The world falls out from beneath me when I touch the sickle for the first time. The sound of boisterous laughter and conversation cuts out abruptly, replaced by almost perfect silence as the light shifts from torchlight to daylight.
I’m in the temple.
I’m standing near the altar, but there’s no sound. The whirring of the sickle has stopped.
I look down, and I understand why.
It’s in my hand.
A figure steps out of the shadows near the altar. It’s Ronan, bearing the torch. I open my mouth to call to him, but no sound comes out.
He points to the transept door and walks towards it, the altar vanishing into impenetrable shadow as he goes. I follow him out onto the hill.
We’re facing the mountains to the west, the skies above overcast as lightning flashes in the distance. The hill is surrounded by fields of golden grain, and down near the bottom sits a village.
It isn’t Avaris, at least not as I knew it before the war. It’s too small and too new, only a handful of the structures that now lie in ruins present. To the south stands a dense forest in a place where I’ve never seen a tree grow.
This is a different time, I realize. This is the past, or maybe the distant future.
I follow Ronan wordlessly along a path through the village. The doors to the homes are open, but the houses themselves are empty even though fires burn in the hearths. We turn to the south and pass a graveyard. The gravestones are new, cut from the same shining white marble as the temple. They reach back into an alcove in the hillside.
Ronan heads into the alcove, the torch lighting the way. There’s a passage at the back, a narrow gap that must lead into a natural cave. I feel a strange compulsion as we approach it. The sickle in my hands is drawn to it almost magnetically. I feel as if it would fly towards the gap if I let it go.
But I can’t let it go. It feels like a part of me, like an extension of my arm. It feels like the tendrils of my shadow, like somethingI could shape and wield at a great distance if I reached out with my power.
The torch casts strange shadows on the walls of the cave as we enter, wrong shadows, the same kind I noticed in the Guild when I found it. The shadows seem to stretch and move of their own accord, becoming figures then monsters then shadows again, always moving in pairs.
We come around a bend, and the chamber opens suddenly into a space the size of the temple above.
And at the back, right where the altar would be, is a door.
I snap awake, my ears suddenly filled with the noise of the inn. Larus and Taran are standing over us, watching us with grave concern.
I turn and see Ronan’s eyes snap open. “You were there too.”
“I followed when you went under.”
“The door. Do you think it’s—”
“The tomb. Yes.”
“What,” Quinn starts, pausing for emphasis. “Thefuckwas that?”
“Are you alright?” asks Larus.
“Your disguise,” says Taran, hissing at Ronan to conceal his face. He must have blocked him from view while we were gone. “You were out a lot longer that time. You stopped speaking, stopped moving,” says Taran.
I reach for the sickle again, and he grabs my arm to stop me. “Don’t worry,” I say. “It won’t happen again. It told us what it needed to.”
“No one is going to tell me what the fuck is going on?” says Quinn.
“It’s theirdestiny,” says Seth, rolling his eyes. “After everything we went through to get that damn thing, of course it only responds to them.”
“Everythingwewent through? You did nothing!” Taran turns to Seth, his hand curling into a fist.
“Oh, don’t start this again,” says Seth, picking at his nails. “I’m a fire-born. I’m not made for digging. Besides, it wasn’tyourancestors we had to grave rob. That was very traumatic for me, you know.”
“Grave robbing?” says Quinn.
