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THE DAWNING REALIZATION that Cyrele had just watched someone disintegrate before her eyes left her frozen in horror. She couldn’t even feel relief that man she’d been so afraid of was gone, not when he’d met such a gruesome end while saving another person’s life—while potentially saving all of their lives, given that they needed Kamene to control the storm. Then she felt a hand grasp her arm as Ninesh started dragging her down the hallway.
“There’s no time to waste, glyphwriter,” he said.
And logically she understood that they had to go, that the storm was beginning to drift through the doorway after them—but there was a part of her that couldn’t understand how she was supposed to continue on as if nothing had happened.
And yet, that was what everyone else was doing. Kamene blazed forward in a bid to distance herself from the storm even as Senna called for her to be careful, to remember that there were traps hidden under the temple’s illusions. Enosis wisely followed after Senna’s cautious steps. And the very end was Cyrele, only moving because Senna’s last remaining guard was making her move.
She knew nothing about him except for his name. And for two of his fellow guards, she hadn’t even known that much—and shouldn’t she have? True, they’d threatened her...but three men had died down here, when it could very much have been someone else who’d died in their place. Didn’t that deserve at least some small measure of respect?
A yelp sounded from up ahead. But when Cyrele looked for the threat, she couldn’t see one...but she also couldn’t see Kamene.
Senna cursed. “I told that fool to be careful!”
“We need her,” Ninesh said. “Without her, none of us will leave here alive.”
“Well, we can’t very well go after her, can we? Not without jumping into whatever trap she’d caught herself up in.”
“Your highness,” Ninesh said, sounding resigned. “We have no choice. We need her.”
Dread coursed through Cyrele. This would be how they died, wouldn’t it?
When she’d made the decision to come here, it had been a sacrifice she’d understood she would probably have to make—her safety for the chance to make a difference. And she’d made that difference. But a part of her had held onto the hope that maybe, by some miracle, she wouldn’t meet a terrible fate in exchange.
That hope was certainly dwindling now. Even if they navigated past the traps to reach an exit, they couldn’t leave without Kamene’s power. Yet even if they found Kamene, the princess had already struggled with the bits of the storm leaking into the temple. What if she failed again? Cyrele could picture their probable future so clearly—getting pincered between the full storm outside and the part of the storm creeping through the temple’s interior, even as Kamene was powerless to stop the electrified clouds from sweeping over them until they too disintegrated into dust.
“Damnation,” Senna said, quietly, as if to herself. Then she raised her voice. “Very well. We’re going after her.”
Ninesh moved from Cyrele’s side and knelt down so he could stick his head through the floor—evidently he’d noticed which illusion Kamene had fallen through—but he rose back up with a shake of his head. “It’s too dark to see.”
Cyrele began lifting the scrap of cloth she was using as a light, ready to offer it to him—
“Don’t bother,” Senna interrupted. “Darkness is part of the illusion. A light won’t help. The only way to find out what’s down there is to go.”
As Senna crouched so she could lower one foot through the floor, evidently ready to lead the way, Ninesh called out, “Wait! You should not go first. First should be...” His eyes fell on Enosis. “You.”
The unspoken implication sat heavy. Senna was a princess, Ninesh was her confident and protector, Cyrele was a glyphwriter...but Enosis, even before her mistress had drained the life out of her, was the most expendable person here. Much like Cyrele had been expendable when she’d first been given to Kamene, the justification that had forced her into exile in a foreign land and placed her at the mercy of the all-powerful Karits.
An indignant fury rose up in Cyrele at the thought, washing past her fear for long enough to make her say, “No. I should go first.”
“You’re too valuable,” Ninesh immediately protested.
“My glyphwriting abilities are why I should go first. All I need is something to use as a platform or a stepping stone, which I can then use to control my descent. Rather than plummeting after Kamene, I can travel slowly enough to call up to you and warn you about where I’m going. You would get no benefit at all from sending Enosis first. If we can’t hear Princess Kamene shouting up to us from wherever she is, I don’t see how Enosis would be any different.”
Ninesh didn’t look happy, but he turned to Senna for her final decision. Senna nodded her affirmation almost immediately.
And that was that. Senna pulled out some sort of stone tablet from her satchel for Cyrele to use as a platform. Inscribing some glyphs on it and on the floor next to the illusion, Cyrele instructed her platform to descend from the level of the floor...and then she was disappearing beneath the illusion.
As she’d been warned, it was too dark to see, but she could reach out her hands and feel the smooth edges of the walls around her. Cyrele ran her fingers along the side to find that the walls were circular, as if she was inside some kind of tunnel...and then, her platform started scraping against the side of the walls. Because the tunnel was no longer taking her straight down, but rather, curving to the side.
