Page 24 of Mantle (IMMORTAL FLAME #3)

~Ariana~

“Kindred.”

I blinked and found myself in Meforian Forest.

But not as I remembered it.

Everything around me was dead.

The peonies.

The grass was ash.

The trees were chopped down.

A single cracked skull with a twisted iron spike driven through it, sat atop a mound of ash.

“Kindred… help. Help… me.”

A harsh wind whipped through the area as I spun around.

“Ketheron?” I called out. “Where are you?”

There was no sign of him.

I caught sight of myself, and strangely I was clad in the special armor that Grandfather had made for me as my birthday gift.

What was going on?

I saw some barbed, root-like vines—ashen gray with crimson seams—coiled into a spiral cage embedded in the ground. They pulsed faintly with some rare, ancient magic I didn’t recognize.

“I’m here.”

“Where?” I cried, spinning around again, as an awful pain cut into me.

I knew instinctively—it wasn’t mine.

It was his.

“Who’s hurting you? Where are you?”

“You’re the only one… you take away the cold.”

“Tell me where you are!”

“He won’t… let me.”

“He? One of the True Celestials?”

“No.”

“Then, who? Who in the hell could contain you?”

“I can’t… he won’t let me say. I’m here, Ariana. I’m still here.”

My eyes snapped open and I panted, finding Nyx right beside me in my bed shaking me gently, his brows knitted with concern.

I pushed up into a sitting position. “What’s… what—” I took in the bed. No. “Kai. Vorzyr. Where are they? Why aren’t they here with us? What’s happened?”

He shuffled closer, and I saw he was wearing one of Vorzyr’s white henleys, the thing rather large on him.

“Everything is well, they are well,” he told me softly, as he took my hand and pressed a soft kiss to my knuckles.

“Vorzyr got up at the crack of dawn to train with Jaxon, like he’s been doing for the last few days.

And Kai’s schedule here is so tight that he’s been pulling all-nighters working with Arcanum Order.

We’re all going to meet for breakfast in the Cafeteria before classes in a couple of hours. ”

Oh. It took me a moment to focus enough through the panic that the dream had wrought. “Yeah… I knew that… I remember.” I shook my head in dismay at myself. “Sorry.”

“You were screaming, Ariana,” he told me gently, gazing into my eyes, those ice-blue pools of his searching worriedly.

I swallowed hard. “I was?”

He looked around, and even though nobody was there, or anywhere near, he lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, “Yeah. About Ketheron.”

Son of a bitch.

“What happened?” he pushed.

“He… he was there.” I winced. “Crying out for help. Pleading for it, actually.” I pressed my hand to my chest. “I felt his pain, Nyx. It wasn’t just a dream… it was different. More.”

“It could very well be. He could be trying to reach you. And you ingested his blood, which would explain how a link like this could be formed.” He shifted so that he was sitting cross-legged in front of me.

I adjusted my black tank that was riding up a bit, then brushed down my plaid pajama pants, then I did the same, crossing my legs opposite him and settling in.

He took my hands and held them between us.

“Tell me everything you remember from the dream, every little detail that you can recall, even things that seem small. Because you are Celestial, I can’t engage you in dreamwalking.

Your power is too intense for me to enter your mind like that.

I mean, maybe if you ever wanted to enter a dreamwalking state created by me, it could be possible, but not the reverse…

not me entering your mind. What I can do, though, is interpret for you. ”

I nodded, then recalled what I’d seen. “Everything was dead… I was in Meforian Forest… there was a cracked skull with a twisted spike through it…”

“A spike through a skull is a twisted grave marker. It could be referencing a burial site, a cursed one.”

“Just after he called out to me, a harsh wind whipped around, cold and unsettling.”

“Wind is tied to whispers, secrets, mental invasion. He’s being silenced and this is his way of reaching out to you.”

I cursed, then went on, “There were barbed vines formed into a cage. That one seems obvious… it was him telling me he’s trapped.”

“Not just trapped, but with the way you described it, possibly by ancient magics. Dangerous, twisted magic.”

I finished telling him the rest, and everything that Ketheron and I had said to each other. “Oh, and I was also wearing the armor that Grandfather made for me.”

His eyes locked with mine.

“What?” I asked, at the grave look in his eyes.

“To be clad in armor… it’s a signal that you need to act now, and that you have the power to intervene. Possibly that you’re the only one who can.”

