Page 183 of Golden Queen
The sea was wild with huge white cap waves marching toward a frozen strip of land that couldn't have been more than a mile wide in some places.
Io told me the place where the sea met the Gap was called Breaker's Bay. Any ship that attempted to land there was broken apart on the underwater portions of the unnamed mountains. The massive mountain range didn’t end at all. It continued running along the seafloor, creating those massive whitecaps.
The mountains returned quickly after the pass, no longer unnamed. The Iyridian Mountains rose gradually, spreading out into more long chains of jagged snow-capped peaks.
We followed the pass ever north until the land began to curve to the west.
“Wouldn’t it be quicker to fly straight north across the sea?” I asked.
“It would be, but dragons hate the sea. They will not willingly spend a great deal of time above it.”
“Does the water hurt them?” I asked, curious. The snow certainly never seemed to bother Veles.
“Not at all, and some dragons love swimming in fresh water. But they hate the ocean, and we don’t really know why—or whether it’s the salt or just the endless dark water. It’s the only place in the world where they are not at the top of the food chain, though, so perhaps they fear the water less than the fearsome creatures who live in its depths.”
The idea of a creature capable of scaring the enormous beast under us gave me chills. I thought of Vulcan’s kraken delaying the Black Fleet and realized I had no interest in sea travel of any kind.
Io’s arm around me tightened. He had his hand beneath the edge of my shirt, his fingers laid against the skin of my stomach. He curled them in response to my chill, and I laid my head back against him. It felt right to be with him, right to have hope finally that everything would come out right.
I must have dozed off because when I opened my eyes, I saw the sky had darkened to full night. There were more stars than I had ever seen before. They were thrown across the sky, dense and bright. They lit the world around us with muted silver.
There were dark patches on the ground where lush, growing plants were interspersed with the endless white snow. They grew more and more numerous as we passed.
The temperature would be much warmer on the ground, I knew. Like in the mineral spring, the heat was created by the many volcanoes under Darkwatch. The lava that lay just under the surface, running through the kingdom, made the otherwise frozen land verdant and fertile.
The dark patches became widespread as the first of the aurora filled the sky. Deep purple grasses spread out under a wide swath of blue green—a band of diffuse light that streaked upward from the tops of the mountains.
We passed a tall peak, and I gasped as the full Iyridian Valley unfolded before Veles' dark head.
The sight took my breath away. A wide valley of deep purple grass and shadowy forests was spread out below towering snow-capped mountain ranges on either side.
A narrow, meandering river split the land in half. The water reflected the sky perfectly, so that all the colors were represented in a beautiful echo on the valley floor.
The entire landscape looked like a painting where the colors had been perfectly chosen to convey the beauty of the concept of night. It all lay beneath the most amazing sky that had surely ever been created—beautiful in a way that I had not been capable of imagining.
The stars strewn across the sky of Darkwatch must have been the same ones I’d seen my entire life. There was the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone spinning the tapestry of fate. There was the brightest of them all, the Dog Star and the Archer's flaming arrow with its halo of red pointed at the side of the King’s Royal Stag. There was the Circle of Perses with its seven dancing sprites. And of course, my favorite, Ashek's mighty blade held point down over the head of the Demon Queen.
But there were so many more—stars I had never seen before. They were vivid, multitudinous, and bright. They were every color from white to red and pale, ghostly green.
They seemed at once so distant one could not fathom such separation, and yet so near it seemed like I should be able to reach up and pluck one from the sky.
And they were scattered across a field of deep blue that was the exact match to their lord's dark eyes.
But the true wonder of the Darkwatch sky were those radiant auroras.
They were spread over the Iyridian Valley in vivid color—from deep purple to pale pink, bold greens, yellows, bright blues, and every discernible shade in between.
They stretched across the sky in great arcs and whorls or streamed out in long, straight swaths that raced across the sky from horizon to horizon.
The colorful lights pulsed and swayed overhead like a living creature in a dance to some music of the cosmos.
They bathed the kingdom in a muted brilliance, so that the world was never cast in shadow as I would have expected it to be. It was, instead, washed in the radiant colors of midnight.
Io tightened his arm around me again and I could almost feel his excitement.
I turned to look back at him, and the smile he gave me as he took in my features threw an ache of pure longing through my chest.
The green and gold of the aurora was reflected in his eyes. His skin and hair seemed to be made from the same night-kissed canvas, the colors becoming him and defining him as though that dimmed version of him from the other kingdom had been a lie.
