Page 30 of Wizards & Weavers (Cozy Questing #1)

Chapter

Twenty-One

Not an hour later, Braiden found himself wishing for a little bit of fire. More than the pitiful flicker in his lantern, at least, which barely warmed him up, his fingers already stiffening from the chill.

Gods, how could it be so cold down here? All these pillars of ice, the wet, slippery crunch of the ground underfoot? Braiden thought of ice wands and frosty beverages back at the night market. He’d never be able to enjoy one ever again.

Braiden knew for a fact that it couldn’t have been that long since they’d left the Underborough, and yet it felt like hours upon hours had passed. How he longed for another bowl of the burrowfolk stew, missing the warmth in his belly — the warmth on any part of his body, really.

And yet he felt worse for his friends, watching as the tips of Warren’s ears flicked and quivered, his body shuddering as the chill traveled down his back.

Elyssandra gathered her robes more tightly around her body, her pale hands reaching up to rub each opposite shoulder.

The glow of her blueberry pin pulsed each time she took it into her hands, the passage darkening as she cupped it for what little warmth it offered.

Even Augustin, the wind wizard himself, stamped his feet every few dozen steps, like he was willing his blood to course faster, to run hotter under his skin.

If the man who braved high, chilling winds to fly unopposed through the clouds thought it was freezing down here, Braiden figured it was fine to be a little bit of a baby about the cold.

He stared hard at the back of Elyssandra’s head, trying to divine the location of the hairpin that held her magical little house. Something about this cold was so unnatural, sapping the strength from his bones and his body at an unsettling rate.

He sighed as he thought of a long soak in the spacious tub tucked away in the bedroom that he and Augustin had shared.

Where would Warren fit into the picture in terms of sleeping arrangements?

Would the three of them have to cram into the same bed?

It would be far too tight a fit, but maybe Warren’s fur would lend some extra warmth under the blankets.

Warmth. Braiden bit on his lower lip, chiding himself for his silliness, his selfishness.

Here he was wearing a sweater of the finest othergoat wool when his friends were suffering through this hostile underground chill.

All three of his friends would need their strength about them in a fight, and they couldn’t be at full fitness if they were wasting all their energy shivering and chattering their teeth.

With a tingling at his fingertips, Braiden called on his weaving magic. His foot scraped against frosty stone as he turned his body, the fingers of one hand swiping at the air in a wide circle. The magicked threads glowed as they lingered in the air.

He raked his fingers again and again down the length of his conjuration, imbuing his design with a touch of warmth, a tinge of comfort.

This wasn’t so different from the beverage cozies he sometimes crafted for drinks at Dudley’s tavern, a temporary creation meant to help regulate something — or in this case, someone’s temperature.

It took a little extra magic to make the threads retain natural warmth, but this was worth it.

Braiden’s new friends deserved it. He smiled as his creation detached itself from the air, falling lazily into his outstretched hands, the thick cords of yarn as soft and plush as anything he’d ever made with his magic.

And then he stumbled, catching his foot on a rock — or was it weakness from expending too much magic? — but a pair of strong hands caught him. Augustin’s face wrinkled with concern as he stared hard into Braiden’s eyes.

“Are you all right? I know you want to hone your magic for whatever may come, but it’s unwise to go burning yourself out willy-nilly.”

“I’m fine,” Braiden said, straightening himself, embarrassed and a little flattered that the wizard cared. “And I’m not just flinging my magic around. Warren, here. Put this on.”

The burrowfolk eyed the thing in Braiden’s hand warily. Warren had his fur to help keep him warm, but Braiden could tell that it wasn’t enough.

“It goes around your neck,” Braiden said. “Try it on.”

There were no winters here, Warren had said. He had never known the need for a scarf. But Warren accepted it, his eyes momentarily brightening at the warmth of the conjured fabric.

“I can’t imagine this would help very much with my mobility in battle.”

Braiden shrugged. “Take it off when you have to, then. Or don’t. It’s only a temporary solution. I’m not good enough with my magic to make it last forever, but it should help keep you warm for an hour or two.”

Within moments of wrapping the conjured scarf around his neck, Warren’s ears had drooped in relaxation, a disarmed smile spreading across his mouth.

