“He didn’t trust you,” Echo said.
“Not in the way he came to. That took time. But he opened up to me eventually. It was killing him, keeping that secret to himself. It was too much for any one person to carry alone, even him.” Dorian looked between Echo and the door as if weighing his options. After a moment, he seemed to reach a conclusion. He managed to sound both impatient and gentle when he spoke. He was in a hurry to get to the other side of that door, to find Caius, but in no hurry to cause Echo any harm. Perhaps it was the debt he felt he owed Caius; perhaps it was just simple friendship that propelled him to say “Whatever is behind that door, I can deal with it.”
“I have no doubt that you can,” Echo said. They were wasting precious time, but she couldn’t bring herself to charge forward, not with the sense memory of charred skin and scorched air so powerfully and undeniably present.
“What I am saying,” Dorian continued, “is that I can take it from here. You need not come with me. You can stay and I will scout ahead.”
Relief, sudden and heady, rushed over Echo, followed by a pang of shame. She couldn’t ask Dorian to face the next trial alone. That would be a level of cowardice to which she hoped never to ascend.
“I can’t ask you to do that,” Echo said. Her voice shook, but she said the words and she meant them and that was enough.
“You’re not asking, I’m offering,” said Dorian.
Oh, how tempting it was. But even in the face of fear, Echo knew she wouldn’t take him up on it. She could not ask others to risk that which she would not, no matter what horrors dwelled in the labyrinth that was her shared memories.
She leveled her gaze at the carved rune. “No,” she said. “We’ve come this far together, we keep going forward together. That’s the only way we’re going to make it through. All for one and one for all and all that jazz.”
She didn’t mean just getting through the temple. Or finding Caius. Or getting out in one piece. She meant all of it. The war. The world outside. The great unknown. None of them would survive to see the end of it if they allowed themselves to splinter.
Dorian nodded, not in simple assent but as if he understood everything she did not say. “All right,” he said. He held out a hand to her. She took it. Jasper held her other hand, and Dorian reached for the rune. His palm came to rest against the red stone, and beneath his touch, the carved lines began to glow a warm orange light that grew and grew until it was a blinding white, so bright Echo had to close her eyes against it.
“Together,” Dorian said, perhaps sensing that Echo would be grateful for the comfort of his voice in the face of the oncoming trial. She was.
The door slid open under Dorian’s hand, and together they stepped over the threshold and into the flames.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
It wasn’t fire that Echo encountered when she followed Dorian through the red door.
It was lava.
Well, that’s new.
One would have thought that a pit of molten lava would have warmed the antechamber they had just been in due to its proximity, but Echo hadn’t felt the slightest hint of warmth radiating from the stone. The temperature had been as moderate as the rest of the temple, which was in itself strange, now that she thought about it.
A narrow stone bridge—wide enough for only one person to cross at a time—ran the length of the room, joining the landing on which they stood to an identical one on the other side. That landing had a door much like the one through which they had just entered. An array of figures and symbols had been carved into the walls. Echo recognized a few Drakharin runes here and there, peppered among drawings of dragons in flight.
On either side of the bridge were rectangular pools of bubbling magma. Every now and then, a jet of boiling fluid would shoot off like a small geyser, splashing the stones of the bridge. Anyone standing upon it would have been severely burned.
It said something about Echo’s chronically perturbed state of mind that she found the presence of unthinkably hot magma more comforting than the fire she had expected.
The three of them stood on a stretch of stone tiles that ran the length of the wall they were all pressed against.
“So, who wants to go first?” Jasper asked. It was abundantly clear from his tone that he was not about to volunteer.
Before Dorian could indulge in more selfless heroics, Echo stepped onto the first tile of the bridge. It felt much narrower when she was standing on it, bracketed by those wicked pools of bubbling magma. The stone was so hot beneath her feet she could feel it through the soles of her boots. She hoped they didn’t melt.
“Does anyone else feel like they’re trapped inside a Super Mario game?” Jasper asked from his perch on the tiles by the door. He hadn’t budged.
Dorian followed Echo onto the bridge. “Who is Mario and why is he super?”
“Oh, Dorian. I have so much to teach you,” said Jasper. With extremely reluctant steps, he followed Dorian onto the bridge, eyes on the spurting lava to his left, the glow of the magma reflected in their yellow depths.
Their banter soothed Echo somewhat—as much as one could be soothed when there was a very real possibility of dying like Gollum clutching the ring of power in the fires of Mordor. At least it would make for an interesting obituary. We regretfully announce the passing of Echo, no last name. She bit it in a pit of lava. It was excruciating, but she was comforted in her final moments by the thought of how badass it would make her obit sound.
About halfway across the bridge, Echo felt the sudden spike of magic in the air. It crackled like static electricity, raising the hair on the back of her neck. She stopped.
“Something’s up,” she said.
“Is your spidey sense tingling?” Jasper asked. To Dorian, he added, “Spider-Man. I’ll explain later.”
The reference may have been meant in jest, but it wasn’t too far from the truth.
She’s here, whispered a voice at the back of Echo’s mind. The spirits of the vessels—more like metaphysical fingerprints, according to the Ala—swirled around Echo’s skull like a flock of agitated ghosts.
“Who?” Echo asked, ignoring the quizzical glances Dorian and Jasper directed her way.
The second the word left her lips, Echo realized what a hugely stupid question it was. There was only one she who could drive the spirits of firebirds past to that sort of frenzy, stirred up by Rose’s fear. Her terror was a rich and heady thing. It made Echo’s muscles freeze and joints lock like a deer caught in the lights of an oncoming car.
“What is it, Echo?” Dorian asked. “What do you see that we don’t?”