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THE STONE SLAB COVERING the entrance to the tomb rose to reveal a wild, overgrown garden of massive flowers—some of them taller than Cyrele. They blocked out much of the view of whatever lay beyond them, allowing only glimpses of the ceiling and walls, themselves covered in thick vines. And as for the ground, there was a very abrupt transition between the stone floor that Cyrele stood on and the foliage-covered dirt beyond the threshold into the tomb.
This was meant to be the queen’s prison? Surely the flowers could not have been there when Maelstrom Shilanar had first locked Amese inside. And yet, given that the writing on the lever suggested immortality lay inside this temple, colossal flowers were perhaps not such an odd choice of décor.
“Come here,” Matiser said, and the magic he’d saturated the air with responded by shoving Cyrele towards where he stood near the tomb’s entrance, just hard enough that she barely kept her footing.
She didn’t dawdle after that, scurrying over towards the prince with her head down. His hand reached out to grab her arm at just above the elbow, in an uncomfortably tight grip that let him pull her along as he stepped inside the tomb. The feel of his magic around her was suddenly pushed back, replaced by...something else. Some heavy, magical force that made her limbs want to sink down to the ground.
A sharp intake of breath came from behind them, as Avenah’s footsteps crunched against the foliage. “What a trick,” he said, wonder filling his voice. “This is not the queen’s tomb at all—this is the vault!”
...no. No, it couldn’t be—the glyphwriting had suggested she would lead the princes into a trap by coming here, not that it would lead them to their very desire. Was the writing a misdirection? Had the glyphwriting triad assumed any glyphwriter who came here with a Karit was working with them and disguised the real vault door as if it were a trap to avoid? After everything she had gone through, had she unwittingly given the princes what they wanted?
“Are you certain?” Matiser asked.
“Don’t be obtuse, Matiser. You can feel its power as well as I can. You’re just refusing to believe what your own senses tell you.”
“Which is sensible, considering that the first temple is designed around tricking our senses.”
“That’s different and you know it,” Avenah insisted. “The temple traps were designed to reflect the kind of power that’s granted by the temple’s vault. The first vault grants mind powers so the first temple plays mind games. The last temple grants immortality—why expect tricks here?”
Matiser glanced back at his cousin incredulously. “Your own theory is that the vault door was disguised to look like the queen’s tomb—which means there’s a trick at play here either way.”
A rumble of stone sounded from behind them and Cyrele turned her head back to find the stone slab dropping back over the entrance to the tomb—or the vault, or whatever this was—blocking the way out. Which meant, vault or not, this was a trap after all. Oh, good...and also bad, because Cyrele was just as caught in it as the princes.
“Look Cyrele,” Avenah said with a grin, when any normal person would’ve felt at least a little trepidation at being locked inside a magical tomb. “It seems you’re going to be stuck attaining immortality right alongside us.”
Coming from him, that somehow sounded like a more serious threat than dying down here. Then again, the chances of the magic working properly were practically non-existent—take your immortality and rot, the lever had said. And suddenly, Cyrele felt a stirring of dread for what she was about to put herself through, all to stop the princes from attaining their goal: to become immortal god-kings, apparently.
Matiser shook his head. “This wasn’t the plan.”
“We can hardly throw her out now,” Avenah said. “Don’t think I didn’t notice you trying to stop the door from closing with your powers, my ever-stubborn cousin. I’d thought you would’ve learned by now.”
“It was instinctive,” Matiser muttered to himself, though the words echoed loudly enough for them to hear him anyway. “I know the vault entrances don’t bend to our power.”
“Oh, so you admit that we’re inside a vault now?”
“Shut up.”
Just as Avenah opened his mouth to continue the bickering, the plants around them suddenly shifted, somehow leaning to the side to open up a path before them...one that revealed some kind of throne with a body draped over it. An emaciated body, though the flesh hadn’t yet rotted off the bone—which didn’t make sense. How could a body this fresh exist inside a temple that had been lost for centuries?
Matiser’s grip on her arm tugged her forward with him as he approached the throne, giving her a better view of the body. It was masculine in appearance and unclothed except for jewelry every bit as rich as the ones worn by the Karits. In fact, Cyrele had never seen anyone except a Karit wear quite so many golden bangles...and was that glyphwriting inscribed on one of them?
Cyrele leaned forward to get a better look, Matiser finally releasing his grip on her arm as she did so. The bangle in question looked strikingly similar to Senna’s vitality-draining bangle, except the glyphwriting appeared on the outside rather than the inside. And the metal seemed rather tight against the wrist...because, Cyrele realized as she focused on the places where the bangle touched its wearer, the metal was actually embedded into the skin. Almost as if it had partially melted into the flesh.
And the glyphs themselves...they did contain the words ‘drain power and vitality’, much like Senna’s bangle did, but there was a difference. Senna’s bangle drained power and vitality for the wearer, while this bangle drained power and vitality from the wearer. Rather than augmenting the wearer’s strength, this bangle stole it.
Who was this person and why had this been done to him? Cyrele couldn’t help glancing at his face, wondering if his corpse still bore any signs of the torment he’d been through—to find that his eyes were open and looking at her.
