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While Imperial history tends to consider King Vylanar the final ruler of the island, a more careful reading of the source material reveals that he was in fact merely the subordinate consort to his wife, Queen Talvia. She was what the locals referred to as “goddess-touched,” a status that this scholar has been unable to absolutely define. (For more information on the goddess-touched, see my volume on Religious Figures and Rites.)

Akeisa: An Overview of Prominent Historical Figures

by Guildmaster Klement

Einar dreamt of the deep.

Not peaceful dreams, filled with that sweet melody he’d come to crave, but dreams of darkness and danger. He slid through the water as the Kraken, and instead of music there were only screams. Cries of terror churned the water until even his vast strength couldn’t keep him from tumbling into the forbidding depths and into the crack at the bottom of the world, the one that had formed when the continents smashed together, raising the Western Wall. No one had ever seen the bottom. Maybe there was no bottom. Maybe he would fall forever, through the center of their world, until the pressure crushed him into dust.

His human heart throbbed in his ears, the only link that remained to his mortal body. It struggled to beat under the enormous pressure, every thump an angry drumbeat calling him to war, but the protective armor of ice around his heart was gone, and the ocean crashed in, crashed in, crashed in—

“Einar.”

The screams were fading, one by one. No, not fading. Being extinguished. Water churned, crashing down, destroying those fragile human lives—

“ Einar. ” The feverish whisper tickled his ears. Did he have ears? “Wake up.”

He reached for that familiar voice, and he had human hands now, too. Hands that encountered warm skin and waves of unbound hair.

“Einar, please .”

The sea shattered around him. Einar lurched up in bed, then grabbed for Naia as the movement almost knocked her over. She ended up sprawled across his lap, disheveled and wild-eyed. “Naia? What is it?”

Her chest heaved with the force of her breaths. “We have to go.”

Her cheeks were flushed, and when he pressed one hand to her face, she felt feverish. Concern swept away any lingering sleep. “Go where? What is it?”

“Can you hear them?” She slipped from the bed and crossed the floor on silent, bare feet, heading for the window and its thin, impossible pane of delicate ice. He scrambled after her, struggling to listen as he pulled on pants and shoved his feet into his boots.

Some of the High Court had heightened senses, but his had never seemed all that much sharper than they had been as a mortal—especially while he stood on dry land. If he concentrated, he could hear the murmurs of an active castle, along with the distant, uneasy churning of the ocean. Nothing that would put that look in her eyes.

Einar snatched a shirt off the back of a chair and tugged it over his head. “What do you hear?”

Her tousled hair and flushed cheeks might have been alluring under better circumstances, but combined with the wild glitter in her eyes, they were almost as alarming as her whispered words. “The drums.”

He caught her shoulders, stilling her frantic pacing. “Naia ... I don’t hear any drums.”

“They’re ...” She looked up at him and trailed off. For one moment, she seemed confused. She lifted a trembling hand to his face, tracing his cheek as if she hadn’t seen him in centuries and couldn’t quite believe he was there.

She dragged in an unsteady breath, and released it on a sob.

“Shh, shh.” Einar folded his arms around her, whispering into her hair as he stroked it. “Come with me, and we’ll fix this.”

The short walk to Aleksi’s room took longer than he would have liked. He rapped heavily when they reached it, but he didn’t wait for a response before shoving the door open. Whatever mood was riding the man was immaterial with Naia trembling in his arms like she’d shake apart. “Aleksi!”

Aleksi wasn’t in bed. He stood by the window, gazing out of it, and turned when they pushed through the door. “Einar?”

“Something’s wrong.” He tried to ease back, but Naia only clung to him harder, her body still shaking with silent sobs. “She says she hears drums.”

Fear hit Einar hard enough to nearly double him over. Not his own; that , he knew the flavor of. This was different—deep and faceted, washing in on him from every direction. Just as quickly, it vanished, and Aleksi crossed the room with swift steps.

If he’d been the source of that terror, there was no sign of it. His hands were gentle and his movements slow as he coaxed Naia from the protective circle of Einar’s arms and urged her to look up at him. Her trembling eased, as if she saw safety in the Lover’s warm brown eyes. Her breathing calmed, and Aleksi spoke just as gently. “Tell me, love?”

She gazed up at him in silence for an endless moment. Then she shuddered. “The ones from earlier. From the celebration. They’re still out there, beating like a heart.”

Her panicked eyes all but screamed that she did not expect them to believe her. But Aleksi only nodded, his expression utterly serene. “Do you know where? We’ll go find them.”

Naia licked her lips. Nodded. “The temple.”

Aleksi glanced at Einar. Of course he wouldn’t know—he had been safe in his bed and sleeping when Naia and Einar had gone exploring. “There’s a path out beyond the kitchen garden,” he explained. “It leads to the top of the cliff above the castle. The goddess’s ancient temple is there.”