Feeling for the glyphs she’d etched, Cyrele quickly corrected course to account for the change in direction. “It’s like a chute of some kind,” she called up. “It should be possible to slow yourself down by pushing against the walls.”
“Acknowledged,” came Senna’s reply. “We’ll use that to follow after you. Alright everyone, try not to fall on the glyphwriter...”
Then soon enough, scuffles echoed down the chute as the others began climbing down. Cyrele turned her attention to controlling her platform, adjusting her trajectory every time the chute curved. By the time she realized she could no longer hear the sounds of the others following behind her and called out for them, they were either too far away to hear her...or unable to respond.
#
THE CHUTE DEPOSITED Cyrele inside what looked like some sort of indoor jungle—but how could a jungle grow down in the depths of the temple? There was no sunlight here. The room was decently lit by a bright glow coming from beyond the trees, but surely that was not enough of a substitute to allow for plant growth.
Was this an illusion like the traps had been?
Perhaps Senna would know the answer, but Cyrele had no idea what had happened to her. Or any of the others. Would they find their way to her if only she waited? Could she afford to waste time here while the storm continued to creep through the temple?
But running from the storm could only get her so far until there was nowhere left for her to run to. She needed another option. And her only area of expertise was glyphwriting. Even though the complexity of the glyphwriting around her ran up against her limitations, if there was any miracle here that could save her, it would be found among the temple’s glyphwriting. That was her only chance.
Ignoring the jungle before her, Cyrele kept to the walls of the chamber, skimming through passages of glyphwriting in the hopes that she would identify something useful. One odd word stood out, made up of characters similar to the glyphs for ‘map’ and ‘sense’. The rest of the sentence read something like, ‘The map-sense chamber below is not visible when the jungle is visible.’
That implied an intricate set of glyphwork that could make the jungle invisible. No doubt it would be too complex for her to decipher even if she found it. Perhaps it would suffice to make an adjustment here?
Cyrele tried chiseling out the word ‘not’ in the sentence, changing it to, ‘The map-sense chamber below is visible when the jungle is visible.’ Hopefully, that would be enough to find this mystery chamber without trying to puzzle out the intricacies of the jungle itself.
Of course, there was no immediate indication that it worked. But Cyrele could hardly tell if the entrance to this map-sense room had suddenly appeared somewhere, given that she didn’t even know where it was supposed to be. Perhaps there was a hint written somewhere else on this wall?
A quick perusal only implied that the entrance was somewhere inside the jungle—odd, given that the jungle and map-sense chamber weren’t supposed to be visible at the same time. But she had no time to wonder what the glyphwriters of old had been thinking. She simply had to search for the hopefully-revealed chamber.
Cyrele headed for the jungle, the air growing increasingly humid with each step. She reached out to touch the first giant leaf in her path, half expecting her hand to pass through it—but instead her fingers brushed against a smooth, moist leaf. Either this jungle wasn’t an illusion after all...or the temple’s magic was capable of mind games so complex that she couldn’t trust her own sense of reality.
Beyond the first layer of trees, she noticed a bright light coming from some sort of indentation in the ground. Another few steps revealed that it was less of an indentation and more of a deep, sunken room, with stairs spiraling down the sides. And at the bottom...
...was not a singular light, but a myriad small ones that formed into shapes, coming together in a style that was reminiscent to a map—except that it was three-dimensional, more of a model than a map. A model made out of light. Was this what ‘map-sense’ meant? How was this even possible?
A marvel of magical technology sat before her, the likes of which she might’ve spent decades studying in another life. But in this one, she could stay for only so long before the Maelstrom’s storm would overtake this entire room.
Cyrele descended to the bottom of the stairs, approaching the model of light. She studied it in an effort to figure out where she was, what routes she might take to escape...but then she realized that a few of the lights were flickering.
On impulse, she touched one of those flickering lights—and the shape of the model suddenly fell apart into a mass of swirling lights, which suddenly resolved into another image. One that look startlingly like Kamene, lying with her eyes closed in a field of flowers.
What was this? Could that flickering light truly represent Kamene’s current location? But how would she have found herself in a field of flowers? To think that such things could truly exist in the subterranean parts of this temple.
Cyrele watched the figure of the princess continue to lie still—was she even alive? But no, there was the rise and fall of her chest. So was she unconscious? Sleeping? Injured? Regardless of the answer, she would be dead if she didn’t escape.
Then the lights unwound from the shape of Kamene’s figure and transformed back into the model. Cyrele counted five flickering lights, enough that they could account for herself, Enosis, Kamene, Senna, and Ninesh. If she’d correctly understood what meant, then everyone else in the temple was dead. But for the five of them that still lived, Cyrele could determine their exact positions.