#
CYRELE FLINCHED BACK at the realization that two bloodshot eyes were boring holes into her out of the emaciated face of the somehow still alive body propped against the throne. Avenah had no such compunctions, pushing past her and leaning forward to get a good look at the man’s face. The man on the throne responded by flickering his eyes in Avenah’s direction, but the rest of his body—even the rest of his head—remained eerily motionless. As if he hadn’t the strength to move anything more than his eyeballs.
How was he still alive?
But then, perhaps this was what ‘take your immortality and rot’ meant—that the magic of the temple prevented him from dying, but the bangle and perhaps the lack of subsistence left him merely hanging onto a single thread of life.
“Who are you...” Matiser muttered as he circled the throne, eyeing it as if it held some hint of the man’s identity. This must have been a Karit, of course—one who’d fallen into the glyphwriting triad’s trap—but Matiser must’ve wanted to know which Karit. Which member of his own family, thought dead, had he discovered alive and suffering?
“Come now, we both know who this must be,” Avenah said.
“That’s speculation,” Matiser shot back. “I want evidence.”
“Who else could it possibly be? He’s entrapped by glyphwriting, which means this happened to him after the Order finished working on the temples. One Maelstrom went missing during his reign, the body never found. And no one else even knew where the fourth temple was.”
Matiser stopped scrutinizing the throne and gave Avenah an inscrutable look. “How could he have fallen prey to the traps he himself had commissioned?”
“A dozen of the greatest glyphwriters in history made those traps. Why expect them to have more loyalty to him than Cyrele does to us?”
They were talking about the first Maelstrom. Shilanar. The man who’d eradicated the old Order and all of its knowledge, leaving future generations to stumble in the dark.
Cyrele looked back at the gaunt figure in the throne. Was this truly the same terrible Maelstrom who’d cast his shadow over her Order for centuries?
Avenah turned back to his emaciated predecessor, meeting the man’s eyes with a cruel smirk. “Can you understand me, old man? Look how low you’ve fallen. All the power in the world at your fingertips and you were outwitted by a cadre of glyphwriters who’d need an hour to blow out so much as a candle.”
Was Avenah...gloating over the first Maelstrom?
“And do you know what’s ironic?” Avenah continued, clearly having fun—though Cyrele couldn’t fathom how he had the audacity to provoke the infamous Shilanar, weakened state or no. “If only you’d shared your knowledge of this temple with your family, instead of the foreigners who stabbed you in the back, you might never have been in this position in the first place. But now that I am the Maelstrom, now that I feel the power of this temple beginning to take root inside me, I don’t feel like saving a man who denied me my right to eternal life.”
“Are you finished?” Matiser asked dryly. “Because our attention would be better spent on ensuring that we don’t end up like him.”
“We won’t,” Avenah said, sounding unreasonably confident in his words. “The bangle with the glyphwriting is obviously the reason why he’s like this. That’s why it piqued Cyrele’s interest. But do you see anyone in here with us who could put such a bangle on us? No. We’re alone here. Which means we need only stay in this chamber long enough to absorb the temple’s immortality and then we’ll have won.”
“It can’t possibly be this easy,” Matiser argued. “All Cyrele had to do was pull a lever—”
“—and if she hadn’t read the temple’s glyphwriting, she wouldn’t have known to do it. Or that the vault was hidden behind a prison door. The only reason it feels easy is because we have a glyphwriter here making it seem easy. Shilanar didn’t have the same luxury, as he’d already killed all of his glyphwriters by the time he fell into this trap.”
“Then who put the bangle on him?” Matiser asked.
Avenah opened his mouth, then paused before closing it again. Because of course, Matiser was right. Cyrele knew that better than either of the princes could. But she was long past the point of warning them.
I don’t know, Avenah finally responded into their minds, before switching back to the spoken word. “But whoever they were, they’re long gone! I know we walked in here with caution because this temple was a mystery to us, but we’ve conquered the mystery, Matiser. Can we not revel in our victory a little?”
“We can revel when we get home,” Matiser said, unmoved.
And that was when Cyrele noticed it: a trinkle of blood flowing down the throne’s armrest until it seeped into the dirt. She couldn’t see Shilanar’s wound from where she stood, but he was bleeding.
Your blood shall water our garden, your bones shall guard our tomb—both this temple and the third temple had those words carved into their walls. And the first Maelstrom’s blood was very much watering the dirt where this gargantuan garden grew, the flowers larger than any Cyrele had ever seen...possibly because they were feeding on the blood of an immortal.
The plant life around her suddenly seemed sinister...but also majestic. The glyphwriting triad had somehow managed to weave a living garden into their temple traps, something Cyrele could never have imagined was possible. And now this garden would be the end of the Karits—all of the Karits.
Because so long as the princes didn’t escape this temple, no one would be able to compel her to open the first temple. Regardless of what happened to her down here, the era of the Maelstroms was over.
Then suddenly Matiser’s attention shifted to her. “It will take days to absorb the power,” he told Avenah, even while looking at her. “There’s no sense in keeping her awake to make trouble while we don’t need her.”
Before Cyrele could process more than her alarm at the prospect of the princes keeping her asleep whenever they didn’t specifically want something from her, a fogginess began overtaking her mind. The effort needed to keep her eyes open grew too great, her limbs grew too heavy...and then she knew nothing.