They had stopped singing before we reached Lake Sodalen, which is when we left behind the vans and switched to traveling on foot, but the haunting melody lingered with me on the long trek across the valley and up the mountainside. It was a hard journey for all of us, but Elof especially struggled, and I carried him most of the way up to Áibmoráigi.

As we rounded the summit of the snowcapped mountain, the path growing more narrow and treacherous, Eliana slipped once, and her heavy pack threw her off balance. Pan saw and grabbed her arm, just in time to catch her before she tumbled miles to her death on the rocks below.

“How much farther?” Pan asked.

“Just around the bend,” Sumi said without slowing as she led the way.

The path widened a few yards before the giant boulder blocking the path, but it was still only wide enough for two or three of us to stand shoulder to shoulder. Sumi crouched down in front of the boulder, then summoned Eliana to help her with the leat fámus. Everyone else waited in a long line behind us.

“The boulder isn’t really there, right?” Pan asked.

Sumi and Eliana crouched down facing each other, and Sumi didn’t break eye contact with her, even when she answered Pan, “It’s not and yet it is. It disappears like mist but you cannot pass through, even when you know the truth.”

“How are you going to make it so we all can go through?” Dagny asked, hovering just behind Sumi.

“I will do it the way it is done.” Sumi cast an irritated glare toward us, and then she looked back into Eliana’s big doe eyes.

“Will it hurt?” I asked, remembering how my skull felt like it was going to explode when Indu did the incantation on me.

Sumi put her hands on Eliana’s face, so her thumbs were over Eliana’s eyes and her pointer fingers were on the temples. “Yes, it will.” And then quietly, Sumi said, “Leat fámus.”

It was like being cracked in the head—a quick but blinding pain. I heard others crying out, and I leaned back against the mountain face, steadying myself on the rocky wall.

When I opened my eyes, with the pain already just a dull ache, the boulder was gone. The grassy plateau was covered in the ruins of a civilization. Crumbling structures of stone and iron had mostly been taken back by nature, with weeds overgrowing and birds nesting in the remains of a tower.

I hadn’t heard anything a few moments ago, but since the leat fámus had removed the boulder and cloaking, now sound could travel through. And now I heard it, the haunting choir singing the enn morgana fjeurn on ennsommora orn.