The Mirror of the Moon (Revenant Wyrd Book 2) (16 page)

“What do you think this is?” Jovian crouched down and ran his fingers through the slick substance he had slipped on moments before. The two men had broken away from the rest of the group a while back so that they could search the cave.

“Hmm?” Maeven turned to look at Jovian.

“This stuff on the floor here; it is slippery and smells kind of sweet.”

“I am not sure,” Maeven crouched beside him. “Let me see.” Maeven ran his fingers through the substance. He rubbed his fingers together, sniffed them, then licked the substance. Making a strange face he spat it back on the floor.

“What are you doing?” Jovian asked. “You’ve no idea what that is or how long it’s been here, not to mention
how
it got here.”

“Yes I do. This is oil once used in basilicas across the Great Realms. It is completely harmless as it was made from non-toxic plants.” Maeven stood and rubbed his hands against his pants, then extended one to help Jovian up. “You were right though; it has been here for a while and tastes a little funny.”

“Why didn’t it absorb?”

“There’s no telling how long it has been here. Plus, I don’t know that this type of oil really can absorb.”

“So you think this was some kind of temple?”

“I honestly don’t know. It seems so,” Maeven confirmed.      

There was silence for a time as they searched the walls of the tunnel. The rainbow light pulsed in rhythmic waves around them as if a lake ebbed and flowed on the floor about their feet, casting their faces in purple, blue, green, and pink relief that shown brighter further back in the depths of the tunnel. It was some time before they found the next bit of evidence that led them even closer to the conclusion of what this cave really was, and it happened when Maeven’s booted foot crunched something under it.

“I found something else,” he yelled to Jovian, who came closer, kneeling to inspect the findings.

“What is it?” Jovian asked as Maeven held up the small branch. “Some kind of tree branch, it looks like.”

“That would be because it
is
a tree branch, Jovian.” Maeven examined it in the light. “See this here,” Maeven indicated the top of the branch, “this is not an ordinary branch. The flowers on this branch grew in panicles—a lilac branch.”

“Then this is a shrine?” Jovian said. It was the Goddesses sacred tree, after all.

Maeven cast a glance further back into the tunnel where the light was glowing bright enough to show the end. Inside the wall, encased for all time, was a large silver box that reflected the light, the source for the brighter light: a tomb.

“Would you like something to eat, Joya?” Angelica asked hesitantly as she neared her sister with some food.

Joya did not answer, but only cast cold, steely eyes on her sister.

“You don’t look so good. Are you okay?” Angelica prodded gently, coming to sit beside her sister.

“Did you ever stop to think, Angelica, that I’m most certainly NOT okay?” Joya whimpered with a sniffle.

“Would you like to talk about it?”

“NO!” Joya snapped and stood to walk away from her sister. She stood staring in the direction that the boys had gone, her hands subconsciously rubbing her arms as something she glimpsed chilled her more than the storm outside ever could. “How would you feel?” she asked Angelica over her shoulder, “if you found out someone you trusted more than any other had betrayed you? How would you feel if one of your own siblings had withheld information from you that could help save the life of your most trusted friend? I would never keep information like that from you if it concerned Jovian.”

“But I didn’t withhold information from you!” Angelica stood, her fists balled at her side.

Grace anticipated a possible blow-up if she did not interject, but then she thought better of it. Maybe coming to blows was exactly what the two of them needed.

“True, I never told you we had visited Baba Yaga, but that was largely due to the fact that I didn’t remember much of it at all.” She went to turn away, thought better of it, and rounded again on Joya.  “You know, I don’t expect you to tell me all the changes you are going through, Joya, and I don’t expect you to
need
to know all of mine. We told you what you needed to know: where Amber was being taken. Jovian and I thought it best, given the circumstances, that we didn’t tell all that happened, but we told the most important piece of the voyage that we could: Amber was being taken to the Lunimara!” Angelica sucked in a deep breath obviously wanting to say something else more heated before swallowing it at the last moment.

“What happened if we went in the wrong direction?” Joya asked scathingly. “Would you have told us then?”

“I don’t know; we weren’t posed with that situation, now were we? We knew where we had to go, and we are headed there. Enough said. You didn’t need to know about Baba Yaga, so you weren’t told.” At her wit’s end with her sister, Angelica turned to leave and headed back to where Grace sat shaking her head at the entrance to the man-made cave, queer colors bathing her like an aura.

“I should have killed you,” Joya whispered, but Angelica had heard it all too clearly.

“What did you say?” she asked stepping closer to her sister, anger making her voice quiver. Joya turned hateful eyes on her. Angelica gasped, stepped back once, and then surged forward as she recognized those cold, hateful grey-blue eyes.

Joya inhaled a quick breath as the first slap rang out over the din of the storm. The powerful blow from the much more battle-trained sister knocked the black-haired woman to her knees. She cried out as blood sprang to her lips. Furiously blotting it away with her hand, Joya snarled at Angelica and stood once more.

