Aster Wood and the Book of Leveling (Volume 2) (24 page)

And his chair sat empty.
 

Low, angry hissing came from the ceiling. I looked up, the book held tightly in my arms, and saw him. Attached to the wall like a spider in a web, the man had transformed. From between his lips a long, forked tongue lapped at the stale air. His hands and feet had become snarls of claws, so strong that they ripped chunks from the granite ceiling. His mossy teeth grew into giant fangs, and his pitted eyes glared at me as a low gurgle erupted from his throat.
 

Before I could move, he leapt from the wall, tossing me to the ground. My head hit the stone, and he pushed up on my chin with one of his taloned hands. He opened his mouth wide and arched his neck.

“Aster!”
 

Jade was screaming.
 

“Aster! Wake up!” She held onto both of my shoulders, shaking me violently.
 

I sat bolt upright, my eyes searching frantically around the cave for the monster.
 

“Where is he?” I said, trickles of sweat running down my face.

“It was a dream,” she said, panting. “You were having a dream. I couldn’t wake you up.” She sat back, out of breath from trying to shake me awake. Almara sat across the rockfire from me, watching, unmoving.
 

My breathing came hard and fast, as if I had just sprinted at top speed.
 
I stood up, examining the small cave where we had made camp, but no beast hid in the corners here.
 

These dreams. Only one dream I had ever had had turned to reality. I wiped the sweat from my forehead and rubbed my eyes. I had dreamed of my father, too. I began to shake as I imagined what my world might look like if these new dreams started coming true.

“What were you dreaming about?” Jade asked. She looked worried and small, spooked by the severity of my dreams, though she could not see them.

“He dreamt of the Corentin,” Almara’s voice came unexpectedly.

“What?” asked Jade, whipping around. “How do you know that?”

“Because I saw it,” he said.
 

“How could you see a dream in my head?” The back of my head ached where I had hit it on the floor in my nightmare, and I rubbed at it.

“I see lots of things.” He hoisted his frail body to his feet and held out a hand for Jade. She took it and stood next to him.
 

“If you saw it, then what was it?”

“I told you, it was the Corentin.”
 

“The Corentin is a dwarf-sized man who turns into a hissing monster with huge fangs?” I asked. Suddenly, I felt silly. It had only been a dream.
 

“No,” he said, taking out the blindfold and tying it around his face. “The Corentin is every monster, everywhere.” He turned and, running his hand along the cave wall, started walking towards the entrance.
 

I stared after him, trying to make sense of his words. They struck me, right in my middle, and I knew they were true. I no longer felt silly at all. It may have been a dream, but it hadn’t been just
any
dream.

“I dreamt of the Corentin?” I asked, more to myself than to him. Then, seeing he was almost at the mouth of the cave I ran to catch up with him, blocking his exit. “Does that mean that he’s—is he in my head, too?”

Almara stopped and turned to me.
 

“Did he kill you?” his mouth asked, his eyes hidden.

“What?”

“Did he kill you in the dream? Were you dead? Did you feel it?”

“No, he was just about to bite my neck when Jade shook me awake.”

He raised his head, almost as if sniffing the air.
 

“Then he has not gained entry into your mind,” he said. “Not yet. Do not worry now. When you feel fangs pierce your skin, a knife stab your heart, or,” he shuddered, “flame set fire to your blood, then you worry.”

We walked all morning and afternoon along the orange ridge towards the tallest peak. The road became narrower as we went, but it did not disappear entirely. Sometime, a long time ago, men had carved this path into the skin of the mountain. A few thousand years was a short time in the life of rock, and the scar was still deep and new. I wondered why there was a path here at all. If I were hiding something, I would want to keep it so well hidden I could barely find it again myself when I was done. But this road was pointing us to the book like an arrow at a target.
 

