The dweller you call your sister is not one of the land. She is born of people, not of magic. This had been spoken in the voice of another pantera, one with a deep, dusky tone. I turned and found myself surrounded by unblinking, luminous eyes, filling the cave behind us. The panteras shifted soundlessly, waiting. None of them stepped forward as the speaker.
“Show me ... my mother.” I revised my request. Surely my mother would be part of the land. She had been made a Jeffrey by Staviti’s magic, after all.
I waited, my heart pounding harder and faster with every passing moment, and sure enough, the colours inside the glass began to emerge.
My mother was in Cyrus’s cave, right where we had left her. She was sitting on the bed that I had slept on, her eyes focussed blankly on the wall ahead. I knew that it couldn’t mean anything, but I still found myself clinging to the hope that she had chosen my bed to sit on for a reason. She missed me, maybe. She wondered where I was. I scoffed, shaking my head. My mother would never have missed me or wondered where I was. Even before she became a Jeffrey.
“Show me Staviti again,” I asked next, my mind wandering back to the image of a tiny baby boy in Madeline’s arms.
I wanted to know why the glass had shown me that particular piece of history. Why Staviti’s birth? Was it because it marked the beginning of the gods? Topia had been a land free of gods, once. Staviti’s birth must have marked a significant turning point for the land itself. The water had saved his mother’s life. Had it changed him as well?
The scene before me slowly filtered into view, as though filled by slow tendrils of coloured smoke, gradually gaining substance.
There was a little boy before us. He was standing in a field, staring up at a mountain. I recognised the landscape after only a click, though the coastline had changed, and so had the surrounding vegetation. It was Champions Peak—the craggy rocks formed the same shape: a rough stone wall to guard against the violent waves of the sea.
Everything else was different, though. I was seeing into the past again.
“Stav!” a boy’s voice called out, and the child we had been looking at turned around. Another boy ran into view, holding a stick almost as tall as he was.
“What do you want, Jakan?” Staviti seemed agitated, his small brow furrowed, his eyes squinting at the other.
“You know you can’t go there,” Jakan replied, throwing down the stick, his voice losing some of the playfulness it had held only a moment ago. “Father said you can’t go back to Topia. If you go there again it won’t want to let you return. It might keep you.”
The boy version of Staviti rolled his eyes, picking up the stick that Jakan had dropped. “We belong there, both of us. We aren’t like mother, or father, or the other children. We’re special, can’t you feel it? Can’t you tell?”
“Don’t go back there ...” Jakan’s voice began to fade, and the scene trembled before me, beginning to dissolve into something else.
“Stav! Stop!” the other boy was crying out, frantically scrambling over the unforgiving stone that lay at the base of the mountain.
Staviti didn’t look back, and the scene fell away completely, leaving the mortal glass black, once again.
“Show me Jakan!” I cried out, my hands flattening to the stone, as though I could climb through it and deliver myself to the base of the mountain with the two boys.
The glass remained blank, cloaked in darkness. I waited, and then I repeated myself, my words softer this time: a request rather than an order.
“Show me Jakan, please.”
The glass glimmered back, refusing to shift into another scene.
“Why won’t it work?” I asked.
“Jakan must not be connected to the land,” Aros replied, sounding just as confused as I was.
“He has to be.” I shook my head. “He was Staviti’s brother. He should be connected just like Staviti is.”
“He was Staviti’s brother,” Rome corrected me. “He must no longer be alive. What you’re seeing is the world as it was hundreds of life-cycles ago. Perhaps Staviti was the only brother to survive.”
“Was he a god, even back then? Was he born a god?” I stepped away from the glass, towards Leden.
I can answer many of your questions, she replied, but the others have forbidden me. It is not for us to choose a side in the battle between mortals and immortals.
“I didn’t even know we were in a battle.” I glanced from Leden to the glowing eyes behind her. There was a humming sound emanating from them. It sounded like some kind of warning, a resonance of disapproval.
We have allowed you to speak to the mortal glass. A deep pantera voice skimmed across my mind, seeming to echo all around me. The Abcurses stirred, as though wary of the sudden change in the atmosphere. It is time, now, for you to carry our gift to the Neutral God.
I was almost surprised that they actually had something for me to bring to Cyrus. I had been more of the opinion that I would have to figure out what Cyrus’s object was, before stealing it and sneaking it back to Minatsol. I had been agonising over how to ask the panteras what the object might be without alerting them to the fact that I was going to ‘borrow’ it. So far, the best I had come up with was: ‘if there was a god with silver-white hair, a drinking problem, and rage issues ... what might he want to steal from you?’ followed by, ‘can I hold it for a click?’
“What is the gift?” I asked, as the panteras inside the cave began to stir, moving toward the entrance at a slow and languorous pace.
It will be arriving very soon. Leden had been the one to answer me, her flank brushing against my upper arm as we followed the others.
We moved out of the cave and I turned to glance behind me to make sure that I hadn’t accidentally lost an Abcurse. Siret’s smile hiked up at the corners and Yael’s eyes flicked down my front, as though taking stock of me the same way I was taking stock of them. Coen nodded at me, his eyes shuttered, his expression guarded—we’re fine, he seemed to be saying. Aros held my gaze a little too long—causing me to stumble sideways into Leden, who paused until I had managed to steady myself again. Rome nudged his chin forward, indicating that I should start watching where I was walking.
I was about to do just that when the shifting of colour caught my eye. I could have sworn that one of the trees had moved. I stopped walking altogether, squinting at the entrance of the cave—except that it was no longer there. There was a forest there, right where the dark opening should have been. The branches interlocked thickly, time-worn roots threading through the ground, making it look like they had been there for an eternity.
“Where did the cave go?” I whispered to Leden, my hand on her silky mane.
Just as the mortal glass does not see the secrets of those unconnected to the land, it does not want to be seen by such people, Leden replied, her voice in my head almost a whisper now. The glass is selective—it will only appear for those who are connected, and the cave’s purpose is to protect the glass. By that logic, the cave will hide itself from any person who is not connected to the land.
“You mean ... a dweller is here? In Topia? That’s your gift to Cyrus? A dweller?”
Leden snorted out a gentle sound, possibly amused. There are many ways to be disconnected. For a god, it is the soul that connects to the land, not the body—the body is only a receptacle. If the soul is taken away, the person is no longer connected.
I opened my mouth to ask exactly how a soul could be disconnected from a person’s body, but the answer came to me before I had managed to voice the question. The imprisonment realm. I had seen it with my own eyes: Sienna tied to the chair, her dark hair falling about her, her wrists and ankles bound in chains. I thought back to Jakan, and how the glass had refused to show him. Maybe he wasn’t dead after all—maybe there really was a reason the glass had chosen to show me Staviti’s brother. Jakan was the key to figuring this out—I wasn’t sure how I knew, but I was somehow sure of it. My intuition is never wrong.
“Your intuition is wrong all the time,” Siret muttered, suddenly behind me.
“I can’t recall it ever being right,” Rome agreed.