33

The cave looms before me, a gaping maw ready to consume my fear—and possibly more than that. The stench of shit, leather, and bile assaults my senses again. The air already feels heavy, and we’re nearly one hundred paces away. Sharp, wet stones and dead leaves litter the cave’s opening. Bones—some snapped, some whole—pile between agate stones.

Jadon finds torches at the entrance among the bones and stones and ignites them with his fire-starter. “We’ll use these to light the fires,” he says. “Protect your eyes, no matter what.”

Damp, cold air whistles and blows from the mouth of the cavern. The smell intensifies with the additions of decay and must, slime and rot. It smells like every breathing, living thing crawled into this cave and died… twice .

“I don’t know if I’ve heard of this place,” I say. “Where’d you learn about it? Old Myrtle’s wall?”

“During Assent. Father Knete warned those who disobeyed that they’d be cast into the darkness of Azzam Cavern by Supreme himself. There, you’ll wander in darkness for a thousand ages until the Vile One ascends from the pits of the cavern and pulls you down and tortures you for a thousand more ages and then, finally, blessedly, burns you up.”

Horrified, I gape at him.

“It worked.” He leads the way, torch up, sword out.

Down, down, down we go. There’s an explosion followed by a chain of smaller booms. The ground shakes. We stand there, frozen, eyes trained on the torch, waiting for the vibrations to stop. Once that booming and banging ends, all that’s left to hear is…chittering.

“Kai,” Jadon says, that one word full of dread. He’s looking down at his feet.

I don’t want to, but I also look down, and my heart immediately shrivels in my chest.

Saloroaches—shortened wings, which means they can’t fly, brown bodies as long as mouse tails, and translucent, which means that I can see thousands of roaches beneath the thousands of roaches already swarming over my feet.

And then comes the noise of shrieking, flapping, and chittering. Immediately, battabies swarm from every direction. Their bodies glow blue, and the group swells.

Jadon shouts, “Go!”

“Which direction?” I shout back.

“Follow me!”

I trip on something slimy and catch myself with my hands before my face meets the filth coating the floor. I recover quickly, wiping the grime on my pants. Jadon’s fire is far ahead of me now, and I follow until that fire flickers and blinks out. My torch still blazes with flame, but Jadon’s… I don’t see him, nor can I see his glow—not amber, not blue, not plum.

“Jadon!” I call out, my heart pounding against my ribs, the panic in my voice echoing through the darkness, answered only by battaby shrieks. I walk faster, my footsteps frantic and heavy, stopping only to swing my torch or my sword at battabies, imagined or real, I can’t tell. Where is he? My panic rises like a tide. My breaths come in shallow pants, each inhale a struggle. I can’t find him in the darkness, and I’m now surrounded by pulsating battaby wings.

My mind races with horrifying possibilities, each more terrifying than the last. Did these creatures take him to the depths of the cave? Should I turn back around and… what? Get help? I am the help. The mere thought of losing him… No . Stop. Don’t . I refuse to even think like that. Because losing him would mean losing my heart. Who can survive without a heart?

“Jadon!” I swing my sword and my fire like I’m swinging at despair, feeling contact only a fraction of the times I swing. I try to peer past the cloud of darkness and the glowing leathery bodies, but I can’t see any other torch. Salty water tumbles down my face. Are those tears? Is that sweat? Yes, to both.

Two battabies strike my head.

“Stop!” I swing my torch in their direction.

Two battabies shriek, one low, one high, and then…

Complete silence.

Still air.

I want to call out Jadon’s name again, but I don’t want to disturb this unnatural quiet. Maybe I can search for him now, if I move slowly, deliberately, so slow and deliberate that they won’t even be able to sense my presence. Maybe they’re haunting another part of the cave now.

I hold my torch out before me.

No blue glow.

No creatures flutter before me.

I spin around.

No blue glow.

No creatures flutter behind me.

I lift the torch above my head and look up.

The blue glow of battabies hums across the ceiling, no piece of granite left uncovered. They’re all healthy, these roosting, dog-sized monsters. Not in attack mode, they’re just hanging upside down on the crags of the cavern. Their leathery wings shine with the light from my fire.

This is the nastiest, stinkiest, most fucked-up place I’ve ever been—and I don’t need memory to know this is true. A visit to Azzam Cavern would be like walking. Unforgettable.

I need to find Jadon, and we need to figure out the best place to start the burn. We have to kill this colony. But I don’t want to start the burn without knowing where he is—I could trap him. I slink away from the densest grouping of battabies to a space with a higher ceiling and hopefully better echo.

“Jadon!” I call, hesitant to shout louder and disturb the flock. I step carefully, slowly, feeling the ground with the toe of my boot before stepping sure, dreading that with my next step, my foot could find his body.

“Jadon?” I call out again. “Please answer me. Whistle. Clap. Do something.”

Some of the creatures hanging above begin to writhe. Two and then three awaken fully. Frozen, I hold my breath. Then, as if one organism, the group swoops down to attack. I swing my torch and sword madly, but they pull back and dip down. Neither my sword nor torch strike one of these creatures. Still swinging, I trip over a large stone— fuck, that’s not a stone, that’s a skeleton —and drop my torch. The firelight shines on those now kicked-apart bones and glints off the black talons of countless battabies. Those feet are made for clawing—my eyes, my brains, any piece of me that stands between these creatures and my blood.

