Page 26

Laurel, Missa, and Ida were full of surprises. It became obvious when they guided us across the entire island and deep into the bowels of the fake Black Heights. Derek and I were still careful and ever alert, but we took comfort in having Haldor and Regine on our side. They’d bound the clones’ hands with Purgatory magic—thin strands of darkness that could not be broken by anyone other than those who had cast them.

We had gone well past the known residences of the dragon clones. The upper cave system of the mountains had been left behind a while back. I checked my wristwatch, though I wasn’t sure why. I had not recorded our entry time, and neither had Derek.

“How much deeper?” I asked.

The corridor ahead tightened some more, its eerily polished walls closing in. I’d thought I’d learned our beloved island by heart, yet this place proved that I had forgotten some parts of it. According to Laurel, at least, the Black Heights and their chambers had been made identical to the original from back home. “We’re almost there,” she said, leading the way. Missa and Ida were compelled to line up behind her, followed by me and Derek, then Haldor and Regine.

It was growing colder, the temperature reaching near freezing. As a vampire, it didn’t bother me, but I still experienced the chills, my skin tightening as I watched my breath flower into playful steam clouds in front of me.

“And what is it exactly that you’re going to show us?” Derek replied. “Forgive our distrust, but your people have done nothing but harm.”

Ida chuckled. “I completely agree. We dared to demand independence and… well, here we are. Left behind to rot in this place.”

“I could describe it,” Laurel said, “but it’s better if I show you. It saves me the additional explanations. You’ll have plenty of questions, no doubt.”

Haldor grunted behind us. “How come I never made it down here?”

“Oh, there are places in The Shade that not even the Berserkers know about. Some clone-made, others from the original designs. Hrista didn’t want anyone to know about the lower tunnels,” Laurel said. “The only Berserker who knew about them was destroyed by her blade. He’s one of your shadow hounds now.”

I looked over my shoulder and I recognized Haldor’s expression. Shock and grief. Unmistakable, even for an entity of Purgatory. “I suppose you don’t know who your shadow hounds are?” I muttered.

“No. They lose any form of individuality when their Aesir are destroyed,” he said. “I suppose whoever he was, Hrista brought him over first, holding his Aesir hostage, much like she did with Brandon’s Hammer. Only, in his case, there was no Haldor to hinder her evil plan.”

“Do you always talk about yourself in the third person?” Regine retorted.

I could almost feel his eyes rolling. “Do you always insert yourself into conversations where you do not belong?” Haldor was a heavy hitter, clearly. Regine had found her match, but that didn’t seem to bother her. On the contrary, she enjoyed the occasional jab, just to remind us that the Berserkers and the Valkyries were literal opposites.

“Just a little bit more,” Laurel said from the darkness ahead. It swallowed Ida and Missa next. By the time we caught up with them, the tunnel had begun to widen again, a distant light casting shadows against the amber-colored walls. I ran my fingers over the surface, trying to understand how this place had been made.

“Magic?” I asked Derek, but he responded with a shrug. “It’s strange. I could swear it’s actual amber.”

“It is,” Laurel replied, slightly amused. “Hrista had her Berserkers scan the entire island and study its depths, too. They came across this place.” The fact that the clones and Hrista knew more about our world than even we did wasn’t the greatest shock. They were already aware of Astra’s genetic makeup as a threat to the disgraced Valkyrie, and there was probably more in their notes on top of that. “Some of the first dragons who came to The Shade made these lower tunnels. They told absolutely no one, and they used amber to mark this as their turf. Fire dragons. So, if ice dragons accidentally stumbled upon these tunnels, they would know to stay out.”

I cleared my throat, the chalky dust in the air making it harder for me to breathe. “It irks me that you know more about my home than I do.”

“Oh, we are just curious to a fault,” Ida giggled. “Besides, the dragon clones, as you call them, they were never that territorial. The rest of us could go up the mountains of these Black Heights freely. The caves, too. It’s how Laurel found this place.”

Finally, we reached the end of the tunnel, and my blood chilled—a strange reaction to a sense of anticipation, I figured. This couldn’t be a trap, that much was clear. The enemies were gone, and we had a Berserker and a Valkyrie with us. On top of that, the comms worked, so we could always call for help. No, this was real, and it was happening, and I dreaded learning the truth. We obviously needed it, yet a part of me didn’t wish to know it. A childish way of hiding from the inevitable, I suppose.

“Here we are.” Laurel’s words preceded the view.

Ida and Missa stepped aside, just in time for Derek and me to step into the giant cave bubble. It had been carved into a cylindrical form, its walls also covered with a thick coat of amber. The floors were the black stone of the mountains themselves, and a peculiar light glowed from below. Only then did I see where we stood—on the lip of a deep chasm, at the bottom of which we could see about twenty odd-looking tanks. They resembled the oxygen tanks used by firefighters in the Earthly dimension but made of glass.

“What the…” my voice trailed off as my husband caught my wrist and held me back. I hadn’t even realized that I was still walking, nearly falling over the edge and into the chasm. I would easily have broken something if I had fallen to the bottom.

“Careful, my love,” he whispered in my ear and pressed his lips against my temple for a second. I smelled his fear then. Sharp and heavy, much like mine, as we both looked down and saw the mingle of shimmering white and sickening black masses that seemed to wrestle one another inside each of the glass tanks. That was what illuminated the entire chamber. The war between light and darkness enclosed below.

“What the heck are those?” Regine gasped, her eyes widening as she followed our gaze. “That… crap, Haldor, look!”

