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“The cave that was the start of Naus Keep.”
His brows lifted, gaze finally landing on Náli. “Are you serious?”
In answer, Náli tackled him in a hug.
Mattias let out a quiet oof of surprise, but his balance never wavered, arms lifting to catch him easily. He stroked Náli’s loose hair, and pressed their cheeks together. “Can you come back, now? There’s something I want to show you.”
Náli closed his eyes, fingers clenched tight in the back of Mattias’s tunic, and pictured the other side. Imagined walking through a physical gate.
Sensation of spinning.
When he opened his eyes, his lungs filled with the familiar damp scent of the catacombs, and his eyes filled with the dim glow of lanterns, their light reflected eerily, as always, in the veins of diamonds that laced the cavern’s ceiling. He was seated, here, cross-legged as he’d been before, slumped back against Valgrind’s cool side, his breathing a steady bellows that lifted and lowered, lifted and lowered. The others, he saw, as he blinked his vision clear, stood at the edge of the well, looking down into it.
Mattias knelt beside him, one hand on Valgrind’s shoulder, the other on Náli’s. He smiled when Náli met his gaze, and his face seemed almost to glow, his skin bright and smooth, free from the constant grooves of stress.
Náli smiled in automatic response, seeing him like that. Seeing him happy – the happiest he’d appeared outside of the bed they’d shared the night before, when love and passion had managed to burn away his ever-present worry.
“Can you stand?” he asked.
Náli tsked. “Of course.” But he was surprised that he could. That he didn’t wobble and stumble and have to lean on Mattias, though he offered an arm for that purpose just in case. His power no longer lay at the bottom of the well; the lifelong tug-of-war between them was at a close, and Náli felt…he felt good. Strong, and steady, and humming faintly beneath his skin; he wanted to burst into a run, to work through a series of sword forms. To sling a leg over Valgrind’s back and take to the sky.
At the edge of the well, Einrih glanced over his shoulder, grinning. “Come and see, my lord.”
Unassisted, Náli crossed the floor and took up a stance beside Klemens. There, he gasped aloud. Because the well…the well was…
Clear.
He stared down into crystal-clear, translucent water, and the smooth stone basin at the bottom. He could see the dark veining in the pale granite, the ridges and stalagmites that marked it, unseen until this moment.
“We all blacked out for a bit,” Klemens said. “…After.” After the power shared with deep kisses. His tone squirmed away from the truth of it. “And when we woke up, the water was like this.”
Náli crouched down and trailed his fingers across the surface, watching the water ripple and swirl, clear as fine-made glass. “It must have been the magic that clouded it.” That was the only explanation.
It wasn’t as deep as he’d always thought, either. The pool he’d spent his whole life fearing looked benign, now. Positively inviting. He wiggled his fingers in it, and it was warm, for a first, the way a pool at the foot of a boiling fire mountain should have been, nearly as hot as the springs beneath the palace at Aeres.
Somewhere above, there came the patter of running footsteps.
Valgrind trumpeted.
“Fuck,” Klemens muttered, steel whispering over leather as he drew a knife.
Náli stood and turned to find Brigida poised at the top of the stairs, hair loose and fluttering as she came to a sudden stop, her eyes wide. She wore a dressing robe over a night rail, its lacy hem peeking through at the bottom, above slippers that had been the source of the light slap-slap-slap of her footfalls.
It was the middle of the night, and she’d come in a hurry. Alone, thankfully.
Náli called up to her. “Yes, can we help you?”
Someone – he thought it was Darri – snorted.
“You’re alive,” she said, like she’d expected him not to be.
“It would seem so.”
“The whole Keep’s been shaking and rattling,” she said, a little breathless. “It’s wakened the whole household. Your mother was threatening to send men down here, so I slipped away and came to warn you.”
Náli turned to look at his men; felt something send out a call in his chest, and echo against them; a feedback loop of power. “Did anyone feel anything?”
Shaken heads, bewildered glances.
