Page 61 of Keldori By Daybreak

Orla, meanwhile, stepped ahead of me to push open the heavy wooden door.

The hot air of the antechamber pushed my hair forward as it escaped ahead of us into the cavernous room. The circular space made me feel like I was sitting at the bottom of a massive grain silo. Buttresses supported the distant ceiling, interspersed with streams of Skal that spilled down the walls with a slippery hiss and disappeared through grates along the room’s perimeter.

At the far end of the circular room, a copper gate glinted against the stone wall. A series of levers jutted from the wall at its base.

“Is that the dam?” I asked. “That copper wall?”

“Yes, I think so.” Orla frowned at the walls in the ambient blue light of the falling Skal. Ivy obscured sections of the stone in sheets of leaves, but charred scars peaked out between the vines. “This is where my people settled when we first came to Skalterra. Quill himself helped carve it, but he disappeared one day, so we moved to the mountain to keep a better look over the Frozen God.”

“He disappeared?” I repeated.

“Yeah, it’s a strange—oh.” Orla’s voice cracked before she could finish the thought. I followed her gaze to where it had landed in the center of the room.

I reached for her hand, and she accepted my touch, her chin trembling.

Most of the blackened marks around the room looked like the haphazard marks of battle, but the beauty of the room’s architecture had distracted me from where bones, only halfway reduced to ash and still recognizable as horribly human, sat at the room’s center.

“Orla,” I whispered. “Your parents…”

Orla shook her head. “My mother and father, Ferrin brought their bodies home. But the Grimguards—”

Orla let go of my hand.

Her parents hadn’t been Ferrin’s only victims that night.

Slow footsteps echoed behind us, and Ciarán, with his cowl pulled down away from his face, staggered forward. Orla and I parted to make room for him, and he limped the length of the room to kneel on the darkened flagstone in front of the copper wall. He scraped at the residual ash with tentative fingers.

An unfathomable grief pulled at my mind, and a tiny voice echoed in my head, though I didn’t think he meant for me to overhear.

“Mother. Father.” Ciarán pressed his hand against the floor and bowed his head. “Mother. Father. Mother. Father.”

I wanted to go to him, to console him, to hold him, but the overwhelming weight of his grief rooted me to the spot. It hurt to breathe through the tightening in my throat, and my eyes burned with the tears that Ciarán refused to let fall.

His thoughts persisted, repeating those two words over and over in his head and mine, until they dissolved into a new mantra.

“Alone. Alone. Alone. A—”

Ciarán’s voice cut off as Orla dropped beside him. She wrapped her long arms around Ciarán and let her head rest against his shoulder. He tensed at the touch.

“I’m sorry,” Orla rasped. “And I’m sorry I stopped you from hurting Ferrin and you got hurt and—”

“Where are their heads?” The words scraped at the back of his throat, as if it took him all the effort in the world to drag them forth.

“What?” Orla pulled away.

“My mother,” Ciarán hissed, “and my father. Where are their heads?”

My vision shifted as Ciarán’s quiet rage blurred the line that separated my consciousness from his. Instead of watching Ciarán and Orla, I was looking down at the ashen, skeletal remains of Ciarán’s parents.

My hand—no, Ciarán’s hand stroked at the years-old soot. From behind his eyes, I could make out fragmented bones that hadn’t quite burned hot enough to break down. Femurs, vertebrae, ribs—but no skulls.

My churning stomach snapped me back into my own head.

“Their heads, Orla.” Ciarán’s whisper was more broken, more desperate, this time.

“He brought them home.” Orla had the sense to remove her arms from around Ciarán, and she kept her head bowed. “As proof, I think. Or as trophies.”

“And what did he do with them?”