Erin Hoffman - Sword of Fire and Sea

Her name was Ilisia, and she was very strange. Twice she called Ariadel by the wrong name, despite polite correction, and during their short visit she seemed to forget what she was doing midtask at least four times.

// We go into the mountain , // Arikaree said. Ilisia seemed to be able to keep track of his words a bit better than the rest of them.

“Ah, yes,” she said, her eyes disappearing into the wrinkles of her face as she smiled. “You will open the dragonspine. They've been speaking of it.”

“Who?” Vidarian asked, but Ilisia only smiled as if he'd said something in another language she didn't understand.

“What is it you study here?” Ariadel asked finally, when any logistical questions proved impossible-and this, as it were, opened the floodgates.

“Study, study,” she said, as if repeating a child's rhyme. “We study inevitability.” Her eyes went vague, and for a moment she closed them in ecstasy. When she opened them, there was neither white nor pupil, but a glassy blue-green as of the western sea in summer. Something churned with recognition in Vidarian's blood, and her voice pounded between his ears: “The world passes away,” she said, hollow and full all at once, “knowledge fades, runs together. The world is connected, streams like invisible water-our minds melt together, carried by waves, all thoughts become one-all returns to liquid.”

The route through the mountain, Ilisia insisted, was not up, but down. She seemed to have some trouble keeping track of opposites-up and down, left and right, living and dead-which wasn't the best for endowing her proclamation with confidence. But up was the everstorm, and that, at least, was indisputable.

After they loaded and pulled the reluctant horses and verali from the warmth of the mountain stable, Ilisia led them behind the tower. There, a gigantic pair of stone doors were set directly into the slate wall that the tower's materials had been carved from. By its position, it seemed that the tower existed to guard this entrance, but, to Vidarian's surprise, Ilisia pulled the doors open without ceremony. A small, cold breeze wafted up from the opening, which revealed a dirt path that spiraled down into darkness.

A thin howl echoed through the mountains; a wolf calling its brothers and sisters in celebration of a kill. But Thalnarra's hackles lifted at the sound, and Vidarian turned to her. “What was that?”

// A wolf, only , // she said, though her hackles remained up. // Surely no concern to us. Though you should mind the meat-creatures. // The image in her mind of a “meat-creature” was an amalgam of horse, cow, and verali, and he was unsettled again at the reminder that she likely considered Feluhim a snack candidate at best. He had no special love of horses, himself (though he certainly preferred them to verali), but the thought of eating the tall dark horse that he fed bits of dried apple to every morning turned his stomach.

“Down you go,” Ilisia said cheerfully, then turned and shuffled through the snow back toward the tower without another word. The horses, however, were not convinced by her cheer, and balked at the mouth of the trail. Altair stalked behind them and hissed, but this only worsened matters, eliciting a shriek of fear and anger from Ruby's horse that further spooked the other two. Finally, Ariadel pulled the head of each horse, one by one, down to her eye level and rubbed between its eyes, murmuring. The little shapeshifter skittered out from her hood and changed into the kitten, leaping onto Ruby's horse and purring. This was enough, at last, to convince them-and none too soon, for all three snow-sodden gryphons were looking increasingly carnivorous by the minute.

Ooh, it's dark down there , the Starhunter whispered just as they crossed the threshold, and Vidarian shivered in spite of himself. He'd learned by now that her absence was always more ominous than her presence, and that if she vanished from his mind, it was only to await a more opportune time to disturb him. The shiver, and his wave of anger at her, rippled through his mind and heart, where it resonated off of the rubies and sapphires. Their answering swing of energy was wilder this time, stronger, and he fought to throttle them down.

He didn't realize he'd been holding his breath until a wave of dizziness made him gasp. A thin bead of sweat crept down around his left eye, and he shook his head.

“That was her, wasn't it?” Ariadel asked quietly, walking beside him. The stone tunnel gave a hollow echo to her words, carrying them ahead and down. Behind her, the still-nervous Feluhim jerked on his lead, and she turned to soothe him, while Vidarian's heart skipped a beat as a thousand very bad ways to explain the Starhunter flickered through his mind: She's a voice in my head, I see her in my dreams, she doesn't like you very much.…

So honest, though. The Starhunter giggled. Don't you want to be honest ?

“Yes,” he said instead, through clenched teeth.

“How…does she speak to you?” Her voice was strained, but he recognized a thin line of determination between her eyebrows.

“Like you used to” would be another wrong answer, and it made the Starhunter chuckle again. “Invasively,” he said. “Annoyingly. She-says confusing things.”

“Like what?” was an obvious question, and he cursed himself for walking into it. Then he wondered why the thought of describing all of it terrified him so.

Maybe Lord Tesseract Vidarian Rulorat is not so noble as he wants everyone to believe .

“She makes you angry,” Ariadel offered, rescuing him from repeating things he didn't want to voice. He realized she was trying to understand, had striven to accept the existence of something she had always been told-by people she trusted-was impossible.

Vidarian nodded. And now that they were discussing the goddess riding in his brain-“Thalnarra,” he said, sweating again as he forced his voice to a controlled tone. “You and Endera knew about the Starhunter. Why hide it from everyone else? From Ariadel, from me?”

Altair clicked his beak in disapproval, a sound like bone cracking that made the horses jump again as it echoed. But Thalnarra's voice was nonchalant. // Mysteries and layers of the priestesshood, you'll have to ask Endera, not me. Gryphons have known of the Starhunter since she was locked behind the gate. //

“But gryphons mistrust humans with a great deal of knowledge,” Ariadel argued, and the bitterness in her voice refuted any reply before it could be spoken. Thalnarra gave none.

They descended the cave trail in silence, the gryphons’ spheres of light racing forward and back to light their way.

Hours were difficult to count down here, as they had been above, and the slow spirals of the trail added to the hypnotic lull. Vidarian would have walked directly into the sudden wall that loomed up in front of them, his thoughts far from his body, were it not for Arikaree's rough squawk of warning.

This set of stone doors, like the walls around them, were sandstone, the slate having been left behind long ago. The gryphons’ colored lights cast everything in a dull orange hue, but the rock itself was a dull yellow, thick with dust that obscured the detailed carvings that covered every inch of the doors’ surface. But the sinuous path that they described could be little else.

“A dragon's spine,” Ariadel said, reaching out to brush dust from the door. It gave way in a powdery flutter that made her cough, baring an intricately carved scale like that of a giant fish.

The rubies and sapphires had been humming in Vidarian's mind, and as he brought them from their pouches at his waist, they flared so brightly that he nearly dropped them. Ariadel shielded her eyes beside him, and he squinted as he raised them to the doors.