HTWBB Chapter 3

She had also been climbing an unfamiliar mountain as if she knew it.

Rietta had sensed this from the first moment she saw him—he was not an ordinary child, in any version of the word.

'Surely there's something he's hiding…'

She let the thought trail off and tilted her head slightly.

Even accounting for his curls, Melian came up only to her waist. Yet somehow, on this incline, he seemed taller than usual.

The uphill, maybe. Or something else she couldn't name.

Melian glanced back the way he always had during the climb—without particular warning, turning to look at her. His golden eyes, catching the light as if they had borrowed it from the sun, held a shine of unguarded trust. Rietta let out a quiet breath and put her weight back into her stride.

The wild animals they passed along the way were consistent: they would approach Melian with evident pleasure, notice Rietta, startle, and bolt into the undergrowth. It happened several times. The higher they climbed, the fewer there were, and then none at all.

Before long, the sun that had sat directly overhead had begun its tilt toward the west.

Melian, who had pressed on without a single rest until then, stopped without warning. Before them, a willow tree stood like a tutelary spirit—old enough that several centuries seemed a fair estimate. Its roots had found the mountain as if they had chosen the spot deliberately.

"Why?"

"Rietta, how many paths do you see?"

"One. To the left."

It was barely enough to be called a trail. Almost no one seemed to have passed through here in some time. The side branches had grown in thick on both sides, filling the space so completely the path looked like it might not exist at all. Rietta studied the opening as if taking its measure, then turned to Melian.

"There's more than one, then."

"It seems like an illusion spell or a barrier. I can't do magic, so I—"

"It's fine. This looks like the right place."

Rietta stepped closer to him. If something had been made specifically to prevent ordinary people—or those of genuinely different constitution—from perceiving it at all, that was very nearly confirmation that something was being concealed.

She pushed through the curtaining branches that hung like rich coils of hair and stood close to the trunk. A small wind moved through. The tree was thick enough that four adults spreading their arms might just circle it—and at first glance, looked entirely unremarkable. As if endurance were the whole of what it had done with its years.

"What are you going to do?"

"Don't tell anyone what you see here."

"Sorry?"

She had closed her eyes without answering. Now she opened them slowly.

The brown of her irises was fading at the edges. Blue spread inward, gradual, from the perimeter.

Melian sensed something was wrong and called out with alarm: "You absolutely cannot break or shatter it!"

"I won't."

Deep blue surged through Rietta's eyes, filling them completely. She looked over the tree again.

What had been invisible moments before was visible now—complex formulae and seal-lines covered the trunk, dense and overlapping, and the air in every direction shone a degree brighter for it.

She read from the roots upward to the branches, then looked to the right.

Beside a sheer cliff face, a boulder sat hunched and rough-cut.

'The real path will usually be the hidden one.'

"I think so too," Melian said.

"Tearing it a little should be fine."

A small wound would repair itself in the space of a blink. Something inscribed in this level of near-permanent high-order magic would not have been done carelessly.

Rietta reached behind her waist and drew out the short-blade she knew by feel. She let a thin thread of magic run through it, and letters surfaced briefly on the short blade before vanishing.

Melian had already stepped back, reading the moment correctly. She confirmed this and in one motion drew a line through the air—toward the view of the cliff. The sound struck her ears—heavy cloth or leather being torn. Along the path of the blade, a clean precise split opened in what had appeared to be nothing.

Rietta gripped it and pulled it apart without hesitation.

"Come through, Melian."

Beyond the split, dense forest continued—and a clear, tended path that carried the mark of human hands.

After passing through the barrier, Melian's guidance was no longer needed.

The slope leading up was formed of low thicket and fruit trees wrong for the season, and it was beautiful in the way of someone's cared-for garden. Small animals—squirrels and their like—that had disappeared somewhere along the lower mountain appeared here again, and she couldn't have said when they'd started to. The magic suffusing this entire space wavered before Rietta's opened perception like heat rising from summer pavement. It was not dangerous. But it seemed, somehow, to have stepped outside the order of things.

"We're here!"

They reached the summit at the hour when the sun, turned fully westward, was coloring the sky red.

It was said to be among the tallest mountains in the region. The clouds were, in fact, below their feet.

Rietta watched the sun dim for a moment, then turned at the feeling that something was too quiet behind her.

Melian had not asked about what happened at the tree. He looked as if he had much to say, but carried an air of understanding—of choosing to wait. Still, he had offered small, unremarkable pieces of conversation throughout the climb, which made the silence after his announcement strange.

The boy stood a few steps to the side, his neck bent back at an angle that might have strained it, looking straight up.

"What is it?"

"Look up there, Rietta."

Melian pointed.

Rietta followed his finger without particular expectation and raised her eyes.

The world in front of her went dark as if night had arrived in one motion.

She narrowed her eyes.

In the last remaining light, something's outline emerged—shadowed and blurred. She had thought at first it was rock. But what occupied that portion of the reddening sky was not rock.

It was an enormous mass of earth.

"This must be the tomb," Melian murmured, in a daze.

The shadow that had fallen across them was not cloud. Suspended above—at a height that would require stacking five of the willow trees from the mountain's midpoint—was a mountain, placed upside down.

No. Not a mountain.

It looked as though someone had taken a scoop of earth from somewhere with a spoon and made a floating island of it in the air. Small rocks orbited the periphery like moons.

〈 In that place, where stepping off by just one foot would bring you closest to the sky, I will find my rest. 〉

That last line of the will had pointed to a place this far outside reason.

Rietta's brow drew together, lightly.

That so many treasure hunters had never been able to identify the tomb was, of course, natural. Now—when those who could wield magic competently were dwindling—more so than ever.

