Rhuk explained that Christian was being held in a minimum-security prison outside Ottawa. “He’s wearing a different face, but he let the facade slip when he was sleeping and the metal bed frame saw him.”

For a second I thought about the cameras and bugs that had been used to spy on me in the past. I had thought that level of surveillance was scary, but what Rhuk was capable of under my direction was a million times worse. Thank goodness it was a million times worse.

“What name is he going by?”

“He’s not. They know he’s Christian, and they’re calling him that. They have photos of his real face, but he tries desperately not to wear it in case they’re filming him, so he doesn’t look like himself. He’s quite ugly. They beat him and his face is freshly bruised and bleeding each night. It’s a minimum-security prison, but they have him locked up and rarely let him mix with the other prisoners. Often they have guards and other people in his cell with him. They ask him thousands of questions. The bed frame says they want him to tell them where they can find ‘the girl’. He replies that he doesn’t know and that’s when they beat him. The bed frame says he seems sick.”

“He can’t be sick. Immortals don’t get sick,” Brandon said, having followed Rhuk into the Ocean Room.

“He’s dying,” I said. “We need to rescue him now.”

“How do you plan to go about that?” Brandon asked.

“Rhuk can tell us where the prison is, where his cell is in the building, and I’ll get him out myself, like opening a tin can and pulling out the meat.”

“I’ll fly her,” Pricina volunteered, stepping forward. “We can’t leave him there even if she makes a mess.”

With transportation settled, my eyes traveled between Brandon and Pricina, but I knew looking to either of them for help once inside the prison would be mishandling things. I couldn’t take either of them into the prison with me. Did I have to go alone? I looked at Rhuk and thought it was a pity I couldn’t take it with me into the building without causing a ruckus. The dolomite that made up its body was enormous. 

Or could I?

I stepped closer and ordered a chunk of it out of the side of a turret. Soon, I was holding a sphere the size of a nickel in my hand. “Can I talk to you through this?” I asked, lifting the severed piece experimentally to my ear.

“Yes,” it whispered inside my ear.

“Excellent,” I said. I snapped a button off my shirt and demanded the plastic to take the shape of a post and back clip of an earring. The button was made out of plastic and adhering to the dolomite wouldn’t normally have been possible, but the dolomite reformed itself around the plastic and I shaped them to fit together like 3d puzzle pieces. I slid the earring through my earhole and wadded more plastic around the back of the post in the most comfortable shape I could mold. 

“What are you doing?” Pricina asked.

“I’m making Rhuk into an earring so I’ll have someone to talk to the elements for me.”

The brown goddess looked curious. “Can you turn it into a diamond?”

“Not without heat and pressure,” I replied before realizing completely that I could do that. I could instruct the elements surrounding the earring to give it that amount of pressure. If I did it while the dolomite was still in my ear, what would that do to my body? I felt like experimenting with how quickly King Christian could heal me.

Instead of speaking to Rhuk directly, I spoke to every element surrounding the earring and the pressure came so fast that it aligned all Rhuk’s atoms. In a moment, all the other elements besides the carbon were gone, burnt off, and I could feel the proper grid shape of its molecular structure the way I could run my hand across the perfect stitching of a knitted scarf. 

I brushed my hair away from my ear. It had hurt less than when I’d got my ears pierced.

“You did it,” Pricina whispered, obviously aghast.

“You didn’t think I could do it?” I shot back.

“I hoped you could do it,” she said slowly.

I nodded, appreciating her support rather than her horror. “When can we go?” I asked.

“Soon. I think you should take a little time to rest. So much has happened. I think it might be wise for you to have a nap. It wouldn’t do for you to make yourself so overwrought that you require a long rest in the Red Forest, and it is a very long flight to Ottawa.”

I was about to refuse her when she added the clincher. 

“I’ll take you to Christian’s room.”

“Yeah, you should take me there,” I answered immediately. I wanted to see Christian’s room. I always wanted to see his room: his hotel room, his apartment, his room in his cabin, his room in Scotland, and even inside his prison cell. I shuddered. I should be on my way, but seeing his room in Nhagaspir would only take a second.

Pricina began leading the way.

I wasn’t sure if I needed to rest or not. From what King Christian had told me about his healing, there was no need for me to rest, but I wasn’t positive. Had I already entered a zone where I no longer required sleep? I decided at once that I’d use the time the ‘rest’ afforded me to ask him.

