by A. Lawrence
"No. I don't want your weird messages on it."
"Ha. Doesn't matter. Matters that we're all here. All safe."
She supposed that was true. "Bel, I'm sorry, but I saw you wincing. I'm going to ask you to sit up for me."
"Mm I'd rather not."
"Bel…"
"I'm not taking off my shirt for you."
"Trust me, you don't have anything I haven't seen, either."
Bel sat up and looked at her carefully before she answered. "Well, yeah. Like you said earlier."
"What?"
"I mean there's not much to see," Bel said, giving Rhyss a meaningful look.
Rhyss glanced at her chest. It was hard to tell with Bel's jacket, but she didn't have an ample bosom by any stretch of the imagination. "Okay?"
"Eleti alive." Bel rolled her eyes. "Well, since we're having a nice little ice breaking conversation I'm trans. There. Now you know."
Rhyss blinked. "Oh."
"Yeah."
"Well, I mean," Rhyss said, fidgeting awkwardly, "do you want me to, um…"
Bel rolled her eyes. "Oh for Eleti's sake, it's a padded shirt, not a medical vest. Heln, turn around."
"I'm going to sleep," Heln turned away from them.
"Perfect," Bel said.
Bel pulled up her shirt, but only enough for Rhyss to see that she had a scrape across her ribs. It wasn't nearly as bad as she'd thought it would be. Her ointment was still good as far as she could tell. In return Bel applied it to the back of Rhyss's arms where her cloak hadn't quite protected her. Her cloak was full of holes, but her armor underneath was still mostly intact, the wood scripted well enough against fire to keep her from being burned. A little charred in places, but it would get her by and would largely heal itself overtime.
Rhyss thanked Bel, who muttered something that sounded like gratitude in return and laid back down. It wasn't long after that her breathing evened out to match Heln's.
Rhyss left the armor off when she leaned against the cave wall, letting the cold soothe her a little bit and lighting up her fire script. It felt like a toothache in her chest, the lack of magic pulling at her, but it was too cold without it.
The script looked like lace made of embers, a bright and cheery orange, twisted and danced in place. It was nothing like the white-hot dragon fire. She slid down the wall a bit, determined to stay awake, to keep the script going and to keep watch. Without a barrier she thought she would feel much more vulnerable.
She didn't. With the fire, it almost felt like a night at the training grounds after a grueling day, her fellow Trainees sprawled out and sleeping while one of them kept watch. It would have been comforting, but every time she closed her eyes all she could see was the red glow of the power core.
Chapter Sixteen
Rhyss must have slept at some point, at the very least it felt like she was waking up. Her back ached and her eyes felt like they were glued shut. Her magic was back, but she still felt exhausted. She made a noise that might have been a grunt and might have been an expletive.
"Well, good morning to you, too, sunshine." Bel's voice was not the one she wanted to hear when she first woke up. Bel was more complicated than Rhyss thought and she wasn't sure that she had fully coped with that. "You are, of course, ravishing in this light. I have prepared us a fine breakfast of mushy, slightly baked fruit and mushier moss."
Rhyss wanted to know where Bel got the energy to joke around after everything they'd been through. If it was her, she would have been absolutely too exhausted. Bel reminded Rhyss of Vin in that aspect. He'd said making it light was how he coped with everything.
Thinking of Vin hurt worse than her back so she shoved it away and sat up, stretching, her entire spine popping. The cloak she had discarded had been draped over her and it crumpled into her lap. The fire script was going, and she felt almost too warm on her front even while her back was freezing. Her cloak was damaged beyond repair, fire and magic light spilling through the holes when she held it up, but it would have to do.
"Most of the scripts are too damaged." Heln was telling her what she already knew. He looked better, Bel must have slapped him with a cleaning script because most of the dust was gone. "But the warming script was woven into the lining, so it'll keep you from freezing."
"Thanks, Heln." She managed a smile at him. That hadn't been so hard to say. His return expression made her think that maybe she needed to work on smiling.
They ate what they could stomach. Their supplies were dwindling fast and setting up the water bottle before her failed watch the night before hadn't produced nearly as much water as she would have liked. She never thought that she would miss being damp.
Rhyss felt a little better once she had her armor on. It fit a little looser than it used to, but it would still protect her. She checked her reflection in her dagger blade. Her hair was a lot shorter and her cheeks were hollow. The armor looked almost out of place. Maybe she didn't deserve to wear it and maybe she didn't care. She had worked so hard just to feel useless. The drills, knowing how to march in formation, what dress uniform for which occasion… it was all so silly, such a waste of time when she could have been honing the skills that were actually keeping her alive.
