The frustration was building up inside me, and I worried it would only get worse while we waited for Phoenix to give us some good news.
Meanwhile, back in our worlds, more fae were falling under the Hermessi’s influence. Five million didn’t seem that far away anymore, and that terrified me the most.
“What happened?” Lumi asked me. “Did you find him?”
I nodded. “But I lost him again.”
“Did he say anything?” she pressed.
I told her about my brief encounter and the scythe’s surprising ability to turn me invisible to a Reaper, complete with my theory on planes of existence and how an agent of Death could navigate them as such. As expected, it made them wonder the same thing—what else could the scythe do in the hands of a non-Reaper, and what was this mess that he’d referred to? Had souls been dumped here arbitrarily, plucked from their planets and left to the Reapers to clean up and shuffle into the world of the dead? If so, why? What was the point? Death’s behavior was increasingly puzzling, and it didn’t promise anything even remotely optimistic for our intention of speaking to her and asking for her help.
“It makes me wonder,” Raphael said after a long pause, “what else we’ll find on this planet. More Reapers? More lost souls?”
“Probably,” Amelia replied.
“Even so, we should keep moving,” Raphael suggested. “The Hermessi are still active here, and they might sense us, eventually. Besides, we might run into chattier Reapers along the way.”
“Perhaps chatty enough to tell us where we are, right?” Eira sighed.
I looked at her, marveling at the sense of relief she gave me. She’d loosened up more since our Hellym adventure. Maybe she’d found a new side to herself during those minutes in which she’d been deprived of her Water Hermessi powers. After all, she’d been as vulnerable as the rest of us. But I didn’t mind the change. I welcomed it.
“Raphael makes sense,” I said. “We should keep moving. At least until we find a Reaper willing to tell us where we are.”
Lumi grinned. “Bet you’re eager to put that scythe to the test again,” she replied.
Deep down, I had to admit—yes, I certainly wanted to see what else it could do, and if I could at least get it to make me vanish again, like a Reaper. It didn’t work straightaway, that much was obvious. I’d managed to will it into helping me earlier, but it didn’t function the same outside those specific conditions.
Even now, as I held it, I wanted it to turn me invisible, but it wouldn’t. Maybe I needed to confront another Reaper in order for it to react. No problem there. I looked forward to finding one.
Phoenix
Even with all of Amelia’s parameters, I still couldn’t find their location. I’d put in all the stars and their celestial positions from where she’d stood at the time. I’d removed the consideration of short distance, assuming that the pink waters weren’t limited to local “wormholes,” and that they could lead to worlds outside Eritopia altogether—that much had been obvious from the moment Amelia had described the night sky, to begin with.
To say that I was frustrated would’ve been a severe understatement. My fiancée was worried about her sisters, whose hearts had broken over Mount Agrith, and we now had at least one Hermessi on Calliope, Firr, gearing up against us. The influenced fae number continued to grow, and so did the natural elements’ power. It was only a matter of time before they reached the magic five million that would help them complete the ritual and destroy us all.
Meanwhile, Taeral and his crew were stuck in the middle of somewhere, with no way of getting back to us. They could try going back through the pink waters, but there was no guarantee that they would come out anywhere in Eritopia or any of the planets we all knew about. That had been the downside of these primordial ponds to begin with—few things were certain, and a traveler’s ability to control the destination point had not been one of those things. Without knowing where they were, we couldn’t even assume they’d had any say in where the pink waters had taken them.
On my end, there was nothing, and Varga and his team were growing increasingly impatient as the hours went by. Time was running out, and we still needed to find Death. So, when Taeral and Varga had agreed to let us focus on finding the Nekronos system first, I decided