Page 99 of Beyond the Winter Kingdom
“There’s something you should know before we get there.” My voice carried low in the narrowing space. “The Fold—it isn’t just a doorway, and it’s more than a converging of the ley lines. It sits directly on a ley line. A big one. one of the few stable crossings between worlds.”
Sadie tilted her head, flicking ichor from her axe with a sharp twist. “And?”
“And the ley line doesn’t open for free,” I said. “To step through, you have to give it something it can feed on. Something that matters to you.”
Her brows drew together. “Feed on?”
“It’s alive,” I said, my tone flat. “In its own way, of course. Like everything else in the twin hells.” My hand brushed against the canyon wall as we walked, feeling the subtle pulse beneath the stone. “The ley line takes a piece of you in exchange for passage.”
Sadie’s mouth twisted into a humorless smile. “When you say a piece of you ...?”
I didn’t smile back. “It’s not always the same. And what it asks of you may be different from what it asks of me.”
The canyon bent sharply, and the space ahead widened. The walls drew back, revealing a jagged gap in the stone—a black seam cutting deep into the earth. Even from here, it seemed to breathe, the shadows shifting in rhythm like the slow inhale and exhale of some buried god. The air spilling from it was cooler still, with an edge of damp that smelled faintly of rain on stone.
We both slowed.
“What kind of stuff does it ask for?” she asked quietly.
“Blood. Secrets. Sacrifice,” I said. “Sometimes memories. Sometimes worse. The severity depends on the mood of the ley lines.”
She blinked several times, processing. “You’re shitting me.”
“I wish I was.”
“Do Meera and Damon know about this? I mean, I feel like this is really important information that you’ve kept to yourself until now.”
I trailed my fingertips along the stone as we moved closer. The wall was cold now, and beneath my palm I felt it: a faint tremor, as though the stone was listening.
We were nearly there.
“It wasn’t worth mentioning yet. It was only important that we made it here. And yes, Damon is aware of what will happen. Corvo made sure to tell him. Whether or not he told Meera, I don’t know.” I hoped it wouldn’t matter. I hoped that whatever Sadie and I could give would be generous enough.
“Right. So your way of thinking was this was a ‘future us’ problem?”
“Correct. And now it’s not.”
The path pinched tight until the canyon walls pressed in like closing jaws, swallowing what little light remained. Every step forward dimmed the world until we passed under a natural arch of stone and into a darkness so deep it felt older than time.
Then, without warning, the space opened around us.
We had stepped into a cavern so vast the ceiling was lost in shadow, the walls stretching away into black. The air here was cool—unnaturally so—pressing against my skin like damp fingers. It carried the faint scent of wet stone and something metallic, sharp enough to sting the back of my throat.
A low hum threaded through the silence. At first it was so faint I thought it was just the ringing in my ears from theearlier battle, but the farther we walked, the stronger it became; vibrating in my teeth, my ribs, the marrow of my bones.
Sadie slowed until she was nearly matching my pace. “Feels like it’s breathing,” she muttered. Her voice carried farther than it should have, bouncing off unseen walls, coming back smaller and more distorted.
She wasn’t wrong. The hum wasn’t steady. It rose and fell, a rhythm that wasn’t quite random. Inhale. Exhale.
The hairs along my arms lifted.
A light shimmered ahead, faint but steady, not the warm flicker of fire or the clear gold of sunlight. This light was soft and cold, shifting in strange ways as we drew closer. It pooled at the heart of the cavern, illuminating a pedestal of smooth black stone that rose straight from the ground as if it had grown there.
Atop the pedestal sat an obsidian bowl filled with liquid the color of molten silver. The surface rippled, though no breeze touched it.
The hum deepened, the sound curling into something almost like words—low, resonant, and indiscernible in direction.
“The cursed king returns, once broken, now whole. Ask what you desire, for the ley knows your soul.”
