Chapter 7 Hannah
Hannah
The ground vanished beneath me, and my stomach lurched like I had just stepped off the edge of the world’s worst rollercoaster.
My arms flew wide, and the torch whipped as the flame smeared gold across the black stone before tearing free from my grip and tumbling away.
The light spun and kept going, skidding down the slick surface like it had no intention of stopping.
My oversized boots slid out from under me despite the makeshift ties at my ankles and calves.
Nothing caught me. Nothing slowed me down.
I slammed onto the slope on my side, and the impact punched the air from my lungs so hard I couldn’t even make a sound.
Fuck.
Then I was sliding. Fast. Faster.
The stone beneath me felt wrong. It was slick, like the rink when I’d tried to ice skate and my feet had swooped out from under me.
My clothes dragged up as I fell faster, and then my shoulder smacked hard against the ground, sending a burst of heat and pain shooting through my arm.
I flung my hands out, desperate to grab onto anything, but the surface offered nothing.
My fingers scraped over it, my nails catching for half a second before slipping free again.
“Not like this,” I wheezed, though it came out broken and breathless.
My boots squealed against the slope, useless friction against something that might as well have been glass. The torch’s light flickered below me, still bouncing and spinning, but it didn’t disappear completely. Instead, the darkness around it began to shift.
It fractured.
The dark gray stone lightened in flashes, streaks of violet splitting through it like cracks in glass. Indigo bled between them in smooth, shifting sheets, catching the spinning torchlight as it tumbled ahead of me.
Crystal.
The realization hit just as hard as everything else.
The tunnel wasn’t stone anymore. It had turned into slick and gleaming and completely unforgiving crystal.
For one dizzying heartbeat, I caught glimpses of openings as I passed them, three, maybe four passages carved into the glowing walls, their edges shimmering with that same strange light.
Then the slope vanished, and my stomach went into my throat.
I was airborne.
Time stretched in that awful, weightless way that made everything feel sharp and slow at the same time. My arms pinwheeled, grasping at nothing, and my body twisted as gravity decided how much it hated me.
Then I hit.
My hip and shoulder slammed into solid ground hard enough to rattle my teeth, and pain exploded through my side. The impact knocked what little air I had left out of me, and I folded in on myself as momentum carried me into a rough roll. Crystal scraped my clothes and skin.
Then I stopped flat on my back.
For a second, I couldn’t move or breathe. My lungs seized, refusing to work while my body tried to figure out if it was still in one piece.
“—ghh—” The sound tore out of me, broken and useless.
Cold air finally forced its way back in, dragging down my throat like shards of glass. My chest heaved as I sucked in another breath, then another, each one burning just as bad as the last.
Okay. I was alive.
Probably.
Everything hurt, which had to be a good sign, right? If something had snapped clean in half, I’d know. Well, we were about to find out.
I flexed my fingers against the ground, and they responded with a twitch. My toes followed, shifting inside the stuffed boots. So at least my limbs were attached. That was one good sign… for now. I let my head fall back and stared up at a ceiling glittering like a frozen twilight sky.
Crystals arched high above me, catching what little light remained and scattering it into soft violet and indigo hues that stretched across the cavern in fractured reflections.
Drip.
The sound came again, and I paused, lifting the torch.
Water, from the sound of it, though it echoed strangely. The noise came in broken swells, some close, some far, some warped, like it slid along the walls before it reached me.
Golden light flickered to my left. Shit! The torch!
I rolled onto my side with a low groan, regretting the decision as pain flared through my ribs and shoulder.
My palm slipped on the slick surface, and cold seeped through my clothes and into my skin and bones.
My breath sounded too loud, the sound clipped and bent until it didn’t match the shape of my chest.
“Fantastic,” I muttered, voice raspy.
Still, I pushed myself onto my hands and knees and crawled toward the light. Each movement sent another wave of protest through my body, but I ignored it, focusing on the torch lying a few feet away near a dark pool.
It was still burning. Barely.
Drip.
I grabbed the handle, the rough wood grounding me. When I lifted it, the flame flared, pushing back the darkness enough to reveal more of the cavern.
