Tides of Torment (Immortal Realms Book 2)

Though not the first page they’d found from the book, it was Sereia’s first time holding one. While she had felt the steady thrum of power from the page Travion carried, holding it in her own hands was an entirely different experience. Power tingled through every nerve in her fingers, trailing up her forearms and zinging through her neck to the very top of her head.

The spell written on the page was in a language so old, it was no longer spoken, and Sereia could not read it. “Taimon must have torn it from the book when they left him for dead.” She brought it across the room to hand to Travion, who took the page and folded it up with the first. “Will this slow them down? Two pages missing?”

Travion shook his head. “The first page was minor spells, things for regrowing crops or forests.” He looked at the newest page. “Taimon managed to tear a page from the destructive side. This spell looks like it is for tearing open the earth.”

“Which you can already do . . .” She sighed and dropped down into a chair. “By the sea, I thought when we found Taimon we would have our answers, yet the book is still missing.”

“That has been our issue the entire time. When Naya attacked the realms, my brothers and I believed that we had found the source of our issues. We never dreamed there was another person orchestrating the attacks. Now . . . we find ourselves with the same problem, and whoever they are has left their lackey to die, and we are back to square one!”

Sereia could see the anger and frustration in his eyes. Constantly trailing behind whoever was controlling this had to be leaving him feeling helpless. Not an emotion Travion dealt well with. She knew this because she felt the same way.

After all their efforts, there had to be something they could do. Sereia glanced down at the pages in Travion’s hands.

“You know,” she began, uncertain if she should even bring this up. “There is a tracking spell whispered about amongst pirates. One used for locating lost treasure.” Travion’s eyes studied her, and she could tell she had his full attention. “Trouble is, it’s nigh on impossible to do because it requires having a piece of the treasure itself, and knowing where it was last on land before taking to the sea. The hardest ingredient to get your hands on is the blood of the last known person in possession of the treasure. And if they’ve already been lost to the sea . . .” She shrugged, eyes locking with Travion’s. “But—”

“We’ve got all that.”

Sereia nodded. “I’m not certain it will work, but if we take a little of that chum-bucket’s blood, this page, and head to the beach where the battle took place, there should be enough magical residue in the land to give us a heading.” It might be a shot in the dark. Sereia had only seen the spell done once and had never performed it herself. She’d be going solely off a memory of a rather drunken and desperate night.

“It would be worth a try. We don’t have much to lose at this point.” Travion’s eyes gleamed with determination and hope.

Sereia prayed she didn’t end up dashing it all on the rocks.

The dory bobbed on the choppy water as Adrik rowed them away from the ship and back to the little beach where they had discovered Taimon’s body. Finn and Yon sat together in a second dory, neither uttering a word. There was an odd tension between the two of them that Sereia didn’t have time to figure out.

When the dory slid through the sand and up onto the beach, Sereia jumped out, her boots splashing in the shallow water. She moved quickly onto the beach itself, clutching a leather satchel. Dropping to her knees in the sand, she wasted no time getting to work.

Sereia brushed extra rocks and seaweed out of her way, creating a flat surface to work on, and dug a large stone bowl out of her bag. Not needing to look up to see if Travion was at her side, she held the bowl out to him. “Please collect some water for me. Only a quarter of the bowl.” Once he had taken the bowl, Sereia brought out the remaining items. The page Taimon had torn from the book, a vial of blood, and a map of the entire sea and surrounding nations.

Travion was back at her side shortly, and once the bowl was set on the beach, Sereia pushed the page of The Creaturae to the bottom. With that in place, she scooped some sand and poured it carefully into the bowl so as not to cloud the seawater. As the sand settled, Sereia took a deep breath and looked up at Travion.

“No promises this will work.”

He nodded. “No promises.”

Unstopping the vial, Sereia began to murmur the spell, ancient maritime words from some long-gone god of creation. “Invenire thesauram quaeram.” As she whispered, the words a prickle of heat along the inside of her throat, a cold wind wrapped around her, sliding over her arms and across the back of her neck. A shiver coursed down her spine. Slowly, Sereia poured the droplets of blood into the bowl, her eyes never leaving the sand and water.

She continued to murmur the words, and Travion, kneeling beside her, joined in on the chant. For a moment, nothing happened, just the two of them whispering ancient words and a chilling breeze swirling around them.

She could feel the expectation and held breath of the group, the way they all eagerly watched, and the pressure of that almost made her falter. But Sereia kept uttering the words of the spell, repeating them over and over again, drawing strength from Travion’s continued support until, at last, the contents of the bowl began to swirl and mix. A faint light then rose from the water.

Sighing with relief, Sereia sat back on her heels.

“A little lackluster,” Travion murmured.

Sereia shot him a glare. “It’s not an immediate solution. It has to track, so now we give it the chance to do that. But it’s mixing, so I do believe that it’s working.”

“Do you know how long it’ll take?” he pressed.

“I don’t know.” She shrugged and sighed with irritation. “It’s old magic, so it’ll take however long it pleases.”

At her side Adrik grumbled. “S’all a little anticlimactic, Captain.” It was his turn to receive a glare from Sereia. “Well, it is . . .” He smirked at her. “How about the three of us work on fetching us all something to eat?”

Sereia nodded at him, her eyes traveling to Yon, who shifted ever so slightly, but it was enough to show acceptance of this task.

