Escape to the Sea (Tangled Hearts #1)

Chapter 15 A Golden Temptation

Ephraim

We crawl through the meadow now, as I mope. Even I am not so naive to think that I’m doing anything else.

But something pulls my attention out of my own melancholy. As we crest another high hill, I stop, taken aback by a shimmering golden wall cutting against the hazy pastel sky. It looks almost like a painter slashed across a canvas with undiluted paint.

“What is that?”

Atrea shrugs. “I’m not sure. Remember, this is my first time too.”

There is a soft hum at the base of my skull. It’s not audible, not really, but it’s still singing. “Do you hear that?”

“Hear what?” Atrea replies, frowning.

I don’t look back, nor do I answer. This sound and the golden curtain are the first things that have felt right since we jumped in here. I shift my heading, moving off the well-worn path and into the flower fields, towards the gold.

Distantly, in the background, I hear someone calling my name, but I don’t stop. I need to get closer. The further I walk towards it, the better it gets, the more the song calls to me in my blood, my veins. I start to make out a vague shape, large and fuzzy in the furthest reaches. What could be back there? Or, who?

I know I’m trampling flowers but I don’t care. For once they don’t matter.

And then, as if out of nowhere, I’m yanked out of my reverie.

I come back to myself in Tommy’s arms. He’s holding me like I weigh nothing at all, and he’s shouting something to Atrea.

“Let go of me, you brute!” I snap, trying to pull away.

“Rude,” he mutters, sullen. He dumps me unceremoniously into a bed of flowers and I stand up in front of Atrea who looks… nervous?

Annoyed, I get to my feet. “What is wrong with you two? I thought we were exploring!”

She shakes her head. “Not that way,” she says.

The rage swells in me again. This whole time these two have treated me like an errant child that needs to be babysat. I’m sick of it.

“Absolutely not. I will go where I please. And you will need to follow, because I have the ride home,” I say, grabbing the necklace around my neck.

“We were chasing you for an hour!” she snaps, green eyes sharp and furious. “We could barely keep up with you! You were running like a madman!”

I stop and look at her, annoyed. “What are you talking about? It’s barely been thirty seconds and—”

“The suns! See for yourself, woodsman.” Tommy snaps.

The lowest of the three suns has dipped under the horizon. I turn to both elves, seeing Tommy soaked with sweat, and Atrea panting, her perfect braid now mussed with flyaways.

I look from them back to the gold curtain. It seems no closer than it was before. “I don’t understand.”

“It could be hundreds of miles away. Or it could be a foot away and we’ll never reach it. We don’t have enough information,” she says, almost pleading. “Come back to the path.”

I still hear it singing in time with my heartbeat, but I check in with myself. I’m clearly fatigued, like I’ve been running sprints with Arlen all morning. The dull pain in my arm has sharpened to a fine point, and draws my focus away. Everything hurts. I sway on my feet and Tommy reaches behind me to steady me. “Easy, cutie.”

Atrea’s face contorts in some mix of anger, annoyance, and relief. “We should still be able to make it to the shelter before sundown. Can you make it?”

Tommy’s mouth twitches. “I’ll help. I’m brute, recall?”

“Tommy, I didn’t—I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine.” He shrugs without looking at me and slips my arm over his shoulder, supporting the bulk of my weight.

Atrea gives me one last look, and then turns and starts stalking back to the path. I take a last look at the golden curtain, the humming in my head reverberating ever louder even as we move away.

~*~

We probably look like quite a mess to whoever lives in this house.

There is a clear delineation between the wild valley of flowers and this denizen’s territory. There are a few flowering hedges that separate the chaos from the slightly more organized chaos. The flowers in here seem to be purposeful, even if their arrays are a little too chaotic for my own tastes. In one bed, there are more of those translucent singing flowers, but they seem to be lazy and soothed in the hotter afternoon sun.

Tommy is a good sport, but I can tell his stamina is also flagging. Between having to run me down, allegedly, and carrying me back through the meadow, he seems to have exhausted even his stores of energy.

Eventually, the home rises up out of the aether. From this far out, I can only make out a clocktower and a large open courtyard. As we get closer, more strangeness appears. The rooms appear nonsensical in their construction, even from the outside, including stairs leading to nothing at all and sweeping verandas that end at solid brick walls.

Perhaps it’s my tired eyes, or the sheer inability for any one area of this place to be defined, but I swear some of the walls are moving, shifting as we grow closer.

“Desire a bed, soon,” Tommy mutters with a shake of his head. “ Karadin ! Are we close?”

“Almost,” she says ahead, and holds a hand up. Tommy stops, his eyes darting over the estate.

From this close, it’s more evident that the clocktower is backwards. Or rather, it’s inside out. There’s the back of a clock face, but the arms are gone. Curled around its face are a number of flowering vines with blooms that pulse like the beating of a heart. Or I suppose, the ticking of a clock.

