Page 146 of The Stolen Throne
“So, princess.” This Eidolon gives a small flourish of a bow. “The power that guides this place has assigned me to you as your oracle, for lack of a better word. I may answer one question you are desperate for an answer to. Only one, so make it good.”
One? I have so many.
There are so many different things we don’t know. And why did the hells send me an old version of Eidolon? Why not my parents? Or the ancestress who trapped the goddesses in the first place? I could have asked her why she did it.
“What if you don’t know the answer?” I ask warily, hoping that doesn’t count as a question. It’s not one I’m desperate for, so…
“Then a spirit who does know will whisper it to me.”
Like a ghostly message chain. That’s not unnerving at all. It basically means the dead can know…everything.
“I have eternity,” he points out wryly. “But you do not.”
Ass.
The amusement sparking at me tells me he caught my reaction. “Ask your question, young domina.”
The reason I came was to find the locations of the other amulets. Only now I’m second-guessing myself. The basest, most selfish part of me wants to ask how to heal Tabra. But I can’t, and she wouldn’t want me to.
Even so, it takes me a long, long moment to let that go and start working through the other options.
Would it be better to ask the whys and hows of the goddesses’ prisons? Or why Eidolon wants to release them? Maybe I ask how to stop Tyndra from sinking or winter from spreading? How long before the Celestial Alignment? If I should release the goddesses? How to release them? How to defeat Eidolon? If anyone might know the answer to that, it seems a ghost of the man himself—one who knows the full history—would.
“Before I ask my question, am I allowed to return to ask another?”
His mouth curls almost cruelly now. “Smart, too,” he muses. “Many don’t think to ask that. Reven made a good choice.”
Too bad throwing a rock at him will just pass through nothing. “What’s the answer?”
He dips his head. “Once every year on the same day at the same hour as today.”
That doesn’t help me in terms of deciding what to ask now. I need immediate answers. A year from now, I could be dead. We could all be dead.
One question only.
Hells.
62
Unhealed
Leaving the Land of Eternal Death is sort of like walking out of a dream, the way that other world clings to you. Night comes too fast for time to be real, and I have to feel my way through the dark, unfamiliar slot canyon. I don’t see the end of the canyon coming until I round a bend and the larger canyon opens up before me lit by stars and the now almost full single moon of Morta.
Wait. How long was I in there?
“You made it.” Basalt sounds…not pleased, exactly. Relieved.
Damn. Was it that much in question?
“They’ve been waiting two days.”
Two days? That’s… I don’t even know how to take that. It felt like an hour at most to me. But what I’m frowning at isn’t the lost time. There’s something in Basalt’s tone that sits like lead in my stomach.
“Did something happen?” Eidolon? Did he come for us? I’m already hurrying around him.
With a rumble of rock and kicking up dust, he moves his leg so that I might pass by. A small, cheerful campfire burns on the other side, and I can see that at some point they got things to make a shelter, because a basic one-person tent is set up. Omma is sitting on a rock by the fire with Bene full-size and lying behind her, curled around the tent like the walls guarding a palace, big head resting on his sandy paws.
Where is Tabra?