Joya clenched and unclenched her fists at her side, a faint red imbued them as they began to glow with power, with wyrd that was even now coursing through her, ready to be freed, ready to strike.

“Are you going to try to kill me now, Joya, when I am able to face you? Or wouldn’t you rather wait until I am asleep so that you don’t have to worry about a fight?” Angelica spat, slapping Joya down again. But this time it didn’t go without retribution. Before Angelica could withdraw her hand from the blow, Joya had unleashed one of her own. The blast that came from her threw Angelica into the nearest wall, and crackling energy held her there as Joya, moving almost faster than the eye could see, rounded on her.

“Touch me in anger again, and you will meet your end!” Joya raged, pointing a shivering finger straight at her sister. Angelica slid to the floor as Joya released her wyrd and stalked away from her.

Just as Angelica thudded to the rock floor, Maeven and Jovian came sprinting back up from the tunnel, nearly running into a peevish Joya on the way. The near collision awarded them with choice curses. Jovian watched his sister stalk down the tunnel and looked to Grace for an explanation that never came.

“Grace, you should see what we found,” Maeven exclaimed, panting with excitement and exertion.

“What is it?” The old lady stood as a flash of lightning froze everything in white light outside the entrance that was positively drenched with torrential rain.

“I think we found where Aaridnay was buried.”

“But that is impossible. No one has ever found her before.” From the sound of her voice, however, Grace was having a hard time believing her own protests to the contrary.

“I know, but I think we just have.”

“Which begs the question of why she is appearing now?” she said, pushing past the two boys and down the tunnel. It wasn’t long before Grace was standing before the brightly shining diamond wall that encased the silver embossed casket.

“Why would she not have been burned?” Angelica asked as she followed, standing as far away from Joya as the tunnel would allow.

“Back when she died it was not customary to burn the dead. Instead they thought it was more fitting to bury the dead in the earth so that they would become one with the mother again, and feed the plants that would give others life,” Grace informed them. “It wasn’t until the first dalua attacks after Aaridnay’s death that bodies began to be burned, consumed by the light instead of given to the dark earth.”

“So this is Aaridnay?” Jovian asked, gesturing to the wall.

“That cannot be proven of course,” Grace said, her voice quivering with delight. “But I believe it is.”

And so did Joya, who stood staring straight at the wall, recognizing the screaming form before her, encased in the wall with her silver casket, her face merging perfectly with Joya’s reflection.

“I think we should stay here the night and figure out what to do later,” Grace suggested, going to the left side of the tunnel and crouching. “Did either of you notice this water here?”

“No,” Maeven answered for them both as the two men approached her.

She pressed her hand to the wall and nodded when it came back wet. “There is water collected here at the end of an airtight diamond tunnel? I think this is a fake door; tomorrow morning we will try moving it.”

Through the majority of the first watch Joya managed to ignore the image of Aaridnay pacing back and forth within the diamond wall. Aaridnay’s every movement matched Joya’s frantic ones, her dead, unfocused eyes following Joya like a wild cat.

All it took was a glance at the image. Within that glance seconds slowed pace to minutes, minutes seemed hours, and even those hours lagged on until time was something of mental construct, and Joya knew no such concept.

She didn’t feel the wyrd seeping into her. Joya stood transfixed for that eternal second and didn’t feel the possession happen. If she had, Joya LaFaye would surely have noticed that this was the way a true adept wyrder worked—not by convoluting the mind to believe what it wanted to believe.

It happened with a flash. A flare of rainbow light burned Joya’s eyes and she instinctively covered her head with her arms trying to blot out the pulsing, burning light even as it chased her vision behind shut lids. When she opened her eyes there was nothing left of Aaridnay within the wall save her coffin. The only face that Joya saw now was her own staring back at her.

In an instant she felt one wyrd meet another inside, and the pain of the confrontation sent her head spinning.

Joya fell to her knees with a gasp; she felt two forces warring inside her. And despite the internal struggle that made her wish nothing more than a long retch on the floor, Joya smiled for the first time in weeks, and felt at peace with herself and her companions for the first  time since the voice started visiting her.

“S
o you think this storm is wyrded?” Angelica asked of Grace the next morning. Though further back in the tunnel the sound of the storm was lessened, it was obviously not any weaker for the time.

Though it was true that the Realm of Air occasionally saw some magnificent storms, much to rival the Holy Realms Summer Storms, they were normally of the wind variety and included little else. Certainly not demonstrating such power as they witnessed now. Grace looked into the concerned eyes of Angelica. “Yes, it is my assumption that this storm is wyrded.”

“So how do you suppose we get through that wall?” Jovian asked.

“Why don’t you try pushing on it?” Grace said sweetly, packing up their meager camp.

Maeven gave a couple stout pushes, and when nothing happened he turned to Grace. “It will not budge. I think we will have to break through.”