“An old war. Darkness. One even the light may struggle to vanquish.” A slight breeze comes from the direction of the vial.
“What is in the vial? Do you know?”
“A gift. An ancient one.”
“Can it be used against the darkness?”
“Light only exists to shine.”
Cryptic much? I wait for an explanation, but none comes. “But is there a way, a spell or enchantment, to use the water in this vial to protect against the ring?”
“Water nourishes.”
Water nourishes? What the hell does that mean? I swallow, and the intensity of the gold in the room fades. The songs of the objects grow softer. I don’t have much time.
“Show me the weave,” I plead again. “I understand the danger, but I want to help.”
“So be it.” The voice seems to echo in the room as symbols erupt inside the frame of my fingers. Foreign words, symbols, and sounds churn in the space around the ring. I latch on to the magic and pull my hands apart to enlarge the spell, my forearms straining with the effort.
I’ve underestimated this job. It’s the most complicated work of magic I’ve ever seen. This ring contains layers of curses. No fewer than five separate spells by five separate witches are braided together. Each spell is attached to the others with what looks like needles or scaffolding. Booby traps. If I break one curse, the entire braid collapses, and I’m guessing this thing self-destructs. This ring is built to be a killing machine. A poison without an antidote.
It’s meant to scare me away. But I grit my teeth and look closer. A charm is embedded in the steel itself, ribbons of darkness woven into steel. This must be what allows the ring to morph into the weapon of the user’s choice. The way it’s sewn into the physical design, it could easily break the ring apart and form it again into a sword or dagger.
Revolving above it is the shimmer of an incantation, a chant that I can no longer hear but whose cadence strikes me as something even older than Latin. I catch a random phrase of it before it sinks into the background, replaced by the acrid stench of the remains of a foul potion.
This ring was soaked in a fluid concocted of bitter herbs, soured fruit, and blood. No dragon’s blood. I’m not sure how I know, but I sense it. The blood is the catalyst. The ring uses the dragon’s own blood as fuel. Goddess, the reek of it slaps my senses.
I open my mouth to breathe through it, hoping to save my nostrils from the reeking evil, only to taste the next spell in the braid. It coats the back of my tongue as if I’ve inhaled a handful of sand.
By the time I cough to clear my throat, the most dreadful spell rises to the surface. Dark whispers wrapped in cackling laughter circle me. The golden room grows darker, the sounds taking shape as dark flapping runes that grow large enough to block out the light.
Someone has opened hell itself to finish this ring.
“Ah!” My arms grow weak, and I close my magical window slightly to give them a break. My heart pounds. My breath comes in pants. That last curse binds the other four together, and it is the deadliest.
I watch as the voices fade again into the ring, a black ribbon looping and diving. Now, I see it. Although the aura around the ring is consistently dark, I’d mistaken it for true black before. Each of the curses on this ring has its own distinct color. Yes, the voices are black, but as the metal charm bubbles to the surface again, I notice it’s the color of tarnished silver. The incantation shimmers navy blue. The potion, with its bloody stench, is hunter green. And that gritty spell I’d tasted on my tongue, it’s the deepest burgundy red.
I observe the strands rising and falling, again and again, each one blending into the next until the pattern repeats. All of them together are a nasty, angry tangle of magic that sounds like the scratch of claws across stone.
Braided magic, fashioned in the shape of a ring, no end and no beginning. Five distinct brands of magic. Five distinct spells. To break this entanglement, I’ll need the antidote to each individual curse ready. I’ll need to slip them into the braid without tripping the trap, and I’ll need to execute the spells at exactly the same time to keep the ring from destroying itself and taking me and anyone around me with it.
The muscles of my neck strain as I desperately try to memorize every aspect. I never expected to find something so complicated, and I have no way to take notes because I need my hands to hold the window open to see the spell. However, I can’t help but hypothesize about the origin of this magic. I don’t think a witch made this. I don’t think five witches could have made this. There’s something far darker going on here. Something far more powerful lending its voice to the chorus.
“This was made by the destroyer, wasn’t it?” I ask, praying the voices in the room haven’t abandoned me.
“We do not speak of it,” the voices hiss in unison.
“I’ll take that as a yes.” My head throbs. My arms ache. The Gold Room flashes in and out of existence. I can’t hold it. My hands clap together over the box, and I list to the side, falling out of my chair as everything gold turns black. The last thing I see is Sebastian’s worried face as he catches me in his arms.
Chapter Fourteen
SEB
Zoe’s body seizes in my arms, going rigid and arching. She torques unnaturally in a way that would be painful if she were conscious. I carry her into my room and climb onto the bed, holding her to my chest. For humans, being physically close to a dragon has healing properties. Every instinct tells me that keeping Zoe close to me, touching me, will help her recover faster.
When Zoe snorted the gold dust, her pupils turned the color of liquid gold, as if someone had opened her head and filled her with molten metal. And then she was gone, there but not there. She murmured unintelligible things, stared at the box and moved her hands as if she were interacting with something that I couldn’t see.
This is necessary. This could be the salvation of my kind. But I hated seeing her like that, lost to some warped ecstasy.
