“I’ll leave if we must, but I can’t leave the city unprotected.” Dusk spoke back determinedly, still holding his wrist to his nose to stop the bleeding, slowing now. “You heard Talia. Treasure-hunters are just salivating to get in here and loot this whole place, not to mention King Markus. Can you even imagine what just the pillars of the Sun Temple would fetch on the black market, Adrian?”
“A fortune way bigger than I have, that’s for sure.” Adrian responded darkly.
Layla could imagine it. She had seen amazing formations of gemstones and crystal grown by Crystal Dragons in other places, most notably beneath the Red Letter Hotel Paris, but this city was truly astonishing. She suddenly felt Dusk’s fierce desire to protect it, and like him, she knew she couldn’t let such a place get looted and torn apart by grave-robbers. “Can you speak to them, Dusk? Can you use your vibrations to talk to your dead and get them to quiet?”
“I’ll try.” He spoke grimly, lowering his wrist from his now-stopped bloody nose and facing the causeway. Layla could feel another wave of furious energy gathering, far down in the city. As if it was using the Highway as a direct channel to get to them, that energy built from all around, beginning to rush up the vast crystal floe once more.
As it did, Dusk stepped out in front of Layla, Adrian, and Yousry. Holding up his hands like he was about to call lighting down from the mountains, he roared at the top of his voice, shuddering it out in massive waves of thunder through the temples like the voice of God.
“Kithlenii hile Aegypti Chryssali, abra houthet hai ne karnak ounir!I am Dusk Arlohaim, First of the Crystal Dragons of Egypt, and I am your kin! I am no threat to you, and only wish to understand the peace you seek! Calm yourselves, spirits of the wrathful dead! Calm yourselves, and tell me what you want!!”
Roaring up the slope, that enormous energy didn’t slow or falter, only plowed on, thundering and screaming and roaring them into submission. It didn’t hear Dusk. It didn’t care. They were the spirits of the angry dead so long forgotten that nobody and nothing could calm them now. As Dusk slammed up his crystal sphere around their party a third time, fracturing it through with hard diamond and ruby now, Layla felt that final shockwave shudder her very bones as she and Adrian gripped Dusk’s shoulders, pouring their strength into him. But even so, the tremendous power of thousands of pissed-off dead Crystal Dragons hammered Dusk straight to his knees.
He screamed, a terrible sound like his soul was being shredded.
And in that scream was one word. “Father!!!”
The roiling wave paused. It held still, listening. In that moment, Dusk’s crystal shield shattered as he collapsed to his hands and knees, sobbing. Wracked with sobs, heaving with them, pained and awful, he screamed, and in that scream, Layla could hear the torture of a child.
A child who had lost everything.
The thunder paused; it listened. It heard Dusk shatter into screams and sobs, roaring out his wrath and misery with the furious overtones and sub-bass notes of his Dragon. Roaring his pain deep into the Crystal Highway and into the temples all around them now, Dusk’s utter agony rang the city like bells. It was a terrible sound, but also lovely, as Dusk poured out his heart in the rawest form possible, as wrathful as his Crystal dead. The spirits of his dead listened; they heard his call. And when all of them were at last attentive, Layla heard a voice shudder her very core, rung by the crystals all around them.
Lay us to rest, my son. Please.
That voice was like a switch flipped inside Dusk. His sobs choked off; he pushed up from his elbows on the Crystal Highway; listening. And when there came nothing more, he suddenly shot to his feet with a roar, his hands ready.
Instinctually, Adrian and Layla knew what he wanted through their Bind. Like they had been born to it, Adrian and Layla used their winds together to create a twinned sand-funnel of furious energy. With their winds, they heaved up the nearest Crystal Dragon skeleton from the ruins of a shattered emerald dome and cast the bones into the causeway.
With a roar, Dusk moved in, hammering a tremendous vibration into those bones and shuddering them, sublimating them. As Layla watched, the bones seemed to become liquid like flowing glass, and then Dusk shot his hands towards the ruined emerald dome. Roaring, seething, enormous diamond-light spines shot from his shoulders as he partially shifted to work his magic, using his hands to smooth those liquefied Dragon remains into the already-existing building.
As columns took shape, as lintels were replaced and foundation-blocks repaired, Layla saw the building made hale from its foundations to its pinnacle. It wasn’t a large dome, just big enough to be completed by a single Dragon skeleton. But as Dusk finished then shuddered to his knees, the furious vibration of ancestral dead all around them quieted. With a smooth tremor, the dead seemed to ease.