Yet the very notion that she could check on everyone inside this temple with this map-sense chamber was ridiculous. A part of her believed she was trapped in some elaborate illusion, perhaps lying unconscious herself somewhere. She might’ve landed in an illusory trap the moment she fell from the chute. Or perhaps the falling ceiling that Kamene had brought down on them had knocked her out and everything afterwards was merely a dream.
Still, it wasn’t impossible that the old Order was capable of this level of advanced magical technology. But then, the sheer magnitude of what they’d lost in Purge...she might’ve learned how to create glyphwork like this at school, if only Shilanar had been a better man.
Touching the next flickering light, it morphed itself into Senna, walking on what looked like thin air and looking not in the least perturbed by it—she was certainly far more comfortable with the temple’s illusion magic than someone who no longer had the power to protect herself had a right to be.
Another light showed Ninesh, stumbling forward down a hall with a limp, jaw clenched tight as the deadly clouds of the storm gained on him. Cyrele felt her heart hammering as she realized that he would never make it.
But why was the storm so close to him, yet not to Cyrele? Or was it closer to her than she thought? With a sudden fear, she climbed back out of the map-sense chamber, hurrying out of the jungle to see how much of the storm had leaked out of the chute—but there was no trace of the storm to be found. Why not? How could it have caught up to Ninesh but not so much as trickled into the room behind Cyrele? Did it have something to do with why the five of them had ended up in different places?
Whatever the reason, she needn’t immediately flee. But on her way back to the map-sense, she caught sight of something white peeking out through the jungle’s groundcover. A shiver passed through her as she realized what she was looking at—a pile of bones.
Her mind immediately flashed to the animated skeletons that had attacked her in the third temple, yet these disassembled bones showed no signs of reanimation. And more importantly, even as she picked them up to examine them, she couldn’t find a single glyph carved into them. But she did find sharp cuts chipped into the bone, resembling the teeth marks of some carnivorous creature.
A sense of foreboding came over her as she eyed the jungle around her, wondering if there was something out there. Surely the trapped floor hadn’t deposited her down here because it was safe. Working with a magical technology like the map-sense had made her feel comfortable, but she couldn’t afford to forget that danger could spring out at her at any moment.
Still, she could hardly take off running in a random direction just because something inside this room might hurt her. Every room could hurt her. And the map-sense provided too great an opportunity for learning the layout of the temple for her to pass up.
Resolving to stay vigilant, she climbed back down towards the light and touched the last flickering light. And the map-sense rearranged itself to show Enosis’ figure slumped against the wall of an empty hallway. For a moment, Cyrele feared she was dead, before noticing her eyes flicker open. She must have been exhausted, having no true moment to rest since Kamene had stolen her life force.
Enosis should never have come here. And yet she had, all because Cyrele had thrown herself into the prospect of finding the first temple and sabotaging it beyond the Karit’s ability to repair. All because Kamene had snatched the opportunity to improve her own situation. And no one had given the least thought to what it would mean for Enosis, who couldn’t rightly be left behind, but didn’t truly belong on this journey either.
A sudden sense of guilt had Cyrele reaching out to touch the image, almost as if some impulsive part of her subconscious had decided she could reach through and pull Enosis to safety—then a light flashed across the screen and Enosis’ figure jolted, her head rising to stare into empty air.
What had happened? Had some temple trap activated? Would Cyrele would be forced to watch Enosis fall into it?
Except...the light had flashed just where Cyrele had touched the image. Was it possible that Cyrele might’ve had something to do with it?
She reached out to touch the image again, and another light flashed. Enosis flinched—oh, but how could Cyrele let her know what was happening? How could she use this to help Enosis rather than frighten her further?
Cyrele trailed her finger along the image until she’d written her own name in Viemian. This had Enosis narrowing her eyes in calculation rather than pulling away in fear, so Cyrele repeated the action once more. Then she checked Enosis’ location against hers on the map-sense and began drawing arrows that would lead Enosis to her. The message must have gotten through, because Enosis rose to her feet and followed, leaning against the wall for support.
The image of Enosis then shifted back into the blueprint provided by the map-sense...except this time, there was one new flickering light inside the temple, still far off. As if someone else had arrived, someone capable of surviving the storm—which of course, made for a rather restricted list of suspects. None of whom Cyrele wanted to find her here.
Forcing herself to touch the light, she held her breath as the lights resolved into an image. But rather than the most dreaded possibilities, such as the princes or the Maelstrom, the image instead resolved into another familiar figure. One whose presence gave Cyrele an unexpected sense of hope.
Because it was Aralath.