So long as their Fade still lived.
“No,” he gasped.
The Crest nodded. It wasn’t arrogance in her eyes. Not hardness. Just sorrow. “So you’ve found out my secret.”
Fin couldn’t believe what he was seeing, what he was hearing. The leader of the invincible army could be hurt, just like him. She felt fear, just like him. She could fail, just like him.
The Crest of the Rise was mortal. Which could only mean one thing. Her Fade… Fin’s real mother…
“My mom is dead,” Fin breathed.
CHAPTER 24
As in the Beginning…
Marrill stared at the tiny path ahead of them leading into the depths of the forest. It was like a nightmare of every fairy tale she’d ever read put together; every scary one, anyway. She half expected hungry wolves or cackling witches to leap from the shadows.
But then, this was the Pirate Stream—wolves and witches were way too tame for whatever terrors lurked here.
Ardent stood at the edge of the tangled trees, hands on his hips as he surveyed their surroundings. “Only three rules you need to remember,” he said. He ticked each off on his fingers in turn. “First, stay on the path. Second, don’t get lost. And third…” He paused, brow furrowed. “I could have sworn there was a third. And come to think of it, maybe staying on the path and not getting lost are the same one.…” He shrugged. “Well, just don’t die, I guess. Anyway, on we go.”
With that, he straightened his cap and started down the dark path.
This was the point where Marrill would normally look to Fin for a wry joke to make her feel better. But Fin wasn’t here—he was back at the Kraken holding off the Rise and the Fade.
Marrill sucked in a deep breath. If he could face down an unbeatable army, with no hopes of success, she could take a walk in some scary-looking woods.
“No problem,” she whispered to herself. Then she plunged into the forest.
The temperature plummeted almost instantly. The very air felt weird: thicker in some spots, thinner in others. Every atom in her body vibrated at an odd pitch as she struggled to keep up with Ardent’s confident stride. At times, she felt like different parts of her were moving at different speeds.
On either side, the forest closed tightly around them. Branches leaned toward her with a creaking hiss, as though Marrill had some sort of magnetic pull. Out of the corner of her eye she thought she saw lights. But when she tried looking at them, they disappeared, blinking out of existence like fireflies.
Then there were the noises. She swore she could hear whispers, giggling even, layered with the calls of strange creatures and the slippery shifting of parting leaves. Underlying it all was a hum that changed pitch whenever she turned her head.
Disconcerting shadows danced at the edge of her vision. “Am I the only one seeing phantoms?” she asked.
Ahead, Ardent slapped his hand against his forehead. “Right, of course! How silly of me. That’s the third rule.” He spun back to her. “What you are seeing are not phantoms. They’re echoes. I’d avoid them if I were you.”
He turned and continued down the path. Marrill scrambled after him. “What do you mean by echoes? Echoes of what?”
“Oh, all sorts of things! Old magic, usually. Remember that a pirate stream is a river that flows away from another river. So if you think of the Pirate Stream as a branch out of the River of Creation, then Meres is an island in the juncture of that branch. Some would even say it is the branch.”
He turned to face her. “That’s what makes this place so magical! It’s the only world that touches both the River of Creation and the Pirate Stream at once. All the waters of the Stream flow through and out from here.”
A chill stole up Marrill’s back, like a cold finger tracing the ridge of her spine. And then she realized that there was a cold finger tracing the ridge of her spine. With a squeal she jumped to the middle of the path, spinning to see what had been touching her.
Nothing greeted her but the darkness of the forest. She was pretty sure she heard a tinkling of laughter hidden in the rustling of leaves. “That’s it,” she said, pressing a hand to her screaming heart. “I’m officially declaring this place worse than nightmares.”
“This?” Ardent waved a hand. “This is the safe path. All this is nothing but a ripple on the ocean that is Meres.”
Marrill swallowed. “It gets worse?”
Ardent threw his head back and laughed. “Oh my, yes. Much worse.” He started back down the path. Marrill was pretty sure she heard him chuckle to himself, “Much, much, much worse.”
