One of our escorts approached the guards.
“Abrackfrom Goddess Ghata is here. He brought a human female for His Majesty,” he said, and the guards opened the crystal doors for us.
I cringed, appalled by what he’d just said. A human female? For His Majesty? Like I was a package to be dropped at his door. In my shock, I couldn’t even come up with words strong enough to convey my indignation.
I dug my heels in, but Leslo gave me no chance to protest.
“Keep going. You wanted to see someone in charge, didn't you? Well, here is your chance.” He sauntered through the doors like he belonged here, dragging me along.
“You’ll have to go with them,” the guard said to the four men who brought us here.
They nodded and followed us in, but I noticed their hesitation. As they followed us down a wide corridor made entirely of glass, they dragged their heels, keeping far behind us and looking ready to dash at a moment’s notice.
I studied their faces over my shoulder, trying to read their expressions.
Was it reverence? Awe?
Or...fear?
Walking inside the glass structure felt like stepping into another world. The air felt warmer here, stifling. The light was dimmer. Everything gained the hues of teal and aquamarine illuminated by the daylight filtering through the numerous glass walls of the structure that looked even more complex on the inside than it did from the outside.
The glass floors under our feet allowed to see the ocean water below. Bottomless, it stretched down as far as the eye could see,to the depths unobstructed by ocean flora or fauna. It was dead water, completely devoid of life and color.
“Go down that passage to the great hall,” one of the men behind us said. “And try not to fall into a pool since you can’t breathe underwater.”
The floor wasn’t solid anymore. Instead, it was peppered with numerous openings, wide and narrow. Some were connected by arched bridges or flat walkways, but none had any guardrails. The pools were very difficult to spot since glass blended seamlessly with water unless one looked very closely, which I now made sure to do.
“This is dangerous,” I gasped, my bare feet slipping on a wet spot on the glass.
No one replied to that. Even Leslo remained quiet, seemingly subdued by the eerie greenish glow inside this weird place.
There were very few straight lines or corners in here. The interior followed the fluid shape of the building’s exterior. The usual rigid definition of rooms hardly applied here, as it felt like one space just smoothly flowed into another. With no doors between them, the areas were separated only by archways or corridors, and sometimes just by a recess in the wall or a few steps lowering the floor.
As we moved along, I realized what was especially weird about this place. Silence. I’d never been in a building of this size that was completely void of life like this one. If a king lived here, shouldn’t there be servants, courtiers, pets? Didn’t he have a family? Someone should be moving, talking, creating noises that living beings normally did.
Finally, we entered a large open space with a wide oval opening in the middle of the floor and a high ceiling that dripped with glass icicles, making it look like an ice cave.
Another bizarre thing about this glass palace was the complete lack of furniture. For as long as we’d walked, I hadn’tseen a single rug on the floor, a chair to sit on, or even a light fixture. There weren’t any curtains on any windows that I could see through the walls. Not even any flags, crests, or standards on the walls that I thought kings loved decorating their castles and palaces with.
In the great hall, however, a large picture hung on the wall, taking almost the entire space between the floor and the ceiling. In it, a muscular man with wavy, royal-blue hair smiled down at a woman whose long, silver-white hair was decorated with a circlet of coral adorned with pearls and golden filigree. The woman was reaching down to a child jumping in the waves between them.
The grand crystal frame of the large picture seemed appropriate for a royal palace, but the mood of the image didn’t quite fit. It was a candid scene of a happy family playing on a beach, framed by the spray of the surf behind them. It looked so different from the typical royal portraits with people frozen in stiff, formal poses that would normally be found on palace walls.
The bright smiles of the parents looked especially out of place because the child's face was missing. The canvas was torn in the middle, with shreds of it hanging down in long strips. Yet no one had bothered to take it down or to fix it. That fact somehow seemed the most disturbing to me. Was it a deliberate act? Or just neglect? Did no one care about this single piece of decor in the palace?
A long rope of pearls was draped between two hooks in the wall under the portrait. The pearls were huge, as big as golf balls, and perfectly round, which meant they were fake even if they indeed belonged to some king. It’d be simply impossible to find that many pearls so uniform in size, shape, and color.
Shadows shifted up ahead, breaking up the panels of watery light on the glass surfaces around us. Up ahead, beyond this hall and the many other glass walls inside the palace, there must bea door or a window that led outside because the light was much brighter from that direction. A man appeared in the arched entrance—a dark, imposing silhouette against the green-tinted light behind him.
He seemed nothing but a shadow at first, silently looming over us from the height of three wide steps that led out of the great hall. The light behind him shone through his shimmering, waist-long hair, creating an iridescent halo around his head. The drafty air in the palace played with the ends of his long tresses, and for a moment or two, that remained the only movement about him. Then, the golden outline of his dark shape shifted as the man slowly descended the three steps into the hall to us.
“How dare you bring strangers in here?” he growled low, with so much menace as if our mere existence in his vicinity offended him gravely.
His powerful voice reverberated through the hall, rolling through the palace like thunder.
“Your Majesty!” The four men escorting us dropped to their knees, their weapons crashing to the glass floor with a cacophony of clinking that reverberated through the hall.
Leslo squared his shoulders, placing a hand on the handle of his knife and pulling me closer with his other hand.
