Aryl shook her head. She was alone, more alone than she’d ever been in her life. Those on Passage sought a living goal; she followed a road made by the long-dead and forgotten. Their purpose, however, was the same: to find a future, no matter what stood between.
She swung her pack around to retrieve a piece of rokly, food left by those who’d last walked as she did. Dresel was what her mouth wanted—fresh, moist, and sweet—but the wizened fruit answered the same craving.
They’d taste fresh rokly, she thought as she chewed, if they could get it to grow again. Ziba “remembered” it fondly. She didn’t.
Aryl’s mind skittered from fruit to Choosers and those to become Choosers. No one else had dreamed or had visions of Sona’s past. If something about their minds made them more susceptible or reached out, it didn’t explain to what.
Or why the M’hir had come perilously close in her sleep.
She stopped on the next arched bridge, toes over the edge, and gazed down into what was now a black abyss. Life should be lived high above the ground, she thought wistfully. There should be a reason to step with care; balance and strength and skill should matter.
If she found water, if Sona could become green again, would Ziba still run the rooftops? Or would the Yena lose that part of themselves?
“Survive first,” Aryl reminded herself.
About to move, she paused, suddenly aware of a vibration beneath her feet. She crouched to flatten her hand on the stone.
Faint. Steady. Like rain on a roof.
She looked to where the valley twisted around yet another slab of mountain. Was there sound as well? Aryl held her breath and strained to hear.
Still faint—more imagined than heard—but there, she was sure. A low, heavy thrum.
Aryl rose to her feet and eagerly took to the road again. She had to force herself to keep to a walk, prepare herself for disappointment. Nothing promised the next turn would be the last.
But it was. Aryl knew it by the time the road and river turned around rock. The vibration here came up through her feet, matched to a growing rumble.
The air took on a scent. Heady, rich, moist.
Alive.
About to run forward, Aryl hesitated, then left the road for a shadow darker than most. Shedding her pack and rope, she tucked them against the rock wall. She pushed back her hood and drew the short knife from her belt, then relaxed. From this vantage, it was easy to watch the road she’d just walked.
Shadows moved and lengthened. The wind tugged at her hair. She felt disoriented, without Om’ray in every direction, but it wasn’t as if she could be lost here, where there was only one path.
No pursuit. Satisfied, Aryl continued on. Keeping to shadows, now avoiding the road, she moved with every bit of stealth she possessed.
With each step, the vibration grew stronger, the rumble louder, the scent of the air more intense.
Nothing prepared her for what waited around the turn.
The valley walls faded back, embracing a vast open space. Their towering reaches were hidden in mist and cloud. The mist came from the source of the vibration and roar: a river that fell from the sky.
Not the sky, Aryl realized as she walked forward, the hand with the knife limp at her side. She faced a cliff whose upper height she couldn’t see. Its sheer face streamed with lines of writhing white and black that glistened and sang with unimaginable force. The amount of water pouring straight down in front of her mocked any understanding she had of her world. This was the Lay Swamp and the Lake of Fire…this was every flood and raindrop…every melting snowdrop…and it went—
Nowhere. The water fell. And vanished.
It couldn’t. That much water had to go somewhere. It should be filling the empty river, racing down the valley to Sona and beyond.
The road, and empty river, ended at a hill of loose rubble and dirt taller than three Om’ray. Aryl ran to it, then up it, her boots digging in with every stride. The roar of the waterfall grew deafening. She met mist, chill and clinging, that turned the footing slick and treacherous. The slope steepened and she grabbed for handholds. Only after the second reach did she recognize what she grabbed.
Aryl froze, one hand on a piece of dark wood, identical to the splinters from the beams of Sona, the other on a skull.
This wasn’t a hill. It was another ruin.
The Oud had struck here, too.
Suddenly the urge to turn back, the pull of living Om’ray overwhelmed her. Aryl blinked tears from her eyes and leaned her forehead against the hand on the skull. “Soon,” she promised herself. “But not yet.”
She climbed the rest of the hill with a heavy heart, making no effort to avoid the gray skulls and bones that dotted its surface, though they cracked underfoot. Their appalling number answered one question: why they’d found none in the homes. The exiles had assumed all of the Sona Om’ray had fled into the mountains and died there. After all, that would be the Yena preference, the safety of height. But Sona had come here, in a final, desperate flight along their road.
Why?
What refuge could protect them from a terror underground? Where would Om’ray run?
The Sona Cloisters. There was no other choice.
Sure now of what she’d find, Aryl came to the top and stood, staring through layers and swirls of mist. Her hand rose to her mouth.
She hadn’t imagined this.
Water dominated everything. It dropped from the sky, barely touching the immense cliff, its spray like plumes of smoke. Where those plumes touched rock, there was life. Gnarled stalks and sprigs of still-green leaves burst from cracks. Vines thicker than her body somehow found hold on the stone itself. Their tendrils, heavy with clusters of wizened brown fruit, hung out in the spray as if to catch it. The air itself was like a drink.
A drink that vanished. The water plunged into a great black hole, choked with spray and rimmed by more ruins. Nekis sprouted in thick groves along that crumbling edge, their stalks short and twisted, leafless in this cold season but alive. Several were about to fall, their roots washed bare.
Aryl worked her way down, wary of the footing. When she came to the first of the groves, nekis barely over her head, she ran her fingers greedily over the tight buds that tipped every branch. This was what water could do. Bring life even here.
As to the hole? Knife in her belt, her woven coat collecting droplets from the plants, Aryl pushed her way to its edge, forcing a path through the stalks. Without conscious thought, she slipped into old habits, checking as she moved for what might fancy a taste of Yena or merely have thorns. The stunted grove seemed barren of dangerous life; “seemed” couldn’t be trusted.
Once at the edge, she found a sturdy, if doomed, stalk leaning over the chasm and walked out along it as far as she could before peering down.
It was like being in a storm where the rain came up as much as fell properly from above. She had to gasp for breath and wipe her face constantly, her bones vibrating with the roar and crash of so much water going…where?
For all she could see, it went through the world to nowhere. There was no flash of white, as if the water struck bottom and boiled. The torrent simply fell into the dark.
Thoughtfully, Aryl walked back up the stalk, leaning with its tilt.
Now she knew where the water from the river had gone—if not why or how.
Returning it to the river was going to be a problem…
Snap! Pop! The stalk’s roots began to give way, and Aryl absently jumped to its neighbor. Maybe there’d be something about moving rivers in a dream, she told herself.
Once more above the grove, she moved along the hill itself, hunting what had to be here. Every living Clan had a Cloisters. Finding Sona’s would be irrefutable proof there had been Om’ray here once.
And could be again.
Rock, shards of wood and bone. The destruction here had been horrifyingly complete. But a Cloisters wasn’t made of rock or wood; didn’t suffer weathering or damage. She’d find it.