The Crown of Gilded Bones (Blood and..

meant. That Casteel would’ve learned when I took the
Crown. “You don’t travel over or through the Mountains of
Nyktos. You travel under them.”
An icy wave of surprise scuttled through Casteel. “The
tunnel system?”
Jasper nodded. “The one from Evaemon leads into
Iliseeum if—and that’s a big if—you know how to navigate
it.”
“Damn,” Kieran muttered, scrubbing a hand over his
head. “All those years messing around in those tunnels and
we could’ve ended up in the damn Lands of the Gods.”
It struck me as a very odd coincidence that Casteel and
Kieran had spent their childhood attempting to map out
those tunnels and caverns, and this whole time, they
could’ve taken Cas right to this Lands of the Gods. Had he
or his brother been drawn to them? If so, had it been some
sort of divine intervention?
I stayed way too long in the shower the following
morning, testing the limits of exactly how long the water
would remain hot.
Feeling the warm water pelting my skin and washing the
soapy suds away was truly too much of a magical feeling to
rush. The shower felt like it cleansed more than soap, as if it
were rinsing away the stickiness of confusion that prevented
me from looking past the shock of everything I had
discovered and learned. That could’ve been my imagination,
but by the time I forced myself to turn off the faucets, I felt
like I could face what today held.
What awaited me in Atlantia.
And maybe it wasn’t just the shower, but all the hours of
deep sleep I’d ended up stacking up over the last day or so.