Page 103 of King Foretold
With a keening cry of determination, the dragon charges into battle.Gods.I’m so proud of that kid.
“What is it?” I spin toward Minju when she tugs on my arm. “Do you think Draco will be okay on their own? Should I help you rescue more of the captives?”
“Where is Daeseong, Sunny?” Minju asks urgently.
“I ... I don’t know.” I’d been purposely not thinking about that.
“That beam of white light ...” She looks across the field as though remembering it. “I could even see it from underground. Was that you?”
“I don’t know.” Maybe it started out as me, but in the end, it was the Yeoiju. A shiver of fear runs down my back. If I can’t learn to control it, the Yeoiju will destroy me. It will destroy both of us.
“Daeseong must have run from the light. You have to go after him.” Minju grips my shoulders and shakes me lightly. “Do you know where he could have gone to hide?”
“The caldera.” I recall with a start. “He’s at the caldera.”
If I can stop the dark mudang once and for all, it doesn’t matter if the Yeoiju destroys me. I remember the aching love in Ethan’s eyes. And the warmth of my friends’ loyalty and affection glows in my chest. The Amheuk willnottouch them.
I cast a worried glance at Draco. While evading the Jaenanpa’s dark spells in a graceful, sinuous dance, the dragon is taking them down with fire and might, leaving them injured but alive. But there are at least a hundred corrupt mudangs coming after them, and my stomach clenches with fear. Maybe I should’ve told them to just kill the bastards in one blast.
“Don’t worry. I will help them,” Minju says. “You must go, Sunny.”
I know she’s right, but that doesn’t make it any easier to walk away from them while they’re in danger. But I take one heavy step, then another, until I’m flat out running for the Red Beach. I need to moon shift to the caldera.
When I reach the beach, I stride into the moonlit ocean without pause. Then I step out onto the rim of an infinity pool and teeter on its edge, with my arms flailing. A quick glance around tells me that I’m at a luxury cave hotel, and I nearly tumbled down the stone steps overlooking the Santorini caldera.
After regaining my balance, I leap down to the walkway below the pool and head for the caldera. But when I get there, I don’t feel the dark mudang hiding in the depth of the waters—its serene life force remains undisturbed. Then where is he?
Wherever he is, I have no desire to make my fight with Daeseong a tourist attraction. I hike up the island, guided only by moonlight. Away from the populated villages, Santorini lies asleep in a deep, lightless night. As I climb higher, the landscape grows stark and rocky, beautiful in its own way.
When I reach an abandoned church on top of the hill, the blue of its domed roof long faded to a sandy brown, I stop to admire the caldera stretching wide and open before me. Going by instinct, I summon the white orb to my palm, careful not to let it grow much bigger than a Ping-Pong ball.
I walk to the edge of the cliff and scan the curve of the caldera with the light outstretched in my hand. No, I need to lookthroughit. I bring the orb to eye level and squint at it, searching for ... something. I’m not sure what I expect to happen, but I’ll know it when I see it.
I’m about to give up my experiment, feeling beyond ridiculous, when the orb suddenly becomes distorted as I move it past an outcropping near the bottom of the cliffs. I whip my hand back toward it, and the light of the Yeoiju undulates against the darkness. My stomach sinks. I found what I was looking for—I found Daeseong.
The light I summoned in front of Akrotiri wasn’t powerful enough to hurt the dark mudang. It just frightened him. That’s why he isn’t hiding in the caldera. No, he is merely lying in wait for me.
Not giving myself time to chicken out, I shift into my gumiho and take a flying leap off the edge of the caldera. I half run, half slide down the steep cliff, sending rocks raining into the ocean. When I reach the outcropping, my eyes widen, recognizing an abandoned monastery I read about in the PC bang.
Tunneled into the face of the cliff, the monastery sits midway between the sea and the clifftop, making access from either direction precarious. I have no choice but to make the climb up. Out of breath from exertion and nerves, I skid to a stop on a narrow pathway that leads to the entrance of the monastery and shift to my human form.With a squeak, I press my back against the cliff and cling on for dear life.
“You might as well come inside,” Daeseong drawls before I can catch my breath. “You came all this way after all.”
“What are you playing at, mudang?” I grit out.
“Akrotiri was getting a bit too crowded for my tastes. This peaceful monastery is a better place for us to chat, is it not?” He pauses. “Well? Are you coming in? Or do you want to stand on your tiptoes all night?”
I mutter a curse and step into the suffocating darkness of the man-made cave. I pitch an orb of light into the air. Daeseong is standing closer than I expected, and I take half a step back before I catch myself. On the plus side, I also catch him flinching ever so slightly.
“Don’t worry.” I smirk as my gaze skitters across the large hall, chiseled into a semblance of a room with four walls and a higher-than-expected ceiling. The two smaller pathways leading deeper into the monastery seem to have collapsed long ago. “It’s just a regular old light orb.”
“I’m not worried.” Daeseong sneers at me. “I know you can’t control the Yeoiju.”
I decide not to tell him I have the sword of light now.
“If you’re afraid of the little white light”—I step around him with my back to the rough wall—“then what are you going to do with the Yeoiju even if I give it to you?”
Never mind that I have no ideahowto go about giving anyone the Yeoiju. All I know is that it would kill me to do it.
