Page 112 of Skalterra By Nightmare
“How long has it been since he’s been here?” I kept my voice low so he wouldn’t hear.
“Four years.” Iseult’s face was stony, but the facade cracked just a little bit as her mouth turned down in a frown. “Does he talk about me?”
“Oh, well—” Ferrin searched for words, but the panic in his eyes told me Iseult didn’t come up much between the two men. “He isn’t really—”
“Yes,” Fana said. “All the time.”
Tiernan and Ferrin both looked at Fana in surprise, but she looked back at Iseult.
“My grandfather talked about me to the Divine Sovereign?” Iseult frowned at Fana.
“I watched my family die.” Fana sounded too matter-of-fact for a ten-year-old child. “It was hard to sleep, so he told me about his granddaughter who also watched her family die.”
“That’s sweet,” Iseult said, though her tone implied otherwise. “He was all I had, and he left me and turned me into a bedtime story.”
“You were all he had too.” Fana shrugged. Iseult stopped in her tracks, but Fana looked to Ferrin. “I’m hungry. Is there anything to eat here?”
Ferrin found some dried meat in his pack for Fana, and we continued our march through the ghost city in silence. The same glowing flowers that had dotted the mountainside peeked through cracks in old buildings and the walkway. I counted them as we went.
Near the middle of the crater, Iseult stopped. Galahad continued to forge ahead, but she held out a hand to the rest of us.
“We’re nearing the Sanctum,” she said. “Urian, stay here and watch the Sovereign and her guards.”
“We don’t get to see the Sanctum?” Orla’s disappointment was apparent in her tone.
“Lyrians only.” Iseult’s grunted response reminded me too much of Galahad. “And the Nightmare. You don’t leave my sight.”
I gave Ferrin a panicked look, but he nodded.
“You’ll be okay. Go help Galahad.”
Urian gave his new wards a nervous look, but he stood aside to let Iseult guide me after Galahad through the maze of ruins. The spired building loomed up ahead. The towers were dark against the stars, and ivy climbed up the front face of the edifice. It looked like it could’ve been a forgotten cathedral in Europe, and I wondered if Mom had seen similar buildings on her tour. Hopefully those cathedrals had been in better shape, but there was something hauntingly beautiful about this corpse of a basilica.
Galahad hobbled up the front steps of the Sanctum and pushed hanging lichen out of the way to step through the wide doorway.
I held back a gasp. I’d expected something more typical of a cathedral. Namely, a floor.
A ravine stretched from the entrance of the Sanctum all the way to the far wall. Skal pooled in its depths, sending soft blue light up the pillars and buttresses that supported the moss-laden walls of the canyon. Above us, stars twinkled down from where a ceiling should’ve been.
“Stairs are this way.” Galahad limped around the Sanctum’s perimeter. He passed through shafts of moonlight that poured in through circular holes in the stone walls where I was sure there had once been stained glass.
Blue light lit the stairwell through crumbling spaces in the rock wall, and I caught peeks of the Skalspring through the stones as we descended.
The piles of rubble did little to detract from the beauty of the space. The light of the Skal lit the farthest recesses of the alcoves that surrounded the pool, and the moss and lichen that grew across the walls, pillars, and floor all emitted their own soft glow.
A stone statue in knight’s armor had been carved from the rock bed that stood at the head of the spring. Her palms were turned out, and Skal poured from both her hands to add to the glowing basin with a slippery hiss.
“Congrats,” Galahad growled, and it took me a moment to realize he was talking to me. “You’re the first Nightmare in over fifty years to enter the Sanctum of Tulyr.”
He limped to the pool’s edge and then stepped out onto the flat rocks that spotted the Skal like stepping stones. Iseult paced along the chamber’s edge, watching her grandfather navigate the stones until he’d reached the one nearest the statue of the woman.
“Is the Skal better over there?” I asked.
“Lyrians believe that the Skal collected nearest Lyria is more potent.” Iseult looked up at the statue of the woman.
“Is she one of the Three Magicians?”
“Yes. The Tulyrs descended from her. They were the most powerful of the Divine families. The other families, the Quills and the Firelds, both sought shelter in the mountains or on the coast, but the Tulyrs? They stayed right here at Skalterra’s birthplace.”
