Kelsa pushed her way free of her mother, dashing aside to the open windows to peer down, getting a look around and shouting descriptions of their surroundings.
Orthos was a burning lump of shell in the corner, and his head snuck out of his shell. He let out a long breath of smoke. “Safe. We are safe.”
Yerin wasn’t shuddering in the corner anymore. She was slumped against the wall, her head hanging. “Useless,” she mumbled.
For Lindon, every second crawled by as though Dross was speeding up his thoughts, but that one word from Yerin speared him through the heart.
He turned around and gathered her up. She let him, all eight arms hanging limply to her sides.
“Lost my spine. Almost buried you all.”
No. She wasn’t the one who had led them all to the edge of their deaths.
“I’m so sorry,” Lindon whispered into her hair. “Yerin, I…I’m just…I’m so sorry.”
She gave a dry laugh. “Sorry for dragging us along?” Yerin tapped the side of her head. “Mostly, there’s only one in here. For a blink there, we had two again. Both of us about to ruin our robes, and curled up like we’re looking to die.”
Lindon squeezed tighter. That wasn’t what had scared him.
She hadn’t frozen up. She’d tried to leave. He had seen the Moonlight Bridge begin to activate.
If she could have, she would have tossed herself to the Bleeding Phoenix.
A hand rested on Lindon’s shoulder, and he turned to see Eithan looking serious. “Ziel isn’t here,” he said in a low voice. “Nor are Jai Long and Jai Chen. They’re resourceful enough that they may survive, but in a battle like that, there are no guarantees.”
Kelsa straightened up. “Jai Long? They left. They’ve been gone for…what, two days?”
Eithan gave her a sympathetic smile, but he didn’t correct himself.
And Lindon knew just as well what Eithan wasn’t saying.
Dross, what happens if the Wandering Titan keeps heading east?
[He might stop at the mountain. If one of them had a huge power source like that, best to guess that they all do. Then maybe he’ll feed on that and go back to sleep!]
And if it doesn’t?
[…there’s no source of aura to interest him for who knows how many thousands of miles east. The Desolate Wilds and Blackflame Empire are too weak. He’ll probably stop to feed on something, but more likely he just keeps wandering until he gets tired.]
And that was assuming the Titan didn’t stop and turn Sacred Valley upside-down looking for whatever prize it wanted. Lindon had been assured several times that ancient security measures had stopped that from happening before, but there was no guarantee it would be the same result this time.
The most likely scenario was that it wandered east, wrecking the Desolate Wilds and the Blackflame Empire. The same way it had destroyed Sacred Valley.
Lindon pulled away from Yerin and removed Suriel’s marble from his pocket. The candle-flame burned as steady and blue as ever, but its calming aura felt like a lie.
The vision of his own future had stopped when he died, so he hadn’t seen what the Dreadgod had done after destroying Sacred Valley. Maybe in this reality, they had averted a worse future. Even if that were true, the fate had come a lot sooner.
And Lindon had failed to stop it.
[Ah, but look at it this way,] Dross said. [Did you fail?]
Dross drew his attention to the dozens of lives still remaining in the cloudship. They were battered and cut and bruised and in terrible shape, but they were alive.
Not to mention the hundreds—maybe thousands; Lindon couldn’t be sure—who had made it out on the Akura ships before. Dross pulled up that memory and shoved it right into his mind’s eye.
The spirit prodded him further. [What did you really set out to do?]
To save Sacred Valley.
That was the answer, and they were the words he’d always used to himself when he thought about his purpose for gaining strength.
But what did that mean, really?
Saving his family? They were safe. Here in Moongrave, with Mercy’s endorsement, they could be as safe as anywhere. Once their cloud fortress was repaired, he could take them with him or even leave them here.
Lindon had always pictured himself saving his home, but deep down, he had wished for something else as well. He’d wanted to stride back into the Wei clan and show them his great power.
He mocked himself for that now. The people of Sacred Valley hadn’t been impressed even when they should have been.
The best he’d accomplished was bullying them into obeying.
As a distant third, he’d wanted to preserve the place he’d grown up. He had been gone from Sacred Valley for a long time now, but it had been his home for longer. He had almost as many fond memories there as painful ones.
Now…it was too late for that. It was gone.
The images of the bodies, spilled all over the foothills of Mount Samara, cut him as though the memory was razor-edged. They had died outside Sacred Valley, just as they would have died if they had stayed home.
But some had made it.
And some were still trying to leave. Still trying to escape.
Even so, Lindon felt the burden on himself lighten. Akura Charity had been a Sage before he was born—before his father was born, probably—and even she couldn’t have taken him across the continent in one trip. There was nothing he could do. The battle was over.
[Ooh, that’s what I said! I said that! Focus on the victory and not, you know, the failure. All that failure.]
Lindon did, and he found the lack of responsibility a welcome relief. He would be wrestling with himself for the rest of his life, he knew, looking to find every little detail he should have done differently to save more lives.
But right now, he couldn’t save more than he already had.
Only then did he notice Mercy, standing against the windows. She held her dragon-headed staff loosely in one hand, and the wind from outside stirred glass shards around her feet and whipped her ponytail into her face.
She had turned around, but otherwise stood exactly where she’d reached when she’d lunged for her mother’s hand. Now she chewed on her lip so strongly that blood welled up.
As Lindon met her eyes, she spoke, as reluctantly as if he’d pulled the words out of her.
“Does anyone want to go back?”
A buzz passed through Lindon’s body. At the same time, he and Dross remembered the item she’d left buried outside of Sacred Valley’s suppression field.
I was right, Lindon thought, and he himself didn’t know if the words were excited or hollow.
[I was way off,] Dross said.
From her void key, Mercy pulled out a stone carved with script. It looked as though she’d etched the scripts herself, and Lindon knew what it was even without inspecting it closely.
The stone itself wouldn’t do anything. Neither did the script, when it was powered. It only linked to a teleportation anchor.
Like the one Mercy had taken from Daji. The one she’d left buried in Sacred Valley when she’d seen her mother show up.
She had known Malice might send her away, and had prepared herself a way back.
That same anchor had allowed the Blood Sage to transport a group of Overlords halfway across the world in one trip. Such small teleportation anchors were disposable—permanent ones were huge, like the tower beneath them that Malice had used to send them here to Moongrave—but this one had been made by Reigan Shen. It would last another trip.
“We’ll need you to carry us there, if you can,” Mercy went on. They all knew it would be difficult for Lindon to move so many people, even if the anchor made it possible. “But…do we…”