As the sailors all dispersed, Sereia patted the sand beside her. “Sit,” she instructed Travion.

He looked like he wanted to protest, but as there wasn’t much else to do, he took a seat beside her.

“I don’t like all of this waiting.”

“Me either. But it’s waiting with a purpose. Once this spell works”—and it would work, she had decided—“we’ll have a proper heading. We’ll know where this damn book is and can go directly for it instead of this constant searching.” It was the searching and never finding that was getting to both of them. She could see it in Travion’s weariness. The faint lines of irritation that pinched at the corners of his eyes.

Neither of them were good at not accomplishing what they set out to do, both running into whatever situation was upon them, good or bad, simply because it needed to be done.

“Mmm,” he grunted in response.

Her eyes shifted to Travion, who was staring down at the swirling bowl, a frown marring his face.

“How are you doing?”

He blinked, but his expression didn’t change. “I’m fine.”

“No, Travion.” Sereia reached out to take his hand, pulling it into her lap, forcing him to look at her. “I mean truly, how are you doing? Your kingdom was attacked, your family put in terrible danger . . . You almost died.” The word still wanted to lodge in her throat, surrounded by a deep sorrow that threatened to spill out of her in rage and woe so violent, she didn’t know if she could contain it. He was safe, so there was no need for it. But how near to death he’d come left her unable to fathom the repercussions. “And now, there is this new, unimaginable threat bearing down on Midniva and all you care about. Forget being king, tell me how Travion is doing.”

He looked like he wanted to speak about anything other than his actual feelings. And for a moment, she thought he would brush her off. Showing vulnerability was not something Sereia was used to seeing from Travion. But he stilled, falling even more silent, if that were possible, as if thinking on it. Then he finally spoke.

“It’s hard to forget the king part,” he admitted softly. “It’s who I’ve been for so very long.” His fingers coiled around hers. “I don’t do well with such violations on my land and people. The threat to my family least of all. I want bloodshed and revenge. I want to ensure that whoever is doing this tastes the cold brunt of steel again and again, until they know such horrors that no one will ever dare attack us again.” His fingers tightened on her hand. “And it frustrates me to the deepest, darkest parts of myself that we are still so in the dark as to who is orchestrating all of this.”

“We will find them,” she assured him. “If we have to scour every last inch of this ocean, dive to the very depths of it, I vow we will find whoever is guilty of this, Travion. And we will make them pay.”

She knew then that she would spend the rest of her days hunting down the culprit if it meant bringing him peace once more.

Travion lifted her hand to his lips and kissed the back of it. “If your spell works, hopefully the depths of the ocean won’t be required.”

Silence fell between them, and Sereia felt herself being drawn in nearer to him. The desire to lose herself to his touch and his kiss was a strong and heady sensation. That is, until a shout broke her from the spell.

Adrik had built a fire for them but then wandered off down to the water and was currently up to his knees in the shallows. There was a small octopus coiled around his arm that he was chasing Yon around with. It startled Sereia to see Yon looking so out of sorts, trying to evade the one long tentacle not wrapped around Adrik’s arm that he was swinging before him in the air like a lasso.

Finn, for all his stoic behavior, seemed to be fighting a grin.

Just as Adrik cornered Yon against an outcropping of rocks, the much smaller woman ducked down and swung her feet, catching the first mate in the ankles and sending him tumbling into the water. When he rose from the waves, it wasn’t only his long hair that clung to his face, but also the octopus which had wrapped around his head.

Drawing her calmness back around her, Yon waded out of the water, leaving Adrik to fend for himself. Finn was kinder and moved over to help him extract the creature, plunging a dagger into the center of it.

Sodden with water and boasting several red suction cup marks along his jaw and neck, Adrik hauled himself and the octopus out of the water. “We’ve caught dinner.” He held the dead creature, whose tentacles still writhed even in death, aloft.

“Perhaps you can stop acting like a child and cook it now?” Sereia growled. They had seen such horrors today, and she could understand the need for levity to wash it all away, but now was truly not the time.

Adrik’s smile faded, and his face grew grim. Nodding, he looked to Travion and then back at her. “I’ll be right on it, Captain.”

Silence fell around the fire as Adrik roasted the octopus, and Finn and Yon came to join them, both sitting close to the heat to dry off. With a deep desperation, Sereia sent a prayer up to the spirits of the sea that the spell would truly work. They needed this to end. This exhaustion. This uncertainty. The constant threat to their lives and anyone who lived near or on the water. This kind of devastation could not continue.

“Captain, something’s happening,” Adrik chimed in suddenly.

Gasping, Sereia rose up onto her knees to loom over the bowl, which was now glowing a faint blue. Travion settled in beside her, his face showing determination.

Inside the bowl, the swirling sand was gradually shifting to the sides, creating what looked like landscape with all the water falling into the middle. The drop of blood, now a faint streak of red like glowing smoke, trailed through what could only be a representation of the sea itself.

“The map!” Sereia shouted, and Adrik moved quickly, tossing the octopus and stick at Finn and coming to kneel beside her. He unfurled the map and flattened it down beside her in the sand, pinning it in place with some rocks.

Together, she and Adrik scoured it over until they found coves and harbors that matched what they saw before them in the bowl.

Placing her finger on the map to indicate what the bowl was showing them, Sereia looked back down at the working spell. The blood moved subtly, but it moved nonetheless. And it was heading across the sea—toward Midniva.