“Rye?” Tahki said.
The rattling stopped.
He hopped out of bed and put his face close to the crack. “Sornjia?”
A low throaty noise resonated against the wood. Tahki’s heart drummed faster. The handle shook again. He grabbed it and held on.
Silence.
Tahki swallowed. Dyraien had said the castle toyed with your mind. It was probably just the wind banging against his door. Someone must have left a window open.
He tiptoed back to his bed, grabbed his mother’s pencil, and held it like a knife. He put his hand on the doorknob and counted to three, then yanked it open. The hallway was empty. Silence lingered, as if he stood in the wake of a storm, so quiet his ears rang. He stepped outside and walked to the railing where he could see the entryway. He searched the ground until he caught movement on the staircase.
Someone stood on the steps. A dark shape against a dark wall.
Sweat broke out across his neck. His first impulse was to flee to his room and barricade the door, but he didn’t move. What if Sornjia had decided to come to the castle? If anyone saw him, if anyone spoke to him, he was dead.
Tahki moved quickly to the stairs. By the time he reached the top, the figure had vanished. He descended, one careful step at a time. Before he reached the bottom, he noticed something odd about the floor.
It moved.
He stopped on the last step. The floor looked black as the obsidian walls, only it shimmered and rippled, and he could see his reflection.
The entire first floor was filled with dark water.
Tahki took a step backward. He didn’t understand what he was looking at. Had the river flooded? Why was the water so dark when it couldn’t be more than two feet deep?
He retreated up the stairs to alert Dyraien. As he climbed, a sudden furious roar sounded above his head. The cry stung his ears and left his head throbbing.
Tahki looked up.
A river rushed toward him, uncontrolled, through the hallway. Water thrashed over the banister and rolled down the staircase.
Panic seized him. “What?” he breathed aloud. “What?” This was a dream. It had to be. It felt too horrible to be life. He tried to wake up, but he couldn’t.
Tahki stumbled backward and made a break for the bottom floor, every muscle rigid with fear. He splashed through the knee-high water in the entryway. He could hear the river crashing toward him as it devoured pillars and forced open doors on all sides, flooding rooms. Before he reached the front doors, the water surged left, forcing him to the right. He opened the first door he came to and discovered another stairway leading down to a lower level of the castle. Dyraien hadn’t shown him this place, but it looked to be his only escape.
He pushed through and slammed the door behind him. His feet caught on the stairway and he tripped, tumbling a moment before his body smacked into a dirt floor.
Tahki panted into the ground and didn’t move for a moment. The chaos left his body trembling, and the fall had twisted his right arm. He sat up. His pulse beat hard. Breath caught in his throat, and he huddled against the stairway and listened.
No sound came from the floor above.
His stomach convulsed, and he dry hacked. Clear dribble fell from his chin. He wiped it away and rose to his feet. Though his legs should have been soaked, they felt dry. His white cotton shirt was also dry. There was no sign of water anywhere, except sweat under his arms. He couldn’t even begin to make sense of his current state. Instead, he turned his attention to the room.
It smelled musty. Light trickled in from around the corner. He stepped back, trying to get a sense of the area, when his back hit something hard.
Two black gates towered over him. They stood at least fifteen feet tall, which meant the castle was much larger than he originally thought. He must be in the basement, and those doors probably led outside. Something about the gates felt wrong, out of place. He remembered Sornjia had once seen a dead sandbull in the road, and he’d said, “It was like trying to look at something with needles in your eyes.” Looking at the gate didn’t just feel uncomfortable. It felt painful. The back of his eyes throbbed, and warmth trickle down his lip. He wiped his nose. Blood.
Tahki rubbed his face with his shirt and took a deep breath.
He didn’t know what this place was or why Dyraien had neglected to show him. What concerned him more were his dry clothing and the blood. The only explanation he could think of was that he’d dream walked, and the fall had woken him. He didn’t have a history of nightwalking, and the idea his body and mind had separated for a moment frightened him.
Tahki grabbed his head. Maybe he’d eaten something toxic, or the anxiety of seeing Sornjia had pushed him over the edge. He felt lucid now. If he walked back upstairs, he was sure the water would be gone.
Still, he hesitated and took a shaky breath. He focused on the gate. Something in the back of his mind whispered pull, pull, pull. Looking at the gates was like looking at a lever someone told you not to touch, so you naturally wanted to touch it.
Tahki reached out a hand and rested it on one of the circular iron handles. There were two, each as thick as his arm and big as his torso. He pulled, but it was locked. It was odd to lock yourself inside the castle, unless the gate didn’t lead outside. He couldn’t remember seeing the gates from the exterior and let the handle fall with a loud clunk.
After one last look, he made his way back up the stairs. He found his mother’s pencil
