On Wings of Fire: Chapter 17, Part 2

The enormous central chamber underneath the Hive was dark and cold. Fyn shouldered his way easily through a partial cave-in at the mouth of one of the larger tunnels and emerged fully into the open space.

He paused, blinking in the utter blackness, his paws shifting automatically to find the familiar marks on the floor. He was here, at the heart of this old drake haven, hidden under a desert, sandy and dry and empty, instead of nestled into a volcano that breathed warmth and bled fiery red. It was hard to imagine any power of Selach had ever lived here.

He stepped forward carefully. In total darkness like this, he couldn’t see so much as he could sense the terrain in front of him. The chamber wasn’t a spiraling convergence of walkways like home. There was no heart of Selach bubbling in the center, unless it had all cooled long ago. Instead, it was mostly flat and mostly empty, with rubble coating the floor and getting between the pads of his paws. He swerved to avoid large pieces of broken stalagmites that he only noticed just in time.

Sasha said they were going to bring Cassia here, today now, for a ritual to break the Treatise. Near the east exit, she had said. But ‘near’ was relative in achamber well over two hundred feet across. Last night, Fyn had cooked up a plan, resting in one of the sleeping chambers near the outer edges of the tunnels lit by Iona’s people.

He couldn't fight Iona. Well, he could try, and he liked his odds underground much better than above, but who knew if she had other mages that could fight, and how many would be at the ritual? On the other hand, if he timed it right, he could spirit away Cassia and the Treatise before any of them had the chance to react.

It all depended on exactly where they put Cassia, and how long a tunnel he could dig before sundown. He might make it fifty feet, but not more. It had been ages since he’d helped blaze a new tunnel. He’d never done it entirely on his own.

But unless he could erupt right underneath her and pull her to safety, he might as well barge in and fight them all. So he felt his way back over to the eastern wall and trod an ever-widening half, circle around it, trying to guess where they would put Cassia.

Fyn stopped when his foot bumped into something hard and round, about forty feet straight out from the east entrance. He crouched down and examined it.

It was a jug, narrow at the neck and then ballooning to a sphere with a flat bottom. Two fragile handles arched high over the jug.

When Fyn touched it with his nose, something tingled throughout his entire body. It felt like when he breathed fire from his mote — the same sort of giving and pulling, giving to yield to the pressures of his god’s raw power, pulling to twist and channel it into a shape he understood.

He pulled away, startled and confused. The tingling didn’t feel like Selach’s raw, burning energies, but more like the rushing of tides, steady and powerful.

He stared down at the jug. Objects had power, but he’d never felt it just by touching an object before.

Only now did he notice that other jugs lay sprawled around the first, forming a rough circle. Each of these jugs was a different shape, and perhaps a different color, though it was too dark to tell. All told, seven of the strange jugs lay haphazard on the floor, surrounded by drake markings Fyn couldn’t read and others he thought weren’t drake markings at all, but some other kind of carving.

Fyn touched his nose to the next jug and the world went silent. The dripping water and groaning cave walls cut off as if he’d fallen asleep or pushed into some other world, separate and elevated. The perfect stillness washed through him like water and cleansing light followed in its wake, bright white with a hint of silver. Fyn caught a glimpse of a midnight silver lake and a glass reflection, perfectly round —

He jerked away, breathing hard. The vision broke and Fyn shook his head, trying to clear it. He felt tainted, unclean. He knew whose power was contained in that jar: Mithrinde’s. The moon in the lake, the peace — those were Cassia’s, her birthright, her belief. He’d recognize that soothing touch and blaze of light anywhere. It was what he felt whenever he wore her wings.

But that beautiful stillness… it wasn’t, and could never be, his.

He understood what these jugs contained, now. Seven jugs, one for each Order. Fyn had no idea how they had been created, or why they were lying abandoned in an old drake warren. But if there were seven jugs here, then one of them held power from Selach.

Fyn dug his claws into the floor. The vision clung to him like wisps of a dream, taunting him with what he could not have, what he should not even want.

Sasha’s voice rang through his head. What matters, Fyn? What do you want?

Was that what he wanted? That quiet calm that was not his?

Fyn gave a strangled roar and launched himself across the jugs, brushing a claw against each and bracing as the flashes came — a hot wind blowing, folding a seed into cool damp earth, the sting of hail, and finally, the burning heat of pouring magma.

Fyn pressed his paw to that last jug, closing his eyes and letting the vision take him deeper, burrowing into Selach’s power so it enveloped him like a rockslide. He steeled himself for the anger after the heat, the raw burning energy that drove every drake to demand more, to push harder and be stronger or else fail and wither and die. If Selach knew what he had done, what he planned to do for Cassia, then that anger would flay him and rightly so.

But it did not come. A fierce warmth spread through his bones, but no flashes of battle or triumph followed. He saw magma flowing and the warm promise of newly cooling rock. He saw the earth shift and new heat rise up from the cracks, rising in bubbles through hot sulfuric water. And all he felt was powerful, simple possibility, and the fire that burned was the power to see it through.

