Chapter 142: Anthony Mitchell’s POV — 2

The mist vanished.

It didn’t thin out or drift away. One second it was pressing against my face, and the next it was gone, as if it had never been there.

The air went clear. The light went sharp.

I stood still and looked at the empty space where it had been.

’Mist doesn’t do that.’

Then I looked up, and forgot about the mist.

Another mountain stood some distance from ours, dark against the sky. On its slope, there was a palace.

It looked small from here, no bigger than a toy, but I had been trained to judge distance, and the math didn’t lie.

Whatever that building was, it was enormous.

Something pulled at my chest.

It wasn’t fear. I knew fear well, and this was different.

It was a quiet, steady tug, like a hand on my sleeve. As if my road had been laid out long before I was born, and every step I had taken so far had been leading to that palace. As if I had finally found the place I was supposed to be.

I shook my head hard.

’No. That’s the Realm. That’s exactly what it does.’

Warm arms slid around my waist from behind.

"Anthony," Petra said against my shoulder. "What are you thinking?"

I could have told her about the pull. I thought about it for exactly one breath. "Nothing."

She didn’t push the talk. She never did.

Petra was the only person I had ever loved.

I don’t say that lightly.

I grew up in a house where nobody kept anything for long. My father was gone before I was born.

My mother left when I was three, my grandfather when I was six, and by the time I was seven I had learned not to hold on to things, because things got taken.

I walked through every year after that with my hands in my pockets.

Then Petra, four years older than me, who joined the G-Agents and started leaving food outside my door when I skipped meals. She never made a speech about it. She noticed, and she did something. That was all it took. I had spent thirteen years building a wall, and she walked straight through it without once asking me to open the door.

So when she held me on that cliff, I let her. Even here. Especially here.

I turned and looked past her.

Down below, a lake lay between our mountain and the other one. Its water was black.

Not dark, not deep-blue, but black, the kind that swallowed the sky instead of reflecting it.

Nothing moved on the surface. No waves, no fish, no birds over it.

Just a wide, silent gap.

On our side, a set of stairs led down to the shore. They weren’t stone. Someone, or something, had built them from wooden slabs, laid one over the other, all the way down to the water.

’Someone built these.’

In the Realm, anything made by hand meant a hand had been here.

"Let’s go tell them about this."

I kissed her.

It was short, and she smiled against my mouth, and for a second the Realm of Evil felt like any other place. Then we turned and walked back along the cliff to where Khan and Eva were waiting.

We told them everything. The mountain, the palace, the stairs. Khan listened without interrupting, arms folded, his eyes on the ground like he was weighing each piece. Eva asked a question or two with her eyes alone. I answered what I could.

When we finished, Khan was silent for a while.

Then he said, "Then, we should go there. If there is a castle, there might be humans living there. Or there could even be a portal there. We can be safe."

It was the only plan on the table. It was also a plan that began with walking toward the exact thing I had felt pulling at me. I looked at the others. Nobody else looked uneasy.

I nodded with them.

Then we went down the stairs.

The wood groaned under our boots. Each slab felt solid enough, but it had the sound of something that had been waiting a long time for weight.

The water got closer and the black got blacker, and halfway down I stopped looking at it.

At the bottom, there was a narrow shore of grey gravel, and a gap of black water so wide that I couldn’t see any bottom on the other side.

Khan stepped forward and held out a hand.

His summon came out of the air. It was a bull, or something shaped like one, as large as a house, with a hide the color of wet slate and horns that curved forward like twin scythes. It exhaled, and the gravel shifted at my feet.

Khan pointed at the stairs.

The bull charged.

It hit the lowest slabs without slowing. Wood exploded outward. Boards cracked and spun through the air, and the whole staircase shuddered, then gave up and came down in pieces on the shore. The noise rolled out over the water and died, as if the lake had swallowed it.

I stared at the wreckage.

"Planks," Khan said. That was all.

It took me a second to understand. We needed boats. And we had just been handed the lumber.

We worked in silence. Eva had the best hands for it, and she bent the slabs and bound them with cord from her pack.

Khan and I hammered and held. Petra kept watch with her back to us, her eyes on the black water and her sword half-drawn. When we finished, there were two small boats on the gravel, plain and slightly crooked, but sound.

Some slabs were left over. A pile of them lay at the foot of the broken stairs.

I looked at them for longer than I needed to.

’Maybe it can help somebody in the future.’

It was a foolish thought. Nobody was coming. We were four people at the edge of a black lake in a place where the big fish eats the small fish, and I was worrying about strangers.

But I left the wood where it lay, stacked and dry. Just in case.

Then I took Petra’s hand, and we pushed the boats into the water.