It was quiet and still in the temple, and Fletcher was glad for a sleep without the strange calls and hoots from the wild demons in the jungle, even if it was in the middle of the day.
The minutes ticked by. They lay there in a comfortable silence, warm and content. Or at least, what Fletcher had thought was comfortable. Sylva cleared her throat.
“Fletcher. You know, about y-yesterday,” she stammered, then paused awkwardly.
“Hmm?” Fletcher mumbled. He was half-asleep, but as his memory of their time in the waterfall swam to the surface, he found himself quickly awake.
Sylva seemed to think for a moment, then spoke again.
“In my culture … when a … if a high elf and wood elf marry, they’re cast out. Shunned by their people, even their own family. They’re asked to leave the Great Forest. Then told to leave. Then made to leave.” She spoke in quick bursts, as if it was a struggle to get the words out.
“Okay,” Fletcher said.
“They don’t like the castes to mix,” Sylva said, and Fletcher could hear the shame in her voice.
“They sound like Jeffrey,” Fletcher said. “He didn’t want any mixing either.”
In the corner of his eye he saw Sylva’s face wince at the traitor’s name.
“Yes, like Jeffrey,” she said softly.
“Why are you telling me this?” Fletcher asked.
Silence.
“They don’t like mixing…,” Fletcher murmured.
He left his sentence unfinished. Realization sat like a cold stone in his stomach.
“I just … I can’t,” Sylva whispered, so quietly that Fletcher wasn’t sure if he was supposed to hear it.
Being with him could ruin her. That was what she was saying.
She turned on her side so he couldn’t see her face. He felt so stupid.
“I thought that’s what we were fighting against,” he said, and he couldn’t keep the bitterness from his voice.
She didn’t reply. It was too painful to talk about it. He wanted to pretend that she had just been telling him about her culture, that it didn’t mean what he knew it did. But the words left unsaid seemed even louder than if they had been spoken.
He gathered Ignatius into his arms, leaving a gap between himself and Sylva. It was a long time before he fell asleep.
CHAPTER
14
NIGHT FELL, AND AS THEY FLEW into the dark skies, the cold and the wind became a blessing in disguise—they had an excuse not to talk. It felt awkward now to clasp Sylva around her midriff. He hated it. Hated it so much that he almost missed the smoke.
A wisp of black, far in the distance, appeared in the overlay of the scrying stone. Was that the shadowy outline of a mountain beneath? He spoke for the first time in several hours.
“There,” he said, pointing.
He knew Sylva couldn’t see it, but his stomach lurched as Lysander corrected their course. Minutes passed as they flew on, staring into the darkness. Already, the first tinge of light above signaled the approach of dawn. They were cutting it close.
“My god,” Fletcher whispered, hope flooding through him like a drug. “I think we did it.”
The wisp had turned into a column of black smoke, widening as it rose into a mushroom of gray that was lost in the ether’s skies. Beneath it was a single peak, jutting from the ground like a vast pyramid, layered with a topping of green forest and dark volcanic soil. The orange glow from the zenith became visible as they neared, the molten lava illuminating an enormous caldera. The lava lake was as large as Vocans’s atrium, and the bowl of earth in which it centered was twice that size again.
As Lysander swooped down toward the crater’s edge, the heat hit them like a wave. The hairs on Fletcher’s forearms shriveled as they landed, and then boom: Fletcher turned his head away as a fresh blast radiated from the volcano, beating his face with its force.
There was a thick band of steaming soil around the lip that their moccasins could barely stand, strewn with boulders that sported surfaces like candle wax. The red-orange pool of lava bubbled and popped, flinging droplets of molten rock that sizzled on the earth. The earth they stood on leaned in an incline toward the deadly lake, and Fletcher’s mind reeled with the irrational fear that they were being sucked in toward the incandescent center.
“How could anything grow in a place like this?” Sylva said, raising her voice so it could be heard over the roiling roar of the lava.
“We need to spread out,” Fletcher said, summoning Ignatius. He knew it was a risk, after what had happened last time the little demon had been near lava.
Still, the Salamander was made for this search, able to approach the hottest areas that they could not reach. He guessed he could yank the demon out again using a kinetic lasso, as he had done the last time.
Lysander’s claws could not take the soil’s temperature, nor could Athena’s, so the two demons settled on the rim for a well-deserved respite. The Griffin was dead on his feet, the grueling nights of hard flying and intermittent sleep leaving him to sprawl on the cooler soil, his eyes closed with exhaustion.
Ignatius ran ahead of Fletcher as he and Sylva parted ways. They were forced to shelter behind boulders as they rounded the edges of the caldera, darting from rock to rock to protect themselves from the radiating heat as they hunted for the elusive flowers. Nothing could be seen but raw, fuming earth.
Despair began to set in as Fletcher slowly surveyed the volcano’s caldera. Nothing. Just dirt, and rock, and fire. They were going to die in this world, choking on the poisonous air as their paralyzed lungs lay stricken in their chests.
Sylva must have yelled, but the tumult of the lava meant he realized it only when he glanced up and saw her waving from the other side of the lava pool. It took him five minutes to work his way around; hissing with pain each time he braved the space between boulders to shelter behind.
His heart dropped when he saw what Sylva had found, the image blurred as his eyes teared up from the oppressive dryness. A patch of broken stalks were all she had found, growing in the lee of a large boulder. The buds had been removed, torn roughly from their seats. A fragment of yellow petal remained here and there, broken and insubstantial, but enough to confirm these were the plants they were looking for.
“I tried healing them,” Sylva yelled, her face stricken. “It didn’t work.”
“There might be another patch nearby,” Fletcher replied, looking around in desperation. Ignatius was approaching them from the other side, having searched the area he and Sylva had not. The demon yapped, and Fletcher could sense the demon’s frustration. Nothing there either.
He fell to his knees and scrunched his eyes tight. They had been so close.
“I thought Jeffrey’s journal was going to save us,” Sylva growled, her voice barely discernible over the roar of the volcano. “All it’s done is waste the little time we had left.”