Posey
Luckily for Aris, I’m too busy trying desperately to keep my mind and heart away from the thought of him in general to disobey his direct orders. Unluckily for him, after a night of tossing and turning, with very little sleep, I wake up the next morning alone in the castle for the first time, staring at the mask, at my scattered, useless tools, and my mind wanders again.
Trying to ignore my wanderlust, I get back to work, popping out the old jewels and busying myself by placing new ones, ones I made myself out of silver and melded until they shone like diamonds. The fawn bounces around my feet while I do my work. Silver is great for this–creating gems. Most alchemists can’t touch silver without a variety of specialized tools and a heavy duty forge, none of which I have, but it doesn’t affect me. Silver feels beautiful under my touch–like silky cream. Like pure, cold water. It makes me shiver as I press shards of silver into stainless steel molds, heating them until the silver within is reduced to shards of what looks like hot glass. It takes a while–all of my morning–to replace each and every tiny gem that once peppered the mask, but I complete it by midafternoon, and still…
“It’s worthless in this condition,” I say to the room, my mind made up.
The foyer is ice cold for some reason. Maybe it’s my nerves, the gnawing sense of knowing that I’m about to do exactly what Aris forbid me to do, but I can’t just sit here, alone, alone with my own stupid, incessant thoughts, and wait for him to find the rest of the mask’s components. In fact, I already know he doesn’t care. Repairing the mask is meant to keep me busy, to keep me here, and in a way, it’s working. I’m of one mind. One single, idiotic brain cell. One focus. One task to complete. Everything else–the time, the day, the fact I haven’t eaten since last night and that I’ve barely slept, fades away as I secure my apron tight around my waist and drape my cloak over my shoulders. Yesterday, I found a large basket in a cupboard in the kitchen and filled it with some rags, bandages, and a few healing drafts I made myself just in case, so I’ll bring that along.
But I have no idea how to access the vault and the tiny door in its shadow.
“I have two options,” I say to the foyer at large. “I can either jump through the hole in the floor, or you can show me how to get to the vault.”
The chandelier above my head rustles. The dust hanging in the strips of golden winter sunlight panics, zooming as something–someone unseen–walks through it to stand at my side. It’s the male spirit. He takes up more space, more oxygen, and his presence carries a strange, almost icy, feel to it. It’s impossible to explain. He feels like he was a warrior at some point in his life–that he was important and hasn’t forgotten.
Still, his counterpart is now causing a ruckus. The castle groans in protest, a popping, grinding sound funneling toward me, and I turn my head and capture the moment a door that wasn’t there before appears directly in the stones under the staircase. The stones themselves have pulled away, revealing a shadowed entrance.
“Creepy,” I muse but smile, and the male spirit brushes my loose hair behind my shoulders before ghostly footsteps edge toward the opening, beckoning me to follow. “He’ll be angry.”
“He needs you.”
“Don’t,” the female voice whispers. Their unearthly voices send shivers up and down my spine. It’s like they’re whispering directly against my ear, more a hum than noise. It’s the only time I’ve ever felt afraid of them, like I have to be reminded of what they are. Ghosts. Apparitions. Maybe even demons trapped in a cage.
“Careful,” she whispers to me when she realizes I can’t just… turn around, not now, not when her companion is willing to show me the way.
I hold my breath and descend a twisted, decaying wooden staircase into the gloom, the deepest depths of this ancient, beautiful place. At its base, the vault comes into focus, and that’s it. Only one way in and out, I suppose, but when that little side door creaks open, and the cave system's gaping maw expands in my field of vision, I shiver again, and this time with fear–palpable fear.
I clutch my basket tightly and say a small prayer I know will go unanswered, and take one step forward and then another.
Soon after I begin my explorations, I realize there are at least four different entrances to this cave system, and only one leads directly to and from the castle. Which, I deduce, means the original castle was built directly on top of the tunnels and channels made by an underground creek, which I sometimes have to carefully cross during my hours of exploration.
My battery-powered lantern shudders several times, holding on for dear life. I came prepared for most possibilities, but I did not bring batteries since Aris and his family members can use their magic for that, and they don't have a single battery in the castle. I looked. For a while.
I’m ready for everything else though, I hope.
I’m not sure what I’m even looking for. Back at the cabin this summer, I laid in Aris’s arms while we listened to the rain. He told me about his descent into the caves. He’d been fifteen, which seems incredibly young. Fifteen and full of hormones and spite, he’d said, which drove him forward when the cave walls and darkness closed in on him. When I asked how he found his bracelets, he said it wasn’t like he just stumbled upon them and grabbed the first thing he saw. He was led to them. He told me he’d heard voices in the darkness, unintelligible, but they grew louder and more frantic, and finally he found what the cave had called him for.
“I found the mask on my way out, though. It was just sitting there, like I’d stepped over it on my way in without seeing it the first time, so I grabbed it, too, but it never lit for me or responded to my powers like these.” I had the bracelets in my hand at the time. He’d taken them off to show me. I fell asleep with my fingers curled around them, my hand against his chest.
The memory is so warm, I stop and ponder taking off my cloak, but a whisper echoes toward me, bouncing off every glimmering wall of crystal.
I freeze, holding my breath to still my thundering heart so I can hear past the blood rushing in my ears–and wait.
It’s a laugh–bright and girlish, followed by more whispers and giggles, the sound of someone falling in love.
My heart skips a beat. I turn toward the sound, my brain shutting off entirely and my senses taking over. It’s a rush, like whatever energy is reaching out to me with long, spidery fingers has its own electric current. It pulls me, guiding me into the darkness until I come back to my senses and realize I’ve gone further into this underground maze than I ever meant to.
