“You are here.” Damien’s finger traced under the Chthonic script surrounding the dot. “But we want to be here.” He pointed to the peninsula on the other side of the range. There was a black squiggle drawn there, and as far as squiggles went, it was probably the most ominous one Amma had ever seen.
“What does that say below our destination?”
Damien groaned. “Temple of the Void.”
“Oh, I’ve seen this before!” Amma released her half of the map and flipped her own pouch open, surprised to find Vanders nestled inside. The vaxin scampered up to her shoulder when he noted the lack of wind, and Amma pulled out her own parchment. “That reminds me of the other bad thing I did.”
Damien cocked a brow. “Please go on in excruciating detail.”
Unfolding the crumpled parchment, she presented it proudly to him. “I can’t believe I forgot about this, but I stole it from Cedric’s chamber at the keep. It’s a star chart, but the writing on it is in Chthonic which he shouldn’t have had. Nobody in the realm is supposed to use that language.”
“Not even you,” he said, tucking the other map under his arm. But Damien’s mischievous look fell away as he took the chart, eyes darting from one point to another written in the language of the infernal.
“There was a second map there too, but it was too big for me to steal. It had Krepmar Keep marked on it and a place in the Kvesari Wood, one in The Wilds, and you can probably guess that the fourth point was labeled The Temple of the Void.”
“What a convenient coincidence.” Damien’s lips turneddown. “This depicts the eclipse, doesn’t it? It’s only showing one moon, but it’s marked as both Lo and Ero.”
Amma tipped her head. “Huh, yeah, I guess so. The moons have been getting closer to one another in the sky.”
“The Grand Order said the pendant needs to be chucked into the pit prior to the eclipse,” he mumbled.
“Excuse me?”
Damien swallowed, handing the chart back. “I’m not terribly familiar with astronomy, I only picked up a bit from Soren Darkmore’s journals, and that was mostly solar activity, a little constellation renaming, some theories about balls of gas. Hold onto this, we may find someone who can actually read it.”
“Damien, what was that about the Grand Order?”
With a hefty sigh, he once again went into his pouch, and instead of more parchment, pulled out a raggedly cut gemstone attached to a chain. Looking displeased at the thing as it hung from his hand, he told her begrudgingly, “This is the root of our quest.”
“It looks broken.”
He cleared his throat. “Does it?”
Amma carefully reached out for the gem. It was cloudy, but when she tipped it toward the rising sun, she caught Damien’s reflection on one of the cleaves. “It’s very pointy too,” she mused.
“The Dreadcouncil’s Fragmentable Pendant of Accursed Bondage and Nefarious Conquest is not for stabbing.”
She dropped the stone. “Thewhat?”
“Nevermind, it’s only meant to sound intimidating, and the name’s likely been randomly produced from a pool of sinister words. They want me to dispose of it in a very specific way.”
“Why do you have to take their trash out for them?”
“Because if I don’t, they’ll probably try and kill me, but not before they attempt to do something even worse to you.”
“Oh, geez.” Amma snatched the map out from under hisarm, holding it open again. “Well, okay, what’s the fastest route there?”
As if she had been speaking directly to the map, it answered in swirling ink, drawing a dotted path from where they stood, down the ridge to meet a road that meandered away from the mountains and Buckhead at its base, and out to the ominous black squiggles on the peninsula, technically just on the edge of Throkull territory, disputed land that both the realm and the tribes of giants claimed.
Amma clicked her tongue appreciatively, but when she looked back at Damien, he was still staring at the pendant. “That’s cursed or something, isn’t it?”
He blinked over at her. “This? No, no, it’s not…well?”
When he tipped his head in thought, Amma clicked her tongue again, this time decidedly less enthusiastic. “You don’t know?”
He slowly raised his shoulders and dropped them back down.
“So, an evil organization gave you an ugly necklace with a horrible name that they want you to get rid of inside what we can only assume is another big, scary pit of doom, but you don’t know what’s going to happen when you do?”
