Adelina.
The whisper echoes all around us, reverberating deep in my heart. It is a voice I know well. I look up at the same time everyone else does. There, some distance away, a pale figure with long black hair walks on the surface of the ocean toward us. As she draws near, I am unable to move. The others remain frozen in place. A chill lodges in my chest.
Adelina. Then she whispers the others’ names too. You do not belong here. You are from the world of the living.
Formidite. The angel of Fear. She has come to claim us.
Her hair trails all across the ocean, stretching on beyond the horizon, so that the sea behind her is nothing but a field of dark strands. She has the body of a child, but skeletal. Her face is featureless, as if skin were stretched tightly across it, and she is whiter than marble. Suddenly I am reminded of the first time I ever saw her in my nightmares, on the evening right after Raffaele had tested me for the Dagger Society.
I bow as she approaches us and the others do the same. Raffaele is the first to address her, his eyes cast down toward the water.
“Holy Formidite,” he says. “Gatekeeper to the Underworld.” We murmur our own greetings to her.
Beneath her layers of skin, she seems to smile at him. Return to the mortal world.
“We are here to save those like ourselves,” Raffaele answers. He must be afraid of her, as are we all, but his voice stays steady and gentle, unrelenting. “We are here to save the mortal world.”
Formidite’s smile vanishes. She leans down toward us. The fear building in me grows, and my power grows with it, threatening to undo me. She looks first at Raffaele, and then turns to Maeve. Something about Maeve catches her interest. She steps closer to the Beldish queen, then tilts her head in what can only be described as curiosity. You have a power, little one. You have pulled souls out of my mother’s realm before, and taken them back to the living.
Maeve bows her head lower. I can see her hand visibly trembling against her sword’s hilt. “Forgive me, Holy Formidite,” she says. “I was given a power I can only say was from the gods.”
I was the one who let you in, Formidite answers. You have learned since then, I know, that there are consequences for channeling the gods’ powers.
“Please let us enter,” Maeve says. “We must fix what we have done.”
Still, Formidite waits. She looks at Lucent, then at Raffaele. Children of the gods, she says as she goes. And then she looks at me.
The fear in my chest spikes. Formidite takes another step forward, until her figure looms over me and casts a soft shadow across the ocean. She reaches down, one bony hand outstretched, and she touches me gently on my cheek.
I cannot stop my power—an illusion of darkness bursts from all around, silhouettes of ghostly arms and red eyes, visions of rainy nights and a horse’s wild eyes, of a burning battleship and long palace corridors. I stumble backward, tearing myself away from her touch.
My child, Formidite says. Her strange, featureless smile returns. You are my child.
I am hypnotized by her face. The fear swarming inside me makes me delirious.
Formidite is silent for a moment. The ghostly calls of creatures from the deep echo up to us, as if they had been stirred to life by our presence. Finally, she nods once at us. When I look down again, the creatures’ shapes are closer to the surface, and they crowd one another. My heart pounds faster. I know what this means, and who is waiting for us beneath the surface. Formidite’s twin angel.
The water beneath us gives way. I drop into the depths, and my head submerges. The world fills with the sound of being underwater. For an instant, I’m blind in the darkness, and I reach out instinctively for Magiano. For Raffaele. For Maeve and Lucent. I find nothing. The silhouettes of enormous creatures glide around me in a circle. As I continue to sink, I get a glimpse of one of the creatures’ faces.
Eyeless, finned, monstrous, fanged. I open my mouth to scream, but only bubbles emerge. I can’t breathe. The energy of the Underworld pulls me down, tugging hard on my chest, and I have no choice but to follow it.
One of the creatures glides close to my face. It is Caldora herself, the angel of Fury. She opens her jaws at me, and a low, haunting echo reverberates through the water. Even though I can’t see the others, I can feel their presence. I am not alone here.
Follow me, Caldora’s thoughts say, penetrating my mind. She turns away, and her long, scaly tail makes a loop in the water. I swim deeper and deeper with her.
Follow me, follow me. Caldora’s hiss becomes a rhythm in the water. Her voice blends with my own whispers, forming an eerie harmony. The water turns blacker and blacker, until the pressure builds and I can no longer see anything, not even Caldora swimming ahead of me, not even the silhouettes of other creatures haunting the waters. It is just deep, black, endless space, in all directions, until eternity.
I sink into the realm of Death.
How noble it must be, the pain of Moritas,
to stand guardian forever to silent souls,
to judge a life and choose to take it.
—Life and Death and Rebirth, by Scholar Garun
Adelina Amouteru
I don’t remember what happens, or how I arrive. All I know is that I am here, standing on the shore of a flat, gray land, its edges lined by the quiet, unmoving surface of the Underworld’s ocean. It is still as a pond.
I look up. Where the sky should be, there is instead the ocean, as if I were standing upside down on the sky and looking down at it.
I turn to face inland. Everything is painted in the same muted tone of gray. The pulse of death beats all around me, the silence ringing rhythmically in my ears. I find myself staring at a flat landscape littered with thousands, millions, countless numbers of towering glass pillars. The pillars are iridescent and white.
Each one is in the shape of a quartz and the color of moonstone, evenly spaced from the next, forming perfect rows that extend outward to the horizon and then tower high up into oblivion. Each pillar seems to shine with a faint silver-white light, a hue that sets it sharply apart from the uniform gray in the rest of this place. As I draw nearer to the first pillar, I see something inside it, suspended in the space of the stone. It is hard to make out the shape, although it seems long and blurred. I step up to the pillar and press one hand against it.
There is a man inside.
My hand jerks away as if the pillar were ice cold—I jump backward. The man’s eyes are closed, and his expression is peaceful. Something about his face seems timeless, frozen forever in the prime of his life. I study him a while longer.
This is his soul, I suddenly realize.
I turn away from him and look around at the pillars stretching as far as I can see. Each of these pillars is the final resting place of a soul from the mortal world, the remnants of that person long after flesh and bone have been reclaimed by the land. This is the library of Moritas, all who have ever existed.
My hands start to tremble. If this is where all the souls of the dead reside, then this is also where I will find my sister.
I look around me, searching for the others. It takes me a long moment to notice the beam of light illuminating my body, as if marking me as a moment of life in this world of the deceased. Four other beams are scattered in the midst of this maze of lustrous pillars, their glow distinct against the backdrop of silver and gray. They seem very far away, each of us separated from the others by what seems like an infinite amount of space.
Everyone enters the realm of Death alone.
Across this eerie landscape comes a whisper. It permeates every empty space around me, echoing up to the ocean in the sky. There is a darkness creeping forward, something greater than anything I have ever seen, a black cloud stretching from the heavens to the sea. It roils onward.
Adelina.