Roman followed Val through the under realm’s passages.
They walked routes that led downward, as if they were descending into yet another world below. One that was darker and older. When they reached a door carved with runes, Val brought out a key, hung from a chain around his neck. Another one of the five magical keys, Roman thought, watching as the door unlocked.
They continued onward. The air felt heavy and thick, almost reverent, and soon carried hints of sulfur and rotting flesh.
Roman reached out to steady himself on the wall and felt briars growing along the stone. He swallowed his gorge and wondered if Dacre’s permission had all been a ruse, and Val was taking Roman levels below to dispatch him.
Was it sweeter to kill someone after you had given them hope?
Roman shivered as the thorny passage at last opened to a wide, vast landscape. Yellow, gurgling pools emitted light from the stone floor, as well as releasing wisps of steam, and the ceiling was so high it was impossible to see. It almost felt as if Roman was standing beneath the night sky culled of stars, and he stared upward into those shadows, feeling small and homesick.
“Watch where you step,” Val said as he began to weave around the yellow pools, stirring the steam with his long strides and the flap of his cloak.
Roman hurried to keep up. The putridness of the air finally coaxed him to cough into his sleeve. He began to breathe through his mouth, his stomach churning with fear and nausea.
He wanted clean air. A cup of scalding hot coffee. Something to smooth away the discomfort in his chest and throat.
“No sudden movements,” Val said, his pace slowing.
“All right.” Roman stifled another cough.
Half a minute later, he understood why. Through the curls of sulfurous steam, a huge shadow of a wyvern loomed on the ground, as if waiting for them. An eithral, Roman realized with a sharp intake of breath. Its pronged wings were outstretched and soaking in the heat from the pools, its white-scaled body shining with iridescence. Its maw was closed, but long, needlelike teeth still protruded and gleamed like ice, and its uncanny red eyes were the size of Roman’s palm, one of them fixed upon him and his abrupt halt.
“Keep walking,” Val said in a low voice. “Slow and steady. Follow my approach to its left side.”
Approach? Roman wanted to protest, but he did as Val instructed. He eased into a walk and kept to Val’s shadow, and that was when he saw the saddle buckled to the eithral, nestled on its horn-ridged back between its wings.
“Are you bloody serious?” Roman said, his teeth clicking together as a shudder rippled through him. “How will you control it? There’s no bridle.”
Val began to haul himself up into the saddle with practiced ease. “Do you want to walk to Oath, or do you want to fly?”
A protest melted on Roman’s tongue. He didn’t know if he had the strength to pull himself up, to sit on the back of the very creature that had played a part in his wounds. But his legs were trembling—I can’t walk to Oath—and his heart was striking his chest like a hammer. He was both exhausted and electrified, and he finally thought of the poetic justice. That an eithral would carry him and his map to the city, where Dacre was destined to lose.
An eithral was about to fly him to Iris.
Roman followed Val’s path, pulling himself up the eithral’s side to the slope of the saddle. He settled on what felt like impossibility incarnate.
“Don’t let go,” Val said gruffly. “It’s always a bumpy takeoff.”
Roman grasped the edge of the leather saddle with a white-knuckled grip, pressing his knees inward until they ached. He felt in no way secure enough to be lifting off the ground astride one of Dacre’s not-so-mythical creatures. A creature that had caused fathomless devastation and pain and death.
He clenched his eyes shut. He struggled to hold his last meal down. Cold sweat was breaking out over his skin, but then he firmly told himself, Open your eyes.
Roman did, taking in his surroundings again. He would have never believed he would be here, in this moment, months ago. Weeks ago, even. And he wanted to soak it all in. He would have never believed that he would be in the realm below, beneath layer after layer of earth, in a world made of starless night and languid smoke, about to ride an eithral.
In that moment before flight, when the air took on a hush of awe and expectation, Roman heard Iris’s voice in his memory.
I find that I am leaning more on the side of impossibility these days. I am leaning toward the edge of magic.
Her words grounded him. He envisioned Iris typing by candlelight, as if she were his gravity.