Even someone lucky enough to pass through the willow barrier would have failed here. With no way up to an aerial tomb, they would have turned back.

"Melian."

Rietta called to him. He was still visibly stunned. When he heard his name he startled and jogged over quickly.

"How do I get up there?"

"Please wait here. If I haven't returned by sunrise, go down the mountain."

"Let me come with you!"

"Not two."

"B-but I'm still young, and the mountain at night—"

"I won't say nymphs find mountains dangerous."

Melian went rigid.

His startled eyes lost their direction for a moment, moving without landing anywhere—and then settled, and went still.

A sharp tension closed around them both in an instant.

Rietta let out a breath at the response, which was guileless enough to be certain.

"My remaining power isn't enough to carry two."

"…How did you know?"

The face Melian turned to her asking this was cold in the way an adult's face is cold.

Rietta looked at his clenched fist and opened her mouth without inflection.

"Look at yourself."

"At myself?"

He glanced down reflexively—and flinched, stepping back.

The sleeves and hem of his robe had ridden up considerably. His trousers left more than a hand's-width of ankle exposed. They looked like someone else's clothes.

Only then did Melian realize that the eye level which had been at Rietta's waist was now at her shoulder.

Her rough voice, like a blade drawn across rusted iron, continued.

"Nymph magic runs through this entire mountain. The moment you stepped onto a mountain like this, you would have been full of vitality."

"I—"

"A half-blood would have had almost no opportunity for this. You absorbed it without restraint, without noticing—because you weren't guarding against it."

What Rietta did not add: that keeping someone she thought she could trust close to her side was precisely what had left her unguarded. He was clearly trying to hold himself together, but she could feel the way his whole body keyed itself against each thing she said. She swallowed every sharp word turning in her mouth.

Melian had been anxious since they first met—anxious that she might leave without him. She couldn't name the reason for the goodwill he carried, but she couldn't look away from it either. She had always been weak to children of roughly this age.

"So go ahead of me. If you want to keep talking, wait at the largest inn in Helron."

She tapped the soft brown curls once.

His head nodded, slow.

Rietta laughed—barely, the way a sigh escapes.

She turned away as the boy's face snapped upward—and looked again at the aerial tomb.

The small rocks floating at even intervals showed no sign they would move.

She breathed in, deep. She gathered her magic into her legs and pushed off the ground.

In the evening sky, her hair spread out—and moved in deep brown.

Melian's gaze followed her, unwilling to let go. The brown settling calmly against her back had gone faintly pale at the tips.

The distances between the rocks were farther than they had looked from below. Each time her concentration wavered, the magic coiled around her legs wavered too, and she nearly fell—twice.

After several jumps that cost more than they should have, she set her feet where she had wanted to reach. The soil here—nothing like the moisture below—crunched dry and powdery underfoot.

Rietta straightened up slowly. Having depleted most of her magic in a short span, exhaustion came at her sharply. Without needing to check, she knew her hair would be patchy.

'For a tomb…'

She looked around, composed.

A tomb usually meant a burial mound, or something with a cross marker of some kind. What she could see, however, looked no different from the terrain she had climbed through to get here. The one difference was that the ground was a floating island in the air.

She followed the edge slowly—the edge where a single misstep would mean a straight fall. This place, which felt wider from above than it had appeared from below, was a circle shaped by rough curves. At about five paces in from that perimeter, trees rose tall and close together.

The arrangement was too deliberate to be natural. It looked specifically as if something had been placed to encircle and conceal the interior.

A quick check revealed no particular magical apparatus, fortunately.

She completed a full circuit of the island tomb and arrived back at her starting point. Without hesitation, she stepped into the space between the trees standing like a wall.

"Peeek—!"

Crrrp.

A startled bird went up with a high cry and climbed into the sky. Its long tail ribboned behind it in the open air. Rietta moved into the gap where the bird had been.

The inner side was tangled in vines complex enough to block sight entirely, and passage was not easy. But she could not simply cut her way through.

Places like this almost always had something that guarded them. Unnecessary killing was better avoided.

"This is…"

She moved along—parting vines and branches so they bent without snapping or tearing—for about ten minutes.

Without warning, the view opened completely.

The sun had set fully in that time, and a nail-sliver of moon had taken its position. A clean night wind crossed Rietta's white cheek.

She gathered her drifting hair back roughly and looked straight ahead.

The center of the ring-shaped forest was close to an open greenhouse.

Trimmed shrubs shaped as if by a skilled hand, smooth-cut square stones, thick stumps—each placed at irregular intervals as something to sit on, and beneath them, every kind of flower regardless of season, swaying in the moonlight until the eyes could barely hold them.

Rietta moved her gaze slowly.

The far north of the flower garden. What stood there, still and guarding the silence, had the appearance less of a tomb than of a shrine.

'They won't have looked at the higher places.'

Melian had been right. The first emperor had hidden his treasure somewhere that even if the location were discovered, no one could easily reach it. It was entirely suited as a task for determining a crown prince.

Rietta stepped forward to approach the interior—

—and lurched back, fast, at the sensation that prickled up the back of her neck.

Thoom!

Where her foot had been, grass and flowers erupted upward as something enormous drove itself into the ground.

The world went dark for an instant.

She blinked. The dust cleared. Details surfaced, one at a time.

It looked like a moss-covered old tree. Or a weathered boulder. Rietta narrowed her eyes. Before she could examine it further, a patch of ground a short distance away was crushed down again.

"…Inconvenient."

The voice that came from above was not unfamiliar. Rietta looked away from it and took one step back. She looked up and traced a long way upward, toward the sky—and then, finally, understood what the enormous thing was.

Standing in place of a living person to keep watch over the aerial tomb.

"A golem?"