I recover the torch and frantically scan the floor of the cavern that wavers and writhes in the flickering torchlight, relieved to find no pieces of Jadon scattered among the bones. Where could he be? Maybe he made it out of the cavern and is safe and sound, waiting for me to join him. I swallow. He wouldn’t leave me here alone. I’m certain of it. Maybe he’s lost in the cave. Maybe he’s trapped somewhere in the dark. Maybe the battabies… No.

My chest feels as though an Otaan is standing on it. We knew the danger. We needed more than swords and fire—neither work against these beasts. We should’ve brought… what ? My weapons haven’t been successful so far.

I shift the torch to my other hand and blink hard, a vise tightening my heart. What if I never see him again? What if I never see the light ever again?

More battabies drop from the ceiling to join the blue cloud swirling above me. None have lunged at my head… yet . They’re dropping slowly as a collective, no doubt preparing to overwhelm me with their sea of bodies.

My poor pounding heart. How much abuse will it take before giving out? My eyes sting from sweat. My shoulder muscles ache from swinging steel and flame. My hands burn . My fingertips glow, matching the colors of the useless torch I’m clutching.

I stare at my hands in wonder. I have another weapon—something these creatures have never seen before. I drop the torch and thrust my hands at the circling swarm. I’ll be able to hurl wind as I work my way through the cavern, pushing past the relentless onslaught of battabies and saloroaches, searching for Jadon and protecting the both of us as we finish our task together. The wind from my hands is the perfect weapon for this battle: anger and fear surge through in equal parts as determination and frustration.

The wind blasts from my core, and blue crackling air punches the battabies like the fists of thirty men. The intensity of their shrieks almost drops me to my knees. Their glow, though, blinks from blue to amber to black. The immediate space around me is now clear…until it’s not. Another cloud of creatures swarms, and I cry out with raw emotion as I send more wind from my hands. Blue glow. Gold glow. No glow. In the breath before the next wave of creatures, I reach to grab my torch still burning on the ground.

But as I reach, I spot that glowing blue sea of saloroaches rolling toward me. Though they’re not as big as battabies, these creatures win by overwhelming their prey in numbers, bringing that doomed target to the ground through sheer weight, then munching and chewing and invading every opening that poor animal has, eating away at it until there’s nothing left except bones like the bright ones scattered at the entrance of the cave, bones like the ones I stumbled over moments ago. A horrible thought pops my heart. What if Jadon was overtaken by these creatures? He doesn’t have wind or the ability to see in the dark. He wouldn’t see the blue glow of countless roaches. What if I’ll never find him because there is nothing left to find?

The vise around my heart squeezes even tighter. I must find him.

The swarm never breaks even as I kick out my feet, stomp and shriek, until I thrust my wind here and there and over there.

Maybe it’s not the battabies we should’ve feared.

One courageous saloroach has reached my knee.

I slap it off, dropping my torch in the process.

Me being here in this cave… Is this punishment for what Elyn claims I’ve done? Will she keep sending otherworldly beasts after me until I surrender? She’d know that we’d have no choice but to come to this cave to kill the colony or risk being attacked again. Veril had never seen these creatures in his woods, which means these creatures didn’t care enough before to haunt the forests around his cottage. How did they know to come there?

More saloroaches skitter past my boots, and I swipe and shudder, kick and swipe.

I can’t let them reach my knees. I’ve lost if they reach my knees. And I don’t lose.

But they’re so many, too many, and they all glow blue, nowhere close to death, and they’re moving higher, and my breathing is…is…

My scream grows from deep inside, near my heart, and I push my hands out, sending the battabies slamming against the ceiling and the saloroaches backward, most taking flight for the first time in their lives, while the others explode from my wind. But my wind also sweeps away my torch, and now it flickers a few paces away from me, atop a hill of battaby dung as tall as Veril’s cottage. And that dung hill is alive with more black-bodied, blue-glowing saloroaches.

The battabies don’t appreciate my wind, and they temporarily abandon this sliver of the cave. The chittering from the saloroaches, though, has started up again. They’ve forgotten the power and intensity and threat of my hands.

The torch sputters, and I’m gradually being swallowed by darkness—that is, until I look down and see the undulating sea of glowing blue light spreading across the ground as far as I can see. There’s no flicker of amber among this new wave of saloroaches. And that blue glow sweeps over the toes of my boots again and fights to reach my knees. I swipe and kick and grip Fury tighter, holding my breath as the flame from my torch dims.

The cave falls into silence. Even the chittering has ceased. The fire from my torch continues to wane. A breeze teases my forehead. My heart’s rhythm is all over the place, beating on ones and threes when it bothers to beat at all. Slowly, I peek over my shoulder, seeing nothing lurking in the looming darkness.

But that’s not accurate .

I slowly sheathe my sword and reach for my dagger.

That teasing breeze becomes a burst of wind, and over on the dung hill, the flame of my torch flickers, then goes out.

I’m dunked into complete darkness.

Not one glowing light, not blue, not amber. Did every living thing, except me, just die?

My vision tries to adjust, but there is nothing my eyes can grab onto.

There is nothing here.

And that’s the problem.