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“Your light would come in handy right about now, Luc,” Nix said.
He couldn’t agree more, though it didn’t help to wish for it. He couldn’t cast anything, couldn’t call on anything. He shivered, and the sound of falling rocks made him freeze. “Lexa? What is the Edge?”
She snapped her fingers, lighting a fire between them, then opened her palm so the fire grew brighter. Then she tossed it, making more and more until globes of fire hovered in midair, lighting the landscape.
They stood at the ragged edge of a ravine, the bottom of which was obscured by a dense fog swirling around them, muting the sound. Incoherent muttering drifted like the fog, reaching Luc’s ears, and filling his head with every dark thought. It smelled terrible, and Luc covered his nose.
“What is that?”
“It isn’t bottomless,” Lexa said, as if in answer to his observation. “It’s a literal shit lake down there.”
Luc gagged.
Beyond where they stood were smooth pillars of stone rising from that formless nothing, and on each stood a soul, chained to the precarious surface. There was no relief there. No sitting, no lying down, only standing precariously to maintain one’s balance, smelling that awful stench.
“Do they jump?” Nix asked, his sleeve pressed against his mouth and nose.
“They try,” Lexa replied.
“Into a shit lake? Gross,” Luc said behind his sleeve.
“See the chain?”
Luc noted the manacle shackled around the limb of a soul on one of the closest pillars.
“They jump,” Lexa said, “and the chain catches, pulling out the limb from its normal position. Painful to just hang there with a broken limb.”
The screams were clearer then—far away but present.
Luc shuddered. “Why is Cumbria here?”
“You will see,” she said.
“How will we find him?” Nix asked.
Lexa snorted and lifted her voice. “Zollah Cumbria. Present yourself.” The floating pillars shifted, moving, shuffling, the souls clinging to their precarious perches with shouts and curses. When they stopped moving, one pillar floated closer to the edge, though not close enough for the prisoner to find a way from his perch.
The prisoner was strange—a man, or it had been once, only now it was as if it was made of four sides. One of the sides looked at them, its wild eyes devoid of color but for red ringing its irises. Its hair was a horrible mess of white with traces of copper. The creature looked like a beggar, ragged clothing hanging off its form. It licked its lips when it saw them, but then its eyes unfocused, looking through them.
“Where is she?” it asked. “Where is my Alea?”
“Alea Maximora?” Nix asked.
The creature yelled at them, its mouth open wide, its jaw distended. Then it chanted, “She is mine! Mine! Mine!”
“Not you,” Lexa ordered. “You are the shade.”
The creature screeched at her, before its head and body twisted, attempting to align the head with the torso that Lexa wanted, all while the pillar swayed in the expanse.
Eventually the shifting stopped, and a man, a real man, stood before them. He was handsome, with auburn hair covered with a crown of silver and sapphire, and gray eyes—familiar eyes—sad. He was dressed in fine garments, his hands at his sides. He was young, though not too young to have been unaware of the world.
“You called, Mistress of Death?” the man asked Lexa.
“Zollah Cumbria, these are my brothers, gods of light and dark.”
The man nodded.
“Did you know Alea Maximora?” Luc asked, cutting right to the heart of why they were there.
