“Come on.” Baz tugged at Emory’s sleeve. “We’ve said our piece, sowed the seeds. Now we need to move forward with the plan or this will all have been for nothing.”
Emory stepped down from the fountain, Sidraeus following suit. Baz was right. They couldn’t make people jump to their side, could only hope the magic they’d worked here tonight would lead some of them to see the truth. The ritual had to take precedence over everything else.
Sidraeus froze at her side, his ecliptic eyes flaring. “She’s coming.”
He didn’t have to say her name. Emory knew Atheia would show up eventually, drawn by the promise of ending her enemies and unveiling herself as the Tides. She couldn’t see Romie’s face in the crowded quad, but she could sense her near, Atheia’s power calling to her.
They had to leave now before Atheia stopped them from reaching the tree.
“What do you need from us?” Penelope asked, that fierceness of hers surprising Emory once more.
“A distraction,” Emory said. “Some of us need to get to Decrescens Hall, others to Obscura Hall. Don’t let the Regulators oranyone elsefollow us there.”
Penelope nodded. “Got it.”
As she and other protesters began to shout at the Regulators, a sea of Shadow-masked people pushing back against a wall of charcoal uniforms, Emory and her friends acted according to plan. There was no time for goodbyes as their group split up, the majority heading to Obscura Hall to reclaim it with help from the Wardcrafter, who would erect the wards around it once more so that only Eclipse-born and their allies would be able to go in. It would be their base in Aldryn College. Or at the very least, a way to keep out the Regulators. If Eclipse-born couldn’t have Obscura Hall for themselves, then no one else should either. It was their home, their safe haven. It would be once more.
The rest of them—Emory, Sidraeus, Baz, Virgil, Nisha, Ife, and Javier—headed for Decrescens Hall to find the Reaper room and the strange, deathless tree that grew there.
If the ritual worked as it should, Emory would meet her mother for the first time—and perhaps change all of fate in the process.
33KAI
HELL, AS IT TURNED OUT, looked exactly like the Deep most lunar mages believed souls went to after death.
If Kai had thought the starry expanse they’d been sailing through was strange and cold and dark, it was nothing compared to the abyss. It was like the bottom of a depthless ocean, with deep crevices and jagged ridges and peaks; forests of algae in hues of dark purple and green and blue that rippled slightly on imaginary currents; flat plains that seemed to stretch on for eternity, littered with odd-looking bones and shells; and everywhere, a darkness so impenetrable, it would have been impossible to see anything if not for the lanterns that Farran lit up all around the ship.
For a second, Kai wondered if theywereunderwater. The small particles all around him looked like floating sediment or air bubbles. But it wasash, falling around them in slow motion, coating this strange world in a sheet of lifeless gray.
There was an unpleasant smell of sulfur in the air, foul and pungent.
Amid the forlorn landscape were statues of people, dull stonecovered in lichen and barnacles and that foreboding ash. There were hundreds of them, so lifelike that Kai got the unsettling impression they were tracking the ship’s movement as it glided by.
“Don’t,” Farran hissed at Luce as she reached out to touch the statue of a woman with what looked like dragon wings sprouting from her back.
Luce snatched her hand back, alarmed by the panic in Farran’s voice. “What—whoare they?”
“They’re the souls of those who’ve been condemned to the abyss. They’re trapped in stone down here, their minds forced to live through suffering worse than the darkest of nightmares, over and over again without reprieve. Unless they find a way to accept what they’ve done.”
Luce raised a brow. “How do they do that?”
“Process their mortal failings, let go of all their baggage. Forgive themselves, basically, for a chance at moving on.” Farran’s eyes shone with a strange, wistful quality. “A chance at a new life.”
“I’m guessing,” Kai muttered, glaring at the sheer number of statues, “that most of them don’t get that?”
“You’d be guessing correctly.” Farran pointed out a statue swallowed so completely by the elements that it was rendered featureless, with clumps of strange, yellow crystals growing on its surface. “That’s brimstone—sulfur. It feeds on despair and guilt, looking to crystalize souls and keep them down here forever. The souls who’ve been here the longest, those who’ve been completely swallowed by brimstone… there’s no leaving for them. Not ever.”
“That’s horrible,” Luce murmured with a pained expression. “All these souls…”
Trapped in stone, doomed to suffer torture for eternity in a hell of their own making.
Kai shivered at the thought. Was this what would await him, when all was said and done? A nightmare world for a nightmareboy. He’d seen so much of pain and fear already, had let it seep in through the cracks of his armor and fester inside him. He didn’t want to end up here where they would remain embedded in his soul, fossilized anger and darkness that would weigh on him forever.
He studied Farran’s face—the tightness around his mouth, the haunted bruises beneath his eyes, the taut lines of his body, as if every inch of him revolted against being down here. This was not the bright, buoyant boy Kai remembered, but someone well acquainted with the kind of pain and suffering hell encompassed.
“How do you know all this?” Kai asked, if only to confirm his suspicion.
Farran shied away from his knowing gaze. “Because Thames’s soul—mysoul—spent some time here after he died. Before the god of balance reincarnated me.”