From that point on, Marrill stuck close behind the wizard. Ardent droned on about various esoteric points, and though she wasn’t completely listening to him, she was grateful that his voice drowned out the strange noises of the forest. Eventually, though, a rushing sound began filling the air, making Ardent harder to hear. It started out low and soft, but the farther they moved along the path, the more insistent it became. Soon, it grew to a thunderous, almost physical presence.
Up ahead, the bitter blackness of the forest gave way to light and air. As Marrill cleared the edge of the trees, her stomach dropped to her toes. She gasped, clutching the wizard’s robe to keep her balance.
“The Font of Meres.” Ardent’s voice was reverent, his eyes shining as he took it in.
They stood at the precipice of a circular chasm so massive that the other side was almost lost to distance. It was completely ringed by the dark forest, the impenetrable mass of trees stretching right up to its edge. In the center, as though the chasm were a great moat around it, a spire stretched up to the sky.
Halfway up the spire’s height, golden water gushed from great maw-like arches on each side, the raw magic cascading into the depthless chasm. Clouds of shimmering mist wafted from the depths, exploding into colors, as if sunset itself had evaporated and hung in the air.
This was the source of the roaring hum; it was the sound of thundering water. This, Marrill realized, was the source of all magic. The spring from which the Pirate Stream flowed.
At the tip of the spire perched a building, looking as though it hadn’t been built so much as carved from the stone itself. Ardent gazed at it a moment before flipping the tip of his cap over his shoulder. “Now then, all we have to do is get to the Font itself, repair the Map, and re-cage the Lost Sun of Dzannin before it destroys all of creation.”
“So, you know,” Marrill muttered, “the usual.”
“Exactly,” Ardent said, apparently missing the sarcasm. “Now, to the Font!” Before she could stop him, the wizard stepped off the edge of the cliff and dropped out of sight.
“Ardent!” Marrill squeaked, lunging forward. She fell to her knees, scooting as close to the edge as she dared. A pair of blue eyes greeted her, scarcely a foot below her own. They crinkled with a smile.
“Oh, you should see your face,” Ardent chuckled. “That never gets old; it truly doesn’t. Anyway, come on, follow me. Mind your step now, it can get a bit tricky in the middle.” And with that, he strode out over the open chasm toward the spire.
Marrill realized suddenly that the glittering mist had congealed itself into an iridescent line just below the edge of the cliff—a shimmering rainbow bridging one side of the chasm to the other. It looked a bit slicker than she would have liked. Taking a deep breath, she slid a leg over the side, positioned herself as best she could, and dropped down onto the bridge made of sparkling dew.
The wind off the water buffeted them as they made their way closer to the spire, coating her skin with its glowing mist. It tingled and tickled at the same time, turning into little bubbles and occasionally causing a random hair to crawl down her arm. But thankfully it wasn’t enough to work any real magic.
Eventually the bridge morphed into stairs, and so she climbed. Ardent was so far ahead of her that he was nothing more than a purple smudge in the distance. Her legs burned, and her breath came in strained pants by the time she caught up to him.
“Couldn’t the wizards have built something more convenient?” she gasped.
Ardent shook his head. “One cannot approach the Font of Meres but through difficulty. If we tried, we would find it had simply moved farther away.”
“Wizard logic makes no sense,” she mumbled to herself.
He continued upward, hands cavorting through the air like birds as he lapsed back into his favorite activity: long-winded explanations of obscure magical concepts. “Indeed,” he declared, “some have speculated that space and time on the Pirate Stream are related to each other solely through the amount of effort expended to travel between them. That’s part of what makes the Master of the Iron Ship so fascinating!”
“The Master of the Iron Ship?” Marrill asked, her eyes on the sides of the barely visible staircase. With each step she struggled between hurrying to keep up and going slowly to keep from tumbling into oblivion. “Do you think we’ll see him here?”