As if the words freed something in her, Naia spun and tore free of their hands. “We have to hurry,” she muttered, starting for the door.

“Naia, wait—” Einar reached for the nearest covering he could see—a cloak Aleksi had tossed over a chair—but she was already gone. “Dammit, she’ll freeze!”

Aleksi grabbed Einar’s arm and pulled him into the hallway. “When did this start?”

“I don’t know. I woke up, and she was on my bed, distraught. I brought her straight to you.”

“She wasn’t with you tonight?”

It was a neutral question, giving away none of the Lover’s thoughts on what had happened at the beach—or how he felt knowing that Einar and Naia had retreated to their own beds in the aftermath. “I left her in her own room. She seemed fine then.”

“She isn’t now.”

That was more than obvious. Naia’s pace seemed to pick up with every step, until they were all but racing through the kitchen gardens and past the greenhouses. Einar tried to drape the cloak over her shoulders, but she shrugged it off as if she couldn’t feel the frigid night air. All her attention was focused on the lights leading up the path. There were more than there had been before, a steady march of lanterns winding up the side of the mountain.

The lanterns offered plenty of illumination. No wind stirred their flames to make the shadows dance, as if the entire island was still, holding its breath. Einar was stretched as taut as a bowstring, and every step up toward the temple only twisted that tension tighter.

And then, as they approached the peak, he did hear something. Not drums, but the heartbeat from his dream. It started soft, a feeling more than a sound, the vibrations of it shivering through his boots. It felt as if the island itself had a heartbeat, and he realized Naia’s footsteps fell in perfect rhythm.

The candles seemed to burn higher at the top of the path. These danced wildly in spite of the stillness of the night. Shadows played across Naia’s face as she searched frantically for something. Three stumbling steps forward, and she dropped to her knees in the exact center of the ruined temple, head tilted back and eyes half-closed, as if she was listening to something.

Then she slapped one hand against the shattered stone. Her nails scraped painfully as she clawed at it, as if she could dig through ancient rocks and reach what she sought. “It’s here,” she whispered, barely seeming to notice when one of her nails broke. “We just have to find it.”

Einar caught her wrist, wincing when he saw her broken nails and scratched fingers. “Tell us what you’re looking for, and we can help you—”

Aleksi knelt beside her. “Naia, darling. Help us understand.”

“I can’t .” Her head jerked up as if she’d heard something, then she pulled her wrist from Einar’s grasp and staggered to her feet. “It would be hidden. Someplace where no one could find it.”

Aleksi reached out, but did not touch her. “Find what, love?”

She didn’t even acknowledge them. The dirty hem of her nightgown swayed in a breeze that wasn’t there as she walked through the ruins as if in a daze. For one moment, she stood framed between two shattered columns, nothing beyond her but an endless star-strewn sky and the moons reflected back from the restless ocean below.

Then she gathered her nightgown in her hands, hoisted it up, and bolted for the cliff’s edge.

“Naia!” Her name tore from Einar’s lips as he lunged, nearly smashing into Aleksi. The Lover was faster, reaching the edge just in time for Naia’s nightgown to flutter through his fingers before she vanished over the edge.

Aleksi threw himself to the filthy rock as Einar reached the precipice, but the look on his face reflected more confusion than stomach-clenching terror.

Einar’s heart wasn’t beating. He wasn’t sure how he managed to choke out a single word. “Aleksi?”

“There’s a ledge,” he rasped, already turning to drop off the edge. “And some sort of opening ...”

Einar fell to his knees to see a ledge—horrifyingly narrow—and a sliver of darkness that must have been the mouth of a cave. Tangled vines covered most of it, which explained why no one could see it from below, and Aleksi disappeared through them as Einar lowered himself to the narrow outcropping.

The cave should have been utterly dark, but a faint glow came from somewhere up ahead. The passage walls started out roughly hewn but grew smoother as they followed the sloping path. The path ended abruptly in a set of perfectly carved steps that led deeper into the cave.

Aleksi was already halfway down, and Einar caught a glimpse of Naia’s nightgown as she vanished through an opening suffused with light. He took the steps two at a time, catching up to the Lover as he approached the doorway.

They stepped through together into a perfectly round cavern with walls as smooth as glass. The source of the light was revealed to be a glowing ball of light that rested on a pedestal in the center of the room.

Every hair on Einar’s body rose as he moved closer. Power whispered over him, the kind that roared with the waves of the fiercest storm and swirled into whirlpools that could swallow half the world. But something softer slid underneath and around it—the playful eddies that nurtured the undersea creatures and the sweet currents that carried the fishing boats home.

Magic throbbed in his veins, and it was only then that he realized the globe in the center of the room pulsed to the same tempo of the heartbeat he’d heard before.

