That’d be nice.
Seven
One moment we were picking a precarious path through the mountains about a mile from the boundary of the academy, and then, suddenly, we weren’t even in Blesswood anymore. I gasped, my footsteps halting, my eyes going wide. The seemingly endless stretch of mountainous terrain before us had dissolved, and a dark, damp-smelling cave had loomed in around us, only a pinprick of light visible in the distance.
“What in the world of the gods …” I spun around, trying to take in everything at once, even though it was too dark to take in even an inch of the ‘everything’.
“Exactly.” Rome had been the one to utter the reply, sounding right behind me.
He had dropped to the back of the procession after declaring to the group that I kept getting into trouble whenever he left me unsupervised, whatever that was supposed to mean. He had been the one to plant a hand on the centre of my spine and push me forward, initiating this trip through reality.
“What do you mean exactly?” I asked in the general direction of his voice.
“The world of the gods,” he replied, making me realise that I was staring at the wrong patch of darkness.
I adjusted my eyes, and then it hit me.
No—it didn’t hit me! Because that was impossible!
This cave couldn’t be Topia. The Abcurse brothers couldn’t possibly know a secret passage into Topia!
“Anything is possible, Rocks,” Siret muttered, grabbing my wrist and drawing me through the darkness, toward the little pinprick of light. I must have spoken out loud—or else they could read minds.
Knowing my luck, it was the latter.
As soon as Siret’s skin touched mine, my head was flooded with conflicting images. Thoughts. Memories. I had no idea what they were, but the men and women pictured in my mind weren’t anything like the sols I knew. They wore robes as they strolled past insanely gorgeous scenery; lakes, rivers, oceans. Some of them were sitting on floating marble platforms which looked down over miles and miles of sky. Siret was using his trickery gift to fill my head with nonsense, and yet … I couldn’t help the feeling that this particular nonsense was actually real.
Because I was in Topia. Those demon-sols snuck me into fucking Topia!
Emmy wasn’t just going to kill me anymore. She was going to cut me up into tiny little pieces, put each piece of me into a tiny box, and feed each box to a single bullsen, which she would burn, and then she would separate the ashes of the burnt bullsen into tiny little piles, and then she would put each tiny pile of ash into a tiny box, and then—
“Welcome to the world of the gods,” Rome drawled, as we stepped from the cave and into the glaring sunlight.
Siret let me go, only to grab me again as I pitched forward. My feet were trying to move before my mind had caught up to the world in front of me.
It was beauty. It had to be beauty personified in a land because there were no other words to explain what I was seeing. Everything glowed, like the sols, but a million times stronger. As if the gods lived on the sun and somehow they’d turned down the heat, but not the shine. The land spread out far beyond what I could see; it was all sparkling lakes, rolling mountains and everything that the tales of Topia had promised. Everything that the tales of Topia had promised to the sols that were going to become gods. It was more, too. More than the stories, and the lectures, and the songs. I was now staring at the same things that I had seen when Siret had dragged me through the cave and into paradise.
Floating marble structures, twenty feet in diameter, drifted lazily above our heads. I couldn’t see beyond them to know if anyone was up there, but … who cared? They were just floating there. It was magic, pure and simple. Powers beyond anything I had ever seen, and beauty beyond what I could understand.
“I finally get it.” I must have murmured it out loud, because five sets of gem-like eyes were suddenly focusing on me, five massive bodies surrounding me.
“What do you finally get, Rocks?” Coen stepped into my space again. He wasn’t the only one. I could feel another at my back, but I was too terrified to turn and find out who it was.
Trying to breathe around the panic, I stuttered out, “I get why you sols spend your lives trying to get here. It’s perfect.”
I heard a snort of laughter to my left, and somehow knew that it was Siret. “Don’t let the beauty fool you,” he said. “This world is filled with as many ugly assholes as Minatsol.”