“Keep your hood up, and be careful, okay?”
“I will.”
They parted ways, then, and she slipped into the night on her hasty path.
At the edge of the city was a ruin so ancient it was nearly taboo. Everyone had always been hushed about the worn and ominous structure. But with Martis’s lesson, Vi now knew why. If she was right, and this was the place her mother had retrieved an axe that had changed the course of history… then she could understand why it was willingly being expunged from memory.Expunged, just like her parents had decreed the dangerous Crystal Caverns following the Mad King’s uprising.
She scrambled up a hill and into the trees that surrounded the city. A shadow began to loom against the starlight winking through the leafy canopy. Vi paused to look up at the tall, pyramid-like ruins that towered above her. She didn’t know if it could be called a tomb, but she would say based on the embellishments that it was made by the same people who had crafted the underground ruins she’d discovered—just far worse for wear, having been exposed to the elements.
It couldn’t be coincidence that Taavin had used the wordtomb, then Martis, and it all added up to this particular place. Looking around for any who might be watching, and finding none, Vi dared to hold out her hand.
“Repeat the process,” she whispered. Only one way to find out if this was her next apex of fate…
Fire ignited in her hand. Vi stared, and waited for the sensations of future sight to overtake her.
Chapter Eighteen
No visions came.
“Why?” Vi whispered, as though the fire would answer. It didn’t, and she extinguished it, looking around. “This has to be the place…” She looked up at the ruins, hoping they would give her the answer, and was surprisingly rewarded.
“Repeat the process—I have to be inside,” Vi mumbled. Of course it wouldn’t be as easy as standing at its base. She had to be inside the last set of ruins and assumed this to be the same. “Now… how to get in?”
Vi took a lap around the structure, then doubled back to where the remnants of an old cave-in could be found. Time had taken its toll on the collapsed rubble, as with the rest of the weather-worn ruins. Roots and vines pulled it apart, creating an opening barely large enough for her to wiggle through.
Taking a deep breath, Vi debated if she was extremely brave or stupid to go into something so dangerous-looking, and began to clamor over the rubble anyway. Just as she suspected, it was barely large enough for her to fit through. A narrower portion dug into her wide hips and made her twist and contort her legs to get her thighs through. But get through they did, and with a small tumble she landed in a hollowed alcove eerily similar to what she’d seen in the jungle.
Shards of what looked like obsidian scattered around her, leaving Vi to pick a few from indents in her hands with small winces. Miraculously, they did not draw blood. She stared at the glass-like stones, lifting up a larger piece for inspection.
Martis had said that following the fall of the Mad King Victor, the blight of the Crystal Caverns had been put to an end, once and for all, on the Main Continent. According to his telling, the crystals, once illuminated with their strange and twisted magic, had gone dark, fractured, and broken.
“This will work,” Vi whispered into the darkness, letting the shard fall from her hands.
Readying herself once more, she held out her hand. Already, the atmosphere around her felt vastly different than it had outside. The feeling of sinking into the flame, of being consumed by it, of not being able to tear her eyes away even if she tried, was already on the edge of her consciousness.
As if drawn from her by an invisible string, her spark rushed forth the moment Vi allowed it freedom. It hazed into the air over her palm, condensing into an open flame. When Vi looked at it, the world went white; like last time, she was quickly overcome.
Shapes were slowly drawn into existence.
While white threads of magic continued to blur at the edges of her vision, the scene she was presented with was one of night.
A man stood atop a dais, a curving silver blade with runes etched along its flat side was gripped in a fist. In the other he held a hand up to the full moon overhead, blood streaming down his palm. It mingled with blood from a secondary source—on an altar behind him was a figure, distinctly human and wrapped in what looked like burlap, whose blood was soaking through the fabrics covering them and dripping into a channel that ran down to a symbol painted on the ground.
She tried to make out who the sacrificial person on the altar could be. But they were wrapped tightly and immobile. Dead, more likely, given that she couldn’t see them breathing. For some reason, Vi couldn’t move; she was positioned in one location in the vision and no matter how she tried, she couldn’t change her vantage.
Ignoring the body, altar, and bleeding man, Vi followed the channel of blood that was flowing down to a symbol Vi recognized near instantly.
It was a dragon, curled in on itself to form a perfect circle. A line had been drawn through the middle, cleaving it in two, off-setting the halves. It was the broken moon of the Tower of Sorcerers. But Vi had never heard of a place like this in any sorcerer lore she knew. She certainly knew there were no sacrificial rituals codified at the Tower.
Men and women were bowed around the outer edge of the glyph. They rose in unison, slowly, chanting under their breath in time with the louder calls of the man bleeding at the dais. At least, what she assumed were louder calls, based on the red of his face and the gulping breaths he took before opening his lips wide for each chant. To her, the world was silent, just like the last time; she could observe only but not interact further.
She couldn’t gasp in her bodiless state. But Vi felt the shock ripple through her as she saw more clearly the faces of the men and women beneath the large black hoods. Most possessed sharply angular features—not unlike the queen she had seen in her last vision—but their skin was ghostly pale and they had bright red eyes that glowed in the darkness.
Whatever they were, Vi had the distinct feeling it was not human.
There were some who had snouts like a lizard—identical to the man she had seen carrying the cage before her father. More, still, looked like normal humans, but with no eyebrows. Instead, glowing dots lined their foreheads.
It was a mix of races Vi had never seen before—never even imagined—and only further cemented that what she was looking at couldn’t be some secret Tower ritual in the South. This felt like a different world entirely.