Val withdrew a small flute, hanging on a chain, from beneath his shirt. He blew three long silver notes—they shimmered in the air like sunlight catching rain—and the eithral jerked its head up and began to flap its wings.
Of course. Roman nearly laughed. They’re controlled by an instrument. By music.
The eithral was beholden to the flute’s three notes, even after they had faded into shadows. Its wings spun up the steam and flashes of heat and golden light until it felt like Roman was lost in a windstorm, the sulfur stinging his eyes and making him cough again. But then the eithral took a lurch forward. One lumbering step after the other, expertly dodging the hissing pools.
They took flight as if they had done so a hundred times before.
It was a bumpy takeoff, but once the eithral was fully in the air, the ride was smooth.
Roman was initially surprised that they never left the under realm. He hadn’t realized that this innermost world was so open and vast—an endless waste of landscape, pocketed with bubbling sulfur pools and veiled with steam. A few times, when Roman dared to look down, he saw something glittering through the haze. His eyes widened when he realized it was rusted chains and skeletons, the bones scattered across the rock paths. They looked like animal bones, until Roman undoubtedly spotted a human skull.
His throat burned as he glanced away. His mouth was parched and held a strange aftertaste, but he was relieved to discover that the warm, moist air eased his cough. Now that has panic had subsided, he could draw a deep breath here and not feel that awful pinch in his lungs.
Eventually, after what could have been half an hour of flying or three—time was impossible to measure without the sky and the sun and the moon—Roman noticed that in some places, the steam from the sulfur pools rose higher than others, as if there was a draft, drawing it upward. After the seventh instance of this, he began to surmise that those must be the places where the eithrals could emerge from the ground. More doorways, large enough to let the creatures pass from one realm to the next.
He wanted to ask Val, but Roman kept his questions captive. Val didn’t seem like a very patient individual, and if Roman wanted to press his luck, he thought he should wait until they had landed. But the roaring silence didn’t quell his imagination or his theories.
Val was obviously close with the eithrals. Perhaps he trained them, or was their caretaker? He also carried the flute beneath his clothes like Dacre did and knew all the melodies to play to control the creatures. What other commands did the eithrals know, and did they still obey musical orders when they flew in the world above?
Roman remembered his time on the front lines, how Lieutenant Lark of the Sycamore Platoon had said eithrals were rarely spotted flying over the trenches because the beasts couldn’t differentiate between enemy and friendly forces. That if Dacre had let them loose with bombs in their talons, they would have just as easily dropped them on Dacre’s soldiers as they would Enva’s, and therefore the creatures were used to bomb civilian towns, a good distance from the front lines.
Dacre’s tactics were to use the eithrals to not only strike fear into the hearts of people, but bomb, then gas, then recover wounded soldiers, so that he could heal them in what felt like complete measures before scrambling their memories to make them feel beholden and subservient to him. It was a terrible and ruthless way to build an army and a following, and Roman could feel heat rise beneath his skin.
But this thought remained at the forefront: surely the eithrals could still be commanded when they flew above. Surely Dacre wasn’t surrendering complete control of his creatures. There had to be a way he could still harness them, as Avalon Bluff had revealed. The eithrals had made two rounds over the town, carrying different materials each time.
Val shifted in the saddle in front of him. The flute flashed in the mellow light as he raised it to his lips.
Roman tucked away the anger and the wonderings when he realized they were preparing to land.
Val blew the flute again, this time two long notes followed by three short ones. The music claimed the air, spawning rings of iridescence that grew so large they faded from sight, and the eithral screeched in response. The creature tossed its head as if resisting the order, but began to angle downward, wings flapping in short but powerful bursts.
Roman clung to the saddle, rigid with dread. But the landing wasn’t as terrible as he expected, and before he could even catch his breath, the eithral had come to a halt—wings outstretched once more over the bubbling pools—and Val was dismounting.
“Let’s go,” Val said.
Roman half-slid, half-fell his way down, his right ankle hitting the stone floor with a painful jar. Val, thankfully, didn’t notice, as he was already walking along the pathway that wound through the sulfur eddies.
