Page 22

“Then you will obey your king,” he says. “I know that most days, you’d rather do anything but. However, right now, you will obey me, and I will get us both to safety.”

Even though I hate the idea of leaving Raila behind, I keep my feet moving, my steps higher, until he has enough faith in me to let me go. We both keep running down the tunnel, and I’m growing more conscious of the fact that the spiders might be running after us. The thought is so paralyzing that when we do come to a fork in the tunnel, I can’t remember which direction to go.

“Which way was it?” I ask, breathing hard.

Death looks both ways, and for a horrible moment, I fear he forgot, too. Finally, he nods. “This way.”

We take the tunnel to the left, the passage now sloping upwards. It grows colder the higher we go, the ground slippery with frost until steps start to appear in the dirt.

“This can’t be right,” Death mumbles as we climb. “We should be going down still, not up.”

I have no idea what to think; I just pray to my mother Goddess that this tunnel doesn’t have a dead end with no door. We’d be sitting ducks.

But finally, we see the end: the door in the dirt at the top of the iron stairs with a single obsidian handle.

“This is it!” I cry out. “This is what she said to look for.”

Death grunts and reaches out with his bare hand, hesitating for a moment before he places his palm over it.

He turns the black handle and pushes open the door an inch, then presses his shoulder against it until it opens the rest of the way.

On the other side of the door is another tunnel, this one level.

And there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Not a metaphor or platitude—literal light.

“This must be it,” I whisper.

“Possibly,” Death says. “The passageway I know of runs straight to the caverns. My mountain lair.”

“Castle Greyskull,” I comment.

His eyes squint under his mask. “It’s a journey of several days in complete darkness. This light, though…it seems to lead right to the outside.”

“So let’s go!” I tell him. “Anywhere outside is better than here. And what if Raila can’t hold the spiders back?”

He nods slowly. “Alright. I’ll go first, but we’ll have to close this door so we aren’t followed. There’s a good chance once it closes, we’ll never be able to go back in this way.”

“Can’t go back to Hell? What a shame.”

He gives me a wry grin and then turns to close the door shut. It groans on its hinges, and the moment the door becomes flush with the dirt wall, it disappears before our eyes, like it was never there at all.

“No turning back,” he says.

“No turning back.”

We start walking quickly down the tunnel toward the light. It gets brighter and brighter, and for a moment, I think perhaps we’ve taken a wrong turn and are heading up to Amaranthus instead, the light is so white and glowing.

Yet, the closer we get to the end, the more familiar the light seems.

It’s daylight.

We come to the end of the tunnel and peer out. It’s daylight alright, a cloudy, cold, snowy white day.

We’re standing on top of a forested hill, the snow thick on branches of pine, the smell of balsam in the air. I immediately take deep gulps through my lungs, the fresh air never feeling so good.

“Where are we?” Death grumbles suspiciously, looking around. From where we are standing, the only view we have is of the trees, though, through the rows, you can see how the forest slopes downward.

“I have no idea,” I say. “You mean to say you can’t recognize a forest from the trees?”