“We don’t know,” Dreven replies. “You can track it.”
“Oh, can I?” I snap. “You might’ve told me about that before now.”
“Why? So, you could worry and drive yourself and us mad with it? No, thanks. You know now.”
“So, fetch,” Dastian adds with a wicked wink.
I give him a smile. “I mean this with all the hatred I have for you. Fuck. Off.”
“You don’t hate me. No one who hates me rides my cock like that.”
“Ever heard of hate sex?” I counter.
“Not like that,” he insists, like he is trying to convince himself more than me. It makes me feel kind of bad. I don’t hate him. If anything, I’m falling for him. For all of them. Bonds and tethers and history be damned. This isn’t fate. It’s… inevitable.
I shove the inconvenient thought into a box and slam the lid shut. Feelings are a no-go when death is waiting on the horizon. “How do I track it?”
“Focus,” Dreven says, unhelpfully.
“On?”
“The fact that you are the only one who can pick up the crown. It wants to be worn. It wants to be used. It wants a being to harness its power. That being is currently you in this realm where it is hidden.”
Why do I suddenly feel a bit sorry for it? I’m getting way too sentimental since hooking up with these gods. But I do as they say and close my eyes, breathing in through my nose slowly and exhaling out of my mouth. I try to picture it, but I have no idea what I’m looking for.
I turn without conscious thought to the left and start walking, seeing a path in my mind’s eyes that is crawling with snakes. I recoil and pull my blade out.
“What is it?” Dreven whispers, cautiously.
“Snakes,” I say with a shudder. “Thousands of them.”
“Where?” Voren asks.
“Right in front of us.”
“She is seeing something only she can,” Dreven mutters. “Open your eyes, slayer.”
I do and see that the path ahead of us is bright and free of snakes. “Weird.” I close my eyes again, and the snakes slither in their thousands. “It is this way. Mind your step.”
I move in the direction my mind is pulling me.
The snakes are coiling over one another, a river of silent, hissing despair, but they part before me as my boots hit the smooth marble. “They’re moving out of my way,” I murmur, keeping my eyes closed as I walk forward. It’s a strange sensation of knowing exactly where I’m going without the sense of sight.
“Just so we’re clear. I’m walking on a tightrope over a pit of vipers. So, no sudden movements.”
“There is nothing here but marble,” Dreven says, his voice close to my ear. His proximity is a solid, cold anchor in this disorienting place.
“Your marble is my slithering nightmare,” I retort. The path in my head curves, and I follow it without stumbling. My body moves with a certainty that my mind is giving it.
The air changes, growing heavier. A low hum starts up, vibrating through the soles of my feet.
“Anything I should know about?” I ask.
“The floor is cracking,” Voren observes, his tone laced with a morbid curiosity that does nothing for my nerves. “We’re entering a memory echo. A dead zone.”
“Lovely,” I say. I risk a peek, cracking one eye open. The flawless pearl floor is now a shattered mosaic of grey stone, with gaping black chasms between the pieces. The snakes in my mind are gone, replaced by asingle, straight path of unbroken stone leading towards a crumbling archway that wasn’t there a moment ago. Ahead, the sky is no longer shifting colours; it’s a flat, dead grey.
Closing my eye again, I try to bring back the vision, but the snakes don’t return. It is gone, leaving me with just the grim reality and no second sight.
