A hum swells in the ground, music I can feel more than hear pulsing in the air.
Onward, alone, I go, brushing the tips of my fingers along the bark of a tree. It responds with blooms of sapphire and violet on its heavy branches. I breathe out, and the wind answers, a light breeze that nips at my ankles, tugs at my hair.
If a crowd watches me from somewhere afar, I don’t hear them. All is silent, save for the chime of the stars. Golden streams and pebbles that glimmer like pearls pave my path. Everything that once filled this place before it was drained, destroyed.
My home. Eleutherae.
I’m alone, and it occurs to me for the first time that maybe alone isn’t a bad thing.
My feet move through Eleutherae like my heart beats in the earth, until I reach the top of the mountain, where every golden stream meets in one pool.
The well we came from. It stretches in a large oval, maybe twenty feet across, gaping like an open wound upon the hill, luminous as my own skin. Golden, alive, and ancient, soaking up starlight in a hazy swirl of brilliance that’s almost too bright to look at.
In its reflection, I don’t see my own face. I see a hundred, and then a thousand, all of them morphing and shifting. I know each of them, their stories still awake and breathing in my blood.
On the other side of the golden pool stands Jude, unmoving.
Or, what’s left of him. Our tumble down the cliffs pulled skin from his frame, leaving new gashes of gold in his flesh. The cut on his eyebrow slices all the way down to his lips now.
His eyes flicker from the well to the mountain sprawling below us, to every glittering star watching from above like an eager audience.
We aren’treallyhere. We’re still in the arena.
But this is where we’re supposed to be, and Jude knows that, too.
He approaches the well with his shoulders tight, expression distrusting. Then swiftly kneels before it, peering deeply into his own golden reflection. When he finally tears his gaze away, looks to me, cracks form in his eyes, that same ruin that dwells in my own.
Rising slowly, he begins to make his way around the well.
“Jude,” I say, careful. “Please. Come home. With me.”
“This place doesn’t exist anymore,Riven.” The words rip from his throat so viciously, I startle. “Eleutherae is gone.”
“But the well isn’t,” I plead as he comes to a sharp stop a few paces from me. “We were stolen. Trappedherein the Playhouse.And we’ve been in this cycle for a long time.”
“The Playhouse is our home,” he snaps. “It’s all we have left.”
“It’s not.” My heart pounds, unruly, but my resolve doesn’t waver. “We’re more than weapons, and you’re more than your fear of not being one.” I breathe and reach for words. For the ones I mean more than all the others. “Don’t make me leave this place without you.”
That does it. Jude’s face clears, fully and completely. Void of expression.
A merciless silence stretches between us for one breath, two.
He knows I won’t play Sil’s role any longer.
By now, he knows I have no intention of winning the Great Dionysia, either.
Then his face shifts, stretches like a jackal. Without warning, he bolts, runs at me, hand poised for my throat.
But I’m faster. I draw my bow and the Eleutheraen arrow from my hip, halting Jude where he stands.
He freezes, an arm’s reach between us, every muscle going still as stone as he watches the point of my arrow poised at his heart. At its golden tip.
The shift of power between us is instant. The hand he’d trained on my throat drops uselessly to his side, defeat welling in his face, pure and resolute, with the quiet hint of a smile. But I’m not fooled. I know Jude has begun to count his breaths in case he needs to hold the last one.
Until he nods, daring me.Go on,he seems to say.End it.
Though I can’t see them, I feel the stares of the audience around us, locked in dead silence. Gritting my teeth, I push everything else out.
