Chapter 45
Forty-Five
My pulse stutters. “Riven,” I croak, reaching out with a shaking hand. “Look.”
He’s beside me in an instant, concern sharpening his features, until he sees what I’m pointing at. He kneels, running a tentative finger along the small mark.
The stone hums.
A soft, shimmering glow unfurls beneath his touch. It seems like old magic waking from a long sleep.
Riven’s eyes widen. “This isn’t random.” He glances up at the branching tunnels, suddenly alert, suddenly hopeful. “These are markers. They must be all throughout the catacombs, guiding paths, routes, something.”
I straighten slowly, my heart pounding for an entirely new reason. “We’re not lost?” I breathe, terrified of letting hope settle in my chest.
Riven meets my gaze, the glow still flickering between us. He goes still. Then, slowly, he raises his hand.
A faint shimmer pulses from his fingertips, a soft ripple, like water disturbed. My breath catches.
“What are you doing?” I whisper.
“Signature sensing, a crude version,” he mutters. “The symbols will have energy currents, like veins, running all the way through. If we follow them, they should hopefully lead us to the catacombs.”
I watch the ripple drift down the corridor ahead of us, then veer sharply right.
We both straighten immediately. “There. That’s a natural channel. Old magic always runs toward the heart of a place. These markers are the key.”
We move quickly now, Riven casting soft pulses of magic that rebound off the walls and guide us deeper, deeper, until the air changes, colder, but steadier. The ripple finally dissolves at the mouth of a massive arched opening, the stone carved with various symbols—including magpies.
Riven lowers his hand. “We’re here,” he says quietly. “This must be the catacombs’ original entrance.”
I exhale shakily, realising only now how tight my chest is.
“So,” I murmur, trying to lighten the mood. “Does this count as me choosing a good route or–”
“Don’t push your luck,” Riven says, though the faintest smirk tugs at his mouth. He takes my hand and we step through the archway. The tunnel narrows on the other side, the faint rushing of running water echoing through the chamber from somewhere above.
The ceiling curves inward, repeating arches carved into the stone overhead, covered in so many cobwebs it’s a wonder I can see the ceiling at all.
Debris crunches loudly under our feet as we walk through the gloom, until a faint light appears round a corner, and we stop next to a gently flickering lantern.
I look down at my feet and instantly regret it.
The debris I thought we were walking on is bones. Hundreds of them.
Bile rises in my throat, and I slap a hand over my mouth, trying not to heave. Death is no stranger to me thanks to my job, but it turns out this is where my stomach draws the line. Riven lifts my chin up with a finger, his breath ragged.
“We need to keep moving. Don’t look down.”
I nod, words refusing to form on my lips. He looks awful. His eyes continuously glaze over then refocus, over and over. It’s a miracle he can even stand at this point.
“Why is this happening to you?” I start to sob, despair clawing at my skin.
“I don’t know.” He’s breathless now, his shoulders heaving. “We need to–”
He staggers back, his eyes glazing over completely once more, panting heavily as he steadies himself against the grimy wall.
“Riven–”
His eyes sharpen. “Run, now!”
I don’t need to be told twice.
He grabs my hand and we sprint, our boots slipping on the bones and snapping them.
Mercifully, unlike the tunnels, there are no diversions, just one long, seemingly endless passage, dimly lit with intermittent lanterns.
I keep glancing at him, fear consuming me as the anguish in his features becomes more pronounced.
Our eyes lock for a second, and the devastation on his face makes my heart stall.
“We need to hurry,” he pants. “Her fate is being sealed.”
How he’s navigating in the dark at such speed while his eyes are continuously becoming blind from visions is beyond me, but I don’t have time to question it. Finally up ahead, a cooler sort of light appears, marking the end of the catacombs.
Or so I thought.
We burst out of the passage into an enormous cavern, and even in my panic-fuelled state, it is nothing short of staggering. A place so old and vast it feels like stepping into the lungs of the world itself.
The tunnel spits us out onto a stone stairway that descends into a cathedral-sized hollow, and for a moment I forget how to breathe.
Pillars of rock—some carved by hands long dead, others shaped only by time and the slow drip of the underworld—rise like titans on either side.
Their surfaces are etched in layered ridges, like the rings of ancient trees petrified into stone.
