11. Journey’s End
Journey's End
Sammy
I woke before the light did, deliciously sore but well-rested and well-loved. A night with an orc is the cure for insomnia, that’s for sure.
The fire had burned to embers. The falls were a constant low roar in the dark, the backdrop to the night, and the same sound that had been underneath my dreams without interrupting them.
Guruk was warm at my back, one arm loose around my waist, his breathing slow and even.
The carved alicorn was still in my hand, which I had apparently held onto in my sleep.
I looked at it for a moment in the pre-dawn gray.
Then, I eased out from under Guruk’s arm, stood and stretched.
He stirred. “Sammy.”
“I'm here,” I whispered. “Stay. I just want to have another look at the water.”
He was quiet for a moment. I felt him watching me in the dark. He nodded. “Be careful.”
I walked to the pool’s edge.
The falls looked different before sunrise.
At the edge of the basin, the mist was thicker, drifting low over the water’s surface in slow, unhurried currents. The sky above the ridge was the first gray of morning, not yet light, but no longer night. It was that suspended moment where everything held still before the day began.
The falls were the same as they had been yesterday. Same roar, same curtain of water, same stone basin, and yet, something had changed in my chest in the night, some quiet rearrangement. Now, standing here, I felt a pull I didn't have a name for.
Something that felt, improbably, like recognition.
I stared at the rock face behind the falls.
The amethyst light shone there.
Not a shimmer this time, nor the subtle edge-glow I’d half-noticed the evening before and filed under mineral refraction.
No, this was a glow. Soft and steady, the color of the inside of a geode, coming from somewhere behind the curtain of falling water where the stone face curved inward and the direct view was obscured.
I stood still, barely breathing.
One of yours is sleeping behind running water.
My hand closed into a loose fist.
Neither lost nor found.
I took off my boots.
The water at the pool’s edge was cold against my feet, the same biting cold as yesterday, my nerves announcing themselves immediately.
I waded in to the ankle, then the knee, moving slowly toward the falls, keeping my eyes on the glow.
The mist thickened as I got closer. The sound grew until it pressed against my ears and filled my chest.
Behind me, I heard Guruk’s footsteps at the water’s edge.
I didn’t turn around. “You see it?”
“Yes,” he said, already wading in behind me.
“It’s behind the water.” I kept moving.
Guruk
The roar of the falls shifted, gaining an echo it had not had before. A change in the light stirred the water. The amethyst glow strengthened as we pushed through the slowest portion of the fall’s curtain, soaking us both in an instant. The cold was enough that Sammy gasped and kept moving.
With the rock face standing in front of us, and the falls behind us, we pushed through and stood in the mouth of a cave.
It was not large. Ten feet deep, perhaps fifteen wide, the walls smooth and dark with moisture, the ceiling low enough that I had to angle my head.
The floor was flat stone, worn in the same patient way as the basin outside.
In the center of it stood a crystal.
I had known, since the market, since the scorched grass at the meadow’s edge, since the cloak scrap on the bridge, that something was waiting here. Having assembled it in my mind and examined it from every angle, I believed I had prepared myself for what we might find.
I stared at the crystal and understood I had not been prepared.
It was taller than I expected, a handspan above Sammy’s head.
A column of clear stone with a faint internal light the color of an amethyst, steady and soft, neither flickering nor pulsing.
Its surface was smooth on the outside and faceted in the state of something grown rather than cut, though I could see, at its base, the seam where it had been set. Deliberate. Placed.
Sammy had gone still beside me.
Inside the crystal, suspended and captured, was a young woman.
Blonde hair floated around her face, as if the crystal had caught her mid-motion and preserved her there.
Blue eyes closed. Expression— and this was the detail that hit me in the chest like a physical blow—entirely peaceful.
Not frightened. Not in pain. Simply still.
Not dead. I knew this with a certainty I could not have named but did not doubt. The crystal was warm; I could feel its heat from where I stood, and warmth did not come from dead things.
I studied the base of the column. The scorch marks were there, as I had supposed, the same pattern as the meadow grass, the same signature I had been tracking for days without telling Sammy what I was tracking.
The alicorn dust had been used here. With craft and intention, shaped into something that was not a weapon but a snare.
The imp had been here. Had built this. I knew it in my bones.
At the far wall of the cave, almost invisible in the shadow, three more scorched marks had been burned in a triangle pattern. Anchor points, I suspected. The thing you would set if you wanted the construction to hold without constant tending. This had been planned in advance.
I filed it. I would tell Sammy all of it. Later.
For now, I put my hand on her shoulder, steady and present, and let her have the moment. We had found one of her friends at last.
Sammy
I couldn’t move.
Which was not, in my experience, how I operated. I was a mover. I was someone who, when confronted with a problem, began doing something about it, even if that something was making a list or naming a sub-quest or writing endless notes.
Forward motion was my default state.
I stood in a cave behind a waterfall, staring at my frenemy suspended in a column of crystal. And I could not move.
She looked like herself. That was the thing.
Not like a person in distress, not like someone afraid or suffering.
Her expression was the same one she wore in the moments before she said something devastatingly accurate: that slight composure, that almost smile, as if she knew something and was deciding whether you deserved to hear it yet.
She looked like she was waiting.
Something loosened in my chest so suddenly it hurt.
She was okay, and she was waiting. Had been here the whole time?
