Page 53

The Blood Of The Mountain

We all lean over a creepy-as-sin hole in the cave floor, about two-meters in diameter, that even the glow of several Imperium can’t penetrate very far down. After spending the night in the first large cavern to rest, it’s taken us much of the day to get here.

“Well, that’s a pile of fool’s gold,” Vos mutters.

After hours and hours of trekking our way through the system of caves and mine shafts, we finally make it to the place where Tziah and Vos both agree the miners originally unearthed the heart. There’s no sign of a fight, or of monsters, no bodies. Nothing.

Just this hole.

“Want to fill the rest of us in?” Reven asks.

Vos crouches down. “This is the exact spot where I buried the heart deep in the mountain in layers and layers of ice.”

We all stare down the hole again. “Then someone must’ve dug it out,” Reven says.

Tziah shakes her head, then points and signs and points some more.

Vos grunts. “She says that the pattern within the ice and rocks isn’t digging. It’s fire.”

Fire?

“Coming from which way?” Hakan asks. “There has to be a bottom to it.”

Vos looks at Tziah, who points in a way that’s unmistakable. The fire went down.

“A Fire Hylorae?” I ask.

Vos runs a hand over his face. “Could be. Eidolon has one among his authoritates. The question is, did they manage to unbury the heart?”

I can’t begin to list all the ways that wouldn’t be good. Starting with the obvious—if he has, we won’t be able to give Allusian her heart. But, even worse, Eidolon doesn’t know what he’s dealing with. All he knows is what happened to the miners in his mountain. One bite turned them into Imperium, two bites into monsters. I could easily see him using the heart as a weapon of sorts. Create more Imperium to fight on his side. Or, if he takes it a bit further, a monster maker.

We all stare down the hole again. What comes next is pretty obvious. We’re going to have to climb down there to find out.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Pella mutters.

Vos gives an unamused chuckle. “Exactly what I just said.”

“Drop a rock,” Reven says. “Let’s see how long it takes before it hits bottom.”

Tziah grabs a fist-sized stone nearby and chucks it in.

Knock. Plink. Knock. Knock.

It keeps hitting the walls on the way down. Eventually the sound of it just fades away.

“Terrific,” Pella says. “This shaft could come out in the bowels of the actual hells for all we know.”

“Nah,” Vos says in a wry voice. “We know the hells don’t work that way now that we’ve seen Allusian and her lost lands.”

She rolls her eyes. “Are you really nitpicking my choice of phrases right now?”

He shrugs.

“We don’t all have to go,” Reven says.

“Splitting us up tends to lead to disaster,” Hakan points out.

Funny that I had a similar thought before coming here. The rest of us don’t argue.

“So…we’re all going,” Vos says. Then glances at Reven. “Can you shadow us?”

“No. I need to know where I’m going.” Reven thinks a moment. “I could lower us on shadow.”

Tziah puts a hand out and shakes her head, signing that we should all conserve our powers in case of danger.

“She’s right,” Pella says. “We’ll have to climb.”

I glance at Bene, who is now in his large dog form. He couldn’t have fit in the places we’ve come through, so he left piles of sand behind in the cavern where we spent the night for me to use to portal us out of this place when this is over. What could he transform into that could make it down that shaft? “I think you’re going to have to fly.”

He draws his lips back over his teeth. Not sure if that’s an agreement or irritation.

Debate over, we climb down the hole, one-by-one, Vos leading the way. Rock and ice stick out of the walls in jagged outcroppings that aren’t the most stable, but at least provide regular foot and handholds. It is so pitch black inside a mountain, even knowing shadows the way I’ve come to, I have never known darkness like this. But I swear it’s a thousand times worse inside this hole.

It crowds in. Feels like something solid and pressing.

We’re forced to light our way by using our powers in the smallest ways possible, creating purple and yellow glowing points in the darkness. Every few minutes I have to change which hand I’m using because I have to take a glove off and it’s too cold to do that for long, all while my own light hardly gets past me, the darkness eating at it before it can spread much farther.

“Are we sure about this?” Pella grumbles above me somewhere in the dark. “Seems questionable to me.”

She’s only saying what we’re all thinking, that maybe we should head back up and figure out a different way to get to the heart.

Vos’s teasing voice floats up to me from below. “I don’t see any problem here.”

He seems to be in his element. And I guess, as an Ice Hylorae from Tyndra, he really is, but it’s almost like he’s feeding energy off the cold. What happened to his earlier grumbling? Must’ve been the wind.

