Page 39 of Heart's Escape

It cracks open in the middle. A line that appears to be made of moonlight swells in the center of the black door, then yawns open slowly as the doors swing inward, crunching across something that might be dead grass or might be thin tendrils of ice. There’s another click when the door finally opens, a hollow, empty sound like resignation.

Alindra’s breath makes a little gasping noise, and for a heartbeat I want to pull the doors closed and walk away from this place forever, because what’s beyond these doors is so bizarre and unexpected that it almost hurts my mind.

The room on the other side of the doors is a wide circle, almost like a bird cage. The roof is made of bars of twisted metal, and it appears to be open to the sky. Silver pipes crisscross the walls, jutting toward the dias in the middle at odd angles.

And the floor is covered with grass. I step forward, nudging my toes into the thick growth, expecting to find soil and moss but instead finding stone. The grass bobs and sways beneath cold moonlight seeping through the bars above. It reminds me of the flanks of an animal, rising and falling with each breath.

“Phaedron,” Alindra whispers.

I look up and find she’s crossed the threshold and entered the room. The grass is almost up to her waist. Tall seed heads bend all around her, brushing her cloak and Skyfire’s sheath. She turns from the tall dias in the center back to me. Moonlight catches on the tears tracing silver paths down her cheeks.

“Phae?” she whispers.

I walk toward her slowly, expecting the stone underfoot to give way at any moment, to become soft earth and to perhaps sway in rhythm with the grass. But it remains stone, impossibly hard, polished stone beneath grass that’s taller and thicker than anything that’s ever grown in the Lands Below.

Alindra is staring at the raised dais in the center of the room, the nexus of all the silver pipes, a tight cocoon of dark bars and gleaming metal and twisting vines. Something deep inside of me recoils, and I find my gaze skittering across the grass, resting anywhere but there. The back of my mouth tastes bitter, and my mind screams not to look. Whatever’s in there, I’m suddenly certain I don’t want to see it.

But I can’t look away. Alindra stands beside me, tears streaming down her face. Grass whispers all around us, moving to the rhythm of wind that only it can feel. The moon lolls in the sky far above us, casting her indifferent silver across the strange room, illuminating each sharp curve of the silver pipes, each twist in the cold, dark metal cage above us. And deep in the center of the pipes, bound in black chains, something shines back.

Looking at it makes my head hurt, like a spike of ice is lodged between my eyes. It gleams like a glowsoft orb, shining with a delicate white light that makes me think of very young animals. The chains wrapping its body are black, the same sort of opaque metal that made the door, but they rise and fall with the rhythm of its breath. The same rhythm that makes the grass bend and wave.

My gaze catches on long, delicate legs, hooves and also horns, and I think of something very young, but the next breath makes me think of stories of great stags in the Worlds Above, massive bucks in their prime who led heroes on a merry chase and always lived to see another day, and then the next breath is almost a sigh, leaving me with nothing but a pile of bones. I blink, then shake my head.

The creature makes a sound. It’s a low, soft moan, an animal noise, although I’m not certain if I’m hearing it so much as feeling it tug on the inside of my ribcage. There’s motion as well, the scrape of hooves against metal, chains digging into flesh.

And then it opens its eyes.

I stare into two unblinking, almond-shaped pools deep in the heart of the forest, wellsprings both great and terrible, something that existed far before the time of elves and will last far after we are nothing but stories and myths. A creature of wild magic, pain, and rage that has no interest in being understood.

The eyes close. I step back, and the world swirls around me. For a heartbeat, I’m almost surprised to find myself here, in a room with stone beneath my feet and stone at my back. For a moment, I was somewhere else, deep within a forest I suddenly know I can never visit again, not even in my dreams.

“Phaedron,” Alindra whispers.

She turns to me, moonlight dancing in the tears caught on her lashes and the tears tracing a path down her jaw.

“They’ve trapped an old god,” she breathes.

Chapter21

Alindra

ANCIENT MAGIC

The magic in this room is so old and powerful it feels like velvet on the back of my hands, or water lapping against the soft skin at the base of my throat. Magic pours from the silver pipes on the wall, leaking through gleaming metal to swirl around me, screaming to be used. To be turned into something.

And that sickening burned scent trails the magic, leaving a welt like a stinging nettle. I recognize it now, because I held my hand to the dark metal door that locked this room. Whatever that door is made of, it’s something dead, something that blocks magic like a cold stone dam ends the chattering life of a streambed.

It’s all over this room, that dark material that stops magic. It’s woven into the walls and circled around the silver pipes. Great, heavy bolts of it have been sunk deep into the stones of the floor to anchor the chains that rise through the grass. The grass grows and grows, born ever anew into the world, and I couldn’t say how I know that’s true, but I know it as well as I know what it is like to be a prisoner, to feel the sky above you shrink smaller and smaller until it’s bound on all sides by stone walls. To know what it’s like to feel grass beneath your skin, to run under the wide, wild sky, and then to lose that feeling, to feel only metal instead. To have the entire world reduced to a window.

Phaedron’s mouth opens, almost like he’s going to speak, but instead he stands in silence with his lips parted, his back straight and somehow naked without his sword between his shoulder blades, staring at the old god chained in the Towers of the Silver City.

An old god. It has to be; nothing else would have this much magic. But it can’t possibly be, because all the old gods are dead. Dead, or fled across the world, far from the ancient warriors who sought to end their reigns.

I thought the Towers’ magical reservoir would be something like the weapons Grathgore made us construct, something made of silver that had been filled by captive magicians wearing collars. But the truth lies in chains before me, its flank rising and falling beneath oily loops of dark chain, its breath inaudible but still powerful enough to make the grass bend and sway across the room.

This creature is the source of the Towers’ magic. The truth of it pulses inside my bones and pulls me forward, pain and power in equal measure. There was a flicker of interest when the old god turned toward me, when the dark pools of its eyes traced the contour of my body.

And that infinitesimal flicker of hope just died. The old god realized I was just another magician, just another vulture come to feast off its still-living bones. And it closed its eyes.

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