"Thinking hard?" Bel put a hand on her shoulder and Rhyss almost stabbed her. She either didn't notice or was used to scaring people holding daggers. "Sorry to interrupt your introspection, but Heln isn't sure that he can sense the dragon at all, so we need to get moving."
"You are so stupid." Rhyss sheathed her dagger.
"Yes, you have informed me, multiple times, yet you keep asking me for information when you don't know something so I'm really having a hard time believing you." Bel beamed at her and Rhyss thought that maybe she should be a little nicer. More than that, she found she wanted to be a bit nicer. The sniping between them was little more than habit at this point. Rhyss wondered whether it ought to be a habit she changed. "Anyway, moving. We're going to start doing that. Are you okay?"
Rhyss gave her a look, not sure how to even start answering that question. "Why can't Heln sense the dragon?"
"Well, I can't yet, so I have to assume." Heln shrugged. "Maybe it went back to sleep when we left the room, maybe it's on the steps below us. I don't know."
"He's not clairvoyant."
"Yes, thank you, Bel."
The thought of the dragon dragging itself up the steps in the dark was enough to get her moving for several more hours, no matter how sore and exhausted she was. On occasion, Rhyss thought she heard something behind them and she honestly wasn't sure if it was her imagination providing those sounds or if something else was on the stairs. Bel was only a few steps above her and she didn't seem to hear anything. Rhyss had to grudgingly admit that her hearing was slightly better. Still, when they rested, she insisted on taking up the rear guard.
Even if every time she turned around to peer into the dark there was nothing there.
She was so focused on what was behind them that she almost fell down the stairs when Bel's
illumination bubble went out.
"Turn yours off, too. There's something ahead."
Rhyss nodded and stopped the trickle of magic to the bubble, winding it down into nothing.
At first she saw absolutely nothing but darkness, so complete that she might as well have had her eyes closed. She thought she would see the red light below them for an instant, but it must have been a trick of her eyes, or a spot in her vision, because when she looked again it was smooth, inky blackness.
After her eyes adjusted she saw what Bel was talking about. A faint, green light far above them. It brightened and dimmed, like a slow heartbeat.
"Do you think that's outside?" Heln didn't sound very hopeful.
"No," Bel said. "But it might be more of that moss, which I'm actually starting to miss. Still, it could be something… bad. Do you feel anything?"
"It all feels the same from here, there could be a barrier." A rustle of fabric was probably Heln shrugging. "Or it c
ould be absolutely nothing. I don't know. But I don't feel any constructs, dragon, clay, or otherwise, so there's that, at least."
Rhyss wished that their biggest problem was clay constructs. She felt like she could take on ten without even a twinge of fear.
"What do we do?"
She started, realizing a moment too late that Bel's question was directed at her. "Well, what can we do? We can't go back, so like I said, all we can do is move forward and hope for the best."
"We're going to die," Heln muttered.
"If we die, we die fighting." Bel spun another bubble. Her expression was much grimmer than her tone had let on. "Well, honestly, if it gets me off of these stairs I am game for anything."
For once they agreed. Rhyss never wanted to see another set of stairs again.
They climbed the last steps up into the light.
The stairs opened up into a large chamber, a perfect dome with a rounded floor, like a bubble had been trapped when the rock was formed. Seven huge pieces of floating stone stood like pillars at the edges of the room. The walls were panels of pale, green stone that emitted a soft light. Each panel was framed by dark stone in straight lines that shot out from a small, raised platform in the center of the floor up to the ceiling, meeting in a shadowy starburst.
The perfect lines were at odds with the stones, which were rough and uneven, their surfaces dark and riddled with magical script.
Bel reached over and touched the nearest one experimentally. It didn't budge, but light rippled through the magical script.
Heln sat down on the ground the moment he crossed the threshold. "Okay. I need to. Not be feeling things for the next fifty years."
Rhyss winced. His eyes were glowing so brightly that she could see them shining through his eyelids when he closed them. The light faded before he opened them again and he just looked tired.
"Guys." Bel was looking at the hand that she'd used to attempt to push a giant, floating stone they knew nothing about. If she was burned or something, Rhyss told herself she wouldn't really feel sorry for her. "I think these are the Rising Stones."
"From the festival grounds?" Heln looked up at her, standing slowly like he wasn't sure how his legs quite worked again. Rhyss helped him and they managed to get him upright but he shook like a newborn foal. "Are you sure?"
Bel knocked gently on one, ripples of magic and light slid around the stone with each knock. "Yeah. I'm pretty sure. We were both drawn here, right? I felt like we were going the right way and this must be why."
