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Chapter Fourteen

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CYRELE SLOWLY DRIFTED back into consciousness, becoming increasingly aware of an uncomfortable pressure around her left wrist. She thought to use her other arm to dislodge whatever was causing her discomfort...but as she tried to move her arm, it snagged against some sort of rough-textured restraints that scraped against her skin. If only she could remember where she was, what she was doing, before she fell asleep, she was sure it would all make sense...

Her eyelids felt heavy, but she managed to open them to behold a blurry sea of green and brown before her eyes. Blinking her vision back into focus, she realized that she was surrounded by giant plants...and restrained by vines curling around her body. The wrist that had been bothering her had a bangled locked tightly around it.

It was the sight of the glyphwriting along the bangle that finally had all of her memories crashing back into her—the vault holding the power of immortality, the first Maelstrom imprisoned inside of it, the princes forcing her into a magical sleep against her will. Which meant that she had fallen unconscious inside the vault designed to bring anyone trying to claim its immortality to the same end as the first Maelstrom.

Her heart beat quickened, because clearly, the trap had sprung within the time that she’d lost. And now Cyrele was pinned against the ground, somehow wearing a bangle of an uncomfortably similar make to the one worn by the barely-alive first Maelstrom.

But what of the princes?

She tried to turn her head to look for them, but the vines held her so tightly that she couldn’t do move much more than her eyes. A sudden wave of helplessness swept through her. Would she truly end up sharing the fate of the Karits who’d strived for immortality? Would she be left to waste away in this chamber for eternity?

“Awake yet?” came Avenah’s voice from behind her. Evidently, he’d been close enough to hear her struggling with her restraints.

“Your highness?” Cyrele asked, the words coming out as a rasp.

“Ah, good,” he said, tone tense even as he aspired to his usual flippancy. “You might have noticed that we’re in a bit of a predicament. Matiser was right after all—you hear that, cousin? Your worrywart tendencies occasionally have a basis in reality.”

“I don’t care who was right, Avenah,” Matiser said, his exhausted voice drifting from somewhere to Cyrele’s left.

“Forgive him, he’s cranky because this chamber is draining him much faster than it’s draining me.” Avenah paused, then continued with a trace of bitterness. “Though that does answer the question of which of us is more powerful once and for all, doesn’t it? A trap like this would obviously neutralize the greatest threat first.”

Matiser groaned in frustration. “Being the primary target of energy-draining magic is not the boon you seem to think it is.”

“Nonetheless, this means that you, Cyrele, will be drained the slowest of all three of us. Placing you in the perfect position to break us out of this trap.”

Did he truly expect Cyrele to save them? Had he no self-awareness?

“The servants found with you in the first temple are safe,” Matiser added. “Avenah wanted them unharmed to use as leverage against you.”

Then Avenah pointedly clarified, “Yes, they’re safe for now. But they’ll only stay that way so long as you cooperate with us. If we don’t make it out of the temple, our guards are under orders to kill them.”

So there was some self-awareness at play after all. But it was the same threat Avenah was already using against her and with less teeth this time around—considering the drain on their life force and power, the princes would have chosen to speak with her using the least taxing method of communication available to them. That meant that they weren’t speaking mentally either because they wanted to conserve their energy...or because they couldn’t.

“I suggest you don’t take too long to plan your next course of action,” Avenah said. “You might experience the drain slower, but it will catch up with you if you dawdle.”

Would it? Cyrele might have been groggy—likely from the remnants of Matiser’s magic—but she felt like her energy was returning rather than draining away...and that may well have been because she still carried the protection scroll in the bag strapped to her side. The very same one that had protected her from the bangle that Kamene had inadvertently used to drain Enosis.

Of course, it wasn’t protecting her from the vines that kept her immobile. And unlike the princes, she hadn’t the ability to break free from her restraints even without the bangle working against her.

So what were her options? The only asset she had was glyphwriting. But assuming she could sufficiently move her hands even while tangled up in these vines, could she even reach her chisels? Or generate enough force to chisel instructions into the vines?

Experimentally, Cyrele tried to lift her left arm—and a wave of pain shot through not only her constricted wrist, but also the underside of her arm. Glancing down, Cyrele realized that the jagged ends of her mirror had perforated through the fabric of her bag and cut into her skin. She did have a faint memory of the glass cracking at some point during her frantic escape from the first temple. How fortunate the mirror hadn’t stabbed her sooner, in the middle of a life-and-death situation. 