“How is that even possible?!” The Berserker was equally baffled, and I had no idea what we were dealing with. I only knew that the dread I’d carried with me into this place had now grown into something much uglier and more difficult to control.

Laurel turned around to face us. “Unbeknownst to anyone, Hrista found a way to embed death magic into Purgatory magic. I reckon it had something to do with her innate ability to wield light and darkness alike. It helped her fuse the two together with a thread of Hermessi energy. The Spirit Bender had that harvested before the war.”

“What are those things?!” I asked, urgency sharpening my voice. I was close to screaming, and my blood pumped so fast, my flesh felt like it had caught fire despite the freezing cold.

“They’re called world seeds,” Laurel said. “Hrista used some seriously awful magic to bind those elements together. But she needed Kedra’s catalyst to make each tank into a viable world-maker.” Upon noticing my confused expression, she briefly explained what Kedra’s catalyst was, and my stomach just… dropped as the dots connected in my mind. Astra had told us about the black witch before—Hrista had mentioned her to them upon their first meeting just before the Flip. This was the same Kedra. My head hurt…

“Wait. What’s a world-maker?” Derek asked, his brow furrowing as he tried to understand what they actually meant. I was inclined to take them literally, since Hrista clearly suffered from a deranged god complex.

“It’s a magical organic compound,” Laurel explained. “It’s got light and darkness from Purgatory. It’s got life from the Hermessi. It’s got death from the Reapers’ realm… and it’s imbued with organic matter from The Shade. It works now, because Hrista activated the formula with Kedra’s catalyst.” She was talking about the cube that Isabelle’s clone had stolen from the real island, the very object that Claudia’s doppelganger had succeeded in bringing over to this place. Up until this conversation, none of us had known what that thing did. Now that we knew… good grief, it was terrifying. And to think it had been in our possession for so long, yet we’d had no idea. Isabelle’s clone had stolen this from the witches’ Sanctuary. Corrine and the others had been equally ignorant to its existence, yet Hrista had known it was there. “It has multiple uses, that object. This was one of them.”

“What do these do?” I asked, suddenly shaking like a leaf.

“You don’t want to know…” Ida replied, shaking her head slowly. There was fear in her eyes as she glanced down at the glowing tanks. I saw reds and greens bursting through the struggle of light and darkness, and flashes dancing across the entire mass. I saw blues and yellows and other colors, too… snippets of something so complex that it terrified me.

Derek shook his head. “But you have to tell us. We spared you for this!”

“Forgive Ida, she wasn’t really sure if I was telling the truth, either,” Laurel said. “I’m the only one in my village who knew about this. Since we were set free from our tasks, I took time to explore this place. I’m good at hiding, so I stayed out of the Berserkers’ sight.” She paused to briefly look at Haldor and smirk. “No one saw me. Eventually, I came upon Hrista and a couple of her loyal clones talking about the world seeds… I figured that was interesting, so I eavesdropped on that conversation, then came down here to see for myself. It’s real. It’s all real.”

“You still haven’t answered the key question,” Regine warned, one hand gripping her sword. She wasn’t the only one itching for violence. Derek was getting restless, too.

“One drop from any of those tanks, and a massive creation will take place. Like a seed of nature, it will touch the ground or the water where it’s dropped. If you feed it and toss it into emptiness, it will flourish in the nothingness like this place did. It will grow, impossible to ever stop. It will develop land and water, trees and bushes and plants…” Laurel sucked in a breath. “A single drop will feed on its surroundings, it will build upon the life it encounters, and it will never stop spreading.”

“This place you call fake… it started with a drop of that,” Ida said, pointing at the tanks, “in a glass of water. Hrista opened this pocket between worlds and let the drop of world seed grow into our Shade.”

“Your Shade,” I replied.

“Why did Hrista leave the tanks here?” Regine wondered, upset and confused. “It doesn’t make much sense, does it?”

Laurel sighed. “I think she plans to use these tanks against another world. Maybe yours, maybe this one, I’m not sure. You see, one drop can make a world, but all these tanks set free at once? The forms will battle and consume one another. They’ll eat everything in their path. You, me, every single Shadian still here… we will all be gone, and the world seeds will keep fighting to coexist, unable to get along… it’s why you see them fighting in the tanks. The glass is powerful magic, it stops them from breaking out.”

That alone was deeply troubling. The implications made me want to scream. We were stuck here with a bunch of literal ticking time bombs, and Hrista could come back at any moment to set them off and destroy us. “There is, of course, a lot more we still do not know,” Ida felt the need to mention that. “Laurel says Hrista took a tank over into the real island.”

My knees buckled. It was all I could do not to fall as Derek tightened his grip on me and moved us away from the edge. Haldor and Regine were baffled. Their expressions spoke of fear, too—they understood the implications as well as I did.

As did my husband. “You mean to tell me that not only are we at risk of annihilation if Hrista breaks these damn tanks, but that she took one of them into our realm, too?”

Laurel nodded.

“And you didn’t think to tell us sooner?” I croaked, my voice breaking.

“I waited until after the Flip before I could explore these parts. As soon as I showed this to Ida and Missa, we came looking for you. At the villa,” Laurel replied.

“I think the Daughters and Lumi will want to see this,” Derek said, scowling at the tanks again. It was as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing, even though it was obviously and painfully real.

“That Soul Crusher guy, too,” Regine added. “It requires the representatives of every realm.”

It most certainly did.

This was insane. The odds were stacked against us even higher than we’d realized, and our most valuable fighters had not yet returned from their perilous voyage. Now, more than ever, I wanted to gather our children close, all three of them… to hold them tight and kiss them. They were the future. I could not let Hrista or anyone else destroy that.