Posey
The snow is wet and thick beneath my paws, unlike a few days ago when everything was a frozen wasteland. I can prance easily, staying mostly on top of the snow instead of sinking into it, and the air feels cold but in a good way instead of that teeth-rattling chill.
I have no idea where we’re going, and I don’t think Aris does either. He’s quick and sure-footed, but so am I, and while we race and weave between trees and leap off rocks jutting out of the snow, our movements begin to sync until I’m beside him instead of behind him.
The forest thins to reveal the shallow valley he was talking about earlier. The ground beneath us tilts into the valley, slippery and uneven.
When I slow and carefully pick my way down, Aris has other plans. He pounces on me, sending us both careening through the snow, and the play fight that ensues has birds soaring from the trees in alarm. He pins me twice, rolling me onto my back, dragging me over the snow and delighting in my little squeals, but I’ve never had this much fun.
He even chases voles with me.
During our jaunt through the old village, abandoned village in the valley, while we explore the outbuildings and rotting homes, he occasionally stops to nip my neck and nuzzle against where my mark is in my human form. It feels insanely good. Everything about this is what I’ve missed out on as a fox before.
When the sun begins to set and paints the sky a vivid crimson, instead of turning back to the castle, he takes us deeper into the valley, back through the tree line where a small lake rests, covered in ice.
I hang back while he trots ahead of me, his ears pinned like he’s prepared to strike, but his body is relaxed while he carefully picks a path for us across the ice.
Then I see it. The reason we’re here. What he wanted to show me.
I nearly burst out of my fox form in shock.
At the edge of the lake, cloaked in icy fog and tucked in a thick overgrowth of gnarled trees, a structure of obsidian rises out of the fog, overgrown with frozen, frosted vines.
The entrance is nothing but a gaping void of light, the shadows within stretching for what looks like miles.
Aris glances over his shoulder, his eyes meeting mine, before he slips into the entrance and disappears.
I trust him. I really do. But I really don’t want to go in there. I want to stay in the sunshine for once in my life, with him, rolling in the snow, but I follow, shivering, my paws slipping over ice that continues through the entrance, and… I was right about the lake having an entrance to the caves.
A few minutes later, dressed in thick slacks and a loose-fitting shirt that reminds me of something out of a romance novel about pirates or knights from a time of old, Aris kneels in his human form. My gaze is on our murky, glittering surroundings. He secures a length of rope through the belt loops of the men’s pants he asked me to put on, tightening the rope around my waist to keep them up. My cloak is twice as long as it needs to be for my height, but with the men’s sweater underneath, rolled up my wrists, I’m toasty warm.
“The boots aren’t going to fit at all, but they’ll have to do,” he murmurs. I absently slip my feet into them, still gazing at the stone archways high above our heads and the crystal formations hanging from them. Water drips in the distance. Behind us, the lake is glassy, reflective ice, stopping at the beginnings of what I believe might have been a massive cathedral now buried in the mountainside.
“Tell me about this place.” I whisper, but my words carry, echoing into obscurity.
“It was the original temple of Veiled Valley. The castle was actually built against it, above it, following the slope of the valley.”
“So our castle is… the top of the structure, essentially?”
He smiles softly when I say our. “Yep. The top six floors or so.”
“Wow! The original castle would have been absolutely massive!”
“It is.” He nods as he rises to adjust the fit of my cloak and smooth back my hair. “What we call the caves is just the old castle, really. Some areas have fallen into caverns, sure, but this place? It’s one of my favorites.” He looks over the top of my head at the entrance, chewing his lower lip for a moment in thought. “But this is the first time I’ve been able to access it this way, with the lake frozen.”
A rush of cold air groans over us. Crystal fragments fall from the archways, crashing to the ground, but Aris doesn’t seem bothered.
“I thought you didn’t want me to come here.”
He smooths his thumb over my mark, his eyes going distant for a moment, like he’s trapped in some thought, then he replies, “I already know you’re not going to listen. And if you’re drawn to this place, maybe there’s something here calling out to you that didn’t call out to me during my ascension. I’d like to know what that is.” The shadows groan again, and his bracelets illuminate, casting a gentle silver glow around us.
It’s enough light to see… Goddess!
“What happened here?”
“Something bad.”
Armor rusts in shambles beneath our feet. Bones disintegrate into dust under Aris’s boots. I follow him, waiting for those whispers to begin, but it’s silent, save for the occasional rumbling groan of phantom wind coming from doorways where the wooden doors themselves have long rotted and fallen away.
We explore the main sanctuary for a while before I decide there’s nothing here. Nothing with ties to the helmet and diadem, but then we cross through another part of the temple and the corridor grows narrow, and instead of grand archways, the ceiling drops, and the cave structures jut from the remains of stone walls.
Some rooms are totally closed off by crystals, but one thing is clear. “We’re in the old castle now.”