Fyn tried to pull away, but he couldn’t. This wasn’t Selach, couldn’t be. The power in this jug matched the power in his mote, but the way it spoke to him was alien and strange. How could fire warm and not burn? This power called to be taken and used, but no heavy hand or smothering, watchful eye hung over it. Instead, it whispered of building and pounding and settling into something new. In the half-vision, half-dream, Fyn reached out toward the glowing power—

A shock coursed through his mote and burst through his chest, stinging fire searing through his veins and down his limbs. It sank hooks into his flesh and tore. Fyn tried to scream but his throat had closed up. His limbs felt like they moved of his own accord as he ripped his paw away from the jug and swung wildly at it.

The jug shattered against the stone ten feet away. He scrambled backwards, tripping over the other jugs. Another collapsed under his weight, driving a shard of pottery deep into the webbed skin between two toes. He kept going, paws carrying him all the way back to the tunnel he’d emerged from despite each stab of pain as the shard drove deeper into his feet.

The burning extinguished the second he crossed the tunnel threshold. Fyn collapsed to the floor, chest heaving as the pain faded away, leaving only the chill terror behind. As his mote calmed to a comfortable, sustaining heat, a low, cruel voice whispered in his ear.

Careful, now. You’ve worked so long to please me, haven’t you, Fyn? If you stray now… well. Wherever you go, you will still be mine. Do not disappoint me.

The voice pierced his skull like a talon dragging along his cheek. Fyn lifted his head, peering into the dark.

“Zhiron? Sir,” he added quickly.

Silence. Fyn could feel it in the ground and see in the shadows: there was no one there at all.

Which meant Fyn had just been disciplined by Selach Himself.

Fyn didn’t know how long he lay on the ground. He was shaking all over. His mote was back to normal again, but never had its warmth felt less comforting.

He knows, Fyn thought. He knows I’m going to try to save Cassia. If I disappoint him, he’ll kill me. That was the best of the dozen horrible scenarios that played through his head if he betrayed his god.

He struggled to his feet. He had to go, had to get away from here. He needed a new plan — he still had to get the Treatise, but now he had to stay as far away from Cassia as he could, because if he never had the chance to kill her than Selach couldn’t be angry—

He put weight on his injured paw and gave a cry of pain as the pottery shard dug deeper. Instinctively, he shrunk into human form, shaking his paw as it shrunk into a hand to fling the shard away.

He fumbled at his hand in the sudden darkness, but he couldn’t be sure if he had gotten all the pieces out. Blood slicked his fingers, dripping down his arm and splashing at his feet. He tore a piece of cloth from his hastily-visualized robes and tried to staunch the bleeding. The pain stabbedat him in waves, but it was a clean pain. HIs mote was cooler, more removed as Selach always was in human form, and between stabs of pain Fyn gasped in air and his head finally cleared.

He couldn’t abandon Cassia. But he couldn’t save her either. Selach was watching him too closely — of course he was. Zhiron had said Fyn’s mission was vital. But if Selach had punished him for lingering too long beside a strange power not his own, what he would do if Fyn showed a shadow of disobeying actual orders… Fyn would never get her out alive.

Fyn slid down the wall of the tunnel, landing with a thump on the floor. The memory of the pain racked him and even the small heat of his mote made him feel like he was burning again from the inside out, smothering under the weight Selach had placed on his chest. There was no way he could fight it, no way he could defy Selach’s will without being burned alive.

He licked his parched lips. He needed water. If only he could be back there, by the calm moonlit lake he had seen in that vision, drinking in that beautiful peace he had never felt anything like in his life—

Fyn sat bolt upright. He had felt that calm stillness before, though he had resented it, and pushed it down as far as he could.

He felt it whenever he wore Cassia’s wings.

He stood up, letting the makeshift bandage fall off his hand. The injury had mostly stopped bleeding. He gritted his teeth and swelled back into drake form, wincing as his mote grew hot again. He needed to be able to see in the dark.

Creeping forward, Fyn stopped before crossing the threshold into the chamber. He couldn’t risk Selach thinking he was repeating his earlier transgression. He squinted into the dark, cataloging the open space as best he could. Though the seven jugs were not in the center of the grand space, they were clearly very old and important. Fyn had felt their power for himself. The Seekers were probably going use them in their ritual to break the the Treatise. Maybe that was why they had traveled all the way out here in the first place.

Either way, it meant both Cassia and the Treatisewould be standing right about there in just a few hours.

Okay, he thought, letting out a sharp sigh. Okay. This might just work.

He braced himself, sure that his mote would erupt again, that Selach could hear the treachery in his thoughts and would know his first punishment had not been enough.

It didn’t come. There was no change in his mote or the silence of the cave around him.

Fyn turned his back on the cave and measured four paces down the tunnel. Then he took a deep breath and started to dig.