Lexen moved to another section of land and started to dig again. His chest was heaving a little, and that was no surprise, considering he’d dug halfway to Australia by now. Needing to move, because I was starting to get sleepy again, I walked back toward the Daelighter symbols on the wall, making sure not to fall into any holes half-hidden in the darkness.
A shadow moved when I was close and I jumped. It was Rao, facing the wall, staring very intently at it, both hands pressed to the rock. I took a step closer, wondering what he was doing.
It looked like he was … tracing the symbols—this guy, who apparently saw the future, was very focused on those symbols. Should we have looked closer at what was written on the wall? Was there a clue there that we had missed?
I stopped about ten feet further along the cliff than Rao.
He didn’t lift his head or acknowledge me in any way, and I made sure to do the same, because drawing Laous’s attention felt like a bad move. I didn’t want this poor guy to suffer any more than he already had.
Rao was still tracing his fingers across the symbols. I reached out to do that same with the ones in front of me. They were scattered across the wall as far as I could see along the cliff, but there were a lot the same. Repeated over and over.
The marks felt familiar to me—no doubt because I’d seen them recently on the overlords’ skin and on the platform between all the houses. Xander’s energy hit me a moment before he stopped at my side.
“What do they mean?” I whispered, continuing to trace one particular pattern that I was most drawn to. It was etched in a deep red clay, baked onto the stone.
“This is legreto,” he said, his hand coming up to rest on top of mine, stopping my almost obsessing rubbing of the top part of the curved shape.
He lifted both of our hands, moving on to another symbol close by. “And this is caramina. The pair represents our people. Royales.”
The caramina symbol looked like a continuation of the legreto symbol, flowing lines reaching for each other between the two. Like … they should be joined, not separate.
“What symbols are for the other houses?” I asked. “Do they all have specific symbols like Royale?”
Xander nodded, lifting his hands up to a dark ocher pair. “This is Leights. They have the Galinta’s symbols.” He traced the first, then moved to another close by. “This one is to symbolize their bond to the tree gods.”
They had two symbols as well, and just like Royale they were intersected with each other. Two parts forming one whole.
“That is Imperial,” a deep voice said from close by. I turned to find Daniel pointing toward the wall. Two symbols were there, their color in shades of blue. One was a flame, the other like a swirling staircase. “The justices and our energy from below.”
“Which leaves Darken,” I murmured, my eyes resting on the final two symbols in this part of the wall. “Theirs looks like a mountain, and the other is slashes of lightning.”
I noticed something, when I leaned back to see all eight marks together. “Your symbols … there’s symmetry here. Like what we have in our group,” I whispered. “Eight marks, eight of us. Each symbol blends into the next, and doesn’t it look to all of you like the eight of these could link together to form a single image?” I kept seeing the lines and swirls linking to each other, and it all looked similar to me.
Xander and Daniel wore confused expressions as they stepped closer, and then further back to see the entire wall.
“The eight are not supposed to be one,” Daniel said, tilting his head. “Our houses are not that closely bound.”
“But they were,” I reminded them. “You said the original overlords were leaders of a single house. House of Daelighter.”
“Could this be a part of our history lost?” Xander murmured. He pulled his focus from the wall, searching the ground, leaning down to forage through the stones and dirt. When he rose, he held a white piece of rock. He placed it on the wall, close to where the symbols were, and began to sketch. He started with House of Royale, and this time he drew them all close together, joining the lines instead of leaving gaps.
“There,” I said, pointing to where I thought Imperial should go.
He looked for a second, and then nodded. A few times it didn’t fit, but once the first five were in place, the rest became very clear.
By the time he was finished, the others had drifted over to us—except Lexen, who was still digging, and Laous, who was not leaving the dragon dude’s side.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Daniel said, staring.
The symbols did all fit together, and no one had noticed before now because the houses normally had very little to do with each other. They did not draw their marks together.
“I think this is the reason we can’t find the stone,” I told them. “The Draygo clearly knew there was no safer security measure than forcing the four houses to work together. That only the eight of us, who are bonded for the first time in their history, would be able to do it.”
Maya was bouncing on her toes. “Like the secret keepers led to the location, but all houses are needed to find the stone.”
“How though?” Chase asked, his hand resting on the rock wall. “I can’t feel any energy. What do we do with the symbol now?”
“What if we needed those crystals?” I asked. “The ones with energy from the ancients?” From the time the four houses were joined as one.
