Storm of Ash. Michelle Kenney

when I was so close to death. Back then I thought it was the call of heaven; now I knew it was the pull of the underworld.

      ‘Eli?’ I forced through numb lips. ‘Where is he?’ My voice came in gasps, fierce and uneven.

      He stared down intently, allowing me to glimpse him. Eli, reflected in the black ovoid surface of his fathomless eyes. He was smiling, holding out his hands towards me or to another. To the one holding me now?

      I stared, dumbfounded, feeling a spark fire within me.

      ‘What have you done with him?’ I raged, pummelling my fists against his rock-hard chest.

      His gills opened, releasing a soft outpouring of freezing mist that stopped me in my tracks. I stared into his black eyes, praying fervently they would show me again.

      ‘You know me, Talia. I am Prince Phaethon, Son of Clymene.’ His whisper clung to the air. ‘I come to you in peace.’

      My mind was whirling through the pages of Grandpa’s book of mythology, until it reached the page I was searching for – heavily inked with a dark, stormy ocean, and eyes that watched as you read. A memory stirred, and Grandpa’s voice whispered through the trees.

       Clymene was an Oceanid nymph loved by the sun god, Helios. Together, they had seven daughters and a son, a prince named Phaethon, who was killed when he tried to drive his father’s chariot of the sun across the sky, scorching the land and its people for all time.

      ‘Phaethon?’ I echoed, my frozen lips barely able to form the word.

      An intense stare was my confirmation.

      ‘Eli … my brother …?’

      The water stirred around us.

      ‘He is safe …’

      I exhaled, feeling the fractures in my heart flood with fresh pain, forcing open the scars.

      ‘Then where is he?’ I burned. ‘Is he here? Why can’t I see him? And Aelia!’

      ‘You brought them to us with barely any life. But we accepted them, as we accepted you and the Commander General …’

      ‘Where are they, Phaethon?’

      And then I glimpsed it, buried in the place where things are supposed to be forgotten.

      A huge rambling city, concealed by an underwater garden, its bioluminescence gleaming like a million candles.

      It was a world I’d chosen to forget. My breath rattled the cool night air, and the shapes beneath the black water darted faster and faster – as though they knew it too.

      ‘Now you claim a right, despite this world doing all it could to end them,’ his ovoid eyes challenged, showing a glimpse of Eli and Aelia’s pale, waxen faces as they slid into the glass river, ‘so, my question to you is, what will you do for my kind in return?’

      His imperial face was as still as stone, the strength coursing through his arms as old as mountains.

       For all revivals the Oceanids demand a payment of sorts: either an equitable trade or promise of recompense.

      I tried to steady my breath. Hadn’t August and I paid the heaviest price already?

      Fresh zeal flooded my veins.

      ‘I can pay,’ I forced through gritted teeth. ‘There can be a trade. Give them back; give Eli back. Stand beside us against Cassius – and I will pay in blood. For the Oceanids, for the Prolets, for Arafel, and for every last misbegotten creature who has suffered at his hand – I will watch Cassius draw his last breath before burning his dark heart until there is nothing but dust.’

      Another memory stirred, only this time it was Atticus pleading with me to spare his father’s life in the cathedral. Was it prompted by Phaethon? Some kind of test?

      ‘This time I will have no mercy,’ I swore.

      ‘Find Hominum chimera.’

      Prince Phaethon’s words faded into my skin as a myriad of illuminations reached up through the water. I stared down, glimpsed them floating somewhere between sleeping and waking, their hypnotic lullaby growing louder all the while. I could see they were coming, all of them, a thousand pairs of fathomless eyes powering towards me and reaching for my innermost thoughts.

      It was beautiful, terrifying and magical in the way only ancient worlds understood. I wanted to sleep, to let their bewitching song engulf me, to take me to them. Perhaps never to return.

      But instead the surface broke one last time and a familiar silhouette reached out of the water beside me. A gentle face, grey-blue eyes and longish sandy-brown hair. He smiled, and for the first time in months, I was conscious of a knot releasing somewhere deep inside.

       Chapter 7

      I was alone. Save for the rustling trees, and the ground beneath me which was as dry as a bone. For a second I stared upwards at the protective canopy of branches, entwined over my head as though to protest, ‘She’s one of us … a land creature … not of the water.’

      Adrenaline fired my limbs into action and I bolted upright, a million thoughts misfiring. I could see the silvery gleam of the lake through the trees, yet somehow I was dressed again – and as dry as though I’d never been swimming at all.

       Was it all a dream?

      Then I heard a rustle in the jade grass beside me. I turned slowly, still caught in the web of my dream.

      There was a man asleep next to me. My breath stilled. A familiar, missing man.

      My breath caught on a painful cough as I reached out. It was him. My brother. Lying asleep beside me as though it were the most natural thing in the world. His skin peachy and perfect. Arafel perfect. As though we’d never lost him at all.

      For a moment it was as much as I could do just to sit there, drinking in every tiny contour of the face that was so like my own, and had yet been so difficult to picture these last few weeks. Then at last, I smiled. Not gratefully. But blissfully. A real smile that broke through the walled-up fissures of my heart and reached into my cheeks to make them stretch until they ached.

      It really was Eli. Glistening and whole, as though he’d never known Pantheon, Cassius or the research facility. And then he was opening his grey-blue eyes, and rolling his head towards me. Fixing me with his gentle smile, and healing me in a way no one else could.

      He raised his head in bewilderment as I reached for his hand. His fingers were a shade of field-gold just before harvest, and I recalled how pale he was when I whispered my goodbye. The thought sobered me faster than if I’d plunged into the river myself, and I threw my arms around him with a sob.

      ‘I’m OK, I’m OK,’ he soothed as I held him fast, uncertain I would ever let him go again.

      He looked the same, felt the same, and yet his eyes glinted with the light of another world and its secrets. And he was alone. My heart ached for Max and Lia, but it only made me hug Eli harder.

      ‘Where have you been?’ I whispered finally.

       Chapter 8

      There was an iridescent mist bathing the mountains today. It swirled around my strapped ankles like tendrils of heaven reaching down to soothe the warm, dusty rocks. It was the sort of day we used to enjoy in the fields. The sun was a blur of spring warmth, affording the workers a degree of respite from the usual searing heat. But the mountain mist was also deceptive, ready to lead any hunter to his swift demise given any lapse in concentration.

      Unus paused to kneel beside a scorched Venus flytrap. We’d passed this way a few days ago, when the plant was green and budding.