room. At the edge, where the extremely high ceiling ended, was a stoa encircling the space. Thick columns surrounded the walkway, creating a semi-open hallway, which had dozens of ornate archways leading out of the main room.

  Despite the rather monochromatic color scheme—a great deal of white marble and granite, with only the occasional splash of copper or gold, and even most of the guests inside seemed to be wearing white or gold—it all had an air of sophistication and elegance.

  This also made the place stunningly bright, so I quickly palmed the sólarsteinn. With this much light, the stone would be liable to cast a giant rainbow over everyone, and I did not want to draw any attention.

  As Lyra had predicted, orisha were waiting around the entrance, happily asking if anyone needed help finding their way around the citadel. I declined as politely as I could and scanned the room for even the smallest hint of seclusion.

  The space was filled with breathtaking architectural flourishes, and it was impossible to take them all in. Oona had become mesmerized by an elaborate rose gold mandala inlaid in the white marble floor, and I had to take her hand to get her moving again.

  “I wish I could take pictures,” she moaned, gazing around the grand room as I led her to the far side, to hide in the shadows behind a pillar.

  A trio of immortals were walking toward us, chatting, but once they passed, it looked like I have might have a few seconds when I could take a peek at the sólarsteinn. I leaned back against a column and waited.

  “This isn’t a vacation,” Valeska chastised Oona, but I saw the way she looked around the room—she was as enamored with it as Oona and I.

  That was the point, after all. Zianna had been created, by some of the most powerful divine beings that ever lived, to be a magnificent sanctuary. It was the culmination of millennia of talent and magic, so obviously the result would be the most beautiful thing that us mere mortals had ever laid eyes on.

  “I know,” Oona said as she looked around wistfully. “I’ll never see this again. Do you think we’ll remember it all? When we go back?”

  Valeska’s expression hardened, and her thick lashes laid heavily on her cheeks as she nodded once. “I remember everything from my time here before.”

  I didn’t have time to ask her more. I opened my hand, just enough to let the light hit the stone, and instantly a rainbow prism appeared, shining right toward a door before the wall curved out of site behind the pillars.

  “That way,” I commanded as I closed my hand around the sólarsteinn again.

  Fighting the urge to run, I walked as briskly yet casually as I could and smiled politely at anyone we passed. When I turned under the archway, ahead was a long corridor with all sorts of marble busts lining the walls. They sat on pedestals of rose gold, four feet off the ground, and the heads themselves t
owered another two to six feet, depending on who they depicted.

  Some I recognized, like Anubis, Venus, Ishtar, and Moai, but there were far too many for me to know them all just by glancing at them as we hurried by. Once the coast was relatively clear, I hid beside the bust of Anubis, leaning back against the wall behind his large jackal head, and pulled out the sólarsteinn again.

  The light directed us farther down the hall, until we turned off onto another smaller and darker one. We turned twice more, following wherever the stone indicated, until we took a long winding staircase, going down deep below the palace.

  I heard the running water before we reached the bottom of the stairs, but I was still surprised to see that we had come to a stream that ran underneath—or, rather, through—the palace. A small stone walkway ran on either side, and the tiled walls curved up and around us. If it wasn’t for the opening at either end of the stream, letting bright light in, or the fact that the water itself was crystal-clear and large koi-like fish were swimming in it, I would’ve guessed this was a sewer.

  The stone pointed far to the left of us and across the brook, to a door on the other side. Fortunately, there were a few stones protruding up above the water, so we were able to cross them like stepping-stones.

  “Have you noticed that there aren’t any guards around?” Oona asked as we carefully stepped across the stones. We hadn’t spoken much so far, but now it appeared we were alone. “No one to stop us or tell us not to go in.”

  “Why would there be?” Valeska countered when we reached the other side. “The arches we passed through are intended to keep out any evil. Zianna is home to the divine, who are incapable of doing anything wrong. Even if they were to sneak into any area that they weren’t technically supposed to be in, the fact that they did it means that it wasn’t wrong. Whatever they do is the good and just thing to do, so why would anyone here want to stop them?”

  “But…” The crease in Oona’s brow deepened as she considered Valeska’s answer. “Does that mean that we’re the most wicked beings in all of Zianna? Or that the only things we can do here are good and right?”

  “I think it means that we have free will, unlike everyone else that lives here,” Valeska said. “We can make choices that they can’t.”

  The conversation reminded me of one I’d had with Sloane before, when I had first learned that my mother might not have done her duty as a Valkyrie and instead had let a targeted immortal live. Sloane had posited that there were only two choices: either everybody has free will, or nobody has free will.

  “But hopefully we’re exactly where we’re supposed to be anyway, so it’s all a moot point,” Valeska amended.

  When we reached the archway the sólarsteinn had pointed to, we encountered our first real door. It was wooden, with an iron support bar running across it secured with a padlock, and it wouldn’t budge.

  “Dammit,” I muttered, and I crouched down in front of the door to pull my lockpick set out of my bag.

  “What’s wrong?” Oona asked.

  “It’s locked.” I took the heavy padlock in one hand and slid a pick in with the other. Valkyries were well trained in the art of picking locks, because sometimes immortals liked to hole up and lock themselves in when they realized their time was up.

  “Oona jinxed us by pointing out the lax security in Zianna,” Valeska said.

  Oona cast her a glare. “That’s not how jinxing works.”

  Finally the lock clicked and I slipped the padlock off.

  I opened the door slowly and realized this had to be the end of our journey. It was one room, with no exits or doors other than the one I was standing in. The walls and ceiling were made of solid slabs of gray marble, and a bronze sink and toilet sat on one side of the wall.