 Pricina led me through a maze of high-ceilinged corridors that were much more like the interior of a fancy hotel than the rest of the village.

“Why is this area different?” I asked her as we walked.

“It’s convenient to have our own rooms, like our own homes. The doors down this hallway lead to private quarters. In the past, such places were necessary if only to find a place where you could hear yourself think. I became immortal during a great rush when over a thousand people found their way to the Red Forest and thrived there. There was a different god here who was the greatest god of all, but he and others like him departed, died, or disappeared. They didn’t really announce it when they were done with us. It made sense. We wouldn’t have let them leave. We didn’t have a greater god living here for many years. Then Damon Christianus came and he was the pinnacle of godhood, everything we wished to become. His skin was like gold and his gaze was like looking into the eye of a storm.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Please don’t mind me asking, Pricina, but you’ve said a few things since I got here that make it seem like you… I don’t know… maybe you once had feelings for him. Did you?”

She laughed and shook her head. “Not the way you’re thinking. I was seduced and married to an immortal before I ever laid eyes on Christian. When Christian went mad, my husband was one of the most powerful gods here. He was one of our brightest hopes that another immortal might be able to control a pole. It didn’t work out,” she trailed off painfully. “When my connection with him was severed and I had the option of choosing a new husband, I didn’t even think of pursuing Christian. I have known him for six hundred years and I have always loved him, but not the way you’re thinking. Whereas Brandon felt new and fresh and… he couldn’t enter the North Iron Room. His skill set isn’t like that… so he was unlikely to go insane trying to do what no one has been able to accomplish. He felt very safe.”

“So you’re happy?”

Her brown eyes flashed. “It’s much better to step through eternity with a partner than without one. It is perplexing to me how Christian could stand to be single, always single, stepping into an Iron Room and shutting the door to keep everyone out. He would never let anyone else in the other Iron Room or attempt to help him control the south pole. He hid the other Iron Room. We don’t even know where it is. Others have tried to find it, but Christian has barred the elements from sharing its location. A god would have to be greater than Christian to get those rocks to obey them.”

We began ascending a staircase that was suddenly grand. It was like the front entrance of a church: a church of night, a church of outer space, and the quiet end of all things. The ceiling suddenly became very high and glorious light lit up the facade of his entrance. Two enormous doors shone like the bells of angels’ trumpets and the feeling of invading a sacred place came upon me.

I stopped moving.

“What are you doing?” Pricina asked. “You have to go inside.”

I touched my chest and the black mark that was the sword. “This is somehow worse than entering his heart. It feels like sacrilege for me to enter his rooms without him.”

“If you think of him as a god the way you have been taught to think of the Lord God, no, you will not be able to enter.” She turned her body half a pace and acted like a girl used as a decoration for a race car or a game show flourishing the doors by spreading her arms. “This is an ancient divinity. It is not representative of a current divinity.” She dropped her hands. “He’s dying and you need to see his rooms… if only for a moment before we leave to get him so you can understand the path he needs to take. Step inside and see what he was.”

She opened the door wide for me and without waiting to see my reaction to the space, headed back down the stairs. “Call for me when you’re finished.”

I stood there stupidly feeling for the rush on my heart I usually felt when I was overwrought, but the feeling wasn’t there. A calmness came over me that should have been unnatural, but somehow wasn’t. Impossibly, I was at ease. I smirked. The tranquility was probably the work of King Christian setting me at ease in almost the same way he’d set a bone.

The entrance to Christian’s room made every church I had ever seen look like a pale, pathetic imitation of this place. My mind drew a sudden comparison to the way his heart looked inside the Red Forest. Anything can look like anything in a place like that. Surely, if Christian had wanted to show how grand he was, it would have been represented there, but in his heart, he was simply a man.

The rooms in front of me were just that… rooms. 

I took my first step forward.

I paused once more in the doorway. All my best dreams included Christian’s bedroom. I remembered the room in his manor in Scotland. That room had been scarcely more personal than a hotel room. I had also been in his bedroom in his cabin in the woods. It looked ordinary, rather at odds with him, who I had always found extraordinary. Now I stood at the threshold of his real bedroom. I didn’t even have to fight my way in. 

My heartbeat quickened and for a split second, I felt that pinch of pain in my heart. The sword almost throbbed inside me.

I took another step into the darkness behind shining doors.