Jade had spent the morning eyeballing me, her concern not easing for several hours, as if she expected me to drop to the ground at any moment, never to be awakened again. Bu as the day wore on, her attitude changed. Her eyes became sharp and hard as she surveyed the landscape, and her feet dug into the mountainside with a level of ferocity that left even me out of breath. For a few hours I let her be, leading us towards the heart of the mountain in her solitary fashion. Maybe, I thought, she just needed a little time to process all of this.
 

But I wasn’t sure that an entire lifetime would be enough to process all of this.
 

People, lots of people, had done great things long before Jade or I or even Almara had ever existed. Who was to say that we couldn’t join them? Maybe we had a shot at this, at actually balancing the Fold. The twelve-year-old kid in me, the one ignored and abandoned, sick and unworthy in my other life, told me that it was impossible. I tried to rally my spirits, to focus on the strengths that I did have, but the horrors left for us by the Corentin were enough to make me doubt everything I knew about myself. As I repeated over and over the actions I had taken to make these worlds better, the words and stories gradually became meaningless in my mind. Instead, my thoughts turned to what I had seen in that church, and I spun myself in circles trying to imagine a life where such things didn’t exist, my own contributions to our effort forgotten in the shadow of that evil.

As the mid-afternoon sun beat down on us, Jade stopped dead in her tracks up ahead. I paused, placing my hand on Almara’s chest to stop him, but she didn’t fall to the ground to hide as she had when we had entered the village. Whatever she saw up there, she didn’t seem to be alarmed by it.
 

Without even a backward glance, she disappeared over the rise.
 

I picked up the pace, dragging Almara along behind me. And when we had crested the top of the hill, I saw why she had left us behind.
 

The entire face of the rock was carved. Stretching fifteen feet above our heads, a gigantic representation of Jared’s symbol was permanently etched into the rock.
 

Together, we walked to the face. Cautiously, I stretched my hand out to touch it, only flinching slightly at the first contact of the mountain with my skin. I ran my hands all along the wall, searching for a way in, but the smooth surface betrayed no entrance. There had to be a way in. Our path ended here, with no other way up the mountain.
 

“How do we get in?” I turned to Almara. He stood before the carving, head slightly raised as though he could see it through his blindfold. My eyes followed his up the face of the rock, and I saw in the center of the diamond something that made my heart stop.

“
Look!”
I said.
 

An indentation the size of a softball was set into the rock, and from below I could just make out another carving, the same as the first, but much smaller.
 

“The stone,” Jade breathed. “Father, it wasn’t a champion you needed. It was only the Kinstone.”

Almara didn’t respond to this. He just held his blind gaze up at the mountain, waiting.
 

I dug the stone out of my bag and held it up above my head, but I couldn’t reach. Jade moved a boulder beneath the symbol for me to stand on. I climbed up onto it and stared at the diamond, face to face.
 

The symbol within the symbol twinkled and glittered. I compared it with the stone in my hand, and I knew I had the key to get inside. I looked out over the valley, and just for the briefest moment I wanted to flee. Not because of fear, exactly, but because of what I knew might lay within this mountain of rock.
 

It could be my salvation inside. My ticket home. The way to fix everything that had gone so wrong, in the Fold and on Earth, for so long.
 

Or it could be, quite possibly, my end.
 

Far below me a breeze blew thick green grass so that it looked like a body of water from so high up.
 

I turned back to the mountain, gripped the Kinstone in both of my hands, and matched the symbol in front of me to the symbol on the link.
 

The side of the mountain shuddered. I almost fell from the boulder, but then got my footing again and jumped down, still gripping onto the Kinstone with one hand. The lightest touch, it seemed, had been enough.

The rock split apart before us, opening up a long tunnel that dove straight into the center of the mountain.
 

Jade and I took a few tentative steps inside. The sides of the tunnel were covered with writing, In neatly chiseled rows, strange ciphers, foreign to my eyes, lined an opening in the mountainside. We walked down the small hill to where Jade stood, brushing the carvings with her fingertips.
 

