Erawan still remained unaware of his presence. Perhaps the nature of his raw magic indeed provided him with anonymity—and Maeve had only known to recognize it thanks to whatever she’d pried from Aelin’s mind.
At night, Dorian returned to Maeve’s tower chamber, where they would go over all he had seen. What she did during the day to keep Erawan from noticing the small, ever-changing presence hunting through his halls, she did not reveal.
She’d brought the spiders, though. Dorian had heard the servants’ terrified whispers about the fleeting portal that the queen had opened to allow in six of the creatures to the catacombs. Where they, through some terrible magic, allowed in the Valg princesses.
Dorian couldn’t decide whether it was a relief that he had not encountered these hybrids yet. Though he’d seen the emaciated human bodies, mere husks, that were occasionally hauled down the corridors. Dinner, the guards carrying them had hissed to the petrified servants. To feed a bottomless hunger. To prime them for battle.
What the spider-princess creations could do, what they would do to his friends in the North … Dorian couldn’t stop recalling what Maeve had said to Erawan. That the Valg princesses had been held here for the second phase of whatever he was planning. Perhaps to ensure that they were well and truly destroyed once the bulk of his armies came through.
It honed his focus as he hunted. Pushed and nudged him onward, even when reason and instinct told him to flee this place. But he would not. Could not. Not without the key.
Sometimes, he could have sworn he felt it. The key. The horrible, otherworldly presence.
But when he’d chase after that wretched power down stairwells and along ancient corridors, only dust and shadows would greet him.
Often, it led him back to Erawan’s tower. To the locked iron door and Valg guards posted outside. One of the few remaining places he had not dared to search. Though other possibilities did still remain.
The reek from the subterranean chamber reached Dorian long before he soared down the winding stair, the dim passageway cavernous and looming to his fly’s senses. It had been the safest form for the day. The kitchen cat had been on the prowl earlier, and the Ironteeth witches hurried about the keep, readying for what he could only assume was an order to march north.
He’d been hunting for the key since dawn, Maeve occupying Erawan’s attention in the western catacombs across the keep. Where those spider-princesses tested their new bodies.
He’d never gone so deep under the keep. Beneath the storage rooms. Beneath the dungeons. He’d only found the stair by the smell that had leaked from behind the ordinary door at its top, the scent detected by the fly’s remarkable sense of smell. He’d passed the door so many times now on his fruitless hunting, deeming it a mere supply closet—until chance had intervened today.
Dorian rounded the last turn of the spiral stairs, and nearly tumbled from the air as the smell fully hit him. A thousand times worse in this form, with these senses.
A reek of death, of rot, of hate and despair. The scent that only the Valg could summon.
He’d never forget it. Had never quite left it behind.
Turn back. The warning was a whisper through his mind. Turn back.
The lower hall was lit with only a few torches in rusted iron brackets. No guards were posted along its length, or by the lone iron door at its far end.
The reek pulsed along the corridor, emanating from that door. Beckoning.
Would Erawan leave the key so unguarded? Dorian sent his magic skittering along the hall, testing for any hidden traps.
It found none. And when it reached the iron door, it recoiled. It fled.
He spooled his power back into himself, tucking it closer.
The iron door was dented and scratched with age. Nine locks lay along its edge, each more complicated than the last. Ancient, strange locks.
He didn’t hesitate. He aimed for the slight gap between the stones and the iron door, and shifted. The fly shrank into a gnat, so small it was nearly a dust mote. He flew beneath the door, blocking out the smell, the terrible pulsing against his blood.
It took him a moment to understand what he looked at in the rough-hewn chamber, illuminated by a small lantern dangling from the arched ceiling. A lick of greenish flame danced within. Not a flame of this world.
Its light slid over the heap of black stone in the center of the room. Pieces of a sarcophagus.
And all around it, built into shelves carved from the mountain itself, gleamed Wyrdstone collars.
Only the instincts of his small, inconsequential body kept Dorian in the air. Kept him circling the lightless chamber. The rubble in the center of the space.
Erawan’s tomb—directly beneath Morath. The site where Elena and Gavin trapped him, and then built the keep atop the sarcophagus that could not be moved.
Where all this mess had begun. Where, centuries later, his father had claimed he and Perrington ventured in their youth, using the Wyrdkey to unlock both door and sarcophagus, and unwittingly freed Erawan.
The demon king had seized the duke’s body. His father …
Dorian’s heart raced as he passed collar after collar, around and around the room. Erawan hadn’t needed one to contain his father, not when the man possessed no magic in his veins.
Yet Erawan had said that the man hadn’t bowed—not wholly. Had fought him for decades.
He hadn’t let himself think on it this past week. On whether his father’s final words atop the glass castle had indeed been true. How he’d killed him, without the excuse of the collar to justify it.
His head pounded as he continued to circle the tomb. The collars leaked their unholy stench into the world, pulsing in time with his blood.
They seemed to sleep. Seemed to wait.
Did a prince lurk within each one? Or were these shells, ready to be filled?
Kaltain had warned him of this chamber. This place where Erawan would bring him, should he be caught. Why Erawan had chosen this place to store his collars … Perhaps it was a sanctuary, if such a thing could exist for a Valg king. Where Erawan might come to gaze upon the method of his own imprisonment, and remind himself that he would not be contained again. That he’d use these collars to enslave those who’d attempt to seal him back into the sarcophagus.
Dorian’s magic thrashed, impatient and frantic. Was there a collar in here designated for him? For Aelin?
Around and around, he flew past the sarcophagus and the collars. No sign of the key.
He knew how the collars would feel against his skin. The icy bite of the Wyrdstone.
Kaltain had fought it. Destroyed the demon within.
He could still feel the weight of his father’s knee digging into his chest as he’d pinned him to the marble floor in a glass castle that no longer existed. Still feel the slick stone of the collar against his neck as it sealed. Still see Sorscha’s limp hand as he tried to reach for her one last time.
The room spun and spun, his blood throbbing with it.
Not a prince, not a king.
The collars reached for him with invisible, clawing fingers.
He was no better than them. Had learned to enjoy what the Valg prince had shown him. Had shredded apart good men, and let the demon feed off his hate, his rage.
The room began to eddy, spiraling, dragging him into its depths.
Not human—not entirely. Perhaps he didn’t want to be. Perhaps he would stay in another form forever, perhaps he’d just submit—
A dark wind snapped through the room. Snatched him in its gaping maw and dragged him.
He thrashed, screaming silently.
He wouldn’t be taken. Not like this, not again—
But it hauled him away from the collars. Under the door and out of the room.
Into the palm of a pale hand. Dark, depthless eyes peered down at him. An enormous red mouth parted to reveal bone-white teeth.
“Stupid boy,” Maeve hissed. The words were a thunderclap.
He panted, the gnat’s body shaking from wingtip to wingtip. One press of her finger and he’d be gone.
He braced himself, waiting for it.
But Maeve kept her palm open. And as she began to walk down the hall, away from the sealed chamber, she said, “What you felt in there—that is why I left their world.” She gazed ahead, a shadow darkening her face. “Every day, that was what I felt.”
Kneeling on the floor in a corner of Maeve’s chamber, Dorian hurled the contents of his stomach into the wooden bucket.