Reign the Earth (The Elementae #1)(87)

I sighed, feeling the weariness in my bones. “Honestly, it was a little more exhausting than I expected.”

“Stay up here. I’ll get you something to drink,” he told me.

I nodded.

He went down the stairs quickly, trotting inside.

Rolling my shoulders, I rubbed my neck a little. It helped my discomfort, my weakness, but as that eased, there was something else. My power was humming, tense, alive—and insistent.

Curling the threads around my fingers, I felt a tightness to it, like the threads had all been interwoven to form a dense, strong fabric. Following it upward with my gaze, I saw a small opening in the rock.

Osmost screamed and sailed past my head, landing on the lip of the opening. He stood there and shook his wings out at me, calling me forward.

Slowly, I got to my feet. Rather than climb this time, I called up a set of stairs first—narrow and steep, but leading straight to the mouth. Drawing a deep breath and feeling the rocks buzzing back at me, I started up the steps.

I was breathing hard by the time I reached the lip. There was an arch carved out of the rock and it went straight through, leaving a small chamber within. The carving was too smooth and perfect to have been made by man or nature—it was an Elementae dwelling.

The threads felt thickened, pulsing with life and energy and making my breath rush faster. The wind swept through the open space powerfully, and I felt like it was trying to push me away. I pressed on against it, seeing two bowls on pedestals the height of my waist on either side of the room. One, I could see from several paces away, was full of fire, still burning, despite the wind and the fact that there was no evidence of a way someone other than me had been there—or could have even breached such a place.

I went toward the other bowl. It was full of liquid, but it was too shadowed and still to tell what it was.

“Water,” I realized, walking toward the middle of the space. I could see for miles in either direction, out into the bluish darkness of uninhabitable mountains and back over the lightening blush of the valley. The wind pushed at my skirts and my hair, cooling my skin. “Wind. Fire. Earth.”

The second I stepped in the center, the nexus of the four elements, the threads around me snapped. I felt my power like a growing thing, rising from the rock and weaving through my skin. The rush—the power—was unlike anything I had ever known, like it was wrapping me and seeping into me at the same moment.

Like this place was the source. Like it was the fount of my power.

Drawing a deep breath, I pulled myself out of the center, and it was only then that I noticed the dark stain where I had stood. It was old, months old at least. Perhaps because of my awareness of this place, I knew what it was without explaining it—blood. And more than that, I suspected I knew who it belonged to.

Kata had been here. This was the Earth Aede. This was the place she had visited, the place where my power had retreated when harm had been done to it, when my husband sought to wipe it from the face of the earth. It had been waiting for Kata to come and align it with the other elements, waiting to be free.

Without knowing it, Galen had brought me to the source of my strength. The source of my power.

I held up my hands. This power coursing through me was eternal, indestructible, but I was not. I only had a finite amount of time with this gift, and I was wasting it, watching as others with my power were tortured, experimented upon, hunted, and killed.

I would not stand idly by anymore.

My heart beating hard, rushing my blood fast and powerfully through my veins, making me both shiver and feel superhuman in the same intoxicating moment, I went back to the mouth of the cave and looked out.

My hands rested over my stomach. I couldn’t feel her in there yet, but I knew in that moment she would never be raised by Calix. Maybe I would have to wait until she was born, or maybe Kairos and I could find a way to stand with the Resistance before then, but I would not let her come into a world where she watched her mother stand passively to the side.

I was trembling with the frightening clarity of my thoughts, but slowly I walked down the stairs back to the outcrop Kairos had left me on. With barely a thought, the staircase to the site shifted and faded back into rock, and pressing my hand to my heart, I sat down on the outcrop.

It was only moments later that Zeph, Theron, and two other guards came racing out, Galen shouting orders at them to search the city.

“What’s going on?” I called.

Galen halted, spinning around and taking long moments before looking up enough to see my perch.

“What in three hells are you doing!” he roared, his hands on his hips.

I folded my hands in my lap. “I couldn’t sleep. I came out here.”

I saw Zeph lean in, and from the scowl that Galen returned to him, I wondered if Zeph had previously offered a similar explanation.

“What’s going on?” I asked. “What are you looking for?”

“You,” he said crossly. “You weren’t there, your brother wasn’t there, I thought you …” He trailed off.

“Ran away?” Kairos asked, coming from another exit with a skin of liquid. Osmost swooped and landed on his shoulder, and he walked past Galen without looking concerned. “I tried to convince her to.”

This made Galen’s glare worse. “Well, what on earth are you doing up there?” he demanded. “You’re climbing? In your condition?”