She did as he said, but she was also distracted by something else. The shimmering emerald path now branched off in three different directions.

“What the hells does that mean?” Sora said aloud.

“I can’t see what you see,” Broomstick reminded her.

“Right, sorry. I don’t know which way to go. There are three paths.”

“Then I think we just choose one, before the owls find an alternate path to us or something else decides to chase us.”

She gave herself another moment to catch her breath, then chose the third route, since three was her lucky number.

The tunnel wound down endlessly. Just when Sora was convinced that it would never end and that the Lake of Nightmares didn’t exist, the tunnel stopped abruptly and spit them out into a colossal cave.

“Good gods,” Sora murmured.

The ceiling was hundreds of feet high, and the other side of the cave was so far away it was almost out of sight. But there were definitely two other tunnel openings over there. That must be why there’d been three emerald paths, because there were three different ways to get here.

And most important: in the center of the cave was a vast pool of glacial water clear as glass.

“Wow,” Sora murmured. “Let that be a lesson in perseverance.”

“It’s not all good news, though,” Broomstick said, pointing.

They could see straight down to an iron trap door at the bottom, likely where Zomuri’s treasure was buried. But the door wasn’t the only thing in the water. There were corpses, about a hundred of them suspended in the water, frozen at various depths and none decomposed. They were mostly men; some must have been centuries old, judging by the ancient robes they wore and their plaited hair, and others drowned perhaps only decades ago. The one unifying feature, however, was their gape-mouthed horror. Sora’s stomach turned.

“Do you think they froze to death?” Broomstick asked.

Sora was staring at the water. “Or they were tortured by the lake,” she said, remembering that those who dared to step foot in the water would be met with visions of horrible imagined futures.

The hallucinations are so vivid, people either drown as they get lost in them or drown themselves out of despair for who they think they’ll become in the future, Mama had said.

And their suffering was preserved for eternity in their underwater grave.

“This is a bad idea,” Broomstick said.

“I know,” Sora said. “But we still have to do it. If we don’t retrieve the Dragon Prince’s soul, we don’t stand a chance. Maybe we’ll die today trying to do this, but if we don’t, then we’ll die for sure.”

“That’s not much of a pep talk,” Broomstick said.