And with that ease came silence.
A vast silence breathed through the city now, as if Dusk’s act had somehow laid them all to rest. But even as she listened, Layla could hear towers and columns being rung like bells far off in the city. Dusk’s dead weren’t finished being angry, they were just mollified for a while. But as Dusk grit his teeth and waved his fingers one last time at the finished emerald dome, inscribing strange hieroglyphs on a foundation-stone right before the ingress, Layla felt the world listen.
“Hathna enthinii melat hahk.” Dusk spoke quietly, his voice resonating through the crystals all around. “I’m not finished with you, and youwillobey me as I lay each and every one of you to rest. This I promise. This I vow, as rightful First of this clan. So be it.”
All around, the crystals sighed to silence.
And far off in the city, Layla heard everything become quiet.
CHAPTER 20 – CAVERN
All around, the city was quiet. If they’d had a pin to drop, Layla was almost certain she would have heard it, everything was so still. As the party breathed a collective sigh of relief that Dusk’s dead had been mollified for the moment, no one was more relieved than Dusk himself. Rising from his knees after finishing the inscription etched into the emerald dome, he could barely stand. Shaking like a leaf in a gale, he nearly fell over, and Adrian and Layla had to swoop in and shore him up as he gave them a tired smile.
Layla could feel a vast exhaustion running through him as he nodded his head at the Temple of the Sun and asked them to help him inside. Moving up the ornate citrine stairs, they were soon inside the massive temple, similar to the Luxor Temple but far larger. Pillars of bright citrine lined the space, though these were not pure gold like the outside, but inset with multi-layered Egyptian gods and goddesses made out of various colors of gemstone.
It made the interior of the temple vivid, scenes of worship and plenty depicted all around in bright jewel tones. Crystal Dragons diving into the Nile to fish were large as life. Crystal Dragons being born inside enormous gemstone pillars deep in the earth were hauntingly beautiful. On every wall they glittered, sometimes depicted as human with enormous headdresses, jewelry, and diaphanous robes, sometimes depicted in glorious Dragon-form with enormous mantles of spikes and serrated scales in every color of the rainbow.
It was astonishing, and the beauty of the enormous temple was barely marred by the far walls, which had been entirely collapsed by the battle, vines of jasmine and honeysuckle creeping in now and carpeting the floor. But as they rounded one massive pillar, Layla’s breath caught. Tears came to her eyes as she saw a dozen small human skeletons before them, all of them crystallized and laying in various broken poses, crushed by a section of wall when it fell. Seeing them also, Dusk hitched a hard breath. But he had no energy left to deal with them just now, and simply nodded Layla and Adrian past as they helped him towards a recessed alcove that burrowed deep into the rear of the temple.
The doorway was flanked by two massive statues of rose-quartz and black opal – of furious Crystal Dragons snarling in beast-form, raking forbidding talons at any invader. The massive all-diamond doors between them were closed, and Layla supposed it was some kind of inner sanctum where the holiest of holies resided. Moving to the doors, Dusk held a hand out. Closing his eyes, he pulsed a repetitive vibration into the doors as if it were a piece of music he knew by heart. With a grinding sound and a puff of dust from broken citrine columns nearby, the doors groaned open – revealing an obsidian passage with a set of stairs that delved straight down to blackness.
Layla had been expecting some kind of opulent room, perhaps a coronation space of some kind since Dusk had mentioned this temple was used to confirm Crystal Dragon Kings and Queens. But this dark, forbidding passage was nothing of the sort, and Layla felt a curl of fear pass through her to be facing that utter blackness after so much wreckage today. But Dusk had no fear, and as he nodded them forward, Layla got the feeling this was the space he’d been hidden in as a child, deep inside the temple as the war raged. It was a stark contrast to the brightness above, and as they proceeded down, Layla and Adrian lit fires in their palms to see the way as Yousry followed, since Dusk was too tired to vibrate the dark amethyst columns flanking the stairs to life.
“Dusk?” Layla asked quietly, noticing her voice was instantly deadened in the passage, even their footsteps hushed as if nothing could penetrate the black. She felt like she had to be extra-reverent in this space, as they descended into darkness and left the upper temple behind. “Where are we headed?”
