Chapter 9 #2
“No, they weren’t. I just finished scanning both walls before I stepped.”
Henrik straightens, his full attention on the symbols carved into the stone.
"Can you read them?" Wylder asks.
He doesn't answer immediately, which I hope means he’s deep in thought. His gaze moves across the wall in a way that's less reading and more parsing, like he's translating not just language but logic.
A full minute passes before he steps back.
"They’re instructions to reset the mechanism and bring the floor back up.
" He traces a finger without touching the stone.
"It says one of these sections triggers the return.
Press the wrong one and—" He tilts his head side to side.
“Well, it doesn't exactly specify, but the gist of it is ‘don’t press incorrectly. '"
"Helpful," Rowan says.
“Screw that,” Asher says. “We reset it and it takes out the next guys, or it’s another trap and you follow those instructions and we’re all blasted with sauron gas or something.”
I chuckle. “I think you mean sarin gas, sweetie. Sauron is the big baddy in Lord of the Rings. But yes, you’re right.”
“What’s your plan, then?” Henrik asked. “That’s one hell of a gap.”
“I’ll teleport everyone across.”
Wylder looks across the chasm at me as if he might protest, but I’ve been watching Asher practicing and have faith in him.
“A great idea. I’ll go first.” I step in close to Asher and wrap my arm around him. “Focus on the other side. Just like Tanner’s been teaching you.”
He dips his chin. “I’ve got this. Focus on the target, no drifting.”
A split second later, I’m standing on the other side of the gap, and Wylder lets out a relieved breath. “Well done, Hendrix. I’m impressed.”
Orion pats Wylder’s shoulder and grins. “Oh, you have no idea how impressive that man can be when he’s focused.”
I press my hands over my ears. “La-la-la-la.”
Orion laughs, and by the time we’re settled down, our entire group is on the correct side of the floor trap.
“All right, then.” Freya gestures forward. “Shall we?”
Before we’ve even gotten ten feet, the floor rumbles and we all brace ourselves. A deep grinding fills the tunnel, low and mechanical, and we all spin toward the gap.
Stone rises from somewhere below, slow and deliberate, sliding upward in sections like a puzzle reassembling itself. Everyone stares in total silence until the surface comes level with the rest of the ground and settles with a solid, final thud.
The grinding stops.
Asher looks at the floor and grins. “Huzzah! I solved it."
"You didn't solve shit." Rowan turns around fully to look at him. "You evaded it.”
"And negated the trap. It gave up because I beat it at its own game."
She rolled her eyes. “If you say so.”
"I do. Didn’t you just hear me? I said so just now." He grins, delighted with himself. Orion, at the back, makes a sound that might be a laugh that he's deciding not to fully commit to.
I pat his shoulder and push him into motion. “You’re the shit, buddy. I celebrate everything about you.”
His grin widens. “That’s because you’re a remarkably perceptive and intelligent woman.”
And with that, we continue on our way.
The second trap is some kind of magical motion sensor that Asher triggers. When the ceiling drops two feet in half a second, we all duck. Asher takes the edge of a stone ledge across his forehead in the rush to not get cracked in the skull.
He's fine, just bleeding, and spends the next ten minutes milking it while Rowan presses a folded cloth to his head and tells him to stop being a baby.
"I’m not a baby,” he insists. "I’m a hero. I found the trap."
"With your face," Rowan says.
"With my forehead, specifically. Very noble. Very brave."
The third trap is a crosscurrent of pressure magic built into a doorway arch that Henrik detects before anyone steps through, pressing his hand to the frame and feeling the charge hum against his palm.
Wylder finds the trigger on that one—a root system grown through a crack in the stone, old and dried, that responds when he coaxes it back to life.
He disables it completely and the arch falls still, allowing us to step through.
The fourth leaves Rowan with a bruised shoulder and a genuine scorch on the hem of her jacket from a burst of ancient ward fire. When it hits, she rolls forward and is smothered by shadows faster than anyone can process.
They recede when the fire is out, and she brushes herself off, and inspects the damage done to her jacket with a homicidal glare. She points at no one in particular. "I'm billing the Order for this."
The progress is slow, but I feel like we’re doing our part to help map out the new tunnel system and making it safer for the next team to come through.
Tired, a little banged up, and with the novelty of the mysterious tunnels long since replaced by annoyance and apprehension, we check our position on the map.
“We’re through the worst of it.” Freya refers to the map, running her finger over a section indicating where we are.
The tunnel branches right and then straightens, and the map shows a long corridor with a series of marks along its length. “If I’m right, we’ve joined back up to this bit here.”
I study the map and yeah, that’s what it looks like. “All right. Let’s still be careful, though. If we’re right, we’re clear. If we’ve miscalculated, we’re still in the thick of traps.”
Wylder nods. “Then we don’t relax just yet. If anyone feels anything, hears anything, call it out. We still treat all of it as a potential trigger."
A general ripple of agreement rolls through the group.
Single file, we move into what we believe to be the final corridor. Orion and Rowan take the lead, as they have all morning. Freya is ahead of me, keeping an eye on the map. Asher and Wylder are right behind me. And Henrik takes up the rear.
This corridor is narrower than the last stretch and longer, and though the light from Freya's headlamp pushes the dark back for an impressive distance, it still doesn't reach the far end.
I watch the floor.
I watch the ceiling.
I watch the walls where they meet the floor and ceiling.
Nothing looks suspect. No seams, no symbols, no variation in the stone. I take that as a good sign and hope it means we really have finished with the traps.
We make it twenty feet without incident, then thirty, and then fifty. The air doesn't change. The stone doesn't shift. Rowan's shadows don't flag anything. Orion doesn’t sense anything.
I let myself breathe a fraction more easily and—
The hit comes hard and fast.
One moment I'm deciding where to place my foot. The next Asher’s arms wrap across my sternum, and we pivot fast. He presses me hard against the wall, and my cheek hits cool stone.
At the same time, a snapping sound cracks through the air with a lash of sickly violet-white light. The bolt of magical energy tears out of the wall at chest height and pierces straight through Wylder.
I think I scream, but my hearing is blocked out by the rush of blood now thundering in my ears.
Wylder’s eyes blow wide, then he drops…