The Princess lifted a brow.
Sonara shrugged. “He has no heart.”
Azariah’s eyes glittered with the hint of a smile. “May I?” She held out her hand, her gloves still intact to hide her scarred skin.
Sonara held the eyeglass out to her, and together, they watched in silence.
The Dohrsarans had begun to move, forming a solid line that stretched towards the rocky side of the Bloodhorns beneath them, the very mountain in which Sonara’s hidden cave sat.
Down below, six workers manned the Wanderers’ great drill. It rumbled and whined as they powered it up, red light surrounding the sharp point of the drill as they pressed it against the Bloodhorns.
The rock melted little by little as the drill spun, and the Dohrsarans shoved with all their might to keep it pressed close. It was backbreaking work. The kind that would have broken a weaker man or woman, but the Wanderers had chosen the strongest to man the machine in shifts, to swing hammers and axes, cutting through the mountain with brute strength. The warriors, the weaponsmaidens, the steed trainers.
The others followed behind, carting away the rock by hand. Soon, they’d cleared an entryway into the mountains, the entrance of a narrow tunnel that faded from view.
Still, those metallic beetles were attached to the backs of their necks. The lights on them glowed red, but every so often, if someone stepped out of line...
They turned green.
And notoneprisoner was taken down, screaming and thrashing through the pain of whatever the hellish beetles were doing to them. Butallof them suffered together, from a single act of defiance.
“There he is,” Azariah said softly. “Your companion.”
Sonara took the eyeglass from Azariah with a nod of thanks, and there he was again.
Jaxon of Wildeweb.
He looked different without his hat. His eyes, always so bright with life and laughter, were dulled, his long scar stark on his face. He stared straight ahead, just as the others did. Never looking left or right, only focusing on the job at hand. He was injured, his arm wrapped in a bit of dirty cloth. But he marched onwards, carrying load after load of rock.
The Garden of the Goddess had turned dim, too. At night, the flowers that snaked along the fingertips of the goddess usually glowed bright, like stars that had been plucked from the sky and placed in artful spirals around the towering monuments.
But now the moonpetals were gone, having burned to ashes in the attack.
The beasts that had survived the attack, noble steeds and great wyverns that hadn’t flown away, were harnessed and used to haul the rubble.
It was something that would have taken months to plan, and a great deal of knowledge about the Dohrsarans, and how their Gatherings worked, to be able to pull it off. But this was an entire operation, set up in a matter of days.
“Your father will pay for this,” Sonara said, glancing at Azariah to check for a reaction.
The Princess only nodded. “Good.”
Down below, Jaxon took a breath as he dumped another heavy rock into the pile. Then he turned, following the others back towards the gaping mountainside. The silver beetle on the back of his neck reflected the moonlight. His skin was red and swollen where those awful legs dug in deep. Bruises bloomed around it, stretching into his hairline.
Look up,Sonara wished she could tell him.Look up, and see that we’re still here. We’re going to set you free.
The Wanderer soldiers stood around the perimeter, clad in their red armored suits, overseeing the work as it went on into the night.
It had never struck Sonara before, just how different the Wanderers were. What sort of world had they come from, where they could craft weapons that could blow apart a person in a single, earsplitting shot?
Where they could arrive to a kingdom by the sea, and whisk its prince away without anyone trying to stop them.
“It calls to my magic,” Azariah said softly.
It was suddenly not so strange to see her lying on the rocks, her face dirty, her hair disheveled. She was a Shadowblood. She had power that made her, in many ways, greater than the father that had once killed her in hope that she’d come back again.
“What do you mean?” Sonara asked.
“I can feel a current in the air. It is always there, much like the wind; something I can feel but not see. I can sense when a storm is brewing on the horizon. How far away that storm is, whether lightning will rain from the skies. How strong each bolt will be. The blue wall feels like a storm. Like someone took the power that runs in my veins and changed it. Stretched it out, to form a sheet that sweeps across the Garden of the Goddess. There are no breaks, no folds. Its energy never seems to run out, either. As if whatever current runs through it is being powered by something endless. If we can find a way to shut that power down… we’ll have our way inside.”
