Chapter Thirty-Six
We land in a pile, our fall cushioned by sand.
“Is everyone alright?” calls Ronan, waving the torch. He sends out light magic orbs into the room, illuminating the small chamber.
Sand is pouring in from crevices up above, cascading into the narrow space in waterfalls of golden silt.
It’s filling the room.
“Where’s my cane?” calls Quinn.
“Here,” I say, grabbing it and tossing it to her. I pull the sickle out of the sand, grateful it didn’t impale anything on the way down. “Seth?”
He spits out a mouthful of sand. “I’m stuck on something.”
Ronan wades to him, digging near his waist. “It’s your belt. It’s caught.”
“We have a problem here. The room is filling up.”
I look around and see that Quinn is right. The level of sand in the room is increasing, and quickly. “Look at the walls. There must be another button or latch like the last room.”
“A little help would be nice,” says Seth. He’s trapped near the ground, buried up to his chest.
“I’m trying,” says Ronan. His frantic digging is having little result with the sand pouring in from overhead.
I abandon my search of the walls, wading over to them. I take the torch from Ronan so he can dig with both hands.
“I don’t see anything,” says Quinn. “If one of these bricks is a button, it must be buried already.”
“Try pushing the lower ones if you can reach them.”
“Fuck that. Help me!” says Seth, the sand up to his neck.
“Godsdammit,” says Ronan. “Hand me the sickle. I’m going to have to cut him out.”
“Don’t hurt me!”
“I won’t if you’ll stay still.”
Seth pulls forward, his hands swimming in the loose sand, trying to escape from the sickle Ronan is plunging down towards him. I reach out for Seth, pulling him by the arm as hard as I can, and then grabbing onto him with my shadows and pulling harder.
“Got it!” says Ronan, and Seth springs forward and into me, my head striking the wall.
“Sylvie!” cries Ronan, wading through waist-deep sand to reach me.
The room spins with the force of the impact, but Ronan is there in seconds with his healing light.
“I’ve got you,” he says.
“You always do,” I reply, kissing him.
Seth groans. “Where’s my dagger? Ronan, did you feel my dagger down there?”
“It wasn’t my top priority. Be careful over there. I don’t know what you got stuck on, but I’m not helping you again.”
I look at Ronan when he mentions getting stuck on something, making the same realization at the same time.
We wade through the sand together, having to dig deep now to reach where Seth was moments earlier.
“I’ve got it,” says Ronan. He pulls on something, and there’s a loud, metallic click.
A lever.
A door opens several feet down, the sand rushing out of the room and carrying us with it on a tide as a breeze blows into the room. “Hold on!” shouts Ronan.
We ride the wave into the largest natural chamber yet, and the first with a shaft of natural light illuminating it from outside. “Got everything?” I ask, shaking the sand from my clothes and boots and taking the sickle back from Ronan.
“Torch,” he says.
“Cane,” says Quinn.
“Dagger,” says Seth, pulling it from the heel of his boot and sheathing it once more. “Damn, I could have been castrated.”
“What a pity that would have been,” says Quinn. I can’t tell if she’s joking or not.
“Well, this room seems straightforward at least,” says Ronan, gesturing to a large gap between two sections of stone floor.
There’s a bridge across the gap made from rope and wooden planks. It’s half destroyed, but there are vines reaching towards it from gaps in the walls.
I slowly approach the vines, noting the vessel symbol on the ground in front of the bridge. “Nature magic. If we had it, we could fix the bridge like the priestess trained the wisteria over our wedding arch, maybe?”
I look back and see Quinn spinning around the room on her cane, calculating something. She pulls her own dagger from her belt and slashes at a vine.
“No. No way,” says Ronan, seeing what she intends before I do.
She’s going to try to jump for it, using the vine as a swing.
“You’ll never make it,” I say. The vine is long—she cut one of the ones that comes in from outside, but who knows how strong it is?
“I’m never going to make it across that bridge with this thing,” she says, holding up her cane. “It’s this, or nothing.”
And then she ties the vine around her waist and darts forward as fast as she can, flying into the ravine.
“Wooooohoooo!”
“Quinn!” I shout. She swings for a long, harrowing moment, and it looks like she’s going to make it.
But then the makeshift rope begins to slow.
“Fuck!” shouts Ronan, reaching out with his single shadow tendril.
I send mine after his, his pushing and mine pulling on Quinn’s dangling body until it reaches the other side. She tosses her cane onto the ledge then scrambles up it.
“Yes!” she screams, resting her weight on her good leg and pumping her fists in the air. “That was so much fun. I wonder how much it would cost to live here—”
“You’re insane!” I shout back, but I can’t help but laugh.
“Come to the edge. I’ll throw you the rope.”
We help Seth across first. He swears the entire way, his hands slipping on the vine, but I wrap my shadow around his wrists to keep him from falling.
“What’s over there?” I ask Quinn as Seth throws back the rope.
There are three doorways visible on the back wall. Quinn groans when she approaches them. “Water.”
“As in…?”
“As in the halls are flooded. All of them. And it’s pitch black in there.”
That’s a problem for future Sylvie. Present Sylvie needs to work up the nerve to take this vine over a ravine.
I lean over from a foot or so away from the edge.
The depths are so fathomless my shadow-born vision doesn’t help me see the bottom.
Then I look up to where the vine enters the cave through a narrow gap.
“Maybe we should try the bridge.” Sure, there are a couple of loose planks, but if we take it at a run, it should be alright.
“If the bridge breaks when we’re on it, we’ll have to climb up, and we might not be on the right side,” says Ronan.
“And if the vine breaks?”
“We grab the ledge with our shadows and pull ourselves up.”
I’m not completely certain our shadows are strong enough to do that. Most of Quinn’s weight was supported by the vine.
“You go first,” I say. I don’t say why, but I’m sure Ronan can tell I’m thinking that if something were to happen to me, he wouldn’t be able to make it across.
“But if I fall, it would doom you as well.”
“Together, then?”
Ronan picks me up, tying the vine around us both. “Together. In three. Two. One!”
Ronan breaks into a run, leaping for the chasm. The vine makes a terrible scraping sound against the rock, but it holds as we cross over the lowest part of the ravine.
And then the tendrils begin to snap, sending shockwaves through the vine. “Shadows!” I shout.
I throw out my shadows as Ronan throws out his, gripping onto the ledge. Our forward momentum is almost enough to get us there, if the vine could just hold on a little longer—
There’s a horrible scraping sound, and then it snaps completely.