Chapter 9
D own and down and down, deep within the labyrinth of Fourtress, they went. White starlight bathed the eroding stone walls, casting a glow that flickered like a Stars Eternal beacon in a place as hopeless as Firekeeper’s pits of doom.
Alora couldn’t help the shake of her hand, though she willed every bit of courage to scorch through her veins. Couldn't help the shiver across her flesh as that hovering orb of starlight drifted before them, guiding their every inch into the belly of this tomb.
She’d never seen Thalon so rigid. Owning a face of ancient wrath as he shoved lethal awareness and caution into his every step.
In fact, they all held their bodies the same. Ready for anything.
Parchment scrunched beside her as Jade glided her finger along a map. Their only hope of escaping.
Aiden wiped his face and grumbled when a droplet of stars-knows-what fell from the damp walls of the tunnel. Alora had ignored her fair share of them, too. Ignored the tight air, the musty smell of something utterly rotten and decaying. Ignored the vermin that scurried at their feet—animals she knew would feast on their bodies should they not make it out.
How many faeries had found their final breaths trapped here?
Her breath began to pant. That fiery blood unnaturally chilled.
Would she become one of them?
Something cupped her shoulder blade. The sudden jolt of her heart could have echoed off the stones. Turning, releasing a breath of relief, a sudden calm rushed over her rising panic. And from that calm, a warm smile formed. One that mirrored Garrik’s as his thumb stroked over her leathers. A reminder she wasn’t alone. That she wouldn’t be alone.
He was there. They were all there. Right beside her. Their fates chosen together.
Further and further, they followed the blazing white light. Crossing pathways so black and ominous even the Lord of Darkness shifted uncomfortably. The darkness down there was so infernally lightless. So unsettling. Whereas Garrik’s shadows were guardians, these were something … damning.
The walls—they whispered with their own breath. Their own heartbeat.
How could a mountain breathe?
Garrik had a death grip on the hilt of his sword as they turned another corner.
Soulstryker waited comfortably in her sheath, and the leather hilt of her sword groaned in her grip.
“What?” Alora asked, turning her face to Garrik, whose expression hadn’t fallen from stone-stiff for the last hundred feet. It wasn’t hard to guess something was wrong. His eyes had shifted into inked abyss.
His footsteps slowed as he drew his sword, positioning the blade expectantly in front of him. “Odd,” was all he said before he battled a step forward, and that hardened expression tightened even more. “You do not feel that? The resistance in your steps? Like something is interfering, trying to stop your path.” His eyes flickered to her, then his Shadow Order.
No one said a word for fear their echoes would bring the mountain down around them. One by one, they shook their heads, and each dared to keep moving.
Alora didn’t remove her eyes from Garrik’s boots. Indeed, he seemed to be struggling. But unlike him, her steps were seamless.
“There is something … so familiar…” Garrik’s words trailed off as his eyes narrowed down the tunnel, but he said nothing more, continuing on.
The distant sounds of grinding stone echoed as a minor quake shivered under their feet.
Not odd, she convinced herself. Merely the earth shifting—the mountain aligning.
Turning another corner, Alora knocked into Aiden, who’d gone still. She side-stepped him, then stared into a rounded room with six awaiting thresholds.
Behind, Jade fumbled with the map. When circled, she twisted the parchment, traced her finger along a red line, and cursed. “This isn’t on the map,” she snapped and ground her teeth. The green of her eyes found Garrik with panic settling inside.
The doorways illuminated with Alora’s firelight.
Garrik straightened and settled on Jade’s pointed indent on the page. There was no indication as to which tunnel to follow. In fact, every tunnel was a perfect mirror of the rest, down to the chisel marks that carved them.
Aiden stepped forward, eyes darkened and twisting a scaled ring on his finger nervously. He stared at Alora, who commanded five more orbs into the air, allowing the glow to penetrate the darkness beyond each door. Or attempting to. The effort was futile.
Swallowed by the darkness, not one ounce of light entered the tunnels. Even Thalon commanded a portal inside the fourth, and it, too, vanished into the oblivion beyond.
“Some kind of magic,” Thalon assumed. His golden eyes like dark bronze in the lack of light. Again, he conjured a portal and attempted to illuminate a different tunnel. It disappeared just as easily.
