Page 51

Chapter

Thirty-Eight

Liv

When my mother died, I hid for weeks and barely ate.

Rebeka was a constant nag, warning that we couldn’t slack.

Work had to be done. The world continued to move.

When I finally braved walking the streets of our small village, no one said a thing to me.

My mother had been the one to make a scene, but the echoes of her protests affected our lives long after she was gone.

Rebeka became meaner. Keepers laughed when we passed.

Some even spat at our feet. I think that’s when I first built the box in my chest, and carved names into the edge.

H e wasn’t dead. He couldn’t be dead.

I felt numb as we headed for the canyons—present but not present. It was my fault. Ollo was—no. Ollo wasn’t stupid. He wouldn’t have given his life up that easily.

Maev walked ahead, silent like a spectre gliding across the sand. She hadn’t spoken to me since the airship was destroyed.

I didn’t blame her. None of this would have happened if I had pulled that lever. I squeezed my fist, and only two fingers closed. I lifted my arm but could only get it to shoulder height before the pain struck. I was the most powerful being in the world, and I was useless.

Maev stared at the sky for what felt like an eternity, trembling, mumbling to herself, before she walked away toward the canyons. She had already lost one brother. A mother. Now she had to go home and tell her father that his second son was gone.

Perhaps what we saw was wrong, I wanted to say, but didn’t.

If I hadn’t made them go to Ouras’s temple, would we have made it across?

How many more mistakes would I make in my life to ruin others?

I was a liability. The Guards hadn’t wanted to bring me along for that reason. It was because of me we were on that burning field when he died. Now, I had an entire world of people who hated me or craved a power that wasn’t mine.

Would I ever be just Liv? He saw me that way, and now I was the thing meant to kill what remained of him.

Behind us, on the horizon, was a hazy mirage of a smouldering ruined city. South Aspis had been a large camp for the Guardians. Now it lay lifeless. Could I be capable of that kind of damage? Were any of the Ikhor before me powerful enough to do something like that?

It didn’t go unnoticed that while Maev was being torn apart inside, I thought of myself—maybe I was the perfect host for the magic.

We walked in silence for several hours until we reached the edge of the canyons. I was hot, sweat-drenched and sore when the sand gradually gave way to light-coloured rock, which became boulders, then towering cliffs.

The black smoke from the crashed ship had turned grey. It would be difficult to find in a day or two … if there was anything left to find.

Our path dipped between stone walls that rose higher than the Danuli trees, and I imagined great rivers ran between the winding pathways once upon a time.

Horizontal red and orange rock with thin veins formed the canyons.

It was beautiful, if not confining. Unless you counted the bones littering the pathways—in some places, there were so many you couldn’t see the ground.

Maev didn’t comment on them as she stepped over countless skulls shaped exactly like a human head.

Birds screeched in the distance, echoing off the walls.

The dry heat tore at my lungs and parched my already sore throat.

Maev still didn’t speak to me. She had never been quiet for that long.

My chest hurt. For Ollo. For Maev.

Every so often, she stopped to check the map, scribbling on it. It wasn’t until the light was fading from the sky that she turned to look at me, but her eyes were empty. She wasn’t seeing me at all.

We stopped for the night in a tight crevice between high rock walls, and she didn’t say a word.

The towering rock swallowed any light cast by the moon and stars as the sky turned black.

Everything became dark shadows. The glowing crystals from my earrings and bracelet gave off enough light that we could situate ourselves between two boulders.

Maev sobbed in her sleep, and I nudged myself closer to her, offering any comfort I could.

I reached a hand into my pocket, where the photo of the Guards lay tucked away. I didn’t pull it out—it was too dark to see, but I held it with the three fingers that worked on my right hand. I tried and tried to close the other two, but they wouldn’t budge.

“I’m sorry, Ollo.” I leaned my head back toward the sky.

How could he sacrifice his life for me—for the mission he was on? It made me wonder how bad things were to push the twins to do all this.

But I wouldn’t go to war. I wouldn’t kill those who didn’t know the secrets being kept from them. It was all a lie—what the Guardians thought of the Aethar, what the Aethar saw in the Guardians. The people on each side had nothing to do with the games played by those in power.

This was the Council’s doing.

Would anyone see it my way? I think that’s what Ollo was trying to explain to me about perspective. Who else had it when it came to beliefs?

