Chapter 12 | Part 6

Xandor led her to a back room.

It was smaller than the common area, lit by candles rather than the hearth’s fire. Four people sat around a table, their conversation cutting off as Maris entered. She felt their eyes on her—assessing, wary, curious.

“This is the seer,” Xandor said simply. “She saw someone drowning in the nightmare sea.”

The silence that followed was heavy with significance.

A dwarf at the table—older, weathered, with the bearing of someone who’d seen too much—leaned forward. “When?”

“Today. The vision came while I was walking here.” Maris stood awkwardly in the doorway. “It felt like a broadcast. Like someone was sending a signal I couldn’t ignore.”

“Dulint,” the dwarf said, extending his hand. “And the broadcast—that’s what we’ve been dealing with.” He gestured to something on the table, and Maris’s breath caught.

A cube. Metal, covered in symbols that seemed to shift when she didn’t look directly at them. It sat in the center of the table like a weight, and even from across the room, she could feel it pressing against her mind.

Screaming.

The word came unbidden. That was what it felt like—a constant, silent scream, pitched at a frequency only she could hear. The pull in her chest had become almost unbearable, a hook dragging her toward the artifact with desperate insistence.

“You feel it,” said a younger dwarf beside Dulint—same features, probably family. “The Beacon.”

“I feel something.” Maris forced herself to breathe. “It’s… loud.”

“For most of us, it points,” Dulint said. “Shows direction. For you?”

“It screams.” She couldn’t look away from the cube. “It’s been screaming since I got close to Riverhold. I thought it was the vision. But it’s this. It’s been this the whole time.”

A human man at the table—scarred, military bearing, watching her with sharp eyes—spoke. “Different perceptions. Interesting.” He didn’t introduce himself.

“This is Eldric,” Xandor supplied. “Former legion. Currently suspicious of everything.”

“Currently justified,” Eldric said. “We don’t know her.”

“The Beacon does.” The last person at the table was younger, a dwarf barely out of adolescence, watching Maris with the mix of eagerness and caution that suggested recent trauma. “It reacted when she walked in. Did you see?”

Maris hadn’t seen. She’d been too overwhelmed by the screaming in her mind.

“The Beacon reacts to seers,” Xandor explained, settling into a chair. “To prophecy-touched people. To anyone with a connection to the systems it’s part of. You walked in, and it—” He paused, searching for the right word. “—acknowledged you.”

Acknowledged. As if the screaming artifact had noticed her presence and approved.

“The vision I had,” Maris said slowly, forcing her thoughts into order. “The drowning. Is it connected to this?”

“We don’t know.” Dulint’s voice was careful. “The Beacon points east. It’s been pointing east since it activated. And now you show up, having seen someone crossing the nightmare sea—which lies east, between here and Wyrmreach.”

“Wyrmreach.” Maris tested the word. “I don’t know what that is.”

“Another land. Another realm. Separated from ours by a barrier that shouldn’t be crossable.” Dulint’s eyes were heavy. “Except someone crossed it. And you saw.”

The stable image flickered through her mind. Boat. Water. Hand slipping under. Grey-dark skin. Long fingers.

“They survived,” she said. “I think. The vision keeps coming, which means the signal hasn’t stopped. Xandor said that usually means the subject is still alive.”

“Alive on the other side.” Eldric’s voice was grim. “In Wyrmreach. Which is not a kind place for survivors.”

“The Beacon points toward them,” the young dwarf said. “It’s pointing toward whoever crossed. That’s what we think, anyway.”

“Balin,” Dulint said, his tone carrying warning.

“She’s here. She saw what she saw. She deserves to know what we know.”

Maris looked around the room. Five people, one artifact, and a vision of drowning that wouldn’t leave her alone. She’d walked into something larger than herself, a pattern she hadn’t chosen, a purpose she didn’t want.

But there was no walking away. She’d known that since the beggar spoke to her in someone else’s voice, since the stable image burned itself into her mind, since she’d felt the pull toward Riverhold and been unable to resist.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“Follow the Beacon,” Dulint said. “Find whatever it’s pointing toward. Understand what’s happening before it gets worse.”

“And me?”

The room was quiet. Xandor spoke.

“You’ve seen things we haven’t. The Beacon reacts to your presence differently than to ours. And something—the Sage, perhaps, or the Beacon itself—sent a conduit to bring you here.” He paused. “I don’t believe in coincidence. Not anymore.”

Maris thought of the hand slipping under the black water. Grey-dark fingers grasping at nothing. A stranger drowning while she watched, helpless to intervene.

“I’m not a hero,” she said. “I’m just a woman who sees things and collapses.”

“None of us are heroes,” Eldric said, and for the first time, his voice held something other than suspicion. “We got caught in something. That’s all.”

The Beacon pulsed on the table. Silent to most of them. Screaming to her.

The artifact pointed east. The vision showed black water. And somewhere, someone was drowning.

“I don’t know them,” Maris said quietly. “The person in my vision. I’ve never seen them before.”

“No,” Dulint agreed. “But you’re going to find them.”

She looked at the Beacon. At the people around the table. At the pattern she’d been pulled into despite every instinct telling her to run.

I’m going to find them.

The thought felt like acceptance, or surrender. The first step down a path she couldn’t see the end of.

The stable image played one more time. Boat. Water. Hand.

Hold on, she thought at the stranger drowning in black water. Whoever you are. Hold on.

End of Chapter 12.6 —> 13.1: The One Who Walks Free: The Cage