And, yet, it wasn’t.
Even Abi seemed to have lost his positive nature. He kicked at the snow and pounded his mittened fists together. I couldn’t tell if he was angry or sad, and didn’t want to disturb him to find out.
Instead, I stared up at the impassive mountain. It didn’t make any sense. Someone had built the trail that led here. There had to be some point to it all, unless...
“It’s all just myths.” Eric punctuated his shout with an explosive ball of flame that rocketed into the sky from his upraised fist. “Lies and stories for children. There’s nothing here.”
That wasn’t possible. There had to be. I racked my brain for any tidbit of information I might have missed from Tanoki’s document. And then it hit me.
I pulled my mitten off with my teeth and unzipped my parka. My fingers shot inside my robes and pulled out the small pouch I’d worn around my neck since we’d returned from Romania. I shook its contents out into my freezing hand and raised the shards into the air.
“The Heart of Eternity has returned,” I shouted into the wind and strode toward the mountain’s blank face. “Open the door, Meriwa, I have it.”
For a long moment, nothing happened.
Then a crack ran through the frost that covered the stone. Another followed it, and another. Sheets of ice crashed away from the mountain and splintered into glittering shards in the snow. The avalanche’s din went on and on, until the mountain itself began to shatter and boulders the size of school buses plunged from the heights.
My friends and I stood and watched as history rolled back to reveal something from another time.
An enormous arch appeared before us. A massive overhang that jutted from the ravine’s wall shielded the opening from the sky. Statues flanked the doorway, their naked forms impervious to the deadly temperatures. Wolf’s head masks covered their faces, and they held spears with tips that glowed in the darkness. The man on the right was marred by jagged scars, while the woman across from him was flawless and unmarked. These structures had to be millennia old, but the passage of years hadn’t dared to touch them. Their lines were as stark and clean as the day they’d been hewn from the stony earth.
Runic symbols, most of which I didn’t recognize, framed the archway. The one at the very top, though, was etched into my memory. It was the final rune from Clem’s rubbing. The triangle within a circle. Meriwa’s sigil.
We’d made it.
“Do you feel that?” Abi asked as we neared the arch. “The power here is beyond anything I’ve ever felt.”
I’d been too focused on saving myself from the cold to notice before Abi mentioned it. When I let myself feel something other than the biting cold, though, the pulses of power that washed out of the archway were impossible to miss. The hairs on the back of my neck and down my arms stood at attention, even under layers of winter gear. Whatever lay inside this place had been worth the search.
“Everybody be careful in here,” I said. “I don’t know what we’re up against, so let’s get in and out as fast as we can.”
I couldn’t escape the sense that I was being watched. It was the same unpleasant fingers on the back of my neck feeling I’d had back at the volcano.
We hurried across the plateau with Eric blazing a trail for us with his fiery hands. The snow melted away to reveal wet black basalt. The ground trembled beneath my feet, a faint and persistent rumble like the rhythm of a vast engine. Spots of bright light appeared inside the archway. They grew in intensity as we approached, lighting our way.
The hallway beyond that enormous entrance was fifty feet wide, the ceiling twice that distance above our heads. Metal plates covered the floor in a precise, pristine grid. I’d expected a carved stone tunnel or even a natural cavern. Instead, we walked down a hallway that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a modern high-rise if it weren’t for its vast scale. More lights clicked to life as we traversed the hall, revealing more of the tomb’s long hallway.
“It is hard to imagine something like this being lost to time,” Abi said.
“Kinda makes you wonder what else is out there,” Clem mused.
That was another thought that had kept me awake many nights. I’d always thought the dragons were a myth, and then they’d showed up on my doorstep. No one had believed the Eclipse Warriors would ever return, and yet, we did. Not even the seers could predict that the Empyrean Flame would abandon humanity and ask us to start over with a new Grand Design. Mysteries upon mysteries, all of them bubbling to the surface when we least expected them.
“There it is,” Eric said, his voice solemn. “It’s beautiful.”
The hallway came to an end at a round room of black stone. The chamber was more than a hundred feet across, its walls smooth and polished to a mirror’s shine. They rose high into the air, burrowing through the mountain above us, their tops lost in a blazing halo of purest white. The only furnishing in the room was a massive silver throne, its back forty feet tall, its arms set half that distance apart.
The chair’s occupant was of the same grand scale. A skeleton leaned forward in its seat, elbows on its knees, bony fingers clasped in front of it. A black steel crown rested on its yellowed skull, and a thick golden chain dangled from around exposed neck bones. A surprisingly dainty ring dangled from the lowest point of that chain, supporting a jagged black sphere the size of my fist. The orb was split into quadrants by blazing lines of jinsei.
It had to be the power of the four kings.
I wanted to rush forward and snatch that treasure from around the bony collar. But another instinct held me back. That treasure