The air here is so cold and wet it sticks to the back of my throat when I take a deep, sulfuric breath. Water glistens in what little light there is to be had in the haze of my lantern, which illuminates stalactites and other impressive, otherworldly crystal formations that have grown over what appears to be columns of onyx. I blink, that tunnel vision evaporating in a single heartbeat, and look down at the floor. Marble tiles–cracked, of course, with veins of crystal growing through the breaks.
I feel a whoosh behind me. Warm air creeps through my cloak. I swear a firm but small hand wraps around mine, the one holding up the lantern to spray light across my surroundings, which I believe might have been a temple.
An altar rests in several pieces ahead of me. The underground creek runs directly through the center of the room now, pooling just a few yards away, creating a glassy, crystal pool.
The female spirit clutches me tight. It’s a strange feeling, like being compressed by air itself.
“You didn’t need to follow me.”
She says nothing but allows me to take a few steps, where I lift the lantern high and…
A gleam catches my attention. It’s duller than the crystals all around us. Metal. The sheen of… iron.
I stomp through the crystal pool, the icy water biting my skin at knee level, and come to a halt just before the altar.
A small, thin band of iron meant to be worn as a diadem, I think, rests on the ground. Crystals grow through the small, intricate detailing of the crown piece, where several settings for gems have been long empty. One moonstone remains, but it’s cracked–shattered, actually. I kneel, my wet cloak spreading out behind me, and tentatively reach for it when I notice what’s lying beside it… and behind it.
The helmet is only a few feet away. Bones of pure white lie scattered between the diadem and helmet. More than one person rests here eternally. Finger bones reach for each other, the digits in exactly the same position they were when the owners of the skulls died here, their hands intertwined.
My heart caves in, sinking like a dead weight against my ribs, refusing to beat.
I think of the mask, of how I figured the broken prong was that way because of a devastating, absolutely catastrophic blow to the face. It would have been deadly.
Instead of reaching for the helmet, my fingers ache, stretching through the diadem. The second my fingertips brush against the ice cold metal, my eyes fill with visions and voices like I’m flipping through the pages of a book.
Raven black hair flutters as she runs down a hallway, laughing, that same girlish laugh I’d heard just moments ago. Silver eyes blink like stars as she turns to grin at him–the owner of the helmet. The helmet she made for him after they married.
“He’s lonely,” she tells her mother in the tower of a castle far north of here. I recognize the mountains, the valleys, but the village beyond is ancient, older than anything I’ve ever seen. Miles away, against the setting sun, I see the ridge my pack is named after. “He’s my mate, Mother. What am I to do?”
It’s a violent time. I watch through her eyes as soldiers march down dirt roads. People dressed in strange, outdated homespun beg and kneel in front of a young man with soft brown hair and eyes like iron, begging for news about family and friends from Moonrise and beyond. Some are asking for news from Rifthold.
“The Great War cost our kind so much blood,” a deeper female voice says as the image plays out before me like a movie. “Isolde, you must be careful. You’re the last of our pack. It’s just you now.”
“He’ll take care of me. He promised. Mama, I love him. He loves me.” An image of a young hand pressing a withered one to her belly expands before me behind a grainy, distorted veil.
“Stop.” I snap out of it the second the female spirit’s presence presses down against my shoulder. I almost drop the diadem. “I remember now.”
I look up, expecting to see nothing but the glare of my lantern against the crystals, I see her clearly–like she’s made of mist. Long, dark hair. Eyes of polished silver. She looks like King Ryatt. Like–Aris but darker–with the same eyes.
“Oh, my Goddess.”
She shushes me, her sad, tired eyes meeting mine. “I remember now. Oh, but he doesn’t remember. Neither of us remembered.”
I think I might be dreaming all of this. Her, the cave, the images still branded in the back of my mind. I can’t really be picking up the helmet next. I can’t really be oh so carefully tucking both artifacts into my basket. I can’t be contemplating taking the skulls with me, can I?
My gaze holds on the bones, on the interlocked fingers, before sliding back to the female spirit, who’s still kneeling, her eyes fixed on the same bones.
“Isolde?”
She slowly looks up at me, her shattered expression cracking my heart into pieces. “He promised me we’d go together. He swore if there came a moment when all was lost that we’d… we’d go. He wouldn’t let them take me. He’d kill all three of us both before–” She looks up from her ghostly, translucent hands and stares at the broken altar.
I crouch at her side. “You’ve been in the castle this whole time? Why?”
“We promised each other. It was our home. We couldn’t let King Kane take it from us. Over our dead bodies, we said. All else be damned. Our son–” She looks up at me, shaking her head in despair. “I don’t remember now. Why don’t I remember what happened?”
A creeping sensation skitters up my spine. The cave groans. Crystal shards hurtle to the ground before the air goes still again. I make the executive decision to take their skulls with me, neatly wrapping them both in rags. I begin to walk out of the cave but stop, turning back to the altar and Isolde, but she’s no longer there.
My clothes are damp, and my brain is reduced to mush when I finally reach my workspace in the spire, my legs aching and begging for me to sit down and never even look at a staircase again. I have big plans. Things to fix. Questions to unravel and find the answers to. The sun sets as I repair the helmet.
The golden light of day fades to twilight when I secure the mask to the headpiece. It warms under my touch–ready. Fixed.
“Isolde!” I call out to the empty room, excited, wondering if she’ll bring the male spirit with her so we can–
Silver moonlight drifts over my boots, stretching across the room as the full moon rises–glorious. Huge.
“Oh no,” I rush out as tingles of awareness rip up my spine, and that clawing, deprived monster whines inside of me. “No, no…”
How could I forget?