  Directly across from the door was a small brass bed. A man was lying on it, with his back to us, unmoving. I timidly took a few steps into the room, gathering all my courage.

  “Baldur?” I asked hopefully.

  Then he sat up and turned around, and the air caught in my throat.

  It wasn’t Baldur at all.

  It was Asher.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  He stood in front of me, looking just as I had seen him last. His clothes were different—traded in for white linen—but everything else was the same: a broad-shouldered walking contradiction of beauty and softness, strength and vulnerability. His full lips parted slightly as he looked at me in disbelief, and his entire posture was rigid.

  Then, I couldn’t help myself, I ran to him. I had to touch him, to feel him, to know he was here. As soon as I reached him, he pulled me into his arms, hugging me to him. The weight and warmth of his body pressed against me, his heart pounding in his chest.

  “Is it really you?” he asked breathlessly as he brushed a lock of hair back from my forehead.

  “It’s me,” I promised as I gazed up into the indigo of his eyes. “Is it really you?”

  He smiled crookedly then, making the scar on his upper lip more pronounced. “It’s me.” Then the smile faltered. “What are you doing here? I told you not to come and find me.”

  “I didn’t, actually,” I admitted.

  I wanted to linger in his arms forever, but that wasn’t the best way to have a conversation, so I moved back. But I still kept my hand on him, touching his arm, afraid that he would slip away if I let go even for a second.

  “Odin sent us here to look for a spear, and I was using my sólarsteinn,” I explained as I realized the error. The sunstone always takes you to what you most want to find in the world, and I couldn’t make myself want anything more than Asher. “I was looking for Baldur, but it led me to you.”

  He expression softened. “I know I shouldn’t be, but I’m glad you’re here.”

  “I was so worried that…” I trailed off and narrowed my eyes. “What are you doing here? Did Gugalanna bring you here?”

  He shook his head emphatically. “No. He brought me to She’ol.”

  I winced, and now that I had stepped back and was really looking at him, I could see fresh wounds, still red and puffy, visible along the hems of his shirt. Just above the V-neck of his shirt, the blotched edges of a purplish bruise were visible.

  “They wanted my blood, so most of my time there I spent fading in and out of consciousness as they drained me of it as much as they could without killing me.” His jaw tightened under his rough stubble. “They only kept me alive so that I could make more blood, and they used all sorts of strange incantations to help with the process. They wouldn’t tell me what they planned to do with it all, but they were definitely draining me as much as they could.”

  “How did you end up here?” I asked, mostly because I wanted to know, but also because I didn’t want to think about Asher being tortured in She’ol.

  “A scout from Zianna found me, and a team of exousia rescued me and brought me here,” he explained.

  Exousia had once been angelic warriors that protected the gods that roamed the earth. But after the Valkyrie Proclamation, they had all gone down to Kurnugia, to protect the divine from being overrun by evil.

  “They didn’t know what to do with me, so they locked me up to keep me safe, and to keep themselves safe,” Asher said.

  “Well, we’re breaking you out.” I squeezed his hand and smiled wanly. “Any chance that you know where Baldur or a spear are hidden?”

  He shook his head sadly. “I’m sorry. The only ones I know by name that I’ve met are Gugalanna, Abaddon, and Sedna.”

  “You were in contact with Abaddon?” Valeska grimaced.

  He looked over at her, noticing the newest addition to our group for the first time. “Who are you?”

  “Valeska Voronin,” she replied, hooking her thumb at us. “I’m with them.”

  “Samael sent her to help us,” I elaborated. “She’s good.”

  “As touching as this reunion is, we should get moving,” Valeska said dryly. “We still have a lot to do before we can get out of here.”

 
; “Do you think you can get the sólarsteinn to work now?” Oona asked. “That it will focus on Baldur?”

  I was about to answer, but the sound of footsteps stopped me. They were pounding on the path outside, echoing through the tunnel. Before we had a chance to make a move or plan, they were here.

  A trio of exousia—clad in golden armor with white-feathered wings extending out from their muscular torsos—stood in front of the doorway, blocking our escape.

  TWENTY-SIX

  I knelt on the floor, the stone feeling cold and hard through the fabric of my skirt. The exousia had walked us down the length of a long room and directed us to kneel before the throne at the end.

  Directly before me was a semicircle pattern inlaid in the floor using various shades of gold and copper to create the sun. Just beyond that were half a dozen marble stairs that led up to an elegant veranda, where a tall, empty throne sat in the middle.

  Above the throne, the ceiling curved down to ornately carved arches and low half walls. Other than the arches, the throne was entirely open to the outside. A crimson phoenix flew by, letting out a solitary despondent squawk.

  As Asher, Oona, Valeska, and I waited—for who or what, the exousia would not tell us—I studied the carvings. They appeared to depict all sorts of great battles among the Vanir gods and other immortals.

  Finally a door off the side of the veranda opened and an exousia walked in, followed by a serene woman in an elegant gown of white suede and fur. She was tall and poised, with tawny bronze skin, and her long black hair fell like a satin curtain around her. Her dark brown eyes were narrow but large and captivating under sharp eyebrows. On her forehead two black inverted triangles were tattooed, and five dots were tattooed across the fullness of the apple of her cheek.

  As she walked to the throne, her movements were so smooth and graceful, as if she were floating. Instead of sitting, she stood at the top step, looking down at us.

  “I am Sedna,” she said in a strong, cool voice. “I am the hundred and third ruler of Zianna, and I have been chosen by all the beings that dwell here to handle the matters that concern our citadel. As such, I need to know exactly who you are and why there are so many mortals where they are not meant to be.”