“Ah!” Pella’s shout sounds from above, and I look up but the barely lit darkness means all I see are booted feet coming at my face.

I duck, pulling in close against the icy wall I’m clinging to, then Reven is covering my body with his so that he takes the brunt of ice she kicked loose that pelts us.

But Pella doesn’t fall past a foot or two. When I peek up around Reven, her feet are still dangling but not coming at me anymore. Hakan must’ve caught her.

“Get ready,” I hear him say.

With a grunt Hakan swings a dangling Pella toward the wall and she manages to get a better foot and handhold this time.

“All right?” I call.

“Remind me next time not to sign up for the side quests,” Pella calls back.

If Allusian’s heart does what it’s supposed to do and gives the goddess back her powers, allowing her to fix the rest of the problems we’ve been facing, then we won’t need any more side quests. That’s the point.

Why does it feel like we are pinning our hopes on a fool’s errand, then?

Pella’s sigh reaches me next. “Get moving. I don’t want to be in here longer than I have to.”

Me neither, actually.

My fear of heights keeps rising up even through my concerted effort to shut off my emotions and even though I can’t see. I’m not sure if the darkness below me is helpful, hiding the depth of the drop and how many outcroppings I’d break myself over on the way down, or if it’s harder, making it seem like this shaft will go on forever and we’re going to die in here.

Bene, now a raven—he tried a larger bird but the hole didn’t give the wingspan enough room—lands on my shoulder and plucks at one of my scarves with his beak. Telling me to be careful, maybe?

Before I can ask, he flies up to Pella.

“Keep moving,” Reven says.

It’s not five minutes later that a hunk of ice gives way under my own foot, and my stomach lurches up my throat as I drop with a yelp. Even as I cringe away from hitting anything, I slam into an outcropping with my ribs and an oomph but get no purchase. To me it feels like I fall at least twenty feet. But a strong arm wraps around me, yanking me close to a hard body, and we stop midair, wisps of darkness melting away in the dim light around us. He must’ve shadowed to get below me.

I stare into turquoise eyes turned murkier by our combined purple and yellow lights.

“I’ve got you,” Reven says quietly.

I don’t point out the bruise my ribs are going to have thanks to the rocks I managed to bounce off of before he caught me. We’re both holding on tight, even as his shadows hold us up.

“Thanks.” Don’t feel. Don’t feel. It’s so hard not to feel. Numb was simpler when he was really gone.

I also don’t look away.

Neither does he.

One at a time, I catalog the details of his features. Ebony hair swept back in a wave. Thick-set brows set over keen eyes. He’s studying me the way I am him, and his slightly crooked mouth tilts to one side.

“I think I just aged a decade,” he says, and smiles.

But that smile fades when I don’t smile back. I don’t say anything. I can’t. Not until this is all over and Eidolon can’t hurt anyone through me. No smiles. No banter. No yearning.

I clear my throat. “Ready?”

Confusion twitches his brows down, but he doesn’t argue. With Reven still holding me, the darkness helps me onto a new outcropping before dissipating.

“Let me go first this time,” he says.

I have no problem holding here a little longer as an excuse while I calm the hells down from both the fall and him.

“Hold up,” Vos snaps out of nowhere.

“What now?” Reven asks.

“It’s blocked just below me. Some kind of cave in,” Vos calls up.

I do not like the sound of cave in. It implies this entire shaft could collapse and bury us alive. How Tziah and her family did this for a living…I just couldn’t have.

“Bene, can you get through?” Vos asks.

The raven dives past us in a blink. For a few seconds, I can hear the scratchy flutter of wings below and then it stops.

“Damn,” Vos’s mutter floats up, then louder, “Hold on.”

The yellow glow coming from where he is below us turns brighter, and there’s a sudden rumbling screeching protest that I swear vibrates the ice and rock we’re all clinging to. Enough that Reven climbs back up to hold on around me like he’s pinning me onto the wall. The same way he once held me onto a tiny ladder bridge suspended over the ocean channel between Wildernyss and Tyndra. At least until the Hollow came for us.

Something below gives and I can hear a tumble of rocks followed by a backdraft of ice- and dust-filled air that shoots upward. By the time it settles, we’re all coughing, and if the others are like me, also squinting through grit in their eyes.

“Vos?” I call, then cough again.

“I’m all right.”

“What the hells was that?” Reven demands.

“I had to force the ice to move out of our way,” Vos calls back. He’s even lower now based on the sound of his voice. “We’re at the bottom. Come on.”