“What is it?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “A code?”

“The book,” I said, slipping my backpack from my shoulders. Many months ago I had stolen a book of codes from Cadoc. Almara’s book, in fact. Now I dug for it in the bottom of the old canvas pack, eager to translate the message on the wall. I felt my hand close around the small volume, and once free of the pack I began flipping through it wildly.
 

Every page of the tiny manual was filled with translations from language to language. Letters from our language were paired with their counterparts in at least eight others, but one in particular seemed, to me, to be the best place to start.

Sabellioc.
Language of the dead.

And I was not mistaken. In the largest letters, the ones placed right over the door, ten symbols of Sabellioc were carefully carved. I flipped through the pages, matching symbols to letters I understood. The first word came together quickly, and I might’ve guessed it had I not had the key to translate it..

“The first word,” I said, “is ‘fire’.”

Jade came to my side, peering down at the little book.

Almara stood still as a statue, his lips moving silently.
 

I got to work on the next symbol, and after a few moments the message made itself fully known.

W-I-T-H-I-N.

Fire within.
 

A shiver ran down my back.

My eyes met Jade’s, as hard now as the stone for which she was named. What I saw there surprised me, and for a moment I was distracted from our intentions.

“Are you ok?” I asked, eyeing her cautiously. “You look, I don’t know, angry.”

I, myself, was feeling a lot of different things at this moment, but angry was not one of them. I was terrified.

Her lids squinted at my words, but then, just as suddenly, her eyes seemed to melt back to the ones I knew so well.
 

“I just want this to be over.” She looked worriedly at Almara, who still stood where we had left him, his lips mouthing words we could not understand. “Let’s just do this and get it over with. One way or another.”

I nodded.
 

After checking a few of the other lines of text against the code book, my suspicions were validated. No other message was written here for travelers to see. In every language on the wall the same warning was displayed.
 

Fire within.

As our feet crossed over the threshold of the entry, leaving the daylit world behind, I hoped that I would be strong enough to keep the fire of the Corentin far, far away.
 

But it was fire that we needed, even three steps into the mountain. The walls that rose up around us were pitch black, and soon we couldn’t see even our hands in front of our faces.

In a flash a bright blue orb appeared in the tunnel before us, a rock from the mountain turned light as air and bright as any torch by Jade’s powers. It bobbed in front of her as she moved, attracted to her as a moth to a flame, guiding us onward.
 

“You alright?” I asked Almara. He looked as terrified as I felt. “Almara?” I asked again, placing my hand on his robed shoulder. He turned his head in my direction and gave a tiny nod, but he didn’t speak.
 

“Jade?” I asked. Her face wore a similar expression to her father’s. She may not have ever felt the fire of the Corentin, but her two-hundred-year imprisonment in a mountain not unlike this one had left its mark just the same. She moved closer to me.

“What do you think is in here?” she said. “What happens if we’re attacked?”

“Then we run. We meet right here, at the opening of the mountain.”

“But what if we can’t escape?” Her forehead crinkled with deep worry.
 

“We will escape,” I told her. “Nobody has attacked us since we got here, right?” She turned and looked down the long, narrow passageway.

“Right,” said her tiny voice. Whatever airs she had been putting on seemed to have evaporated. Once again she was a nine-year-old girl, scared of the dark and the monsters that lived there. She knew those beasts only too well.

My heart thudded in my chest as I regarded my traveling companions. We were no army, no warriors. Madness and torture had left two of our number in a questionable state, while self-doubt and sheer terror left me wishing I could crawl into a hole and let the whole thing play out without me.

But I could not choose defeat.

Jade walked first, and I followed close behind her. Almara’s sandaled feet scraped along the rock path, echoing off the walls of the tunnel.
 

Down, down, down we went into the deep. Soon my legs were sore and aching. For an hour we walked down, nobody speaking and only Almara’s shuffling stride making it to our ears.