KINGDOM OF THE STONE -- a Wattpad featured novel

Chapter Twenty Eight

Outside his wife's room, Amantis leaned against the wall.  The image of Charissa's face, twisted with an almost inhuman hatred, burned in his memory.  He rubbed at his throat in anticipatory pain; it was too easy to imagine waking to that nightmare.  He went back to his room and snatched up the pouch with the stone from its shelf and caught himself as he was about to throw it against the wall.  How could it have failed him so utterly?  In every other matter it had guided him perfectly!  Yes she was now officially his wife, but what good was that?

He poured out some of the faeyn wine into a gold drinking bowl and drained it.  The memory of Apaidia coming out of her bedroom, her large breasts swinging as she pulled on her robe, replayed in his mind.  He poured himself another drink and drained the bowl, a nearly forgotten hunger stirring within him.

Hanging the pouch around his neck and snatching up the skin of wine, he grabbed a candle and headed for Apaidia's room.  Once outside the door, he hesitated.  Should he knock, or should he just barge in and take what he wanted?  Would she refuse him?  Would others find out and shame him?

He opened the door and stepped inside holding his candle.

Apaidia rose sleepily, the bed sheets falling away and exposing those breasts he remembered.  She just looked at him sleepily a moment, then threw back the rest of the bedclothes, exposing her nakedness and smoothed the sheets beside her invitingly, a wicked smile spreading across her face, making her otherwise plain features far more interesting.  "I wondered how long I would have to wait."

Amantis set the candle down and closed the door behind him.  He slipped off his robe but carried the wine with him to the bed.

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Hours later, Amantis emerged from her room in a happy delirium that had little to do with alcohol.  He was, however, thirsty and so he headed for the cellar in search of something to drink.  In his daze, he had neglected to bring the candle but brought the pouch containing his stone instead.  Pushing open the door to the dark cellar stairs, he realized he didn't have a light so he closed the door behind him and pulled out his seeing stone.

Small pinpricks of light appeared like stars in the infinite depths of the stone, lighting up the stairs and filling his head with a never-quite-familiar wordless whispering.  Amantis descended the stairs, marveling at the size of the cellar, and wondered at the walls which did not show any sign of having been carved with tools.  The wooden floor creaked as he followed the smooth curve of the wall to a large shelf filled with clay jars.

Amantis inspected one huge jar and felt a draft of air sigh up from behind the shelf on which it sat.  Deciding the curve of the wall must have left a space beyond the shelf, and since the jar was empty, he pulled it out to peer behind it.

A space just big enough to crawl through led to the back of the room and another opening in the wall.  Stepping over a small pile of loose stones, he entered another stoma which, as stomas often do, opened into another and another like a chain of bubbles.  As he descended into the ground, the cold stone walls began to run with condensation from the humid air.  Finally, as the weight of all the stone hanging over his head began to grow almost unbearable, he paused in a chamber that echoed deeply with his footfalls.  He held the seer stone aloft and it flared with unexpected light.

Stretching out before him into the distant shadows lay an underground lake.  The water, without ripple and as clear and smooth as a summer sky, was only a few inches deep.  Beneath it a layer of fine silt ran out into the middle of the lake where it rose up into a small rocky island.

Amantis stood on that strange dark shore, his head craning upwards as he turned in slow amazed circles and stared into the shadowed curve of the high ceiling.  The whispering voices had stopped and the whole world seemed to hold its breath as if waiting for something to happen.  Amantis stood for several minutes, unable to leave, the air filling with an indefinable tension.  He wondered if the world had been this quiet when it was first pulled from out of the Void.