“Shall we roll a die, then?” Aiden shuffled inside his coat pockets and produced a skull-like ivory cube with black dots.
Alora’s face twisted, sweat lined her hairline. Her eyes bounced between the dice, Garrik, the others, and each one of the five open doors. One for each of them.
By her best guess, it’d been over an hour since they’d left the cliffside. This would set them back even closer to the fate of being trapped in the mountain by winter. But they couldn’t sit in this room all day. And everyone taking the same path would slow them down. What if they got to the end and it was the wrong one? But then again, what if they split up and someone got lost?
The room breathed.
Actually breathed.
One moment, immovable stone surrounded them, the next …
The walls expanded .
Moving away, sealing every opening until they were in a room with no exits. Then, like exhaling, the stone ground against stone and moved inward.
Walls scratched and moaned against the stone floor. The mountain rained loose stones and pelted them into their armor.
They were trapped .
Thalon summoned a portal. “Go. Now !” he screamed, waving them on.
Jade was the closest. Her red ponytail swung behind her as she leapt, only to be thrown backward and land on her back.
Wasting no time, Garrik’s palms twisted, calling upon Smokeshadows.
But they, too, didn’t show.
The males pounded their hands onto the contracting walls. Their boots slid against the stone floor as their strength fought to keep the walls from crushing them whole.
Jade’s eyes succumbed to terror—the first time, besides from flames, Alora had ever seen her that way.
Alora inhaled deeply before grabbing Jade’s hand and forcing a smile.
Jade didn’t smile back. Her eyes were locked onto Aiden struggling against the weight pressing into his palms.
“It’s going to be okay, Jade.” Alora squeezed her hand as a wall pressed against her back, pushing them closer to one another.
Garrik grunted. It shot a pain through her heart.
“Go help Aiden,” Alora commanded, and Jade finally broke her stare with a hard swallow and nod.
Surprisingly, Jade’s palm squeezed Alora’s before she flew forward and pressed her palms beside Aiden.
Her fingertips burned. Overwhelming panic rippled through her. But this wasn’t the time for panic. Even if she offered three times less the strength of Garrik, she still had to try. And when her palms smacked into the wall beside his hands and their eyes met, a sense of calm fluttered through her nerves.
Garrik nodded with his irritating smirk before they forced their combined strength into the wall.
Alora’s feet scraped the floor, pressing into something behind her. Only, when she turned, her heart sank, realizing that it was Thalon’s boot. Then another on the side of her foot. Jade’s.
The room had pushed them close together. Mere feet remained between them as the walls pushed closer and closer and closer.
Her head snapped to Garrik, who was already looking at her. In his eyes, she found regret and fury, woven together with a string of guilt and some sort of pain she couldn’t place.
He opened his mouth to speak, the veins in his forearms and neck bursting from the sheer strength he pressed into the wall. And just as his voice began and she heard her name so desperately on his lips?—
The floor gave out beneath them.
Alora’s legs twitched on a smooth, icy surface, leaving her bones shaking from the chill of the floor.
The same oblivion of damning darkness in the tunnels above dwelt here—wherever here was.
It was like a crypt, capturing the deepest darkness and restraining it to lurk forever in the lowest pit of the mountain where nothing, not even starlight, reached.
A hardened cushion underneath her upper body created a barrier, keeping her from fully lying on the floor. Her hand traced the hard planes, sloping across solid inclines every few inches. She pictured the indentations as her warm fingers scraped curved shapes with pointed edges etched into the leathery surface.
Then, her skin met with flesh so frigid there was no mistaking who she landed on.
Her fingers traced across the thick collar of Garrik’s armor and brushed against the ridged scar on his neck. When she met his jaw, she felt his skin tighten as if he had smiled.
Garrik’s unusual heartbeat thudded into her ear pressing to his chest. He breathed—thank Maker of the Skies. And when that breath inhaled heavily, his deep voice asked, “Are you alright? Anything broken?”
Alora moaned, not wanting to move any further. Not even wanting to breathe. Her body ached horribly . If it wasn’t for him beneath her, she would’ve been worse off. “No. You broke my fall. Are you okay?”
