Everneath 01.5 - Neverfall by Brodi Ashton

Author:Brodi Ashton [Ashton, Brodi]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2012-12-25T23:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

NOW

The Hall of Knowledge.

The Brain left us alone in the Hall of Knowledge. Max grasped my arm, clutching it like a vise. “We shouldn’t be here.”

“It’s too late,” I said, shaking him off. “We’re here. Just calm down.”

The dark hall stretched before us, with stone walls on each side that reached up at least twenty feet. A waist-high trough ran along the wall on the right, parallel to a thin, horizontal opening that provided the only breach in the wall.

The gutter was about as wide as a human hand, which made sense considering its purpose.

The Delphinians believed that everything that could be said about a person was written on the palms of their hands. By placing my hand in the trough, the Fates would be able to read me, all the way down to the imprinted wisdom on my soul. The stuff even I didn’t know.

On the left side of the hallway, a four-inch-tall window ran along the length of that wall, about six feet above the ground. Only darkness was visible beyond.

The House of the Scholars lay behind that wall, the head-high window representing the flow of knowledge. The House of Fates would be behind the wall on the right, the trough of palms representing knowledge that couldn’t be found in books. The kind of knowledge that glimpsed the past and the future, and the things inside the Everliving mind.

A white wall blocked off the end of the hallway. It was the only thing I’d seen that wasn’t the color of charcoal.

“What do we do now?” Max said.

I shrugged and stepped through the threshold and into the hall, and as I did, a screen on the white wall flickered on.

Images lit up the barrier, flashes of my life up until that point. A boy with blond hair running through a juniper field bordering the fjords in Norway. A lyre, one of the first I’d ever played. A woman’s face. Gynna. She’d turned me into an Everliving and then broken my heart. The emotional heart, not the literal guitar-pick one. More faces of so many of the people I’d stolen energy from. Hannah Bordal, my first Forfeit. Young and vibrant when she’d entered the Feed. Old and bent when she’d left.

The flashes lasted for a few minutes, a strange reflection of my life, and then the screen glowed white and showed my own reflection in the present.

“Coleson Stockflet.” A chorus of voices filled the hallway, speaking in unison. “You seek information.”

I stepped forward, even though I had no idea where the voices were coming from. The image on the wall in front of me mirrored my movement.

“Yes,” I answered. To anyone else, it would’ve looked as if I were talking to myself in a mirror. “About Eurydice, and others like her. About anyone who has survived the Feed. I want to know how they survived. What do they all have in common?”

“We gather information. We do not impart it.”

“You do sometimes. And you knew I was coming. You knew I would be here, and you expedited it.

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