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At first, I saw nothing. I thought he was simply pointing to the end of the horizon. Then I realized the clouds were missing. He really was pointing at nothing. My breath caught, and my heart began to race.
“There’s a huge cliff ahead of us!” Lucas yelled at the Ferryman. “We’re going to fall off. You’re steering us the wrong way!”
The Ferryman said nothing as he continued to dip his staff into the water, steering us toward the edge.
“Hey!” Chloe cried. “Are you going to listen to us, or keep paddling us to the edge of the world!? You said you’d take us to the Abyss.”
“That is exactly what I intend to do,” the Ferryman said.
“That drop will kill us,” I protested.
The Ferryman shrugged. “You never said I had to keep you alive.”
Talia gripped tightly to her seat and began to scream as we came closer and closer to the edge of the waterfall. “I want to get off!”
Lucas curled me tight in his arms, and I squeezed my eyes shut. We reached the edge of the ocean, and the boat tumbled off the cliff.
My friends and I screamed as we fell through the air. My stomach leapt into my throat, and I thought we’d never stop falling.
Abruptly, the free-fall ended. My eyes shot open, but I saw nothing. Wherever we were, it was pitch black and eerily silent. I could feel the boat beneath me and Lucas’s arms around me, but that was it.
I cast a witch light, and my heart rate began to slow. My friends and I were safe in the boat, and we were dry again. We appeared to be floating—on what, I wasn’t sure. We could have been floating on the water or in the deepest parts of space. I couldn’t tell, because there was no light and no sound. Beyond this boat, it was as if the light from my spell was entirely consumed by a black hole. It was the kind of place that would make you go mad if you spent any amount of time here. There was nothing, save but your own thoughts to preoccupy you.
The Ferryman began to laugh. “I’ve been doing this for thousands of years. I know where I’m going.”
Chloe gazed around in wonder. “Where are we?”
“The Astromancers call this place the Endless Void,” the Ferryman said.
“They get their magic from the stars, don’t they?” Grant asked. “But there are no stars here.”
“Which is precisely why it is the worst place for them to be,” the Ferryman replied.
“But where is everyone?” I wondered.
“They’re silent,” the Ferryman said. “The Astromancers here don’t feel like they can speak up, only that they must endure the darkness alone. But if they just turned on their light, they could get out of here.”
Chloe squinted into the distance. “I see something ahead. Is it the angels’ hell region?”
The Ferryman shook his head. “The angel hellscape is back where you started. What you see ahead is the Abyss.”
The tiny pinprick of light Chloe had seen grew bigger, until I could make out the shadows of twisted, barren trees amongst a dense fog. The river turned black, and a broken sign read Now Entering the Abyss.
The Ferryman paddled us to shore, stopping along a muddy path within the dark forest. “Take this trail to the witch village. When you are finished here, follow the river downstream to return to the pits you came here through.”
“Downstream?” Grant asked as he stepped out of the boat. “So it’s all just an endless loop? If we were so close to the Abyss before, why didn’t you just take us here to begin with?”
“The river only flows in one direction,” the Ferryman stated. “I wasn’t going to paddle you upstream.”
Lucas held my hand as we stepped off the boat, and my shoes sank into the mud several inches.
“How far is it?” Talia wondered once we were all on shore. “Perhaps you can stay and wait for us.”
“That was not part of the agreement,” the Ferryman said, sounding annoyed. “I have souls of the dead to ferry.”
“But what if we—” Grant started.
The Ferryman cut him off by dropping his hood once more. An illusion of some sort replaced his Elvish features, displaying a ghostly face of twisted bone and sunken eyes. My heart lurched, and we all jumped back as a hiss echoed throughout the forest.
