Page 195 of Skalterra By Nightmare
The building we’d come out of was made entirely of wood with few windows and a steeply-sloped, multi-tiered roof. It stood at the top of a hill nestled against a cliff face. Ahead of us, the landscape flattened in the distance, before giving way to a bay of massive icebergs. Either side of the bay was dotted in firelight ranging in hues of red, greens, and golds.
A storm raged at the bay’s center. Heavy clouds sat low over the water, and blue lightning forked at its heart, flashing against the icy faces of the surrounding icebergs.
“What is that?” I asked.
“The Bay of Teeth, where your grandmother’s prison used to be,” Ciarán said. “But her prison has been broken, and now she’s doing what she can to hold both Ferrin’s and the Barony’s armies from entering Keldori.”
I shook my head.
“That storm is…Gams?” I remembered the flashes of blue lightning that had brought the cavern caving inwards as we’d made our escape. “But then how do we get her out?”
“We don’t.” Ciarán’s arm tightened around my shoulder, but I pushed him off.
“I’m not leaving my grandmother in the middle of a storm!” I snarled. “She’s my grandma! She’s— she’s—”
Wonderful. Fiery. Compassionate.
Everything I wasn’t.
My legs shook beneath me, and I couldn’t feel my toes in the cold, but when Ciarán took a step towards me, I took a step back.
“We aren’t leaving her in a storm,” he promised, but his furrowed brow and strained frown didn’t do much to put me at ease. “The original Divine Sovereigns froze her in the Rift four hundred years ago, and Sorcha says we can do it again.”
My heart plummeted, and I turned to look back at the distant storm. My knees buckled, and I let Ciarán catch me this time.
“We have to re-imprison her?” I said.
“We have to try,” Ciarán conceded. “We don’t have a Tulyr, but we have you.”
“You want me to do it?”
Freeing Gams had put both Skalterra and Keldori at risk, but there was something cruel about refreezing my grandma and condemning her to a life in a town full of phantom people.
“I’m sorry, Blue,” Ciarán said.
My grandmother had opened her home and her arms to me for the summer. She had cared for me. She had given me a job. She had made sure I had friends.
And now she stood at the vortex of a storm, holding off two armies, not necessarily because of me, but I’d played a role in bringing Fana and Orla north. I’d been Ferrin’s missing puzzle piece in finding Keel Watch Harbor. I’d broken the glacier in an effort to save my friends.
And now I was the one who would have to lock her away again.
“How much Skal does she have?” I asked. “She can’t last forever in there.”
“I’d give her three months, give or take,” Sorcha sniffed behind us. I twisted around to watch her shuffle down the snow-covered path. “Lucky for us, she’s a better Magician than she is a backgammon player, but you need to go back upstairs and get better because you’re headed in there to fix this before it’s too late.”
She pointed a wrinkled hand at the storm in the distance.
“Leave her alone, Sorcha,” Ciarán sighed.
“‘Heal her ribs, Sorcha’. ‘Fix her ulcer, Sorcha’. But then it’s ‘leave her alone’ as soon as you don’t need me,” Sorcha snorted. “I’m only out here to let the Lady Saergrim know there’s someone here to see her.”
“Who?” I demanded.
Sorcha already had her back to me as she retreated back into the building.
“No, don’t worry. I’m leaving!”
Ciarán helped me after her, and while I had no idea who might be waiting for me inside, my heart hammered painfully in my chest.
