We’re here. Come to us.
Steeling myself, I turned back to face the light and reached out again. I stepped forward, shadows falling from my body like a living cloak of dark smoke as I strode through the darkness. They caressed me as they fell away as if to say so long, for now. I let them brush against my fingertips, wrap around my throat before dissipating. Feeling them go felt like leaving a part of myself behind but somehow I knew I needed to in order to get back. Though I couldn’t remember what I was going back to.
I came awake with a gasp, sitting straight up and breathing hard in the dry heat around me. I glanced wildly around to find myself within a canvas construction of material and poles that formed a shelter of some sort. I was on a cot made of the same wood and canvas and below me was coarse, dry sand. Like the desert I'd seen in my dream, I realized, staring down at it in awe.
“Thank the gods,” someone spoke.
I jumped at the voice only to findZyarushing forward from the flap in the canvas she'd pulled back which was now billowing in the breeze, revealing an expanse of endless sand under a clear blue sky and burning orange sun beyond. I stared at the vastwasteland as she ran forward to settle onto my cot next to me and shoved a bowl into my hands.
“Eat this. You’ve been out so long we started to worry you’d starve to death before you woke up.”
“I—” I started, blinking against the bright sun streaming in from outside. I was slowly coming out of my dream and back to the world of reality. Realization struck me so hard I was on my feet in an instant. “Darius! Where—”
“He’s fine,”Zyaassured me, reaching up to place a hand on my arm and pulling me gently back down to the cot. “Gryfonhealed him. He’s with Roxy and the others now.”
“Gryfon?” I asked.
“He’s the one who pulled us out of the tunnel. He’s—well, I’ll take you to him when you’ve eaten.”
“I’ll go to him now.”
I made to stand butZya’sfingernails dug into my arm causing me to hiss and look down at her hand, wide-eyed.
“You aren’t going anywhere until you eat, Adrian,” she told me. In her tone I heard the same firmness my mother used to use against me.
I had no choice but to settle back onto the cot and take the bowl from her hands. She watched me for a moment as I ate, neither of us saying a word despite the endless questions swirling in my brain, the haze of my vivid dream still making my mind too foggy to properly understand what had happened. Or perhaps that was the hunger, I realized, as my stomach filled with the broth and my mind seemed to clear a bit more.
“How did you do that, Adrian?”Zyawhispered once my soup was down to the dregs and I was slurping from the bowl itself.
I looked up at her, blinking uncertainly.
“Shadows came out of you,” she said, her eyes wide. “Darkness. Like actual darkness. It was like what comes out of the twelfth at the Culling. It wasn’t just the dark, like the tunnels,like the Underground without its lights. It was…tangible, thick, smothering. I’ve never felt anything like it. Not since…”
I cleared my throat to stop her before she began to compare whatever had occurred to me with something as evil as the Culling.
“I made it to Sanctuary,” I told her, staring down at my empty bowl as I finally recalled what had occurred just before the cave in. “I made it all the way to the twelfth. I saw the Culling from within Sanctuary. I saw…Zyasomething is wrong in Sanctuary.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, brow furrowing as she leaned forward, concern etched plainly in her expression.
“Some of the Culled banded together and refused to go through the arch.Cosmowas there and the priests. They killed a boy, beheaded him right there on the cobblestones in front of the arch, a brother of one of the Culled. As an example, they said, a threat to force the Culled to go through the arch. They wouldn’t let their families say goodbye. They left that boy’s mother weeping in the street.”
My voice broke as horror linedZya’sface and she shook her head.
“That isn’t how it’s done,” she said, stunned. “They don’t force the Culled. They don’t bring violence to their precious ceremonies. The Culling is sacred to them. They wouldn’t do that. They can’t.”
“They did,” I told her. “And when I was in Sanctuary, during my last Trials before my Fall, there were these zealots, these people who were worshiping Dante and I as saints. The High Houses slaughtered them all and anyone who was caught up in the melee as well. And then, after the ninth, the entire gathered priesthood forced me into the tenth. They showed up in force, threatening violence if I should refuse to go directly to my fate. I thought it was just in response to my defiance. I thought thethreat was only to me. But they’re killing innocents,Zya. And no one is stopping them.”
Zyastared at me for a moment before standing. She wrung her hands together as she paced the length of the space within the tent. I watched as she walked, feet disturbing the sand beneath them, leaving tracks in a ground that seemed so much softer than the stone I'd always trod upon before. I had an urge to bend over and examine the strange substance but it passed in an instant. We had bigger issues to contend with for now. An examination of this strange new place would have to wait.
But we wereout. Out of Sanctuary and out of the Underground. Out in a way neither of us had ever known was possible before. I hadn't even known there was an out but, as I blinked up against the sunlight streaming in through the crack in the canvas flaps, I realized there was a whole world out there, a whole new domain I'd never known existed.
“Were the minor houses there?” Zya asked after a moment, drawing my attention back to her.
I considered her question before shaking my head.
“Not that I saw,” I told her.
“Good,” she replied, shoulders relaxing slightly as she nodded. “Then not everyone stands withCosmo. He has the priests, that’s a lot of gathered power, but if none of the minor houses showed up, he’s lacking the support of the entire Second Ring and undoubtedly the Lowers.”
