Only three stories tall, the monument wasn’t very impressive, and it was clear no one gave much thought to its maintenance. The once-white stones were stained black by exhaust from the cars whose drivers ignored it as they passed by every day. Birds had perched on its sloped roof and left dried streaks of yellowish white down its walls whenever they relieved themselves.
“There’s only one guard,” Clem whispered.
“I’ll take care of him,” Eric said. “I don’t even think he’s a sacred artist.”
Abi put a hand on our friend’s chest and shook his head. “You’re not going to fight him. He’s just doing his job.”
“I’ve got this,” Clem said. She left her hiding place and hustled across the road with a spring in her step. She waved as she approached the guard, then twirled a strand of hair around her finger and tilted her head with a little shrug. I couldn’t hear what she said and couldn’t imagine the guard would understand whatever it was. Regardless of the language barrier, the two of them exchanged smiles and pantomimed pleasantries. A few moments later, the guard nodded, offered Clem his arm, and led her down the street toward what looked like the center of town.
“Let’s go,” I said to my friends. “Maybe we can get in and out before the guard figures out what Clem’s up to.”
We crossed the street, waltzed through the fence’s open gate, and entered the small tower through an unlocked door. The building turned out to be a hollow shell around a display stand ringed by a velvet rope. The stand looked older than the building, its wood warped and cracked by the relentless march of time. Fortunately, it only supported a single, bone-white item that was scarcely as large as my fist. That had to be Wallovik’s carving, but it only radiated a faint aura of power that wasn’t nearly strong enough to be the Heart of Eternity. There was something else here.
We just had to find it.
“See anything, Abi?” I asked. He’d spotted the design at the cave and the writing on the map. If there was anything unusual here, Abi would be the one to find it.
He turned in a slow circle, scanning the rugged stones that surrounded us. He tilted his head back to take in the two empty floors above, then shook his head and shrugged. “There’s power here, I can feel it, but I don’t see anything.”
“Me, either,” Eric said with a frown. “How about you?”
My vision shifted as I cycled my breathing. There was plenty of jinsei around us, free and unfettered by any scrivenings. That much power was impressive. We had to be on the right track. The question was, what were we missing? I searched for any hidden scrivenings, or even threads of fate, and found nothing. If there was anything tucked away in this old tower, Wallovik had done an expert job hiding it.
I leaned back against the wall and took a deep, cleansing breath to purge the pain aspects that had taken root near the site of my injury. The nagging pain clouded my thoughts and made it difficult to concentrate. There was far too much power in this old place. There was something here, just waiting for us to find it.
“Keep looking,” I said. “Abi, check the stand. Eric, go over every inch of these walls. I’ve got to think about this for a second.”
My friends went to work as I picked and prodded the information we’d gathered so far today. The marks Clem had made a rubbing of were important, but I didn’t know why. The only other things we’d found in Saito’s coffin were the two crystalline shards. I plucked one of them from my robes’ inside pocket and examined the emerald green crescent more closely.
The shard wasn’t a single color, as I’d first thought. Its left edge was jagged, with sharp silver teeth emerging from the emerald body and jagged red spikes on its right side. That made sense, I supposed. The Heart of Eternity had broken into shards mostly along elemental lines. Green was probably for earth, crimson for fire, and silver for jinsei. The other shard I’d found was blue, and it took only a moment to confirm that it also had silver and red bits jutting out of the blue center, though reversed from the emerald: red on the left and silver on the right. I held the pieces side by side, their tips touching. It was obvious where two other pieces would fit to form an orb.
If we could find them.
If we could put them back together.
I held the opaque emerald shard up to the light that slanted in through the tower’s tall, narrow windows for a better look. To my surprise, the opaque emerald surface became nearly transparent where the sunlight passed through it. I peered through the glassy slice of the Heart and took in a sharp breath at what I saw.
There were five spots of gleaming jinsei arranged equidistant around the tower’s interior wall. All of them were at the exact same height as the object on the display stand, and all of them had a small design glowing just above them.
“Find anything good?” Clem’s voice in my ear caught me by surprise, and I nearly jumped out of my skin.
“Yes and ow,” I groaned, pressing my hand firmly against the wound in my side in a vain attempt to contain the new waves of pain I’d unleashed with my sudden motion. “How did you get in here?”
“Ancient Thunder’s Children secret,” Clem said, wiggling her eyebrows. “You’re not the only one who learns new techniques every once in a while. Good to know it let me sneak up on
