The chilling thought washed over me with dread. If we had gone through a shadow tunnel to come here, I would never be able to get back to the temple on my own now.
“Your three stars are gone, Elaine,” Erik stated in a flat voice.
The night sky spread over us like a diamond-studded velvet. But my three guiding stars were no longer there. Their glow was gone, replaced by a myriad of new stars I could barely see and didn’t recognize.
“Where are we?” I exhaled in a whisper, my heart swamped by heavy hopelessness.
Piara sauntered out of the darkness.
“Welcome to Ashgate City,” she said. “The place where Joy Vessels are valued above all.”
The smirk on her face promised nothing good from being “valued” here.
Ihad no idea how long I’d slept. But what did it matter anyway whether it was an hour or five minutes? The shadow tunnel could’ve taken us any distance in that time. I knew that only Joy Guardians from the Temple of the First Priestess could create the portal connecting to the River of Mists using a spell. But it appeared that a plain old shadow tunnel without a connection to the magical river could be created by any fae, even by the traders.
I had no way back now. I was stuck in this city.
Except that…it didn’t even look like a city.
I saw no hill, no wall, and no light. It was just the same endless black desert swallowed by an equally dark night. With the magical glow of the tunnel now extinguished, only the shimmering crests of the dunes and the twinkling stars above broke this infinite darkness.
Our caravan kept moving forward. I couldn’t see much and strained my hearing instead, expecting to hear crowds clamoring, people chatting, horses or camels trotting along the paved paths—all the usual noises of a shadow fae city that I’d often heard in Teneris.
None of it came. Instead, the sound that stretched over the sand dunes was a distant, measured hum that rose and ebbed in intensity. It seemed to spread under the night sky reaching everywhere at once.
“What is that noise?” I muttered under my breath.
No one answered, of course. The shadow fae led the camels forward. Erik gripped the bars of our cage, staring out into the darkness.
“Do you see anything?” I asked, hoping his eyesight was better than mine.
“The desert ends,” he said in an ominous voice.
That note in his voice was what made me pause. He seemed to have snapped out of his numb stupor, yanked out by genuine fear.
“What do you mean it ends?” I peered out into the darkness.
“There, see?” He stretched his arm between the bars of the cage, pointing straight ahead.
I saw little, just dark night and the shimmer of the sand and stars. The dunes were smaller here, much shorter than before. Up ahead, they flattened completely, melting into the desert floor. The day storms had arranged the sand into ripples, like waves frozen in time. The starlight merged with the shimmer of the sand, making the desert appear like a river with its surface rippling in a breeze.
And then I saw it… The shimmer stopped, cut off in an uneven, jagged line beyond which lay nothing but darkness with no sand and no stars. The dark abyss stretched all the way to the distant horizon, eventually merging with the sky.
I tried to remember what I’d overheard from the talks of the traders about Ashgate.
“The lawless place…”
“The city at the end of the world…”
This was it then. The end of the world.
And what lay beyond? Nothing.
Yet the traders didn’t stop. They kept leading our camels to the edge of the desert, to that ragged line that separated the shimmering sand and the dark abyss beyond.
No… I held my breath as we moved closer and closer.
Stop!