Ardent paused, looking back over his shoulder at her. “My dear Marrill, I would almost be stunned if we didn’t. Recall that the Wiverwane showed me the Master meeting the Dawn Wizard, though the two should never have existed at the same time. And Tanea Hollow-Blood’s reported last words show he was interrogating her about means of time traversal. To do that would require more power than I have ever even heard of. Perhaps as much as only the Lost Sun itself could provide… but how that would work…”
He stroked his beard thoughtfully. “At any rate, the Master has gone to an unbelievable amount of effort to bring the Lost Sun into being. Whatever his reasoning, I cannot imagine he will absent himself from this confrontation.”
“Great.” Marrill shuddered at the thought. She was tense enough as it was; the last thing she needed was to add the Master to the equation.
At long last, they reached the base of the building. Marrill collapsed against the stone wall. If it took effort to reach the Font of Meres, she’d definitely earned her way in.
Ardent, on the other hand, barely appeared winded. He placed a hand on her shoulder, and she felt warmth flow through her. “Ready?” he asked.
She nodded as he kicked aside the hem of his robe and stepped into a narrow sliver of an entranceway, so thin he had to turn sideways to squeeze through. Marrill started to push her way after him, but as she did, she caught sight of the far side of the chasm. What she saw made her throat close and her gut clench.
On the other side of the island from the Kraken, out beyond the edge of the forest, the arc of the sky ended. Everything ended. The glowing waters of the Pirate Stream poured into the darkness in perverse mockery of the waterfalls flowing out from the Font all around her.
The void of nothingness. The wake of the Lost Sun, eating its way toward them like a black hole, consuming everything it touched. A figure in silver strode purposefully ahead of it, walking along the surface of the Stream as though it were a flat highway. From his footprints, the trail of emptiness spread.
The Lost Sun of Dzannin was nearly upon them.
CHAPTER 25
Life’s Blood, Spilt
My mom is dead.”
Fin choked on his own words. Around him the Rise and Fade muttered to one another. Vell paced, fingers pressed to his forehead, grappling with the revelation.
The Crest ignored all of them, never taking her eyes from Fin. “Yes,” she said, curling her finger into her fist. Her blood stained the lines on her palm in ruddy crimson.
Fin let out a strangled cry. All this time he’d been searching for his mother… all the nights he’d looked up at the star she’d pointed out to him, dreaming that one day he’d see her again, that she would hug him again. Every hope of having a home, a family. And she was dead.
She’d been dead.
All of his dreams were lies.
“How long?” His voice was a sob, a cough, and a whisper, all jumbled up together.
Vell stormed forward, knocking Fin to the side. “Yes, Mother,” he said with a sneer. “How long? How long have you been hiding your weakness? How long has this atrocity been allowed to stand?”
She cut a cold gaze at Vell, reminding Fin that every bit of cruelty she’d showed had been genuine. “That is none of your concern,” she hissed. Whatever weakness or vulnerability she may have had, she was still the Crest. Still the woman who had sent Fig to steal from them, still the one who was intent on releasing the Salt Sand King. She was still ruthless.
“So long you won’t even admit it then?” Vell snarled. “Why allow that weakness to reside in you? Why not cut it free again?”
But Fin didn’t care about that. He was focused on something much, much more important. “When did my mother die?”
The Crest stepped back, surveying both of them at once. Her back was still straight. Her gaze was still harsh. But the edges of her eyes twisted down, carrying in them real emotion. Her posture, too, seemed more open—not welcoming, perhaps, but not guarded, either. She was an odd mix of cruel and compassionate, harsh and yielding, weak and strong.
She was a person, Fin realized. Not an emotionless Rise, not a shrinking, indeterminate Fade. Just a person.
The Crest let out a sigh. Not one of impatience, but one of exhaustion. As though she’d been carrying the weight of her weakness for too long. She looked to Fin. “Your mother isn’t truly dead,” she explained. “She’s a part of who I am, who I’ve become.”
Her expression had softened slightly, and he searched for anything familiar—for that part of her who’d held him in her arms as they sailed into the Khaznot Quay.
“Wait… so you… are my mom?” Fin asked, voice breaking.
