Chapter 17
T he path was short and ended abruptly.
Aelrie stared down into a seemingly bottomless pit. The purple glow intensified the deeper the hole sank. Shikra went this way to get to Dark Elf land, but she could see no ladder or way to climb down.
How did he do it? Especially since there was nothing but a gaping hole before her eyes. A very deep, gaping hole that gave her a fear of heights for the first time ever.
She stared down into the abyss for a long while, so long that the violet glowing light from the bottom started to pulse, faintly at first. It then rose like the tempo of a drum, and even though there was no sound, there was a pounding in her skull.
The light and sound. It drew her closer.
She leaned toward the hole to get closer to that pulsing light and sound.
Her feet wobbled on the edge, and her toes pointed downward, making her body fall forward. Her arms swung frantically at her sides to regain her balance. Leaning her body back, she was able to get both feet flat on solid ground .
She took one step back from the hole as her heart pounded wildly in her chest, withdrawing a long breath she’d been holding. That was close. But …
Down there. At the bottom. That was energy. That was magic. It was pulling her deeper into the abyss.
Think.
Shikra must have had a way down. If Dark Elves used this as a passageway to the surface, that meant it was easy for them to use, but also, it was something only they knew about.
If she left this abyss and retreated to the surface, she would never have her revenge, never solve Lindana’s murder. And if she fell from this distance, to who knows what death may lie below. Well. With either choice, her tale would end here, one way or another.
It was a leap of faith. Everything in her logical mind warned her against it. Fear. Danger. Death. She had to brush these aside and clear her mind, or she would never be able to go through with this.
Believe.
Closing her eyes and drowning out every thought screaming at her not to do this, she took a step off the ledge.
Of course, she fell immediately, but a scream did not cross her lips.
Her eyes opened. She was falling, but slowly. It was more like she was descending deeper into the mountain, maybe even far deeper than that.
She floated down into the abyss, and the purple lights glowed brighter, turning everything around her into blinding violet.
She shielded her eyes at first, but the brightness lessened into a calming purple hue the deeper she descended.
Gazing around in wonder, there were clusters of crystals ranging from big to small to enormous embedded into the rock surrounding her.
The magical crystal lights were soothing, giving a reprieve to the oppressive darkness.
But there was also something heartbreaking about them.
To look upon them was to feel a strange sense of longing for something lost forever.
How sad the Dark Elves must have been to lose their home on Yggdrasil, where they once lived in the dark southern forest of Nevandil.
Though the Dark Elves deserved it for starting the war, she couldn’t help but feel pity for them because they could never return to their ancestral homeland.
This was because it no longer existed. Light Elves claimed the land after the war.
Now the southern forest was green and full of light, not mist and shadows, and was renamed Evandil.
The Light Elf city, Alfheim, was built on this newly claimed land twelve thousand years ago at the end of the great war. The city where she once lived a peaceful existence with her priestess was the city she vowed to return to one day.
But to be cast out of the light and thrust into the dark, never to see the sun again and feel its warm embrace or gaze upon the moon and stars in all their serene magnificence.
She understood Dark Elf resentment. She felt it too. Her life was simple, a peaceful existence of one day flowing into the next without any discernible differences between them. The pain of having that stability, only for it to be ripped away .
As she descended further out into the open now, the sheer size of the cavern came into her view.
Purple crystals glowed through the murky darkness, rows of teeth-like stalactites and stalagmites cut through the ceiling and rose from the deep chasms; paths of rock crossed through the chasms, some covered in mushrooms and fungi of different sorts; and off in the distance, partially covered by the gloom, tall buildings with knife-like spires clustered together, a city or town.
The bottom appeared below her. At first, it was a gray light, but as she descended further and it came better into her sight, she realized it was a platform. Her booted soles landed softly on top of a circular gray stone with runes carved in black all around it.
This was magic.
Written in the runes was “elevator,” a word she’d never heard of before.
So, this was magic that “elevates?”
Something then pulled her back up. The magic worked both ways, it seemed, up and down.
She stepped off the platform to avoid going back up and walked down the steps at its base.
The path widened as she walked further down, and as she stood at its edge, she gasped. An immense cavern stretched into the distance as far as her keen elf eyes could see.
This was the true realm of the Dark Elves, the Evergloom.
Clusters of magical crystals embedded on rock and wall bathed the stone in a soft violet glow that sparkled and refracted off the damp surfaces.
Massive stalactites and stalagmites jutted from the rocky ceiling and floor as winding pathways of rock that were formed and weathered over time created meandering bridges that connected both up and down and left and right.
Gigantic mushrooms formed a forest of fungi that glowed spectral blue, bioluminescent violet, and warm orange.
Arcane energy hummed in the air, permeating the darkness with the sheer magnitude of magic needed to light the Evergloom from the purple crystals.
Through the beauty and wonder of this hidden world, something caught her eye, making her take pause.
Off to her right, there was a large structure sitting up high in the cavern.
To get there, she would have to take a path that started below her and wound around massive stalagmites.
But she could not see the whole pathway from her vantage point; the murk swallowed all in the distance.
The crystals and mushrooms did provide light, but worked best the closer one got to the source. There was a point where the eye could see, even keen elf eyes, but past that was gloom, a dense haze of shadows and silence.
The only reason she could see the structure further out was because of its size and the lights illuminating it. It must be a settlement or manor, or something to that effect. But she would have to make the trek to it without knowing what may lie around the corner.
She had no choice but to go forward, already resolved in her decision that there was no going back for her, even if she died here in this dark place all alone and soon to be forgotten .
The darkness was broken occasionally by the phosphorescent lights from the crystals and mushrooms as she passed them—a welcoming sight, even if they were not enough to fully light her surroundings as much as sunlight could.
Add to this the tomb-like silence, and the home of the Dark Elves possessed an eerie kind of stillness.
But this did not mean it was uninhabited.
Malevolence breathed from every nook and cranny, hiding all manner of creatures, both the shy and timid and those with ill intent.
The structure in the distance left her sight as she walked down a narrow path that wound itself around stalagmites in between chasms on either side.
As she walked ahead and up a pathway, she was able to see, atop a rock that rose from the depths.
It had a wide, flat surface area that housed a colony of fungal growth that grew on the sides of the rocks littering the horizontal surface.
Perfect hiding spaces.
She trod through carefully. The path curved around the mushrooms, but because many of them had grown large and unchecked in this wild Evergloom, it was hard for her to see around each bend.
Her ears pricked up. There was a shuffling sound coming from somewhere, but she couldn’t tell which direction. She took a deep breath and reached for her dagger.