Page 69 of Ashes of Gold
“Hold this,” she says, handing me the orb.
I take it, watching carefully as she fumbles through her keys.She passes the same ones several times, her hands jittery. I swallow. What am I walking into?
She stops on the right key and takes a deep breath before putting it in the first of several keyholes. “When she is finished… you can just bang on the door.”
“You’re not coming in with me?” I tap my watch, but it’s barely distinguishable in the darkness.
“No.” She says something else under her breath, but I can’t make it out. The next several moments are her sticking keys in all sorts of locks. She turns a dial on one, then twists a lever on another. She shoves odd-shaped keys into a variety of lock holes, and once each clicks, she pulls hard on the door handle.
“Help me with this, will you?” I pull back with her, and the lead door creaks as it opens, revealing another door behind it. This one wooden. My fingers graze the door and heat tingles my fingers. Someone groans behind it.
“She knows we’re here. Are you ready?”
I nod.
“Good, because my mother hates waiting.” She pushes open the door and shoves me hard into the chilled darkness. I tumble forward inside.
“Your mother?” I turn, but the door slams shut and with it light disappears. I hug around myself and I feel whispers of my magic. It hums in my skin. The walls aren’t made of lead in here. That’s why they keep two layers of doors and so many locks between the Seer and them, I guess. Magic tickles my insides, moving through me, unsettled and restless. But I don’t move. Something pins me in place. I don’t know if it’s some sort of dark magic… or fear.
“Come closer,” a voice drips in the darkness. It echoes as if it’s coming from the walls themselves.
I peer around but only see black. “Who’s there? Sh-show yourself,” I say, conjuring a ball of fire.
Her words crawl all over me, resounding in my head. “I can smell the fear on you like musk. Come closer.”
I don’t know if it’s the lull in her voice, the ominous way it booms over me, or some type of magic luring me, but when I tell my feet to stay still, they betray me and take a step. “Where are you? Show your face at least.”
Blue flames erupt up ahead, blossoming upward, splitting the darkness. The heat draws me closer. “I still can’t see you.”
“Because you’re not truly looking.”
Zora’s advice slinks through my memory, and I close my eyes.
“Closeeerrr,” she breathes, and I realize it’s coming from above me. I step closer to the flames to better see the rocky walls glowing an eerie green. I scan the ceiling. Drizzles of stringy white hair are dangling above the fire and I follow them to a face, sharp and sunken, skin hanging off the bone. The woman lies on a bed of stone hovering magically above the flame.
She sniffs the air. “There is a cost to my company. Make a request and pay me. Or I feed you to the flames.” She cackles and her laugh ricochets. Then she folds over the edge, peering at me again. “A child?” His brows twist. “Come closer so I can see you.”
“I—”
She curls a finger at me and the square of floor beneath my feet buckles, detaching from the ground and rising in the air. Up it climbs with me on top until I’m above the flames on her level. Theplatform beneath me halts. Blue flames swarm beneath us, licking the bottom of her stone bed, its edges so jagged, she couldn’t get off there if she wanted to without grave injury to herself.
Our eyes meet, and for a moment she looks as shocked as I am. She stares at my arms.
“Jelani?”
She knows my name. I scoot away from her as much as I can on my island of stone. How does she know my name?
She pulls herself up to a sitting position. Stringy hair is a curtain around her face and a nest in her lap. I squint in the darkness and make out thin lips, a nose that is the same as Taavi’s, pointy. Her watery eyes are swallowed by a million creases.
“Y-you were Totsi’s mother,” I say, the words spilling out before I can hold them in.
She convulses, a wail ripping from her throat in a cry of pain as a single tear runs down her cheek. “Do not speak her name,” she says, her fingernails digging into the stone. She shudders in pain and flicks away the tear.
It hurts her?
Crying… feeling… remembering hurts her?
What an awful way to live. What sort of cursed existence is this? Empathy wells up in me, but I don’t know this woman. Perhaps she’s more sinister than she’s letting on? Why else would Taavi keep her locked away here like this? Pity mixes with my fear; I sit to be eye level with her.
