I tried to scream, but I couldn’t. It was trapped in my throat, like with the Ögonen when they’d caught me in the Catacombs of Fables back at the Mimirin. But this time I was paralyzed too my limbs frozen in place as I gasped in the darkness.
But suddenly there was light in the darkness. A green fog that I was flying above, and then I zoomed in toward it. None of it was of my own accord. Rather, I was being dragged along by some unknown force, pulled into the emerald cloud, which smelled of sulfur and ash.
My vision cleared. I couldn’t turn my head to look around, but behind me I heard something chasing after me. It made a thunderous roar, twisted with a painful shrieking.
Then I was plunging down, underneath the cloud and into cloud water. But that only lasted a moment, an icy few seconds where I couldn’t breathe, and then I was surging out, gasping for air as I flew up over a waterfall.
I was spinning, spiraling really, and the waterfall was below me, disappearing back into the darkness it had sprung from.
Suddenly I was falling again, and a grassy field came into view hundreds of meters below. I fell through the sky, where rust-red vultures circled, and I was plummeting toward the meadow. It was empty, except for three yellow flowers, and I closed my eyes shut, bracing for impact.
But instead, I landed on my back gently on the soft grass, and I opened my eyes to the bright blue sky above me. I was lying on the cliff in the ruins of Áibmoráigi again, and I was gasping for breath.
I sat up and scrambled back from the edge, frantically looking over my shoulders until I saw the Ögonen standing to the south of me. They looked like the ones I had seen back at Merellä, with the light shining through their semitransparent ocher skin.
They had no mouth but wide dark eyes, and they stared down at me. Slowly, they raised their slender arm and pointed toward the south side of Áibmoráigi. I followed their fingertip, and I saw a white woolly elk walking toward the south side of the city.
I got to my feet, and I followed the elk, walking the past the Ögonen and following the winding paths through the crumbling stones. Beyond what Indu had shown me when he’d brought me into the First City.
And there at the far southern point, where the bluffs ended against the steep mountain face, there was an arched stone bridge spanning over a steep canyon. The woolly elk paused before the bridge, looking back over its shoulder, the cinnamon-red eyes on me. When it started walking again, I followed it over the bridge.
I didn’t look down, because I knew if I did, I wouldn’t be able to take another step. The stone bridge was narrow with no parapets on the side, nothing to prevent me from falling over the edge and down, down, down … I took a deep breath and slowly made my way across.
The albino elk was walking faster, not quite trotting, but before I could reach the other side of the bridge, the elk had started to round the mountain. I ran, the bridge shaking underneath me, and I stumbled at the end and fell onto the plateau. The grass and dirt softened my fall, and I got to my feet and ran onward, but I didn’t see the woolly anymore.
On this side of the bridge, across the canyon that separated me from the ruins of Áibmoráigi, the air smelled sweeter, and I could hear the sound of rushing water echoing off the cliffside and mountains.
I chased after where the elk had been, but there was no sign of it. Just a wide grassy ledge curving around the mountain. It was angled, with rocks and small boulders hiding in long grass for me to trip over or slip on as I scrambled along.
When I finally rounded the mountain, my bare feet slipping in the mud, I found myself face-to-face with a waterfall. It was tall, with the water coming from a spring far above me, but the way it spread across the rocks, it didn’t seem that heavy. There was an ethereal, almost gossamer quality to the water.
If I had to guess, I was about a quarter of the way from the top of the waterfall. The fast-moving water had cut through the land around me, and the pool at the bottom of the falls was hundreds of meters below.
When the coursing water broke over the ledge, it flowed down the mountainside to join the chain of lakes in the valley below. There was nowhere else to go. The elk had disappeared into thin air.
The bridge had connected Áibmoráigi with a bumpy path winding around a mountain ending in a broad plateau jutting out from sheer mountainface so that it seemed more like an island floating in the sky. It curved around the mountain, and it ended when the waterfall cut through it.
I stepped back, trying to see if there was anything I had missed, and that’s when I really saw how familiar and beautiful the waterfall looked. I had never seen this one before, but I had seen another like it, in the faded pages of Mr. Tulin’s old nature magazines. Catarata velo de la novia in Peru, which roughly translated to the Bridal Veil Waterfall in English, had gotten its name because when you looked at it from the right angle, the falling water made a silhouette like a woman standing in her bridal veils.
And that’s what I saw now, but not a woman in her bridal veils.
“‘Remember to find the woman in the long white dress,’” I whispered.