“We’ll still have to be quiet,” Kaan interjects, then jerks his chin and shoves through the door.
We follow into a circular chamber so vast and white it’s like we’re caught in a cloud, every step across the polished floor a hollowthud, lost to the hungry atmosphere.
Shivers scuttle over my skin as I take it all in through wide eyes, breath caught.
The swooping wall boastshundredsof duplicate doors, each bracketed with glass drips of captured moonlight hanging from coiled hooks of Bothaimian ore.
“Is this the—”
“High Treasury,” Pyrok murmurs, then takes a swig from his flask—the words a punch to my chest.
It’s hard to breathe in the wake of them.
Essi often spoke about this place, wishing she could explore it. Being here without her is another painful reminder that I failed to keep her safe.
I push down the thought and force my lungs full, casting my mind to our conversations …
Essi said many of the world’s most precious and powerful relics are hidden here, locked safely away. But what she was most taken with was the story of a male fae who’s been around for eons. The first to tame a dragon, his skin now etched in so many runes he’s become something …other, kept behind one of these doors.
Apparently.
Pyrok corks his flask, then smacks his palm against Roan’s chest, making him grunt. “This is the place that got this idiot tossed to the anthe.”
Kaan presses his finger to his lips again, turning just as Roan’s staggered steps slow, gaze cast on a pair of doors bearing the only thread of color in the room—an etch of silver ribbons that shine like the aurora, moving gently. As though someone sliced them from the sky and stitched them across the wood.
Pyrok rolls his eyes, takes Roan by the arm, and steers him toward the open-arched exit on the other side. I follow, pausing when something glints in my peripheral.
My skin prickles as a silver shimmer gathers midair before the doors Roan was so taken with. Atoo familiarsilver shimmer.
If that Fate-fucker is herding me again, I will rage.
It coalesces into a metallic smear that sluices through the thin gap between the doors, disappearing.
My eyes narrow. What if there’s something in there that could help me protect Kaan? Something powerful? Creators, I owe it to Essi to at leastlook …
I move forward and grab a handle. Pull the left door open a smidge, eyes widening at the small domed chamber on the other side—all polished obsidian dented with specks of luminescence that make it appear as the sky in The Shade. Like I could step over the threshold and just …fall.
That silver sheen coils around a black plinth in the center of the room, as if the Fate Herder just tucked around itself and readied for slumber. Except it doesn’t appear. Instead, a small silver book no bigger than my hand manifests into existence—thicker than the height of my thumb, the uneven stack of pages so white they gleam like captured moonlight.
My breath catches, something within urging me to move closer and inspect. As though a ribbon just knotted around my spine andtugged.Even the muscles under my tongue tingle, innately aware that I just stumbled across something plump.
Somethingpowerful.
“Hold up,” I call to the others. “I’m going to take a look at this book real quick.”
There’s a pause. Just enough time for me to step through the doorway and into the chilly tomb before Kaan roars my name so loud it’s as though he just stuck me with a serrated shiv.
I turn to see him dominating the doorway, his eyes all-consuming, packed with a churn of dragonflame. “I thought we were beingquiet?” I whisper-hiss, throwing both hands out in a silentwhat in the Creators-damn fuck?
He continues to stare, unbreathing, all the color gone from his painfully beautiful face. Pyrok and Roan push up behind him, equally ashen.
“H— Wh— How did you do that?” Roan sputters, looking at my legs. Like he’s surprised they’re still connected to my body.
“Do what?”
“Walk straight pastthose.” He dashes his hand toward a shimmer of runes etched along the threshold—tricky to see, but obvious now that he’s pointed them out.
My gaze follows the line.