The Crest nodded. “In a way. Her individuality, her personality, her thoughts—those are gone, now and forever. But her memories, I have those. They come with the essence of who she was. And that’s still here, in me. After getting it back, I couldn’t just let it be cut out again.”
She reached out and took his hand, crouching so that they were face-to-face. “I know it’s hard to see. I know I can seem… I can be cruel. But believe me, I would have protected you.”
Fin pulled back. He was pretty sure what had happened up until now wasn’t protecting anyone. “By throwing me in a pen? By enslaving people like me and telling us we’re nobody?” He looked back to Fig. Her face was a mask of fear, sorrow, and confusion. Her hands clutched the glowing wish orb tight to her chest. “By stealing the wish orb and unleashing the Salt Sand King?”
The Crest grabbed his arm and pulled him back to her. “Yes!” she said. “When the Salt Sand King comes, everything will change for the Rise and the Fade. We have a real chance to undo the way we’ve lived for millennia! But somebody has to be there to explain it to our King. Someone with the station of the Rise, but not their heartlessness.”
Fin snorted. “So you expect me to believe that even though you want to free the Salt Sand King and help him conquer all of the Pirate Stream, you also want to help me and the Fade.” He shook his head in disbelief. “Next thing you’ll say you’re proud of me and Vell equally.”
“I am,” the Crest said. For the first time, possibly ever, a real smile stole across her face. “People are complicated, Fin.”
“People are ‘complicated’ because people are weak,” Vell broke in. He sneered at Fin. “She’s been your mother,” he said with an impatient wave of his hand, “for far too long.”
He pushed Fin aside so he could confront the Crest directly. “I understand this happens. The Fade are weak and stupid. They do foolish things, they die, they have to be removed. What I don’t understand is why you allowed that weakness to live in you.”
“Humanity isn’t weakness,” the Crest began.
But Vell cut her off with a sharp shout. “This is why we lost the game! This is why they escaped our blockade, why they got away from us in the first place!” He gained speed as he talked, body coiling like a cat. “This explains why we’ve yet to take the orb. Why we’ve yet to free our King and conquer the Stream.” He leveled his eyes on the Crest
. “Because you’re weak.”
The Crest ignored him, turning back to Fin. Behind her, Vell’s expression shifted as something seemed to suddenly occur to him. “Because you’re weak,” he repeated in a whisper.
Fin realized too late what Vell’s statement meant. Already Vell had stepped forward. Already he’d slid his knife free of its scabbard.
And before Fin could move. Before he could even utter a warning, Vell thrust the blade into the Crest’s back.
Her eyes went wide. A hiss of shocked pain slipped through her lips. A moment later, blood bloomed across her chest in a violent gash of scarlet.
“No!” Fin screamed.
He lunged for his mother, catching her in his arms before she could fall. Slowly, carefully, he lowered her to the deck.
It was all too much, all too fast. He’d just found her again. Even though he wasn’t sure who it was he’d found. “Why did you—why did she take me?” His voice quavered as tears spilled down his cheeks. “Why did you both leave me?”
“Because love isn’t a weakness.” She gripped his arm. Her breathing came short and fast, her eyes black with pain. “Remember our star, Fin.” Her words became labored. She pressed trembling fingers against his cheek. “I never forgot.”
There was so much Fin wanted to tell her. So many things stored up in his heart from all the years apart. But the words wouldn’t come.
And then she was gone.
Fin’s heart shattered into so many pieces that he wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to find them all again. Uneasiness rippled through the ranks of the Rise and the Fade, but Fin ignored it. Closing his eyes, he let his forehead drop, pressing it against hers.
The Crest. His mom. He didn’t care which she was, because she’d never forgotten him. All these years she’d still looked up into the sky at night, searching for the star that reminded her of Fin.
Vell let out a cry of victory. With a whirl and a flourish, he turned to the ranks of his soldiers. “As the new Crest of the Rise, it falls to me to secure the orb,” he announced. “I shall be the one to call forth our King. I shall be the one to unite us to his will!”