“Only at night?”
“These creatures come from the dark depths of the Abyss. Daylight kills them.”
“Good to know,” I muttered, going to the trunk to look for a dry nightgown or at least for a towel.
Unlike Kye, I felt the opposite of sleepy. With my nerves still rattled, my mind wouldn’t quiet. Alcohol had calmed me a little but not enough to make me want to sleep. The waterysemidarkness of the glass palace unnerved me. I dreaded the silence that would follow if we stopped talking and Kye fell asleep.
Thankfully, I still had a gazillion questions to keep him talking all night, as long as he was willing to answer them.
“Kye,” I said to his back as he headed toward his bed.
He stopped, tilting his head to turn his ear to me, as if curious to hear his name from me. I assumed not many people called him just by his name. Maybe no one at all. I waited for him to correct me, to insist on his pompous but rightful title, but he didn’t. Instead, he responded to just his name.
“Yes?” He turned around.
I found a dry towel in the trunk and wrapped it around my shoulders. “How does this place exist?”
“Do you mean the palace? The Lyrei Reef? The Olathana Ocean? Or the entire Nerifir?” he clarified.
“Any? All? Frankly, I’m unclear about the difference between them. Until today, I didn’t even know any of them existed.”
“Right, of course.” He ran a hand through his hair. “I’ve heard humans are the most oblivious creatures in all of the worlds of the River of Mists.”
“How many worlds are there?” I asked, trying not to get distracted by the moonlight playing in his hair as he combed his fingers through it.
“Many.” He sat on his bed, and I stood a few steps away from him. “But no one really knows exactly how many, and if some claim they do, they’re lying.”
“No one travelled to all of them then?” I asked.
He laughed, shaking his head, as if I said something incredibly silly. “No one usually travels between the worlds. Not for fun, anyway. It’s a perilous and pointless journey, with no coming back.”
“Why not?” My attention sharpened.
Was he trying to scare me intentionally, to deter me from escaping?
“When crossing the River of Mists,” he explained, “one can never return to the same time and place. Well, a place is usually a little easier, as the River drops you off at least in the vicinity of the area close to your heart in some way. But time? That is the biggest peril. If you try to return to your old world, you may end up a day or a million years either into the past or the future from the time when you left.”
“What are you saying?” I asked softly, hoping I misunderstood.
“I’m saying, my little—”
I lifted a finger to stop him from uttering whatever nickname he was going for this time. “It’s Maren. Or Ms. Blackwell, if you will.”
His eyes narrowed, his jaw flexing. He clearly wasn’t used to push backs like that. After a long calming breath, however, he inclined his head in acquiescence.
“Alright, my dearMaren,”he said with a quiet rumble of displeasure in his deep, velvety voice. “What I’m saying is that you can never return to what you’ve left behind, no matter how stubbornly you keep insisting on it. The time you lived in is long gone by now. Or maybe it hasn’t even started yet. If you went back, you may not find anyone you knew.”
“May not? Does it mean there is a chance that I may?”
“Oh,” he laughed again, looking amazed more than amused this time. “Clearly, I have underestimated your stubbornness.”
“Just tell me, is there any chance at all to land in my own time?”
He stretched his shoulders, speaking reluctantly, “Well, I guess there is always a slim chance that you may come back to the tiny dot of your lifetime on the long line of your people’s existence.”
A tiny dot. That was my entire life on the line of hundreds of thousands of years of human existence. I didn’t need to be a math genius to figure out that the chance of that happening was very slim indeed.
“Nerifir is our world, connected to the River of Mists just like your world is,” Kye continued as I just stood there, rooted in place by the harrowing realization of everything I had truly, irrevocably lost. “We’re in Lyrei. It’s the name of this reef and the capital of Olathana Ocean, the kingdom of sirens and the most beautiful place in all of Nerifir. Even after being practically a prisoner here for an entire century, I still believe it.”