A cold, blue-grey haze coils through the chamber, drifting in lazy swirls that blur the distant arches overhead.
The ceiling seems impossibly high, lost in shadow, and every sound is swallowed and warped—the soft echo of our footsteps, Riven’s uneven breathing.
A faint crackle sounds from surrounding torches, the flames shuddering with every draft and painting the cavern with shifting gold that makes the shadows seem alive.
Far below, the staircase vanishes into darkness, but ahead of us, at the edge of sight, there’s the faint ghost of an archway, framed by drifting mist like an apparition patiently waiting.
“The Mirror Cavern is through there,” Riven says, panting heavily as he follows my gaze.
My heartbeat thunders in my ears. Everything feels too large, too silent. But I force myself forward, gripping the rough stone wall to steady my trembling legs. Bones skitter down the steps, dislodged by our boots as we hurriedly make our way up the crumbling steps.
It feels like the grave of a lost civilization…and we are trespassing on its bones.
The archway at the end swallows us whole, its stone cold against my shoulders as I slip past Riven and into the next cavern, only to stumble to a halt.
The chamber beyond feels wrong.
It is vast, but not like the huge hollow we just crossed.
This space hums unnervingly, as though something enormous is breathing beneath the floor.
The air hangs heavy with a fog that isn’t quite mist and isn’t quite smoke, drifting in slow, deliberate curls that shiver when they move, as if reacting to our presence.
At the far end of the cavern stands a mirror.
My throat goes dry.
Just like Riven described, it’s at least fifty feet tall, framed in a stone veined with shifting silver that moves like liquid beneath its surface.
The mirror itself is darker, an obsidian void broken only by vague ripples of light, like a reflection trapped under deep water.
Every now and then, something glimmers within it, something not quite a shape, not quite a face. A wrongness. A pull.
It makes me feel sick.
I tear my eyes away and the nausea instantly lifts.
A crumbling dais sits directly before it, fractured by age and pressure, what remains of its engravings almost clawed away by time.
Riven inhales sharply beside me, clutching his temples, his visions seemingly brushing against whatever magic radiates from the structure.
But what freezes my breath is not the mirror.
It’s the figures surrounding it.
The Children of the Briar.
A circle of cloaked silhouettes stand tall and motionless, their hoods pulled low to conceal their faces.
They stand like silent sentinels around the dais, none of them moving or speaking.
Laying on the dais in the middle of them all are the bodies of the three dead seers.
Only now, their eyes are wide and unseeing, their throats slit.
Something prickles down my spine.
Impossible.
How can someone die twice? I examined those bodies myself, there’s no way they could’ve been alive.
Unless…it hits me like thunder, the staggering realisation that we’ve been skirting around the truth the entire time.
The tranquillising spell. We assumed it had gone wrong. But we must have been wrong.
But right now, I can’t focus on my mistakes, on the insanity of it all. This case, these murders…they feel horrifyingly insignificant now compared to the only thing that matters, that consumes me. I stumble across the room, Riven close on my heels.
“Where is she?” I scream, but still no one moves. “Tell me where she is!”
I grab the nearest cloaked figure, my hands fisting in the material of their hood as I shake their shoulders. A young, bearded man stares back at me wordlessly, a small smirk on his face. I shake him again.
“Tell me where Stryx is.”
Again, he says nothing. Just stares.
I release him with a huff of anger before turning to the woman next to him and receiving the same response. The tension in the cavern tightens around me like a noose. The cloaked figures remain silent, unblinking, their stillness maddening. My panic swells, growing into a furious, choking scream.
“Where is she?!” My voice echoes, raw and desperate, bouncing off the fog-laden walls. My hands claw at the air, at the circle, at anything that might yield an answer. The silence stretches unbearably long.
Then, a loud, slow clap thunders through the cavern, piercing the silence.
It echoes like a drum, each strike reverberating through the cavern and rattling the mist. I freeze, heart thundering in my ears.
From a side tunnel, stepping into the hazy light, a figure emerges. Calm and composed. Nauseatingly familiar. Her presence alone commands the room as she claps mockingly.
Impossible…
“Finally, the chosen one returns.”
She steps into the light and my blood runs cold.
Vesper.
She sneers at me with pure venom.
“You’re late.”