Naia stood before it, unmoving, staring intently into its ethereal glow. “Someplace where no one could find it.”

Then she reached out, and Aleksi hurried forward to intercept her hands. “Perhaps not, darling,” he murmured. “We don’t know what that is, except that it is absolutely magic .”

She whispered something in response, too quiet to hear. Einar stepped forward and laid a gentle hand on her shoulder. “What did you say?”

“I know what it is,” she repeated. “The Heart of the Island.”

Petya had always told him stories about the heart of the island, but they’d been even more fantastical than the usual tales. The kinds of stories even a child suspected were more fancy than fact. “There are myths about it,” he murmured. “That protecting this island from the final wave burned through the goddess’s body, but not her power or her heart. Petya would tell me ...”

He trailed off, his gaze finding Naia’s. In that moment, she didn’t look entirely of this world, though Einar couldn’t say why. Surely her broken nails and the tattered hem of her nightgown should have given her an air of fragility. But the light from that pulsing orb illuminated her face, showing ...

What? Einar had recognized the islanders’ belief that Naia was their goddess, returned to them, but he’d given it little thought. A Dreamer with some power over the sea might seem like a singular miracle to those on Rahvekya, but Einar had walked Dianthe’s court. He’d witnessed the Siren’s power, met others who held sway over the waves or the creatures beneath.

Naia was a god. That didn’t mean she was their goddess.

“She’s dead,” Naia whispered. “But a piece of her remains.”

Naia reached out again, as if she couldn’t help herself. Aleksi took half a step toward her, his voice tight with worry. “Naia ...”

“It will be all right, Aleksi.” She said it with serene confidence, as if she trusted in what was about to happen implicitly—and wanted them to trust her .

So Einar locked his muscles, forcing himself to stand unmoving as her fingers grew closer and closer to the shining globe. The ground seemed to tremble beneath his boots, as if the entire island hummed in anticipation.

The tip of one finger made contact. Light licked out from it, welcoming her.

For two agonizing heartbeats, nothing happened.

A hot wind whipped through the cave, carrying the scent of tropical flowers and sultry nights. It tugged at Einar’s clothing and tangled Naia’s nightgown around her legs. Her hair blew back in a sudden gust, and it wasn’t just the ball of light that was glowing anymore.

Naia glowed, too. Brilliant, incandescent, coaxing stinging tears from Einar’s eyes that he let flow down his cheeks, because he couldn’t look away from her. He wanted to fall to his knees. To beg for the blessing of her touch. To be worthy of her as the wind brought her scent to him, somehow twined with the tropical world this island must have been before the continents had shattered it and time had frozen it.

As quickly as it had come, the wind vanished. The glow coming from Naia winked out, and her knees crumpled.

Einar dove toward her, barely catching her before her head hit the cold stone floor. “Naia!”

She didn’t respond. Her body was limp in his arms, her head tipped against his shoulder. Einar’s heart froze in his chest, only resuming a staccato beat when Aleksi knelt next to them. “She’s breathing.”

“What in the name of creation is that thing?” Einar demanded, hoisting Naia closer to his body. He didn’t think cold could kill a creature of the ocean, but the chill of her skin still stirred the dangerous side of his protective nature.

“I don’t know.” A frown furrowed Aleksi’s brow as he brushed the hair back from Naia’s pale face. “This place has affected her strongly, though. She’s been having such intense dreams.”

Naia stirred, her eyelashes fluttering.

“Was I dreaming?” she mumbled.

Aleksi gave her a soft smile. “I think perhaps you were, little nymph.”

Whatever the orb was, Einar wanted Naia far away from it. He rose, with Naia cradled close to his chest. “And now we’re taking you back to your bed, which is a far safer place for dreams.”

Getting her out of the cave was easy. Getting her back up over the cliff’s edge without jarring her was more complicated. She stirred with a murmur as Einar adjusted his hold on her, tucking her close to one side. Grateful for the many lazy afternoons he’d spent cliff diving with the brazen youth of Dianthe’s court, he found finger- and toe-holds just wide enough to allow him to scale the cliff with one hand. Naia’s chilled fingers wrapped sleepily around his neck inspired him to haste, and he was grateful to pass her up into Aleksi’s waiting arms before he hauled himself up and over the edge.

Aleksi arched an elegant brow but said nothing when Einar reclaimed Naia. He didn’t care what he revealed to the Lover at this point. He was too concerned with the harsh bite of the winter wind this high on the mountain.

He held her close in his arms, her head tucked beneath his chin, and descended with as much speed as was safe in the uncertain darkness—and tried not to wonder if the wind that had whipped through the underground cavern was responsible for snuffing out the lanterns that usually guarded the path. They’d been lit even in the teeth of a storm the night he’d first tasted Naia in the temple, but tonight ...

