Imogen’s brow twitched, perhaps a failed effort to raise them in interest. “Didn’t know that bit.”
Kai nodded, eyes on the looming beam of light. It was brighter now, its shimmer washing out the entire back wall of the cavern so it was impossible to tell anything other than that they were close. He knew it, too, by the way his pulse thundered in time with the pendant’s, his blood stinging his veins, caught in the storm of the Mother’s magic all around them. Just a little farther. He just had to keep her conscious and on her feet a moment longer.
“Mother Adhlas hid her heart away to protect us all,” Kai gritted out, hoisting Imogen upright as she sagged once more. “Though she loved us eternally, we’d become monsters in her eyes, and she feared the harm we’d do to ourselves. So she created the only thing that could scare off the monsters; an even greater monster.”
The light was blinding now, Kai’s vision nearly entirely white. He held Imogen’s faltering gaze through a squint as he dragged her toward the back wall, the whispers around them growing so frantic that it was all he could do to raise his voice.
“The great beast made a nest beneath the Laune,” he called, “and as it lay down for its long sleep, the Mother set her precious Pearl between its teeth. And as the story goes, once the Pearl was removed, the beast would awaken.”
Imogen stiffened against his arm, and Kai paused to let her stop walking. She only stared up at him, waiting, and very suddenly alert.
“And then what?”
Kai faltered, thrown by her sudden recovery.
“Well—then the beast would defend the Pearl and devour the intruder, before settling back down to sleep.”
Imogen dropped her grasp on his arm and glanced around, swaying only slightly. Her forehead was a map of concern, furrowed so deeply that Kai worried he’d scared her in his clumsy attempt to hold her attention.
“It’s only a story,” he said, gentle as he could while hollering over the indiscernible hush now ringing off the ice-walls. “The waters here were treacherous; deadly. To approach the cavern, even for a Merrow, was to risk death. The beast is just a metaphor.”
Imogen didn’t respond, nor look at him. Her gaze was still darting around, but she stopped and whipped around to face the blinding light of the back wall.
“What?” she whispered. “I can’t hear you.”
Something cold clawed its way up Kai’s spine. “I didn’t say anything.”
The pulse of his pendant was accelerating, beating so fast it sent vibrations through his bones. Imogen took a step forward, and the discomfort in his bones eased; it took Kai a moment and a shifting glint of green light to understand why. His pendant hung before him in the air, surging with magic. The same undiluted power that had his blood burning, his headthrobbing,his pores screaming with every step she took toward that blinding wall. The hairs on the back of his neck rose beneath a non-existent breeze.
“Imogen,” he called, a hoarse warning.
She took another step into the light, raising her hand before her.
“Imogen,don’t—”
Overwhelming magic surged like wildfire through Kai’s insides, pain forcing him to his knees and ripping a scream from his lungs. The whispers dropped to a dead hush, the world and the air and the glint of Kai’s pendant all stilling as Imogen’s fingers were swallowed by the light. Rigid with agony, Kai watched through streaming eyes as her hand met the glowing back wall of the cavern. For an unbearable moment, the flare of the light washed the entire world away. Then, the cavern inhaled its own glow in one swift gasp.
And Imogen collapsed.
???
No.
Kai’s pendant swung against his chest, released in the same moment that the pain evaporated from his veins. The same moment that Imogen hit the ground.
No, no, no.
It was more feeling than coherent thought, Kai’s heart catapulting into his lungs and locking in place. He could barely breathe, and his eyes strained in the sudden absence of the glow. Beneath the dim sheen of the unlit white wall, he could just make out Imogen’s form, prone on the ground. He jerked toward her, but his joints trembled as though he’d been running for hours, giving way beneath him when he tried to climb to his feet. Kai dragged himself, panting, across the cavern floor in a half-crawl.
“Imogen!”
She was unmoving, entirely limp, her long skirts spread like a snow blanket in perfect symmetry to the halo of her curls beneath her head. Sweat gleamed on her brow despite the seeping chill of the cavern, and beneath her closed lids her eyes flicked feverishly back and forth, seeing something he could not.
“Wake up,” he pleaded. “Imogen,wake up.”
But she lay there still, eyes flicking ever more rapidly.
Kai reached for her wrist, ready to haul her up and crawl back out of this cavern with her atop his back if he had to. But at the pressure of his fingertips, her pulse gave an almighty throb, echoed at once by the pendant around his throat—and Imogen gasped.