“Nothing I cannot manage.” In the darkness, she felt his muscles stiffen as he adjusted on his back. Slightly grunting when his muscles flexed.
She was sure he would be sore. Especially if he had endured the full brunt of the fall and her weight slamming him into the stones. But Garrik would never mention any pain—she was certain of that. Not any real pain.
“Thalon? Jade? Aiden?” he called their names, pausing.
Somewhere to their right, a gravelly female voice groaned. Then movement, a muffled scrape against soft fabric and steel clanging against steel. Jade.
Another groan to their left. Deep and agitated. Thalon.
“What the bloody hells?” Aiden’s airy voice drifted as if he were up and fumbling around the darkness. Hollow thumps followed his voice, along with muffled footsteps. Alora felt Garrik exhale relief when Aiden began, “Is it just me, or does anyone else think this place is trying to kill us?”
“No. Just you,” Jade crooned, her voice ringing from the floor. “Can we get some light in this damn place?”
Right. Starfire. Alora’s muscles screamed as Garrik bent upward. She steadied herself in his lap, shaking the dizziness from her head.
Are you certain you are alright? Garrik asked as his hands fell to her waist.
She nodded, then almost laughed. He couldn’t see her. They couldn’t see anything.
A white sphere of star-kissed flames rose from Alora’s palm before she answered, Yes. I’m fine. And smiled when the light of her fire illuminated his beautiful face.
Aiden’s palms smashed against one of eight grand, dark amethyst pillars.
In between each, a set of five steps rested, adorned in the same hue. Each led up to doors made of shimmering obsidian and diamond dust, a perfect reflection of a night sky. Iron-wrought sconces hung from the lightest shade of amethyst walls; their metal twisted like beams of sunlight.
The stone floor? Where dark amethyst rugs didn’t cover was an intricate design of the night—a mosaic—laden with a grayscale of colors. And high above them, so high the darkness almost swallowed her light, an amethyst moon, larger than the mountain, gleamed off her fire through a sealed skylight.
Pushing herself off Garrik, Alora lit seven more starlight orbs and floated them to the sconces. The room exploded with glittering beams reflecting from the obsidian doors.
On the floor, Garrik drew in deep breaths while failing to hide the slight wince on his face as he scanned. Alora followed his careful assessment.
They had landed at the very center where seven rugs came to an end. Beneath their feet, a colliding moon and star laced within the grayscale of stones encircled them.
Thalon sat on one of the staircases, elbows to knees, rubbing his face.
“This wasn’t on the map,” Jade admitted as she pushed to her feet from a rug.
As each of them scanned, awestruck, Garrik broke through the silence and stood. “It was not on the map because you brought us to the door. Well done, Jade.”
“Where are we?” Alora asked.
Aiden shrugged. “The foyer?”
“An atrium.” Garrik’s eyes roamed over the room, stopping to observe each marking on all eight doors.
The doors each held their own unique symbol: a silver wisping moon, an exploding golden sun, the night sky in hues of silver, another wisping moon and white flamed star colliding, a single white flaming star, the same star covered by tendrils of Darkness, clouds of darkened storms, and the last beheld tendrils of Darkness.
After another moment of contemplation, they decided to split up. Thalon would open the door of the sun, Jade chose the clouds, and Aiden felt drawn to the moon.But Alora couldn’t stop staring at the star. And little to everyone’s surprise, Garrik stalked to the door of Darkness.
“Do not touch anything,” Garrik warned. “Only the gem. We do not need this place trapping us inside because the owner of this … house was protective of their treasures.”Glowing silver studied their faces.
Every one of them turned to Aiden, who gleefully beamed at the moon door, bouncing on his heels. He must’ve felt their attention and spun with an oh-so-innocent expression. “What?”
Garrik arched a brow as Thalon cut in, “Must we mention the Warathol incident?”
“Warathol?” Alora asked.
“You don’t want to know,” Thalon and Garrik said at once, looking at one another and shaking their heads.
Garrik turned to Aiden and crossed his arms. “Do not touch anything. ”
“ Fff-fine ,” Aiden mumbled under his breath, “You lot are no fun whatsoever,” and spun around to his door. The wind caught his long black coat before he twisted the handle and strolled inside.