She wasn’t particularly pleased about being stabbed now either, but the gash it had made in the fabric of her bag made the contents more reachable. Her chisels might not be much use against the vines while she was tied up but...the mirror itself might be. Or rather, the scarlet wax coating the back of the mirror might be. Because even if she hadn’t the strength to carve glyphs into the vines, she could cover the vines in scarlet wax and press glyphs into the softer material, whose magic would transfer the effect to whatever it was touching.

This time, Cyrele braced herself for the pain before she moved. Curling her arm just enough to grasp the protruding glass, she began using it to saw through more of the bag, pausing whenever she became too lightheaded. Eventually, the bag became tattered enough that she could catch a glimpse of the scarlet wax inside. She reached for the it, fighting off a wave of nausea instigated by the flareup of pain in her wrist. Tears gathered at her eyes as her fingers brushed against the wax, picking at the edges to peel it off the mirror.

The princes stayed blessedly silent throughout this process, letting her gather a chunk of scarlet wax in peace. It cost her another wave of pain to place the scarlet wax so that it lay on top of a cross-section of the vines—she had no strength left to spread it over the vines so that it would stick—and then twitches of discomfort as she used the glass in her hand to press glyphs into the wax.

Slowly, she spelled out the word for ‘disintegrate’ across the wax. The urge to rush was strong, for the vault’s immortality was seeping into her more and more with every moment. She had no notion of how long she’d been here already, no sense of how long the princes had left her unconscious before the trap had sprung. But there was one thing she did know: if she took too long now, all she would ever have to look forward to was an eternity down here, kept alive by nothing but the power of the temple.

Yet she couldn’t afford any mistakes. This glyph had to work. So she took her time, ensuring the glyph was accurate and that she didn’t accidently create a similarly written glyph—like ‘burn’, which would set fire to the vines that were currently wrapped around her body.

Then she was finally adding the last line needed to compete the glyph—and both the vines around and her and the glass in her hand dissolved before her. She was free. And as she propped up her body against her elbows, she saw that the princes weren’t.

No, both them lay trapped against the ground, well-secured by the vines. Avenah was watching her avidly, his body tense. And Matiser...his lifeless eyes stared out into space from a face that was already beginning to look gaunt.

“Us next,” Avenah said. “Remember, your friends will die if you don’t release us.”

Cyrele glanced down at cuts across the skin of her arm, wondering if she needed to treat them somehow...only to find that they were already healing. Which meant that...oh no. It meant that her body must have absorbed at least some portion of the vault’s power already. Panicked at the thought of what might happen to her as soon as the protection scroll left her person, she pulled out her finest chisel and started carving ‘disintegrate’ into the bangle around her wrist.

“Worry about that later and free me now,” Avenah insisted.

As the bangle disappeared off her wrist, Cyrele considered her next step. The power she’d absorbed from the vault wasn’t a weapon like Matiser’s ability to spontaneously send her into unconsciousness or Kamene’s ability to wield fire. But it meant she had far less to fear from both the temple traps and the prince’s guards than she had before, at least in terms of her life—she stopped herself from imagining all of the horrible things that could still happen to her body despite what it could withstand.

In any case, she wasn’t freeing the princes. Not when they were no longer merely all-powerful, but also immortal. She would have to rely on her own abilities to save Aralath and Enosis. If she couldn’t...well. There was no point in dwelling on it before she’d even tried.  

She slowly raised herself onto her feet and took a cautious step towards the exit, the edges of the broken mirror digging into her side—that dratted bag was still strapped to her side, wasn’t it? 

“Cyrele!” Avenah snarled with an edge of panic to his voice. “Don’t you dare walk out of here without me—my guards will splatter the blood of your friends across the ship’s deck!”

So the princes had left their hostages on their barge? In retrospect, it made sense—why give anyone, even the guards they’d trusted enough to travel with them to the fourth temple, access to the temple interior? At least finding Enosis and Aralath would be simple enough, once Cyrele managed to think of a way to leave the temple. Freeing them, on the other hand...

But she had to take it one step at a time. And of course, the next physical step she took towards the exit prompted another outburst from Avenah: “Can you even imagine the torment I’ll inflict on you if you don’t free me immediately? Cyrele!”

Avenah’s screams of rage followed her as she moved out of the vault, continuing as she perused the glyphwriting inside the tomb for a way to open the door—and found it. Once outside, she finally unstrapped the bag holding the mirror to her side and set it on the ground. She was done carrying around a broken artifact to remind herself of the fate that the powerful had tried to tie her to.

The note of panic in Avenah’s voice did remind her to hedge her bets against the future long enough to collect the remaining scarlet wax. Then she pulled the chamber’s lever so that the stone slab slowly lowered itself to block the door inside the vault...until the stone door finally shut and Avenah’s voice died down into nothing at all.