There are several levels—one has fresh game being hung out to air and dry, while further still is a line of clothes with too many holes for arms or heads. On the next, a hammock is lazily stretched out. Beneath the clocktower is an archway, where the door to the tower is partially extended. On the other side of the door is more flowers, with a small pond. I can hear frogs croaking. If they are frogs.

“Any dangers?” Tommy asks.

Atrea shrugs. “If there are, none that I can see.”

Tommy stops and thinks for a second and then nods. “Coming!”

He carries me under the gate, and then into a large courtyard. Atrea winds us through an orchard of trees planted within the walls, the branches fat and heavy with different fruits.

There is a large, partially exposed greenhouse where someone must have been working on breeding new variants of flowers together.

“Need a room, A. Find us one, please.”

“I am looking, but the architecture here is making this difficult,” Atrea says. “As soon as I find a room with a door we can close, I’ll let you know.”

And, almost as if someone heard us, there is a grinding of stone against stone, and a wall up ahead shifts, a door slowly appearing before our eyes.

Atrea turns to face Tommy. “See?”

Tommy rolls his eyes, and then starts to walk with me again. “Come on, cutie.”

“Should we really go in there?” I ask. “It appeared as we spoke of it. What if we’re walking into the maw of some great beast?”

Tommy shakes his head. “No moms here.”

“No, not ma, maw—”

Atrea crosses her arms and turns backwards to face us. “It doesn’t seem like we have a choice. Besides, if this place were a beast, it would have eaten us when we passed under the portcullis.”

“Not better!” Tommy says cheerfully. He slowly rests me against the wall and I try my hardest to stay on my feet. He pulls out his spears and motions for Atrea to back away from the wall. Then, with a deep, very dramatic sigh, he heaves the door open and into the room.

He seems only slightly annoyed that nothing comes roaring out of the doorway. He moves in and then quickly out. “Safe. Come on,” he says.

The two elves manage to pull me into the room and Tommy shuts the door, although he grumbles about how there’s no lock. When we turn around, there’s a gigantic table that dominates the rest of the room.

“Fuck me,” Tommy sighs. “This place is too much.”

And then, as if someone is pulling an invisible tablecloth off the table, it fills with food. Pounds of it, double and triple stuffed to the point where the table sags under the weight.

My mouth immediately waters. I don’t think I’ve ever been so hungry in my life.

“Bad idea,” Tomlyn warns. But his eyes are on the table too, and honest to gods, I think I hear his stomach growl.

“We shouldn’t. Not without permission,” Atrea says, her Elvish clipped, strained. The sharpness in her tone pulls me right back into those darkened evenings in my cavernous bedroom.

My mother was not the most attentive. With her background as a Sea-walker, she seemed to always have one foot in our plane and one in another. It gave her a dreamlike quality that was hard to attach to. But in the evenings, she would occasionally drift into my room. She would tell me stories about the denizens of the sea. Dangerous beings with friendly faces. They lure you in with good company, or good food, and then come calling at the worst times.

Atrea backs up to stand as far away from the table as possible, crossing her arms, clearly trying to fight off the same ravenous hunger that’s ripped through Tommy and me.

Tommy looks up, inches away from taking a bite of a sunshine-bright yellow apple. “Hungry, Karadin . We didn’t eat.”

Atrea shakes her head firmly, clutching her arms tighter around herself. “No.”

“Well, at least one of you has good manners.”

I wheel around, dropping the plate of cheeses that was apparently in my hand to the floor with a clatter.

For a moment, the voice is disembodied. But then, a form wobbles and solidifies into a vaguely humanoid shape. Much like the table of food, their shape coalesces suddenly, as if a curtain has been dropped.

Their shape is athletic, their skin a dark amber hue with glowing gold eyes. As they saunter from the doorway towards a newly visible chair, They brush their hair out of their face, a billowing cloud of dark blue that curls and falls over their surprisingly broad shoulders.

Somehow, they are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. They snap their fingers, and for a moment, the ravenous hunger fades and I’m left with the same sluggish exhaustion that has seeped into my bones.

“Oh, you dears have been traveling for so long. You look quite bedraggled. Here. Let us help.”

The being snaps their fingers, and suddenly, the cloud lifts from me. I take a deep breath as my shoulders straighten, and the dull, throbbing ache ebbs away from my thigh.

“There. Isn’t that so much better? We are sure that you are all relieved,” they say. Then their eyes lock with mine.

I think some of the oldest philosophers and mages of our era believe that we were prey animals at some point. That humans were hunted by something older, darker, more cunning.

As this creature stares into the depths of my soul, and then through it, I think that maybe we found the predator that hunted us, before the world was civilized. This being, the master of this ever-changing domain, smiles at me.

“Welcome to our home. We suppose it is time for introductions.”