C. E. Murphy - Wayfinder

Evrei pointed to the door Aerin had disappeared through, though the pout still pulled at his lips. “You’re only supposed to ask one question.”

“Evrei, I could have asked if the sky is blue or if grass is green. You can’t lie to me.” Lara hefted the pack on her shoulders, scowling at the doorways. “ ‘Truth will seek the hardest path.’ Shit . Aerin, when I catch up to you …”

The threat unfinished, Lara stalked through the door leading to certain doom.

Murky night enclosed her as she stepped through the door. Mist crawled up, encircling her thighs as if to hold her back, and the city shifted in her vision, becoming darker, grimmer. Lara retreated a step and encountered rough sticks that cracked under the pressure of her pack. She twisted around, heart jolting, to find the doors bleak hollows overgrown with impassable coral. Evrei and Evrawg were gone, if they’d ever really been there at all. The thought wavered tunelessly and Lara put it out of mind, unwilling to explore what was true and what wasn’t, especially having deliberately chosen the wrong door.

What had once been city streets sprawled before her, but she no longer saw them as Llyr had enchanted her to. Silver stone was buried beneath drifting sand, and scuttling bugs peeked out of bone shelters sunken in the moving earth. The homes and towers that had graced the Unseelie city were dank now, lightless and lifeless, and the defiant banners that had flown no longer rose above the town. Chilly wind passed through instead, lifting Lara’s hair in thin dancing tendrils and holding it aloft the way water would. Coral snatched at the strands, trying to tangle it and hold her in place.

She shut those thoughts down, too, and forced herself forward. Aerin had left no footprints, or the shifting sand had already taken them. Had already taken her , perhaps; Lara sank ankle-deep with each step, sand clouding up to grasp at her calves and knees before wafting down again. Pressure swam against her legs and over her arms, wind carrying more weight than it usually did. She wondered what devils hid in it. Song pounded inside her skull, encouraging her to pull down the veil of Llyr’s gift and see what accompanied her as she walked across the ocean floor.

It would be a very brief viewing. A minute or two of appreciating just what monsters and dangers roamed the drowned city. Then, without Llyr’s gift at hand, she would join them, one more lost soul far beneath the sea. And if she was lost, so were all the memories she’d promised to return to Annwn. So was Dafydd, and so, maybe, was Annwn itself. She’d seen no forgiveness in Emyr’s eyes. If she didn’t come back with answers, he would ride on the Unseelie city and destroy it. The transformation would be complete: Annwn would be the Barrow-lands in totality, a land of the dead and dying, though it might on the surface appear to be more.

An orchestra’s worth of triumphant music flooded her, pushing back the weight of heavy air. She had seen the Seelie as dying, had even seen the rival peoples as two halves of a whole, but the entire land’s metamorphosis had escaped her, at least in conscious thought. Drowned Lands, Barrow-lands; together they made up a whole, and she doubted suddenly that the Barrow-lands would ever be healthy, so long as the ground she walked now still lay beneath the sea. Whatever Hafgan and Emyr had done so many millennia ago had spelled doom for both of them. Hafgan, perhaps, had realized it earlier, and fled back to the Drowned Lands. A generous soul might think it was to lend his strength to maintaining what little memory of the land was left here, but Lara suspected his intentions were darker. Harboring his power, perhaps, so that when Emyr was weak enough Hafgan could attack without compunction.

She’d become cynical since meeting Dafydd ap Caerwyn. She wasn’t certain she was proud of that, but it lent her a sour strength to forge beyond the gates and enter the city itself.

Broken walls rose up cleanly, streets remaining delineated, but the ground was uneven, stone from fallen buildings making hills and toe-stubbing lumps. Lara scrambled up them, fingers dug into shallow earth, and slid down their far sides with her attention more for the grim skies than the path she took. The ebony towers shone darkly in the murky light, as opposite to the glowing Seelie citadel as could be imagined.

Her mind’s eye abruptly filled in details of shattered architecture, finishing the spires and swoops of the towers. They’d echoed the Seelie citadel once, though this city was built around its soaring towers where the Seelie city was entirely contained within the palatial structure. Still, their hearts were one and the same, another reminder that the highland and lowland peoples were of a kind. Or that they had been, before they’d been torn asunder by the staff Lara now carried across her back.

The staff pulsed as she thought of it. The air flinched, then surged in, weightier than before as it pried at the ivory rod. Lara’s breath clogged, her confidence slipping away as the air— air , she insisted, not water—took on a determination to separate her from the staff. Muck thickened, daylight fading until the only light came from the dark towers.

The air—the ocean—lit up around her in wrong colors, a flood of black light illuminating the things she hadn’t been able to see before. Sea life flickered by, darting around her at the last moment. Lara was grateful, as it seemed wholly possible, in the wavering blue light, that she might register as a ghost herself, and that fish might swim through her without noticing. Bits of net wafted through the water, constantly tied and untied by the currents. But it was the city itself that came alive in unnerving pulses.

Fallen buildings were reconstructed in the changing light. From one moment to the next walls flickered into place and faded again, reminiscent of an old hand-cranked film. But no ancient film had the quality of effects the withering city showed her. Beasts swam within the broken city walls, serpents and kraken and long-toothed monsters she had no name for. Lara stood rigid on the ocean floor, heart sick in her chest, certain that any motion on her part would bring a tentacled, hard-beaked behemoth whipping down on her.

Women sauntered by, their bodies so beautifully formed that Lara’s avocation as a tailor twitched to the fore, eager to measure and mark them for clothing. Their long hair streamed behind them, paragons of femininity, but the faces they turned to Lara were stretched in raging screams, like the Sirens of Greek legend. Men trailed after them, but not lovelorn sailors: these were ragged skeletal horrors, as tormented in appearance as the women whose paths they traced. Fish darted in and out of their skulls, escaping through parted teeth and eye sockets. Lara pressed knuckles against her mouth, holding back gasps.

The impotent fury of a drowning people had not left their city unmanned. Not when those who died were creatures of magic themselves. The phantasms revealed by the towers’ light were real , as able to rend and destroy as any mundane animal. Motion would almost certainly attract them, and she had no weapon with which to fight.

Warmth pulsed from the staff again, contradicting that belief. A stillness swept through the ocean. Then as one, the city’s protectors turned toward Lara. Toward the staff she carried; toward the embodiment of the city’s downfall. The next breath she drew was thick with water, though the black light didn’t relent. There were more magics at work here than just Llyr’s, and the only question was whose were the strongest.

Lara whispered “Llyr’s,” investing the word, the thought, with a thread of desperate truth. She didn’t dare unleash the staff, not yet, maybe not ever, but the air cleared a little. She lurched a step or two forward, sand still clouding around her feet. It settled again quickly, though, making divots like any sand dune might. Wind— wind , not water, she told herself fiercely—rushed over those depressions, smoothing them out again so she left no more trace of her passage than Aerin had, but the greater ease of movement was heartening. She wasn’t utterly without power, even in a dark realm where her magic could be her undoing.