I pulled my hands from his and shoved them through my hair, trying to reconcile it all.

“I don’t like this… him coming at you in this way… the invasiveness of it.”

“He needs help, Nyx. He didn’t really have much of a choice.”

He stilled.

“Damn. Of course,” he uttered. “He knows me, right? He remembered me, even when I still can barely remember him. But with that on his end, he’d know what I’m capable of.

He might have been counting on me being able to use my abilities and dreamwalking knowledge to interpret the symbolism he placed in that dream. ”

“That makes so much sense. By doing that, we’ve already discovered that he hasn’t left the mortal plane like we were led to believe.

Somebody must have planted and falsified that marker that had the best trackers in the world believing that.

We also know he’s trapped and that some ancient, twisted magic is being used to hold him.

He’s being used by someone or something that’s also trying to keep him quiet and keep that knowledge from us and everyone else.

” I grimaced. “And he’s being hurt, Nyx. ”

“You told us that he said he used his blood to heal you instead of his Celestial Light because he thought of it first as he’s part vampire.

But maybe he really did it purposely, as a failsafe, because he was concerned that this being or group would try to control him again once he broke free onto the mortal plane. ”

“It could very well be.” I rolled off the bed and strode to my desk in the corner.

“What are you doing?” Nyx asked. “Halo, despite this cry for help, and me being with you on Ketheron having humanity and not just being a monster made to destroy, he still was created to kill you. Kai was right that we can’t just downplay that because you and me are empathetic to Ketheron.”

“We’re not downplaying it. If we can find him and help him, we also nullify the threat aspect.”

“I mean… possibly. But things aren’t in place, the Inhibitor spell isn’t ready yet, none of that, so we can’t just track him down and have you in his presence while we don’t have a defense against him.”

“It will take time to track him. Burial grounds? There must be hundreds across the mortal realm.”

“Thousands. But combined with the dream pointing to ancient, twisted magics being used, we can narrow it down.”

“To do that, we need help. From somebody who has unmatched Celestial knowledge. With his Fall, Grandfather was cut off from the full extent of it, a lot of what he did know even taken from him. And my dad won’t be on board for this, so despite him being imbued with Draco’s knowledge that’s a no-go for now. He won’t sanction this.”

“He won’t stop seeing him as anything but a threat to his baby girl.”

“Exactly, cutie pie.” I opened my desk drawer and rummaged around, telling him over my shoulder, “Also, he only has Draco’s knowledge, so there’s still a disconnect there to the higher echelons of the Celestial Plane and their knowledge, as Draco was their instrument, not their equal.”

“Cassius, then.”

“Yes,” I confirmed, holding up what I’d grabbed from the drawer.

The Echo Coin.

A small, mystical disk etched with Celestial script, a shimmer of stardust swirling at its center.

He frowned. “I thought you were avoiding him until you figured out what the hell he was thinking by making you learn that spell, which destroyed those Threniths so brutally?”

“I did figure it out. That’s the problem.”

He arched an eyebrow.

“Last night,” I revealed. “I was studying the book he gave me and I made a connection to another section that focused on Celestial Law and Limitations.”

Before he pressed it, when it was Cassius who I needed to press it with, I rubbed my fingers over the Echo Coin and uttered, “ Vocare.”

I’d intended for us to head outside, at the edge of the ward around the Maven Academy grounds, figuring we had a few minutes—at least—before Cassius showed up, especially with him still embroiled in that heavy and highly-complicated research with Mom and Dad regarding finding a way to break the mortal plane’s link to the Celestial Plane.

But then his familiar white light erupted, the ward Kai had sweetly employed around my dorm room shuddered, and Cassius blew right on in.

“Jeez,” Nyx choked.

At least Cassius wasn’t clad in his highly conspicuous Celestial battle garb this time.

Although, in those gold leather pants paired with a white linen shirt that barely stretched across all that powerhouse muscle, he still did draw attention—but at least for completely different reasons. Fortunately, he was just in my dorm room right now and not roaming the Academy halls.

Cassius frowned as he took in the sight of me in my pajamas, and likely the fact that I’d summoned him into my dorm room, rather than to an appropriate training location.

His gaze darted to Nyx who was just wearing Vorzyr’s shirt and nothing else.

“What is the meaning of this?” he asked, with more of a confused edge than any sort of reprimand. “I assumed when you called that you had now completed all the Tier Two Practicalities, and you were ready to tackle the Tier One elements together.”