“Well, this is just lovely. Thank you.”

“That’s awfully nice of you, Braid,” Elyssandra said, rubbing her hands briskly. “What a kind gesture.”

Braiden could sense a touch of envy in her tone. As if he would leave her — or Augustin, for that matter — out in the cold. “Give me a minute,” he said, taking some time to weave each of them an ensorcelled scarf.

It took him mere seconds to crisscross warp and weft, to make a pair of scarves long enough to wind around the neck and shoulders, but Braiden knew that even these smallest acts of magic were sapping his reserves of energy.

Elyssandra thrilled and tittered as she threw on her scarf, delighted by the warmth.

Augustin was a little less enthusiastic, giving Braiden a suspicious, appraising look. “And you’re quite sure you’re strong enough to continue, even after being so generous with your magic?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Braiden said, hoping it was too dark for Augustin to spy the sheen of sweat that had formed along his forehead.

He thrust the third scarf out, his arm slightly shaking.

They would find time to rest later. For now, while the weaving magic held, they needed to press on and take advantage of the warmth.

Augustin made a thoroughly inappropriate sound when his scarf met his skin, the kind of ululating moan that Braiden thought belonged behind closed doors, in the privacy of a bedroom. He took it as Augustin’s wordless approval of his skill in weaving.

The wizard clasped Braiden’s hand tightly in thanks, at once tugging him forward gently as a signal to continue the journey.

Augustin’s fingers hooking through his, the square of his palm — all of it was warmer than anything Braiden could have hoped to conjure.

Augustin unclasped their fingers to rearrange his scarf, then rearrange it again.

Braiden tried not to feel so sore about it.

He would have liked for Augustin to hold his hand all the way through the tunnel, for the warmth if not for the physical support, and certainly not for any other reason, real or imagined.

He could feel his strength flagging, disappointed that the wizard had been right about using too much magic too quickly.

Now the passage had narrowed, almost so that the four of them had to move single file.

It was a pattern in this dungeon, Braiden was sure of it: tight long passages that opened into great cavernous spaces.

They’d seen it with the luminous cavern with its glowing mushrooms and its bubbling pool, and then again with the underground village of the Underborough.

It was only a matter of time until this long, freezing tunnel led them somewhere massive, surprising, and miraculous.

A man could dream, couldn’t he?

It took about another half hour, by which time Braiden’s legs were half turned to jelly, but his prediction proved fruitful. There it was, just up ahead, the opening to what most assuredly would be an icy cavern. Would it be massive? Perhaps. Was it surprising? Not in the least. And miraculous? Eh.

Elyssandra ushered her blueberry lantern forward, the bluish glow revealing a wicked set of spikes lingering above the cavern threshold. They were natural formations, glimmering icicles that made the cave mouth resemble an actual mouth, the gaping maw of an immense frost-born creature.

Braiden thought back to the entrance of the entire dungeon, how he’d wished for it to be a little more menacing, just a tad more thematic. He regretted wishing for anything sinister or exciting at all.

The icicles made an oddly pleasant tinkling noise when Warren tapped them with the end of his staff. Good thinking, testing them to see if they might threaten the party in their passage, falling out of the cave roof like loose teeth.

Warren turned over his shoulder to show off a cheeky grin as he improvised a clinking, ringing tune on the various lengths of sharpened ice. Everyone laughed. Braiden was glad for the chance to chuckle and exhale, a tiny moment of relief.

The spikes of ice held fast as they followed the floating blueberries through the passage. From this far behind, the pin looked like a lonely ghost, a wisp of light pulsating in a frozen forest.

Larger icicles were scattered throughout the cavern, these growing upward from the ground. As Elyssandra’s berries illuminated more of the space, Braiden saw that the largest pillars weren’t only made of ice.

Some of them contained skeletons, frozen in frost and time. He might have thought of it as a graveyard except for the gnawing feeling that these bodies hadn’t been entombed this way on purpose.

In most any other circumstance, being surrounded by frozen skeletons would have frightened the living daylights out of Braiden. But he only felt a twinge of sadness, an odd sensation to hold in his heart for this icy necropolis of forgotten strangers.