No. Tomorrow was soon enough to worry about the implications of all of this. Tonight, she simply needed to be safe and warm.

Naia seemed content to snuggle against his chest until they reached her rooms, where she suddenly turned stubborn. “I can walk,” she insisted, pushing so weakly against his chest that Einar suspected she’d collapse to the floor if he agreed to set her feet on it.

Instead, he carried her to the connected bathing room. While Aleksi ran warm water in the basin, Einar set Naia on the edge of a pristine marble countertop and lifted one of her bare feet. The healing power of a Dreamer had ensured she took no serious harm from her frantic scramble up the cliff and through the temple. When he used a warm washcloth to wipe the dirt away, he found only the thin memory of scratches that had already healed.

Her hands were in worse shape. The cuts and bruises had faded to fine lines and faint shadows, but her nails were ragged and broken. Aleksi held her upright as Einar used a fresh cloth to tenderly clean her wrists and hands. The soft smile that curved her lips as he finished squeezed at his heart, even as the world dipped. He had the momentary, dizzying sensation that he had done this before—

It shattered when Aleksi lifted Naia into his arms and carried her to the bed. Einar followed, every step fraught on a floor that seemed to dip and sway with an uneasy rhythm. Lingering unease from the cave, perhaps, and the knowledge that the odd, pulsing power sat somewhere above them even now.

The next time it called out to Naia, she might not stop to tell one of them. He watched Aleksi tug the patterned quilt up to her chin and made a decision. “I’m going to stay here. To watch her.”

Aleksi hesitated, then nodded once and began to turn away.

He stopped when Naia wrapped her fingers around his wrist. “Don’t go.”

It was less of a command than a plea, and Aleksi exhaled sharply, as if hit by a blow. “Of course.”

They both removed their boots in silence. Naia looked small and alone in the generous bed, but it felt tiny once Einar had stretched out on one side of her, with Aleksi on the other. She snuggled down with a blissful smile, seeming oblivious to the way her hip brushing Aleksi’s thigh made the Lover’s breath hitch, or how her fingers trailing sleepily up Einar’s chest made his entire body tense.

Her hand found its goal, and she grasped Einar’s wrist and tugged his arm so it was draped over her. She did the same to Aleksi, urging one of his arms around her. Then she sighed in contentment. Einar’s fingers brushed Aleksi’s where they rested on the quilt, and he only hesitated a moment before twining their fingers together.

When her breathing finally evened out, Einar exhaled softly in relief. But he didn’t dare move, not even to find a more comfortable position for their hands. When he spoke, it was barely a whisper, terrified he’d disturb her fragile rest. “Do you have any idea what that was? A dream, you said?”

Aleksi’s gaze met his. “More like a memory, I suspect. That’s what most of her dreams here seem to be, and it makes sense. Only a long-dead priestess of the local religion could have known about that place.”

Einar let himself listen for the beat of Naia’s heart, soothed by its steady, easy rhythm. “Is that why she hasn’t been sleeping much?”

“Yes. She’s been trying to conceal it, but being here has been difficult for her.” Aleksi sighed. “This place has so much history. So many memories.”

“They think she’s their goddess,” Einar said. “Word must have spread across the entire island by now.”

“Mmm. It would seem the weight of that belief is starting to affect her.”

Because dreams became reality in their world, and could there be any power more potent than the faith of a people who had resisted the Empire’s attempts to annihilate their beliefs? “Can we help her?”

A faint smile curved Aleksi’s lips, and he dropped his free hand from the pillows above their heads to smooth the furrow between Einar’s brows. “We’ll do what we can, love.”

Einar felt his muscles relaxing, soothed by the Lover’s magic. Not the flashfire of desire this time, but a warmth that seemed to spread out from Aleksi’s touch in a gentle wave, leaving an odd sort of peace in its wake. Maybe that was love, in its purest form. “We have to finish this mission and get her off the island,” he said softly. “Is Gwynira at least close to agreement?”

“It’s hard to say,” Aleksi admitted. “She trusts us more than she trusts her own court, but that’s not saying a whole hell of a lot.” He shook his head. “She needs something from me, but I don’t yet know what it is.”

“Would it help if I came with you tomorrow?”

“Oh, I think we’ll all have to put in an appearance eventually.”

Einar would do anything to convince Gwynira to lend her support and her knowledge to the fight ahead. Dealing with the court would be tedious, at best—and infuriating, at worst—but if he could hasten their departure, he would endure.

The only sure way to protect Naia was to take her away from this island, with its too-vivid memories, and whatever magic beat an ominous rhythm in the island’s heart. He’d learned more than he could have imagined on this visit to the home he’d never known, but he could leave its shores with an easy heart if it meant protecting her.

It was one thing both the man and the monster could agree on—keeping Naia safe, no matter what.