Roman hesitated, glancing at the eithral. It was watching him again, eye sparkling like a ruby. With a pang in his stomach, Roman realized it was just as captive as he was.
He hurried after Val, stepping over pieces of a skeleton and a chain of iron that vanished into one of the boiling pools. Soon, veins of briars began to crosshatch over the floor, and Roman found that the plants guided them to where the doorway was, its arched lintel covered entirely in thick vines, clusters of amethysts, and bloodstained thorns.
“This way,” Val said, his impatience ringing just like one of his musical notes. He stepped over the threshold and into the shadows, and Roman followed, his eyes struggling to adjust to the darkness.
He could feel the floor steadily rising beneath him. The incline turned his breath to fire, his temples throbbing in response. They passed through another door, returning to the main level of Dacre’s realm, only this time it was deathly quiet. There was no city market to greet them, and the air tasted dusty and stale. A lonely echo reverberated through the darkness.
Val struck a match. Its meager light helped more than Roman would have thought possible, and they soon began to wend through a very narrow passage that broke into multiple new routes. Cobwebs were strung thick overhead; small bones were piled in corners. Amethysts grew from the wall in clusters, glittering like a thousand eyes in the firelight, and Roman had to duck and squeeze his way through, mesmerized by the haunting beauty of it.
“Are we beneath Oath?” he finally asked, trying to memorize the exact path they had taken.
“Yes. We are approaching the doorway.”
“How did you know when to tell the eithral to land? There were no markers, no way of knowing where we were.”
“There’s always a way of knowing,” Val answered. “If one pays attention.”
Roman pondered over that a moment before he remembered the steam vents. Perhaps Val had counted them as they passed, knowing which number corresponded to Oath. It seemed the only plausible explanation, but Roman didn’t have time to dwell on it as Val began speaking again.
“You’ll recognize where you are the moment you pass through the door. It’ll be dawn, and I’d advise you to change your clothes and then do what needs to be done with Iris Winnow first before speaking with your parents. Do you know where Gould’s Café is located?”
“Yes,” Roman said.
“That’s where you should meet Miss Winnow. Keep your explanations brief and vague. Say nothing of the doorways or the eithrals. Most people who have never been below struggle to understand our ways here.”
Roman waited for more, but when Val remained quiet, he said, “I’ll keep this in mind. Thank you, sir.”
Val came to an abrupt halt, his boots crunching a tiny skeleton. Roman dodged stepping into him but noticed that the amethysts grew into a glittering archway above one of the branching routes.
“Take this passage. It will lead you to the door,” Val said. “I’ll be waiting here for you at dawn tomorrow. Don’t be late.”
Roman nodded. He gazed up at the crystal archway, unable to fight his admiration of it. Darkly gleaming facets that would lead him home.
He began to walk, unsteady at first. He was surprised by how much he missed Val’s light as he drew farther away from it, and how chilling it was to move through such dark passages alone. But then the air began to shift as one realm melted into the other.
Roman caught a draft.
It smelled like lemon polish on hardwood floors. Like bouquets of flowers that had bloomed in a glass house, and treacle biscuits, still warm from the oven. Like cigar smoke and his mother’s rosewater perfume.
It smelled like home, and Roman ran toward it, his breath loud and jagged in the shadows.
The stairs were steep and rough-hewn, just barely discernable as if starlight limned them. Roman took two at a time until his legs almost buckled, and then he slowed down. He made himself swallow, breathe, step carefully. Higher and higher he ascended, until he felt the power of Dacre’s domain shiver down his spine, stripping away like a shed coat.
Roman approached the door. He could see the handle flash in welcome, as if it sensed his heat.
He wondered how many times he had walked past this door before, completely unaware of what it could become with the turning of a key. He wondered how many mundane things hid magic, or perhaps it was better to think of it as how much magic liked being married to the ordinary. To simplicity and comfort and overlooked details.
Roman took hold of the handle and turned it. The door popped open; he was greeted by a slender shaft of light, tinged blue with dawn.
Heart in his throat, Roman passed over the threshold.
