Blaze glided over the Valley of Screams, and I held on and welcomed the cool high-altitude air brushing through my hair and filling my lungs.

I occasionally glanced below, noticing shadows as they darted through the ravines. I couldn’t see very well from this height, but I felt as though it was safe to assume that those were daemons, maybe following us from afar.

What might their plan be, though? Surely they weren’t crazy enough to try to attack us, not when Blaze was in full dragon form. They kept to the shade, hiding beneath the trees, before they shot forward.

“We’ve definitely dealt a big blow to the daemons, especially inside their city,” I said, mostly to myself, but also to Blaze. “With so many of them dead, they will probably need time to recover. Some are following us now, but I’m not sure what their aim is.”

“They’ll probably have to report back to Shaytan,” Blaze’s gruff voice came through, as his massive wings flapped.

“Yeah, it’s not like they can do anything else at this point,” I replied. “Besides, I don’t think we have more than one, maybe two days before reinforcements arrive from other daemon cities. You heard Mose, there are plenty of other daemons ready to take up arms against us.”

“For now, we just need to find out if the Lords knew about Darius,” he grumbled.

He was right. What Darius had done was beyond comprehension, and definitely beyond forgiveness. My mind kept going back to Rewa, and the seemingly endless stream of tears that she’d cried when she had recognized her father’s Lordship ring… and when they had cremated what were supposed to be his remains.

Her grief couldn’t possibly have been made up. That pain, it had to be real. I just couldn’t imagine someone so perfectly capable of such deceit. Frankly, I wasn’t too crazy about her, mainly because of the way in which she kept approaching Blaze, but that was just my jealousy rearing its ugly head.

And what about the others? Members of the other Lords’ families had perished in those fires. Dozens of innocent Imen were also gone. No, it just didn’t make sense. Darius must have made some kind of deal with the daemons. He must have switched sides, taking many of his own down in the process.

And he’d specifically targeted Lord Kifo, too. Maybe Caspian knew something. Maybe he’d suspected something about Darius and his intentions. Maybe he’d even confronted him, prompting Darius to rig the Kifo mansion with explosives as well.

After all, Caspian was out here, with us. He was putting his life at risk to help us. No way was he involved in whatever Darius had put together with Shaytan. But even looking at it from afar, even as I tried to visualize the full picture, there were still blanks in desperate need of filling in, in order for me to really understand what this was all about.

On one hand, we had daemons organized in underground cities, rallying their armies as they hunted innocent creatures for their souls. On the other, we had a mountain city where Imen and Maras had supposedly learned to coexist in peace and harmony—but something rotten lay underneath, secrets untold, strange behaviors, and an alarming amount of mind-bending. It just didn’t seem right.

And then, way beyond the gorges that sealed Azure Heights away from the rest of the continent, were the Free People, the rogue Imen, who wanted nothing to do with the Maras, while they struggled to keep their own safe from the daemons.

We were smack in the middle of it, with the king of daemons eager to capture us and eat our souls, making us sound like some kind of… exotic delicacy. The planet wasn’t kind to us either, preventing us from reaching out to Calliope, to our GASP base and our families. We couldn’t even leave Neraka.

It seemed as though the deeper we dug, the more filth we uncovered.

About twenty miles ahead, the eastern plains stretched in deep shades of green, with narrow tributary streams snaking across. The deep blue ocean stretched endlessly to our right, while the mountain rose proudly beyond the field.

I could make out the shapes of Azure Heights, the streets and terraces, and hundreds of white marble buildings with reddish rooftops. The mountain ridges were dressed in deep velvet green, thick woods bordering the city. And within those white marble walls were secrets—which I yearned to uncover.

Whatever they were hiding, whether it had anything to do with Darius and the daemons or not, we were going to get to the bottom of it all. I’d lost my patience. I wanted to get out of here. I wanted to be back on Calliope, getting to know Blaze better and training with my sister and best friends.

No more of this…

No more running for our lives. We were members of GASP. We were supposed to be the ones restoring law and order, and protecting those who couldn’t defend themselves. We weren’t supposed to be the victims, not in this world, and not in any other.