Page 64 of From the Myths of Kings

They limped down the tunnel together, ducking under sharp stalactites and avoiding puddles of silty water. The pads of their damp bare feet slapped against the rock. Every curve in the pathway was surreal. When he first saw the dream the morning they left for the Isles, Rook had watched from afar as the mysterious torchbearer had wound his way through the tunnel. Now, Rook followed the same path as the male in the dream, reality and memory colliding eerily as the passageway unfurled in the shadows.

“Titans.” Saoirse suddenly stopped in her tracks. “What is that?”

Rook followed her gaze, eyes landing on the cell at the end of the murky tunnel. A sharp feeling of déjà vu throbbed in his mind. The dark cell appeared just as it had in his dream: cloaked in shadow and rusted so severely that reddish powder coated every inch of the iron bars. There was no sign of the occupant, though perhaps her bones remained hidden in the darkness.

They crept closer to the prison cell, leaving a trail of wet footprints in their wake.

“Why would a lone cell be all the way down here?” Saoirse mused. “Navigating these tunnels is a veritable labyrinth on its own. Anyone imprisoned here would never be able to find their way out. The isolation would drive even the soundest mind to madness.”

Please let me out.

The brokenness of the woman’s phantom voice echoed through Rook’s mind. Now, he understood why her voice had been saturated with such raw desperation. Saoirse was right. The cell was purposefully separated from the rest of the prison block, a psychological cage as well as a physical one. It was designed to enact a punishment of the highest order. One could easily go mad down here with nothing but the eternal dripping of water, watching year after year as rock formations tediously grew up from the floors. Rook wondered what crime the woman committed to earn such an abhorrent fate. Or, had she been an innocent victim of a monarch’s paranoia just like they were? But he’d never be able to ask her now. No movement or sign of life indicated another soul was down here with them.

They stopped before the slats of metal and peered in. Just like the dream, a pool of shadow swallowed up the barred crevice and obscured whatever lay hidden inside.

“What an awful place to be imprisoned,” Saoirse whispered. “It must be mind-numbingly lonely.”

“It is,” a voice rasped. Rook jumped at the sound, involuntarily leaping back from the cell. He threw a protective arm in front of Saoirse.

“Hel’s teeth,” she hissed, wrapping trembling fingers around the offered protection of his forearm.

Rook searched the shadows for the piercing eyes that haunted his dreams, but he saw nothing save for a barely discernible form huddled in the corner of the cell.

“There’s two of you this time,” the voice snaked out of the darkness. “Come to leer, have you?” Beside him, Saoirse went utterly still.

“Who are you?” Rook asked, daring to step back up to the rust-coated bars. “Why have I seen you in my dreams?” Saoirse remained rooted behind him, an odd expression on her face.

Bright eyes snapped open in the darkness. Silver-blue irises as luminous as a moon-gilded lake stared back at him. “You’ve seen me in your dreams? It has started, then. The prophecy. The Old magic is awakening as it was foretold.”

Prophecy? She was speaking nonsense.

The female prisoner crept out of the darkness and sidled up to the bars. She was startlingly emaciated, with hollow cheekbones and a skeletal frame only barely concealed under a paper-thin dress hanging off her. Streaks of silver shot through her dark brown hair. Her eyes were enlarged, reminding Rook of the salamanders accustomed to living in the darkness of caves.

Saoirse finally broke out of her trancelike state and came to stand before the cell, wrapping her hands around the iron bars. Her face was twisted into something like anguish and confusion.

Rook turned back toward the woman, taking in more details of her face as she pressed closer to the light. Silver scales crept along her cheekbones. Recognition slammed into him as all of her features came into focus. He’d seen that face before.

Eight years ago. Outside of that Titans-damned carriage.

Saoirse whispered, “Mother?”

The woman’s eyes flicked to Saoirse as if noticing her for the first time. The light in her gaze faltered as she took her in. “Saoirse?”

28

SAOIRSE

Saoirse’s mind was on the brink of collapse.

Recognition warred with denial, crashing together like vigorous waves threatening to pull her under. No. It cannot be.

Saoirse felt her legs give out, the bite of stone against her bare knees skinning her soft flesh. She stared at the hollow-eyed woman behind the bars, not fully comprehending what?who?she was looking at. Behind her, she could feel Rook’s hands settle on her shoulders. But she barely felt his comforting touch. Her mind refused to see the skeletal figure as her mother, and yet her heart lurched toward the woman.

How is this possible?

Though her body was grown now, Saoirse felt much smaller as she stared into the shadowy cell, at the woman who should have been long dead. Suddenly, she was the same ten-year-old-girl that had attended her mother’s funeral on a cloud-veiled day. Memories slapped her in the face as she stared at her mother. She could still taste the briny wind of the morning the day she’d sent her mother’s coffin into the sea. She could still recall the sobs that had torn from her father’s throat as a torch was dropped into the thrashing ocean waves, the bright blue eternal flames clinging to the coffin as it burned the wood. The sapphire blue flames glimmered through the waves like a dropped gemstone, vanishing into the darkness.

She hadn’t seen her mother’s body, of course. They’d sent an empty coffin into the sea as a symbolic gesture. They’d been told Eleyera’s body had been burned beyond recognition after the carriage was attacked by Ballar’s assassins. They’d set the carriage ablaze once their targets’ lives had been taken, leaving nothing behind save for ash and scorched earth. Terradrin officials had claimed no remains could be retrieved. The former rulers of Aurandel and Elorshin had a permanent resting place on Terradrin soil.

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