Page 8 of Splintered Shadow
They moved silently through the grass as they approached the temple complex. No trace remained of the betrayal that took his parents. He knew this, but a childish fear had lingered, that the grass would still be red with their blood.
Focus. Baris gave you a mission. Prove that you are still useful to your king.
The temple appeared much the same, despite the vegetation. There had been snow on the ground at the time of his ceremony.
He couldn’t imagine a spy infiltrating a karu sanctuary, sacred or not, but a saboteur…yes. That would put an end to the treaty negotiations. They needed to intercept the individual before any damage could be done.
A female’s scream pierced the silence.
Sarah
Today was the worst.
The fall knocked the breath out of her. She lay gasping, willing herself to breathe evenly instead of gulping erratically. The world eventually stopped spinning, and she sat upright.
Sarah carefully touched her head, dismayed to feel wetness. Amazingly, she still had the octopus sock clutched in one hand. She pressed the sock to her head to stop the bleeding. Touching the wound hurt, but, honestly, her wrist hurt worse. It took her weight when she landed and had to be sprained.
Wherever she was, it was dark and stifling. Sweat crawled down her skin, making her itch. Still, this was marginally better than baking under an alien sun.
And it was an alien sun. Sarah knew this in her gut. Call it dream logic, where you just know. The sun, the sky, even the vines… they had been familiar, but just off enough to remind her she wasn’t on Earth. Not plunging to her certain demise was also a big clue. She landed hard, but not as hard as she would have had she fallen through a roof onto a stone floor.
At least on Earth.
The fall knocked the breath out of her, but she should have broken bones, something more than a wrist that smarted and a scrape on her head.
That portal transported her to another world.
Sunlight filtered through the hole in the ceiling. The vines swayed, moved by an air current. Shafts of sunlight pierced the darkness at regular intervals, making Sarah believe that a giant hole in the roof was a design choice and not structural failure.
Pillars formed a ring around her. The vines cast shadows. As the vines moved with the breeze, the shadows shifted. In the distance, she heard splashing water.
Groaning, she hauled herself to her feet. Everything ached, and there would be a hell of a bruise on her butt tomorrow, but hey, her useless phone was still snug in her bra. So success?
Sarah pulled out the phone, dismayed to see the cracked screen and the power at less than twenty-five percent. In a fit of optimism that maybe her phone would do that portal thing again and she could go home, she put it to sleep to conserve juice.
The phone went back into the bra. What now? She needed to think, and if her head would stop spinning, that’d be fantastic.
She limped toward the nearest pillar. It was covered in symbols carved into the stone. Was this a written language or purely decorative? The symbols repeated down the pillar. She ran a finger over the rough surface, tracing the designs and leaving behind a smear of her blood. It was humanoid—two arms, two legs, and a torso.
Shadows shifted as the leaves moved, scattering the light. Caught on a raised ridge, a shadow cast over the symbol, giving the figure widespread wings, like an angel.
Or a demon.
Sarah stepped back. The light shifted again, and the figure transformed, wingless. She stepped to the right, and the wings returned.
Huh.
On inspection, the light and shadows cast the same illusion on all the pillars. Each figure was different, as if they told a story.
She slowly spun in place, watching the images play out on ancient stone pillars. The effect was overwhelming, making her chest ache from the effort of breathing, or perhaps that was the heat.
Desperately thirsty, she followed the sound of water. A thick layer of fallen leaves and dirt covered the floor. The shafts of sunlight provided just enough light for her to pick her way through the debris. After a few minutes, she found a fountain embedded in a wall.
A spout trickled out of a stone wall, splashing down into a small bowl. The overflowing water spilled into a larger pool at the bottom. Colored pieces of white, blue, and green tiles formed a geometric design. It was… pretty.
Sarah did not expect a fountain on an alien planet to be pretty or, honestly, as basic as it was. She expected something out of a movie with glowing blue lights and hovering. Everything hovered in space. Now that she was standing in front of a source of water on an alien planet, disappointed that it seemed like any other fountain you could buy at a garden center, Sarah realized the heat was playing tricks on her.
Water. Now.
