Page 53 of Song of Night

My heart beats so fast in my chest it feels like it’s going to bruise itself. Zara’s vision. The stairway. The goddess.

With trembling hands, I hold my light aloft and descend the smooth black steps. They are wide, spanning about a dozen feet on each side of me, and deep, as if made for the feet of giants. They are not, however, very long. Eleven steps, and then I reach the bottom.

A massive stone temple stretches before me. It is made of obsidian, too, floor, pillars, and ceiling. As I step forward into it, torches along the walls burst to life, torches set in glass holders shaped like crescent moons. It is not natural flame that lights them but magic, flickering violet orbs of it. I can taste the magic on my tongue, ancient and reminiscent of stars.

I walk the length of the temple, and at the end stands a simple throne made of stone, with straight, clean lines and a back that forms a triangle at the top. There are no carvings, no adornments.

It is also empty.

I turn in a circle, lifting my light high, sending more magic into it to brighten the room, to make sure I am not somehow missing the obvious.

But there is nothing to be seen. There is no one here.

The goddess Zara saw in her vision is gone.

Chapter Forty

ZARA

I can tell when we reach the edge of the Waste by the change in the air. The tunnels smell of earth and bone, but they also smell of old magic, remnants of the blast two centuries ago that created this place.

I’d been using the location of the goddess to guide me here, moving away from her instead of toward her. Keeping a ball of magic palmed in my hand, seeing the layout of Night in my head, and putting distance between me and that bright light that lies at its source.

“Are we close now?” Vyrin asks, his tone a mixture of suspicion and eagerness.

I know he must sense the old magic, same as me. “Yes—can’t you feel it?”

He nods, eyes bright.

Behind me, Kieran remains silent, and I don’t dare look back at the thing of shadows and teeth. I’d been terrified from the moment I began to move away from the goddess that it would be able to sense my deception, or somehow know we were going in the wrong direction. But it must not be able to sense her, or else they wouldn’t need me. I’d be locked in a cell, or dead.

So far, my plan is working. But the hardest part lies ahead. The part that will likely get me killed.

I brighten the flare of my magic slightly when we reach an intersection of the tunnels, making a show of using it to look down each. We’re slightly north of where we entered Night with Jaylen just hours before, and as I’d suspected, this area is just as criss-crossed with a multitude of tunnels as the place we’d crossed. I take several turns until I find one of the wider tunnels, and I turn down it.

“Almost there!” I call, loud enough so that my voice echoes down the tunnel.

We continue walking for several minutes, though it seems an eternity. My heart beats so loudly I’m sure the others can hear it, and my throat is tight and dry. I slowly bleed more magic into the ball of light at my fingertips, brightening it gradually.

When the tunnels begin to shake, I can’t tell for a moment which direction it’s coming from.

“What is that?” Vyrin asks, eyes flaring wide.

I spin, looking both ahead of us and behind. I’m so distracted by whatever is coming that when I stumble into the next intersection, it takes me a moment to realize the tunnel to my right isn’t empty.

Isn’t empty in the least.

The great wyrm stares at me with milky white eyes, eyes narrowed in a look of patient cunning. It fills the entire circumference of the tunnel, which is a dozen feet high. The rest of its body is white, like its eyes. It is strangely beautiful, like one of the dragons of House Animus, but with a long, serpentine body and no wings. Its front claws are huge, the length of two swords each, and curved in an arc almost like a scythe.

I’m clearly not the only one who set a trap today.

The wyrm opens its huge jaws, revealing a row of deadly dagger-like teeth, and then it lunges.

I dive forward across the intersection and it misses me by a hair, the side of its face knocking into my feet and sending me crashing into the tunnel wall. My vision blurs a moment, and I hear yells of alarm from Vyrin and Kieran. I’ve landed upside down, so for a moment my perspective is flipped. As I scramble to right myself, the wyrm retracts its head, shaking in fury.

That’s when the second wyrm, the one making the tunnel tremble, bursts through the ground near my feet. I fall backwards as it lunges up and over, past the head of the first one, and swallows Vyrin whole.

A mighty roar fills the tunnel as Kieran shifts into dragon form and launches himself at both wyrms. I don’t wait to see who wins. I get to my feet, and I run in the opposite direction as fast as I can. The ball of magic in my hand lights the way, and I call on more magic to wrap shadows around me and help me run faster. I can only pray I don’t attract more monsters before I get out from under the Waste. Now that Vyrin is gone, no longer buzzing with all that magic like a dinner bell, I’m going to stand out all the more.

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