CHAPTER 2 #2
“Don’t start with the ‘but Augustine managed to survive, so there’s hope’ delusion. There’s no hope. There’s only gruesome death, painful death, and semi-painful death. You should take your hope and place it on the third.”
“You’re just a ray of sunshine, aren’t you?” I muttered, leaning back against my pillows.
“The irony that that is the meaning of my name is not lost on me.”
“What? Sunshine?” I rolled onto my side to look at her properly.
“Solana. But you can call me Lana. My friends do.”
“Are we friends now?”
She shrugged, rolling off the bed and standing. “If we’re going to die here together, we might as well be.”
I mimicked her movements, pushing the duvet off and getting to my feet carefully. They felt wobbly. “I’m Lirahna. Lirah for short.”
“Lirah and Lana,” she mused. “When they sing the song of our deaths, at least it will be poetic.”
I didn’t respond. Her words, though pessimistic, were not wrong. But I owed it to Umma to at least try to make it out of here. Hope was a dangerous thing, but deciding you’d failed before even trying to survive meant certain death.
I watched as Lana padded to the wooden door at the corner of the room and thumped twice. Nothing happened. She tried the doorknob, but it didn’t give.
“It’s locked,” she huffed, facing me. I smoothed down the crumpled night clothes I still wore from Augustine and surveyed the rest of the room.
Two identical cots, a narrow window, door, ceiling, walls.
No other furniture save for a small wooden chest built like a safe and painted the exact eggshell white of the walls, so that it camouflaged into its background.
My gaze would have skipped right over it were it not for the small indentation near the side where one might open it.
“Look.” I pointed, crouching down to run my fingers over its edges.
“What is it?” Lana asked, coming to stand beside me.
I slid a nail into the crack between the indentation and the edge and the chest popped open. Several objects were stored inside. I pulled them all out and placed them in a line before us.
The first two items were a set of identical clothing.
Sturdy black pants that molded perfectly to my body when I tried them on.
The top was fashioned into a corset, made of hard leather.
Three gold buckles strapped down its center.
The boning was slitted on the sides to store… I didn’t even know what.
“A corset?” I said, staring down at the garment in distaste.
“A cuirass,” Lana clarified. “It’s meant to go over your long-sleeve. Protects the torso.”
Right. Another reminder that I was now in a situation where my torso would need protection.
“It looks like a corset.”
“Compete for your lives but make it fashionable?” She shrugged. “I can’t understand the elven.”
I pulled the corset – cuirass – on, buckling it into place as Lana reached for the third and final item laid out.
It was a small page, dark lettering in sprawling curlicues stretching from end to end.
“What does it say?” I asked, stepping behind Lana to read over her shoulder as I secured my hair into a bun atop my head.
My eyes flitted across the page once. Then twice. Lana’s fingers trembled as she read aloud:
“‘Atop a hill lies a cabin on a cliff,
Surrounded by jagged peaks frozen stiff.
For survival to be earned, it must be unlocked
Or you will find yourself plunging down to the rocks.’”
She looked at me with concern. “What is this?” she breathed. “A riddle?”
I shook my head. “No. It’s an instruction.”
As if on cue, a tile not three feet away from us began shaking. It quivered with the force of a mini earthquake, vibrating and fissuring, tiny cracks spiraling across its surface. I watched in horror as more pieces began chipping off, a cold draft billowing in through the fractures in its surface.
I wasn’t surprised when I peered through the cracks to find snowcapped summits yawning for miles beneath.
“There’s a key hidden somewhere in the room,” I muttered, my eyes spinning around the sparse space I thought I had thoroughly analyzed. “There has to be, to unlock the door.”
“Shit,” Lana said as the next tile began to split.
Shit was right. The Mortal Trials had begun. Whether we liked it or not, the only way out now was through.
The entire room stretched and groaned, like a beast waking from slumber.
“We have to move quick.” Lana crouched before the wooden chest, her fingers running the lengths of its compartments, up and down, searching for the key.
I tested the floor in front of me gingerly, the toe of my boot tapping once before I hopped onto the next tile, until I made it back to the beds.
Around me, other tiles shivered, but I couldn’t focus on them.
Not when the key could be buried beneath our sheets and the floor might give way at any second.
I started at my bed first, wrenching the cream duvet off in a flourish and shaking it. Nothing fell.
The sheet stretched taut over the mattress was plain cotton, and I knew without checking that the key was not underneath. I pulled it off anyway, running my hands across the divots in the mattress. Even if the key was miraculously stored within, I would not have a tool to cut it open anyway.
Lana huffed her abject frustration behind me. She leaped across an open patch of the floor, which revealed more snowy peaks and dark rocks jutting out in menacing, bone-splintering angles.
“We’re going to die in here,” she muttered, ripping off her own bedcovers.
I didn’t waste any precious seconds to respond. I pulled the mattress off the bedframe, not caring where it landed, my eyes scanning the iron frame. Still no key.
I dropped to my hands and feet just as the tile beneath my right hand began to shake. I had seconds. Seconds to stay alive. I stuck my head beneath the frame, my left hand extending to sweep the surface of the floor. And then it gave out.
My right hand fell straight through, the tile dropping with it.
I keeled forward face first, my body crashing into the shuddering surface as my entire arm sank into the air.
I floundered, terror gripping me with icy tentacles.
My heart hammered against my ribcage as I shoved myself up and away from the broken tile with my other hand, yanking myself back.
My sleeve got stuck on a ragged edge of floor that had not yet fallen. I pulled violently, desperately wanting away from the plunging drop below, and the material tore. The jagged tile scraped painfully along my wrist as the sleeve tore off and a cool breeze stole it from view.