My breath caught.
The space was massive. The ceiling arched high overhead, studded with crystalline formations that caught the torchlight and scattered it into a thousand violet and indigo sparks.
Passages cut into the walls at varying heights—some at ground level, dark mouths gaping like hungry throats, others higher up, accessible only by climbing.
I counted at least six before I gave up, my eyes tracking upward to one particular opening, maybe twelve feet above me, where the slope I’d tumbled down ended in a jagged lip.
That seemed the most likely one. Anything higher than that, and I probably would have broken something. This crystal floor wasn’t particularly forgiving.
Not that it mattered. There was no chance of getting back up.
The floor angled upward toward the passages, the colors shifting depending on how the torchlight hit the crystal. Indigo. Violet. Dark enough that they almost blended together.
The Night General had mentioned that the crystals were different colors, depending on the kingdom you headed toward. Unfortunately, in this lighting, black and dark blue looked very similar. I stared at the ground, then back at the walls, adjusting the torch slightly.
“Well, flitter.” I tightened my grip on the handle. “I’ve got to be a color expert now too.”
My voice came back wrong, the tone distorting until it didn’t sound like me. I flinched, and my heart stuttered against my ribs. That wasn’t a fun trick at all.
Drip.
I turned toward the sound, and the torchlight caught the water again. Just how big was this cavern?
I limped forward, testing my weight with each step.
The pool stretched across the far end of the cavern, wide enough that I couldn’t see the other side even when I stood only a few feet from the close edge.
Parts of it lay perfectly still, glassy enough to reflect the violet and blue-black crystals like a mirror.
Other sections rippled with concentric rings where droplets struck the surface, the patterns spreading outward before dissolving into that unnatural stillness.
Water clung to the crystal formations above, gathering along jagged edges before dropping into the pool.
I stilled, realizing my breath wasn’t frosting.
It was cool in here, probably above freezing, and nothing like the biting cold outside. Compared to the mountain, this felt… tolerable.
I inhaled slowly and listened. Then, just to test it, I whispered, “Hello?”
The sound came back wrong again. Too loud and close, fracturing into pieces that didn’t line up with the rhythm of my breathing.
The crystal.
It had to be the crystal walls, warping sound the way they scattered light.
My skin prickled. Something felt off.
Then I heard it.
I went completely still, straining to hear past the dripping water, past the warped echoes, and past the pounding of my own pulse.
Footsteps.
Faint. Muffled. But real.
And beneath them, threading through the distortion like smoke through broken glass, came voices.
I couldn’t make out words or tell how many there were or where they were coming from.
The crystal twisted everything, the sounds reverberating until they seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. But someone was down here with me.
My grip tightened on the torch. Those bastards.
Maybe this was the real sacrificial site—or a handy backup plan. Maybe they’d funneled me here so they could grab me again and drag me back to that nightmare tree, torturing me with the belief that I could escape and then snatching it away.
I wasn’t sticking around to find out.
I scanned the passages, my gaze darting between the dark openings as I tried to remember what the Night General had said. Black if you’re heading toward the Night Court. Blue and violet if you’re going toward Dusk.
Great.
Because in this lighting, they all looked like slightly different shades of “You’re screwed.”
My head throbbed as I studied passage openings, the colors shifting every time the torchlight moved. The longer I stared, the less certain I felt.
That one on the left had a definite indigo cast threading through the crystals around its entrance…
or at least I thought it did. The flame in my hand flickered, and the color shifted like it was alive and the tunnel itself couldn’t decide what it wanted to be.
The passage beside it looked darker at first glance, almost black, but when I leaned a fraction to the right, suddenly it wasn’t black at all.
It was blue...or maybe violet. Or… possibly I was about two seconds away from losing my mind in a cave that hated logic. The latter option seemed the strongest.
A strange pull tugged at my chest then, faint but unmistakable, like a thread tightening somewhere deep inside me. I froze, my breath catching.
Yeah, I was definitely going nuts. This sensation resembled the yank I felt toward Kai. Persistent. Familiar in a way that made my chest ache for reasons I didn’t have time to unpack.