Millions of stars moved across the sliver of sky between the black walls of the canyon.

The wind whistled between the cracks, blocking out any sounds of the night that would surely haunt me.

After an endless amount of time, when my mind was fading to dreaming, the sounds of the wind changed—whistling turned to humming.

I bolted upright, peering toward the edge of the crevice, and stifled a gasp. I slapped my cheek. “This isn’t a dream.”

The stars above sparkled as I had seen them thousands of nights before—no sign of the strange crystalline sky from that nightmarish place.

But there was a monster here.

A swirling darkness, almost invisible in the already black night, moved like water in a drain. It was a pillar in the dark, blocking our way out of the tight gap in the canyon rock.

It edged closer.

I jumped to my feet, fumbling with my swords, getting one into my hands. The glow from my crystals only reached a few short feet past me, but I didn’t need light to see and feel the shadow. “Stop right there,” I said in the most confident voice I could muster.

Be brave and fake it if you must . That’s what Ollo taught me.

The shadow didn’t listen. It glided toward me, swirling and whirling as it transformed into the shape of a figure. Arms. Legs. A head. It took steps now as it slunk forward, hunched, as if scared to approach.

I couldn’t keep track of the things that haunted me, but the shadow was one I couldn’t explain. “Wha—what are you?” I tightened my already painful grip on my sword, and I slid my foot outward, scraping on the rock to find flat ground.

The shadow rose higher, its height impossible for a man. Arms that shouldn’t have been there reached out. It was so close now.

I lifted my sword, only a foot away from the shadow. “Stay back.”

It glided closer, sliding past my sword, through it, unaffected by the sharp point.

I tilted my chin up as it towered above me.

A shadowed hand appeared beside my face, and a touch as cold as ice traced a line down my cheek.

I shook violently, my breath coming in short gasps as the blackness swirling inches from my face absorbed the glow from my earrings. My back was flush against the canyon rock as I blinked in the darkness, straining to see better.

A low rumbling came from the shadow as it loomed over me, pinning me against the wall. I jumped when the shadow held me by the hip like a lover, and its ice-cold touch cupped the back of my head.

“Who are you?” I hated what my subconscious wanted to believe. “Brekt?” My voice cracked with his name on my lips, and I felt like a fool. He hadn’t appeared like this before, but nothing was normal about what he was—what we both had become.

The rumbling intensified. It was a growl—a warning. The shadow stopped moving—no more spinning blackness. The cold hand on my hip tightened, freezing me, as two eyes cracked open. Glowing. Deadly. Hungry.

The creature roared in my face, and I closed my eyes to hide from it, whimpering. The hand left my body, and my eyes shot open.

The shadow swirled again. Gone was the human form. It was a churning whirlwind, blocking out the world beyond.

I waited, afraid of what it would do. But it only turned into smoke and rose toward the sky.

I remained there. Shaking and still holding my blade.

No. It can’t be him. Was something happening to him—changing him? He had been a man the last time … nearly.

“Liv?”

I spun, my feet sliding out from under me, and I fell hard on my ass, dropping my sword.

The sky was turning lighter, outlining Maev’s form sitting up and staring.

“You heard that?” I asked.

“Heard what?” She rubbed at her eyes.

“W-what woke you?” I grabbed hold of the rocks, kneeling to retrieve my sword.

“I only heard you talking. I have been awake for hours.”

I put my sword back into its casing, and it settled in place. That’s when I realized what she was saying. “You were awake? And you didn’t hear anything? Did you see anything just now?”

“No.” Maev’s voice was raw like she had been crying most of the night. “Not until I looked over and saw you standing against the rock holding your sword.”

I had been hallucinating. The shadows I continued to see—it wasn’t him. It wasn’t real —I had lost my mind.

Unless the shadow was something else …

Was the shadow monster connected to Brekt and the Aspis? Something about the swirling smoke was the same.

“Let’s get moving if we can’t sleep.” I retrieved my pack with shaking hands.

I needed to get out of here, to get away from all of this and to find those gods. Maev hadn’t seen the shadows. Did that mean?—

“Maev,” I choked. “On the deck of the airship. I wasn’t making it up, right? I saw him?”

“What are you talking about?” Maev stood, yawning.

My next words were a plea. “Did you see the Shadow Guard? What’s real—I don’t know anymore.”