He nods, using his bracelets to light our way. Stone walls give way to raw earth and back again. I feel like we’ve been walking for miles, somehow moving upward into the valley again. The floor beneath us, rough stone littered with rust from ancient armor and the occasional piece of pottery or other artifact, tilts upward, and Aris guides us up a gently curving staircase etched from stone, his hand wrapped around my elbow.
Water trickles down the wall to our left. It’s surprisingly loud, but other than our footsteps, it’s the only tangible sound.
Something raw and painful expands through my chest. My heart lurches and squeezes tight. I stop short, accidentally yanking Aris back a step, and he whirls, eyes blazing silver in the darkness.
“It’s okay,” I murmur a bit breathlessly. “I just feel weird.”
“Light headed? We’re moving up, and the air will be less heavy soon.” He leans down a bit to look me in my eyes, but I shake my head.
“No, just…” I scrub my chest beneath my cloak. “I found a room I thought was the temple, but now I think I was wrong. It’s where I found the helmet, diadem, and the skulls. It’s where the spirits of the house died, I think. Where is it?”
“I don’t know. I’ve likely never seen it.”
I feel disoriented in the dark. I can feel Aris’s nerves tightening as I collect myself and urge him forward in our exploration, but the further we travel, the more my chest aches.
Aris starts to move us down a wide corridor where the ceiling tilts again, closing us into another ancient section of the castle, but my legs suddenly refuse to move, and I turn to the sound of whispers directly behind us. His bracelets shudder before glowing again. He stiffens behind me, his hand folding over my hip. “What do you feel, Posey?”
I flex my fingers, which tingle, growing increasingly warm.
“Posey?”
In the darkness, through a slit in the shadows, I feel a pull, like someone’s reaching through my cloak and yanking me to the side.
There is, in fact, a small cleft in the wall of the corridor. I move through it. Aris barely fits, and his hiss of pain and grunt of effort behind me as he squeezes through the cleft barely registers in my head as sound because it’s all whispers now. Whispers at first, and then full, startling, barely discernable conversations.
Our boots slash through stale water. Darkness sweeps in, and the air grows thin and empty.
“Oh, my Goddess,” Aris breathes, lifting his arm and letting his powers dance. His shadows expand with flashes of throbbing blue light, illuminating a great, cavernous space.
A ballroom.
“Wait,” he rushes out, grabbing my shoulder before I can take a step, and we look down at the littered floor.
“Oh, no.” The whisper leaves my lips in a pained moan. This is a burial ground. Piles of bones and armor. Tables in shambles, turned to rot. The remains of plates and cutlery rusted and buried beneath decades–no, centuries–of stillness.
And at the very back of the room is a door.
I immediately know where it leads, and my heart sinks to my too-big boots.
The altar room sits beyond the ballroom, through another break in what used to be a wall and small servants’ corridor. The hallway itself is in shambles, littered with artifacts and bones, like whatever battle took place spilled over into the closed off, private wings of the castle.
The whispers stop once I reach the watery grave of the spirits who’ve been so kind to me, to us, the guardians of the Shadowsyngers who came after them despite all odds.
Aris crouches to examine the bones of Isolde and her mate and sighs.
“I saw her,” I explain, telling him in detail about my time here. “She’s been so quiet since then. I can barely feel her anymore.”
“And the male spirit is in protective mode,” Aris agrees with a grunt, like he somehow gets it. “Do they talk to you? Can you hear them?”
I nod, and he seems pleased with the answer. He takes a deep breath and squints into the shadows.
I say the thing that’s been weighing on my mind for several days now. “Do you think… once we’ve found all the missing pieces of the armor, that they’ll… go away?”
“I don’t think it’s possible for us to find everything,” he admits. “The ascension… Look, you found the helmet. You’re connected to this. I think, being my mate, and being an alchemist, it called out to you for me. You were meant to mend it, and you have.”
“But the diadem–”
He steps toward me, closing the distance between us. He’s warm and solid–something real, something I can touch to keep me grounded as an ancient world long buried thrums all around us.
Aris smooths my hair back, his thumb ghosting across my lower lip, and then he kisses me. It’s lovely and soft while equally possessive. “You’re going to be the Luna Queen of Veiled Valley. My mate. My queen. My wife. If that diadem called to you, it’s because you’re meant to wear it.”
“This whole thing kind of put a damper on shifting,” I mumble, but I’m blushing so deeply I’m sure my cheeks are bringing the temperature of the caves up by ten or more degrees.
He cups the back of my head and angles my face upward to meet him, pressing a kiss to my forehead, whispering, “We have time. Solstice is next week, and then we have so much time to figure all of this out, and better yet, just to be us. Here, in this creepy, dusty old castle.”
“I love it here.” Our fingers intertwine, mirroring the eternal embrace of our ghostly companions’ bones on the ground nearby. I can wholeheartedly understand why they didn’t leave if it was voluntary.
“There’s something I want to ask you,” Aris says against my skin.