Had she been tucked behind the water, held by something in this crystal?
Now that I was close, I could see the craftsmanship of it.
The crystal had a base, a seam, something set rather than grown.
She was held by something that was not her choice.
But she was okay.
She does not have it in her to be afraid for long.
I stepped forward and touched the amethyst surface.
The crystal was warm under my fingers. Not feverish, not unsettling, rather that deep-from-within warmth that radiated outward. It pulsed once under my palm, the light brightening for a half-second and then settling back.
As if it knew I was there.
As if she knew.
My throat tightened. I pressed my hand flat against the surface and stared at her face: the composure, the almost-smile, the blonde hair drifting. I felt every mile of the road behind me and every promise I had made to myself since Berry had first pointed east, days and yet a lifetime ago.
“I found you.” I whispered, almost immediately swallowed by the sound of the falls behind us. I pressed my forehead to the crystal. “I found you, buttercup.”
The crystal pulsed again. Twice this time. Stronger. Strong enough that I felt it in my palm, in my forearm, in my sternum. The light inside it illuminated and held for a full breath before settling.
Something inside it was aware. Something inside it had heard me.
Guruk’s hand was on my shoulder, steady and present. I covered it with my free hand without looking away from Raine’s still face.
I stayed there for a long moment. The falls roared behind us. The amethyst light moved softly inside the crystal, its own slow tide.
Then, I took a breath.
“Okay,” I said, to Raine, to Guruk, to Berry who I could hear arriving at the cave entrance behind us, to myself. “Okay. We found her.” I straightened. My hand stayed on the crystal. “Now we figure out how to get her out.”
Guruk
I held tight to Sammy’s shoulder, offering my silent support.
The light inside the crystal had responded to her touch .
I had felt it, seen it, two pulses stronger than anything it had done before we arrived.
That was not incidental. That was the crystal recognizing something.
Sammy’s connection to the human inside, or Sammy’s connection to the alicorn magic, or both.
Both seemed possible. Both seemed important.
I filed it. There was much to tell, and none of it needed to be said in the next thirty seconds.
I glanced at the base of the crystal again. The scorch marks. The anchor points in the corner. The seam where the construction had been set, deliberate and considered and made by someone who knew what they were doing with alicorn dust and old magic and the space between realms.
The imp had not acted alone. It could not have.
The knowledge required, the access to alicorn dust, the understanding of how to set an anchor in a cave behind a waterfall.
This was craft beyond what a single imp, however resourceful, was likely to possess.
There was something larger behind this. Someone.
I would talk to Thad, when we returned. I would talk to Stoneclaw in person, directly, not through the network. I would present the evidence: the cloak scrap, the market sighting, the pattern of the scorched grass.
But first.
I studied Sammy. Her hand still on the crystal, her forehead just lifted from it, her spine straight with the particular determination that meant she had moved through the emotion and arrived at the other side where the work was.
Her eyes were bright. She had been crying, or nearly so , and she had stopped.
She was the most extraordinary person I had ever known.
“Guruk,” she said, not looking away from the crystal.
“Yes.”
"We're going to need Inara."
I thought about this. The alicorn. Her magic. The dust the imp had likely used to build this thing. It meant alicorn magic had made it, which might mean alicorn magic was the key to unmaking it.
“Yes,” I said. “I think we are.”
“And Stoneclaw.”
The falls weren’t in his jurisdiction, but the deputy was a Havenlore citizen of the central village, and the imp…well, he’d be made to answer too. “Yes.”
“And probably Thad.” She finally looked at me. Her expression was steady and fierce and lit with purpose. “We're going to need everyone.”
I thought about the house and what she had said beside the fire, how she wanted it full and loud and difficult to move through.
Framing her face with my hands, I said, “Then we'll get everyone.”
She nodded once between my palms. I let my hands drop, and she looked back at the crystal, at Raine’s still, waiting face. I saw her mouth move, something small and private, just between them.
Breathing deeply, she squared her shoulders, turned toward the cave entrance, and walked back through the falls.
I looked at the crystal for a moment longer.
“Not long now,” I said to the blonde woman inside it. I wasn’t sure if she could hear me. It was Sammy's touch that had made it respond, not my words. But I had a strong feeling about Raine. Strong enough to say it. “She came a long way for you.”
The crystal was still, but I thought I saw the faintest pulse of light before I turned and waded back through the water.
Sammy was standing at the pool’s edge with her arms wrapped around midsection and her eyes on the ridge, where the sun was just beginning to clear.
Berry was at her feet, three tails wrapped tight, looking up at her with the open, attentive expression they wore when they were offering something without being asked.
I came to stand beside my little human.
She leaned into me immediately, her head against my arm.
We stood there as the sun came up over the ridge and lit the falls gold from the top down, the light spreading through the curtain of water and catching in the spray, and behind all of it, visible even from here if you knew to look, the faint steady glow of amethyst.
“We go home,” she said, a fierceness in her voice I hadn’t heard before. “We get everyone. We come back.”
“Yes,” I agreed at once.
“And then we get her out.”
I tightened my grip on her shoulders. “Without question. We get her out.”
She looked at the ridge for a long moment. Then, turning toward home, she said soft enough that only Berry and I could hear, “Suck it up, buttercup.” A breath. “We've got a quest to complete.”
The falls roared on behind us.
Thank you for reading!