The streams filled the cavern. It was hard to find pockets of air to breathe. Kooris became light-headed as he struggled. The cave was gone. There was only water. There was no up, no down. Kooris floated in an endless sea. The pressure built. His skeleton wanted to collapse, his eyes hurt from pressing into his head. His lungs burned.
Something popped. A moment of razor-sharp clarity, then limitless sensations hit him in a wave. A sword in his belly. The taste of salted plums. The smell of old wood. The shrill sound of a whistle. Acid. Lilacs. Sand. Music. Pleasure, pain, and a sensation that made both words meaningless.
Kooris found himself standing before the woman's convulsing body, which leaned against the unwavering support of War's statue as if nothing had happened. It was over. Kooris knelt and took deep, gasping breaths. Anything else was beyond him. Where had the water gone? Where did it come from? What had he experienced? In all of his years as the vault's guardian, he never suspected the immensity and might of Chaos. The archives fell far short of describing it. Chaos was overwhelming. Terrifying.
One thing was certain: those “dice” were much more powerful than he believed. He crawled forward to find where the cubes landed and discovered them lying at her feet.
As Kooris reached for them, the cave became much colder. The rain covering the woman and the statue of War began to form a column of ice, freezing from the bottom up. The ice claimed the dice lying on the ground. Kooris tried to grab them, but he almost froze his hand inside. The high priest clutched his palm and stepped back as the column reached the chimney, entirely encasing both the woman's body and the statue inside the frozen rainwater.
At that moment, the storm broke. The rain stopped.
Kooris picked up a leg bone and pounded on the column. The ice did not even chip. He screamed in frustration at the wooden cubes lying in the ice inches beyond his reach.
As Kooris stared at the dice, Lorre did the same, peering out from the mirror hanging around Kooris' neck. The moment before the high priest replaced the mirror beneath his robe, before darkness claimed everything, Lorre saw what she rolled.
An icicle. An hourglass. And a boy.
“There be pirates, without a doubt.” Nobbin’s guttural words floated from the mist. “I hear their shanties ringing out. Protect yourself as best you can, for they're all fighters, to a man.”
GALEN FROWNED AS his finger traced the words on the well-worn page of his mother’s journal. The advice came from a character called Nobbin. His mother described Nobbin as a bizarre but helpful spirit guide of some sort, yet Galen didn’t trust him. Maybe it was because Nobbin insisted on rhyming as if he were ridiculing whatever dire situation Galen found himself in.
And there were many such situations. Before his mother disappeared six years ago, they both filled this journal with stories featuring Galen as the main character. Reading them made him feel special—a hero instead of just a fisherman’s boy. This pirate tale had been one of Mama’s favorites. He ignored Nobbin’s silly poetry and read on.
Nobbin’s message would have been more helpful were it delivered earlier. Before Galen could prepare, three huge pirate frigates burst from the fog. High as buildings, sporting brightly colored sails and menacing figureheads, the ships surrounded the tiny skiff. Their pirate crews lined the railings. They growled and taunted him—but despite the clamor, a woman's scream cut through.
“Are you still awake?” Galen’s twin sister Myra sat up in her small bed on the other side of their shared room, blinked her large green eyes at the light from Galen’s burning candle, and yawned. “Are you reading Mama’s journal again? Tonight? You need to sleep. We both do. Don’t you remember what tomorrow is?”
“I know. I know. How could I not know? The testing is all you’ve talked about for weeks.”
“And because we’re testing, Da’s taking you fishing early. You won’t get any rest at all if you stay up reading.” Myra pulled her blanket up over her collection of dark blond curls. From under the covers, she added, “Put out that candle and go to sleep.”
“I will.”
The candle’s flame flickered. Galen knew he should extinguish the light and go to sleep, but the dark unsettled him. Other children might be afraid of what hid in the dark, but Galen was afraid of what wasn’t there. The dark was nothingness. The absence of possibilities. The end of stories.
Maybe he’d read just a little longer.
“Stinking pirates! You think you’re safe up there?” Galen called up to the brigands leaning over the deck railing. “I won’t stop until I rescue that helpless prisoner from your clutches!”
Galen threatened them with his gleaming sword, but the pirates just sneered and laughed. Inside, he was the one laughing. This was his story, and he always won.
He swiveled his head and scanned the ships for any weakness. In the process, he noticed their pirate flags. Each presented a simple, solitary symbol. The first was an icicle. The second, an hourglass. The final was a boy.
He’d seen those symbols before. They always meant something. Galen knew he had to get up there somehow.
One of the boats was close enough to touch. When Galen ran his hand over the rough timber, feeling for a handhold, he spotted three knotholes arranged like a crude face.
The ovular mouth of the knot-face moved and a voice emerged, Fight you may, but deep down you know. It’s time to leave. You have to go.
He snapped his hand back. Those words sent a chill down Galen’s spine like an icy shock. “Is that you, Nobbin?” shouted Galen. “Leave me alone. This is my story!”
The sky darkened. Up above, the pirate flags were somehow sucking the very light from the air, becoming three black smudges. The pirates withdrew from the railings.
“There’s nothing to be scared of,” breathed Galen. “It’s just bad weather, and those are just pirate flags.”
The dark flags exploded into countless black scraps that swarmed together, circling in the center of the three ships' masts like a flock of single-minded birds.
Galen panicked. Pirates he could deal with, but the terrible swarm that had invaded his story was something different.
Like a brackish waterfall, the scraps dove down toward the skiff. Galen screamed and sliced the air with his sword. The thought of even one of those things touching him was frightening beyond all reason.
Conner grabbed Galen's fishing pole with one meaty hand. “Galen, calm down. Is screaming and waving your pole around some new strategy to catch fish? Because I'd be hard-pressed to think of a worse one.”
Shaking, Galen stared at his father with wide eyes as he tried to catch his breath. Below a blue sky dotted with puffy white clouds, their modest boat was surrounded by the familiar community of fishermen, each trying to out-catch the other.
“Sit down before you tip the boat.” His father removed his cap, wiped his leathery brow with it, and replaced it on his sandy brown mass of sweaty hair with a practiced motion. That cap had long ago been beaten into a shape that only vaguely remembered what hats should look like, but Conner would not part with it. It had been a gift from his wife.