Warren was the first to speak, tapping the butt of his staff against the base of a frozen pillar. “I’ve never seen anything like this. The explosion must have unblocked the way to this cavern.”

“Are these adventurers?” Elyssandra held her hands just above the ice, as if standing at a shop window, afraid to smudge the glass. “Are they from Weathervale, somehow?”

Augustin shook his head. “The state of these bones, they couldn’t possibly be. These are old. Very old, indeed. A different time. A different place.”

Braiden couldn’t deduce anything helpful from the tattered clothing that still clung to the ancient skeletons.

This might have been his one area of expertise, but these poor things were only wearing moldering scraps.

A few skeletons were still clad in armor — warriors in life, perhaps — but even the metal had worn and rusted away.

“They weren’t buried this way,” Braiden muttered, thinking of the town cemetery far up above. They didn’t have unusual burial customs in Weathervale, mostly the same common practice of stuffing a body in a box and giving it to the earth for safekeeping.

Ah, and there it was: splinters of wood suspended in the ice, fragments of stone.

These bodies had once been buried even deeper, but this explosion of unrelenting cold — the kaboom heard across Weathervale, that seemed to have summoned half of Aidun’s adventurers — had it truly been so powerful as to hurl these old skeletons upward from the depths?

“This dungeon goes far deeper than I thought,” Augustin said, all but confirming Braiden’s suspicions. “There is much to see here, so much to study, and yet the sheer force of the explosion concerns me deeply.”

Elyssandra folded her hands and studied the wizard’s face. “You’re thinking about it again, aren’t you? Sealing the dungeon.”

Warren’s ears stood at attention, a pair of exclamation points. “This is the last thing I wanted to report back to the Underborough, but the sooner, the better. The elders will refuse to leave the village. There has to be something else we can do.”

A knot twisted in Braiden’s stomach. Sealing the dungeon meant sealing away his greatest chance of saving the shop, but he knew it was selfish. It felt wrong to still think of the moongrass filament when there were burrowfolk lives at stake.

How could he deny the grave danger that a second blast would bring, seeing these corpses exhumed by an explosion from below? If only they could find its source.

“I know we’re all aching,” Augustin said, “and cold, and exhausted. But we must press on until we find the root of the problem. Then we can regroup and assess what must be done to mitigate the danger. If sealing truly is the only option — ”

The wizard trailed off. Braiden met his gaze, but he said nothing, only folding his arms and sighing in resignation. He leaned back against the closest pillar of ice, but only after checking that this one didn’t contain a skeleton. It would feel disrespectful.

For whatever reason this particular pillar reached up far higher than the others, grown thick around like the trunk of an especially old tree. Braiden frowned when he spied a second enormous pillar situated mere feet away.

How strange that two of these icy spires would build up to an approximately similar thickness, and presumably an approximately similar height, too. Braiden tilted his head back, trying to trace exactly how high the pillars went.

He frowned even harder when he found both pillars converging in one spot, then continuing ever higher past the point where they fused. He scratched the top of his head, only now appreciating the bizarre knobbly patches that sprouted halfway up each pillar, almost perfect mirrors of each other.

He glanced down, again marveling at how both pillars terminated in large, lengthy bases attached to the ground, oblongs each tipped with five large icicles that resembled — that resembled —

Braiden shuddered. “Toes.”

“Did you say something, Braiden?” Augustin leaned closer. “What was that?”

These icicles on the ground were toes the way that the long rectangular bases were feet. And the knobbly patches halfway up the pillars — halfway up the legs — were supposed to be knees.

Perhaps it was a statue. Braiden gulped. It was only a statue, wasn’t it? A very rudimentary and very crude ice sculpture of a very large and very jagged man. That was all it was. And yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that it was something more.

“I think we should leave,” Braiden said. “Right now.”

“Absolutely not,” Augustin replied. “Not until we identify the exact source — the exact source of — ”

The wizard trailed off again, but this time it wasn’t because he’d run out of words. An immense cracking noise had split the gloom of the cavern.

One foot. The great, frozen thing above them had just lifted its foot.