Dark Lord's Wedding Read Free

the first instant, yet I wanted to believe. My true diamond is near.”
    “Is it below?” The lord’s voice was dry like dead grass in the wind.
    “The Bright Palms must’ve dropped the genuine jewel into the sinkhole, keeping the false one in hand to taunt me. Painfully sensible of them.”
    “What can we depend on these days if not stupidity?”
    “Very little,” the lady said. “Except possibly each other.”
    “Shall we descend together?”
    “We always seem to.”
    Jerani blinked and tilted his head to the side for a look. The lord and lady were holding hands in front of the black nothingness.
    She turned to him, and in the light from her gemstones, her face lit violet. Her cheek bones were sharp angles, her chin a point. She had nothing soft about her. There couldn’t have been, or she would’ve shriveled away from the lord. She would never have matched his gaze. The corner of her eye couldn’t have wrinkled with fondness.
    Jerani had seen her face before, somewhere. But he couldn’t have met her on his travels. He never would’ve forgotten the Lady of Gems. What could her real name be?
    The lady and lord stepped off together into the chasm.

    Hiresha flew down. Night air washed over her, a nip on her bare feet, a thrill up her legs, a cool flow along her back, and crisp pressure against her face. Tingling waves ran along her arm with which she held Tethiel.
    His hand bit into hers. Her power grasped him tighter.
    The limestone walls rotated around them as they fell deeper. The world moved. They were still. Time resonated, fluttering forward and back along her spine.
    She had the sense she had been here before. Or she would again soon. In her other dream, in her other facet of reality, she had saved a young man who had fallen into the sinkhole. This time, he was safe above. She would rescue her red diamond. Or she would find it broken. Gems were more fragile than people.
    Their depth increased, and the air warmed. It thickened with a sulfur stench.
    “If this cave is a deity,” Tethiel said, “we must be entering the wrong end.”
    “If we descend into a god,” she said, “it would pay to be politic.”
    Hiresha sent her blue paragon ahead. The pyramid-shaped diamond dropped to illuminate an underground lake. Bodies bobbed. The waters churned with the hunger of cave scavengers. Eyeless fish dashed in to bite, and knobby legs of half-seen things skittered about with clicking pinchers.
    In three-eighths of second, Hiresha predicted, she and Tethiel would plunge into black water and nibbling teeth. Yet a lucid dreamer need only fall as far as she wished
    Hiresha dreamed a dream of power and magic. Awake or asleep, reality or whimsy, she didn’t waste time deliberating, not when she could fly.
    Her dream inversion had given her mastery over gravity, of the forces pulling objects together and apart. She had only to think it to Lighten herself and Tethiel. Their descent slowed until they were swimming in the air.
    “How reassuring,” he said, looking down, “that the dark and deep places of the world are full of terrors.”
    “I’ll be reassured when my red paragon is found unbroken.” She tightened her amethyst grip around his fingers. “Hold your breath.”
    She allowed gravity to tow them into the watery blackness. It slurped around them, warm and thick with filth, almost gelatinous. She waved away the skitterers. She Repulsed the grime. Her blue paragon illuminated the way while towing Tethiel and herself deeper with the force of Attraction.
    A figure glowed to their left, a woman. One of the Bright Palms had survived the backbreaking fall, as Hiresha had hoped. Her mercy was taxed when the luminous woman floundered toward them with a knife. The survivor would have to take them unawares to have any chance of success, and Bright Palms were about as stealthy as fireworks.
    Hiresha raced out of reach, past sludge, beyond the clutter of bones, between stalagmites, down to the god’s treasure.