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Excerpt

Chapter One

I was covered in grit all the time lately. Fine crystal dust between my teeth. Flecks of obsidian beneath my fingernails. Smears of coal across my skin. The filth made me feel inhuman.

Ironic, considering what I now knew.

As the guards escorted me, I smacked my lips to try to get rid of the taste of dirt. In the month—Had it been a month? Time was impossible to tell down here, and they wouldn’t give me a clock—it had lingered no matter what I did. Like my last memory of Rune’s bloody face screaming my name as I was dragged Below.

Sotera, Empress of Those Below, waited for me on the bridge spanning my cell and the Deep. She was smiling. That was never good.

“I hope you had a nice rest,” she said. “I expect you to do better than yesterday.”

When I didn’t answer, her inhumanly beautiful, cruel face, composed of patches of luminous blue crystal and flesh, twisted in a frown. “You look troubled.”

“No kidding?” I snapped. “I wonder why that is.”

I hadn’t slept well for a single night since being taken here. It was more than the hard bed they’d given me, so different than the root-made ones of the Wilds. It was the nightmares.

I squeezed my eyes shut against the onslaught of images. Night after night I’d dreamed of Father Dumas, leader of the worshippers of the Mother Tree, plunging a knife into my arm. Carving my flesh down to reveal my crystal bone. The light shining from it reflecting off his maniac, too-wide eyes.

That hadn’t happened. Peyton had never left me alone with any worshippers of the Mother Tree.

Still.

I glanced at the pulpy, pale scar on the inside of my left forearm. It was only coincidence that it was in the same place Father Dumas had supposedly cut. Being down here had dragged up long-forgotten memories and conjured false ones.

It didn’t matter what the nightmare showed, anyway. I knew what I was now. Or rather, I knew what other people thought I was.

One of Those Below.

Sotera’s cherished.

“Little fox,” Rune’s voice taunted. “My trick.”

I’d been that for him. And we’d all paid dearly for it.

“Isn’t it beautiful?”

Sotera motioned for me to join her at the edge of the bridge. The city—the Deep, as they called it—spread out before us. From here, the people of the Deep were nothing but shadowy forms in the dusky light.

Just like everything else Below—the fake sunlight, grass, wood—the city resided in the uncanny valley; it appeared close to real, down to the color and texture, but still off-putting in a way that was difficult to describe. Steam rising from geothermal vents coiled around the Deep’s dwellings and settled over fields of pitiful crops. In the distance, across jagged plains of crystal, was the black outline of subterranean mountains.

There wasn’t a bit of real greenery in sight. Not a leaf. Not a tree. Not the sliver of a vine. Nothing living. Nothing natural.

All my life I’d been told to fear the dangerous green depths of the Wilds. Now, I feared I’d die here without seeing them one last time.

The dark chasm beneath my feet seemed to beckon me in.

“You could end it all,” Sotera said. “Take one more step and hurl yourself into oblivion. It would be a far less painful death than any you’d receive from me.”

Rune told me once about his time in the prison of Mog Moren. How he’d stayed alive out of pure spite so he could one day pay his captors back.

I returned Sotera’s smile with one as cold as my surroundings. “I won’t give you the satisfaction of knowing you drove me to do it.”

If my smile was cold, Sotera’s was downright frigid. “I know you won’t. It’s good you have some spirit left. Perhaps that will lead to better results today. Come.”

I was past resisting her commands. I had the first week or so, but my lingering bruises and the threat of others getting hurt in my place made me give up.

I sped up as Sotera crossed another of the Below’s many bridges in long strides.

The sun-forsaken Deep was split into three tiers, each made of slabs of obsidian, petrified wood, jade, and agate.

We snaked up treacherous stairs leading to the first tier’s tight, crooked streets that bordered a steep drop off into another chasm. Sotera’s presence was noted almost immediately, and soon a small crowd of Those Below flocked to us. More appeared from within cramped houses and nooks and crannies that led to the lower tiers, like worms pushing through the ground.

Sotera smiled as she cut a path through them. I tried to keep my arms tucked to my side and follow close behind, but Those Below knew by now that her arrival meant mine—Sotera’s cherished.

“Stop,” I bit out as one grabbed me hard enough to bruise. A hand shot through the grasping throng and pinched my cheek. I whirled. “I said—”

But the perpetrator was lost among the crowd, and more surged forward. I should have been used to this. They’d never seen anything like me. Most of them had flesh faces, but the rest of their bodies were patchworks of crystal and rock. I, entirely clothed in skin, was supposedly their purest form.

The only thing I felt like was a piece of meat.

Sotera looked amused as another grabbed me. “You don’t seem to be enjoying yourself, Cherished. You should be happy. You give them so much.”

“Like what, a target?” I asked. I ducked to avoid another hand. The guards stationed behind us, of course, did nothing.

“You give them something to aspire to. When we breach the surface, all of them will become as you are.” She placed a gentle hand on a weeping woman’s head, leaned down, and kissed the top of it. “Enjoy their adoration.”

