Chapter 47
Lilith frowned and looked into the distance — and her eyes went wide.
Deep within the Frostlands, a blinding pillar of white light had erupted skyward.
Dozens of yards across, it speared through the raging blizzard and vanished into the clouds, an icy-blue radiance wrapping it into a colossal column of frozen light.
Space itself warped around that much power, and a crushing pressure rolled out through the air.
Something ancient was waking.
The ground convulsed again — and this was no ordinary earthquake.
The entire landscape rolled like an ocean caught in a storm, deep rumbles rising from the surrounding mountains as sheets of snow tore loose from the slopes and thundered down, enormous white waves sweeping toward the basin from every direction.
"Damn it!"
They were standing in the ruins of Giles's Territory, ringed by mountains — and every slope was collapsing at once. The avalanches pouring in carried enough force to bury everything under hundreds of feet of snow.
"Get us airborne!"
The bone dragon loosed a low roar and spread its wings. Before it could lift off, strange light spread across the sky: pale-blue lines threading through the blizzard like a vast web. Wherever they passed, space twisted and fractured, and snowflakes froze in midair as though time itself had stopped.
Lilith's vision blurred. The world began to spin.
The roar of the avalanches, the howling wind, the shaking earth — all of it cut out at once, replaced by a strange vibration, like countless voices whispering at her ears, chanting the words of some forgotten spell.
She grabbed instinctively for something solid and found nothing.
Her body drifted in a weightless void with no up, no down, no direction at all.
She heard Giles shout somewhere nearby, his voice impossibly far away.
Then even that was gone.
Seconds passed, or minutes; she couldn't have said which. When her senses came back, she was lying on a freezing stone floor beneath a high vaulted ceiling, walls of smooth white stone glowing faintly around her.
Lilith pushed herself upright, still dizzy. "Where the hell did we end up?"
She swept her surroundings at once. A broad corridor, walled in towering white stone, every surface covered in dense runes and intricate images with pale-blue light flowing slowly through the markings — they looked almost alive.
At the corridor's far end stood a massive stone door, an ice dragon carved across its face in breathtaking detail, every scale distinct, two blue gemstones set into its eyes regarding the intruders with cold indifference.
"My Lord..."
Giles's weak voice came from nearby. He was propped against one wall, face drained of color, a shallow cut across his forehead — thrown into the stone during the teleportation, most likely.
The Bone Dragon crouched farther down the corridor, a low growl rolling in its throat as it eyed the unfamiliar surroundings.
The passage was too narrow for its wings; the enormous creature was, for all practical purposes, stuck.
Lilith set the dragon's predicament aside. She didn't understand the situation any better than it did. She went to Giles instead.
"Are you hurt?"
"Nothing serious." He wiped the blood from his forehead and stood, looking around. "Are we underground? Did that storm bring us here?"
No other explanation made sense. Lilith studied the ceiling, then the unnatural cold radiating up through the floor. "That storm was probably the start of the third omen. Whatever happened out there caught us in it."
Which meant this place was almost certainly tied to the mysterious treasure of the Frostlands. She had tried to stay out of the struggle entirely — and been dragged into an unknown location against her will for the trouble.
One question mattered above the rest: had the native factions gathered in the Frostlands been pulled in here too?
If the Werewolves, Vampires, Frost Sabertooths, and Goblins had all been transported into this place, the underground complex was about to become a battlefield. Not an ideal position to be standing in.
"Is there an exit?"
Lilith had no desire whatsoever to get tangled in a war between multiple Elite-ranked factions.
She moved along the corridor hunting for another route, fingertips brushing the glowing runes as she went.
Powerful magic ran through them — these were no decorations, but part of an ancient magical framework sustaining the stability of the whole complex.
She summoned Deathfire and pressed it to the wall. For the first time, the black flames failed to burn through something. She struck the stone directly. Same result. Not a mark.
"We're trapped."
Giles stayed surprisingly calm. "What do we do now?"
Lilith looked down the corridor ahead — the only path on offer. "We keep moving."
There was no other choice. She considered the architecture around them as they walked. "This place was created by the third omen. Until we know more, we'll call it a dungeon." She glanced back at Giles. "We were nowhere near the center of the Frostlands, and it still reached us."
"I was inside my Territory during the previous one," Giles said, nodding. "Its effects were nowhere near this severe."
"Exactly." Her expression turned thoughtful.
"This may be the first omen to create a physical location.
" The Goblins' movements came back to her.
"Based on everything we know, the third omen must mark the treasure's appearance — and this dungeon was probably created for exactly that.
" Her gaze drifted to the massive door at the corridor's end.
"Which means the treasure may be somewhere inside. "
Giles caught the interest sharpening in her voice. "My Lord, are we going after it?"
Lilith smiled. "We're already here. We might as well make it count."
The original plan had been to watch the factions fight over the treasure from a safe distance — she didn't need the treasure itself. The corpses, though. The corpses were another matter.
"Let's move. There may be other valuables tucked around the dungeon's outer sections. That's what we're looking for."
She started down the corridor, Giles following at once.
The Bone Dragon stayed behind, crouched miserably in the narrow passage with nowhere at all to go.