I was suffocating, like breathing lulling yarrow spore. I’d been reduced to nothing but a tool for others to gawk at while Sotera played games with purposes I didn’t know and prepared to destroy my home and everything above.

I shut my eyes against another pinch and took a deep breath. I could endure. I didn’t know for how much longer, but I could endure.

At last, the narrowed streets ended and the guards blocked off the last remnants of those who followed. Sotera led me down a few steps into a shallow, tiled courtyard where the latest ones chosen had been assembled.

When Sotera brought me here the first time, I’d been shocked at the state of those she’d picked. Most were old, with dust-crusted beards and wrinkles chiseled into their fleshy faces. The young were often sickly, looking as though they’d been dragged from wherever Those Below received medical help and propped up in line with the others. It seemed like a cruel punishment to be forced to endure her scrutiny, but the chosen’s eyes always shone with reverence as Sotera walked before them.

“Empress,” one murmured as Sotera gently placed a hand on her head before moving to the next. Soon, Sotera’s palm was slick with the oil the chosen’s loved ones had anointed on their heads. Strings of glittering gems had been draped around their necks and across their bodies. Sotera reached the end of the line.

“What do you think?” she asked me. “Will they be enough to work with?”

I gave a curt nod. I couldn’t bear to meet the chosen’s eyes.

Sotera jerked her head to her guards. “Bring them.”

As the guards helped the sickly and old hobble out of the courtyard, Sotera took her place beside me once more. “I would have thought you’d have become used to it by now. Compassion is a weakness you must purge.”

“Screw you,” I muttered.

Sotera smiled before stepping into the street. “Rejoice,” she called to the crowd. “Your loved ones have been specially selected. They will be revered above all others.”

I tried to block out the grateful crying and shouts of joy. They thought their loved ones were being healed and prepared to fight for their beloved Empress. If they only knew the truth.

When the last of the chosen were taken away, we passed through a grove of crystal oaks so detailed I could make out veins on the leaves. Below us was a lake of fire circled by a riffled shoreline, a magma river feeding into it.

I was coated in a sheen of sweat and already flagging by the time we crossed the last bridge out of the Deep. Sotera looked perfect. The enormous crystal sword she always had strapped to her belt swung easily with every step.

Normally, she left me at the crossroads, letting the guards take me to where I “practiced”. This time, someone was waiting for us.

Sotera frowned as the older man waddled over, his gait stiff. “I don’t recall summoning a meeting with my war council, Ulmid.”

Ulmid? This must have been one of Sotera’s numerous generals, the ones leading the assault on the Wilds through the sporadic and constantly shifting cracks in the earth’s crust.

The crystal around Ulmid’s joints had started to harden, creating fine fractures in the incandescent surface. Those Below didn’t bleed, not like I did, but watery black grit leaked out. His skin-covered hands and face were wrinkled and sand-colored, coarse hair pinned with shards of nephrite those of the elite preferred.

“Empress.” Ulmid gave a hasty bow. “I’m afraid this can’t wait. The latest wave, the location you—we—determined was right, it has been… He has been busier—”

“Quiet!” Sotera seethed. Her eyes flickered to me, but I’d heard enough for elation to cut through the layer of numbness that seemed to have built around me like a second skin. A warmth I used to recognize as happiness rose to the surface.

He. Rune. It had to be. As the new High King of the Wilds, he was the biggest threat to Sotera’s planned takeover of the above.

Ulmid could tell he’d royally screwed up. “Eternal apologies, Empress. If you’ll allow me and General Abaki to try—”

“Wait for me with the others,” Sotera said. “We’ll discuss this later.”

“I feel it may be prudent to speak of this with all possible haste—"

Sotera rested a hand on the hilt of her sword. “Do you recall what happened to the last general who failed to do as I asked? You will wait with the others.”

Ulmid hurriedly rattled off another apology before stumbling away, followed by an entourage of various assistants. Sotera stared across the jagged plains of crystal that separated the Deep from the caverns and less hospitable desert. She snapped her fingers at one of the guards.

“Three, this morning.”

He hesitated before bowing and hurrying off. Sotera must have caught my elated smile because she smirked. “I pray that’s not hope you’re feeling. Hope can just as quickly be the wings that carry you upward as the stone that drags you down. Don’t hope this changes anything.”

I couldn’t resist smiling wider. “Then why do you look so pissed?”

The guard returned, riding an enormous wyrm and leading two others. I didn’t know the real names of the enormous, snake-like beasts, so I stuck to calling them earth wyrms. Because their elongated bodies and slitted eyes looked like mythical wyrms and their diamond-hard scales could burrow through the earth and even crystal. Exhaustion had left me with little creative energy.

Dread curled in my stomach as Sotera mounted one. “You’re coming with us?”

She took the reins and expertly brought it about. “It’s time I saw your progress in-person. Don’t keep me waiting or you’ll regret it.”