"I'm glad we know where we are and it's really neat that we found out where they go, but I think it's more important there's no exit from this room." Heln gestured to the other side of the room, which was all panels and dark lines. The smooth stone didn't even look like it could be a possible door from where they were standing.
"I'll check it out."
Rhyss decided it would be better to edge around the room rather than go anywhere near the middle. Besides, a door might not be directly across. It took a bit longer than she expected. Once in a while she had to dodge as the stones spun very, very slowly in place, light and magic flaring across their surfaces. The magic would connect with the dark lines on the floor and magic script scrolled on them would light up, too briefly for her to see what they were for, gleaming as it rushed towards the center of the room. Some went to the pedestal and the rest to the starburst on the ceiling, making it a brilliant green for a moment before it faded again. She was not eager to see what exactly was happening at the center, but she knew that was their next stop if there was no way out.
There was no door.
Somehow, Rhyss had known that was inevitable. Of course there was no door. As far as she could tell the chamber walls, despite their designs and the magic that was clearly happening, were completely smooth. She couldn't even fit her knife blade between the panel and the dark stone, and looking at it for too long hurt her eyes.
She completed her circuit and joined Bel and Heln at the entrance.
"No door." She told them, needlessly. "So, big brain full of information, what do we do now? Because we can't go back, and we can't go forward."
"Let's check out the center," Heln said.
Rhyss wanted to hit him, or scream, or really do anything but actually move to the center of the room, but she knew that she didn't have much choice. It was the next logical place that they could check.
"Maybe... I don't know, that pedestal is a button, or something that we can activate somehow, and if we press the button—"
"Then the secret panel slides open and we go home." Bel snapped her fingers like it was a done deal. "It's worth looking at before we, y'know, go back to certain death. Let's go."
The center of the room was brighter than the rest of the room. The difference in the illumination compared to their bubbles made her squint. Heln was oddly enough the bravest of the three of them, reaching forward to touch the pedestal. It was chest height and slender, perfectly round, as far as she could tell, like someone had cut a column in half.
"It's... a teapot."
"What?" Rhyss swore the light dimmed when he said it and she was able to see the object herself.
A teapot. It was nearly the same size as the pedestal at the base, curving up and around. It looked a bit like a dragon, if the person that had made it didn't know what dragons look like and had gone off of the vaguest of descriptions. The spout was open jaws and the handle was the curl of the tail. It was made of the same green stone as the panels and the pedestal. It seemed to glow with its own inner light.
"All of that and it's a teapot." Bel glared at it like it had personally offended her and at least ten generations of her family. "I mean, I was kind of hoping for treasure. Dragons, tunnels, ancient magic, all that. And it's an ugly dragon teapot. Think we could sell it?"
"I think the more important thing is that we can't get out of here," Rhyss said. "Not this way. We'll have to turn around and go back."
Even as she said the words, Rhyss knew she didn't want to go back. Every single part of her was completely opposed to turning around and going back down those stairs, unsure of what they would meet in the dark. She couldn't bring herself to do it immediately, even though it was her idea.
Rhyss sat down on the ground. "Let's just… Let's just rest, okay? Right here. And we'll figure out what to do after that."
Maybe Bel would pull some brilliant idea out of nowhere. Something about controlling power cores, or maybe even how to get a signal to the outside world with all of the magic they were surrounded by. Even better, Heln could realize that he had sensed something different about one of the panels and she could just smash their way to freedom. She didn't care what it was as long as they didn't actually have to go back.
"Resting sounds like a good idea, we're all pretty on edge." Rhyss wasn't sure if it was what she meant, but Bel sounded like she wasn't on edge herself. Rhyss wanted to kick her, but she settled for glaring at the floor. "There has to be a way out, I'm sure if we give it some time we'll figure something out."
Rest didn't help Rhyss come up with a brilliant plan. If anything, it set her more on edge. After a few minutes of sitting, she got up to pace the length of the room, carefully avoiding the stones. As far as she could tell, there was no possible way for them to lift out of the room, which didn't make any sense. The panels must be able to retract, but no matter where she tried knocking the hilt of her knife it didn't seem to matter, it all sounded the same.
Bel leaned against Heln and seemed to doze off. Her illumination bubble was barely brighter than the moss in the cavern. All of the magic meant that the room was a lot warmer than the tunnel and it should have made her drowsy, too, but she just wanted to hit something.
"So, the Rising Stones gather magic, and put it in a teapot." Heln frowned. "That sounds like the start of a bad joke. It feels like that big crystal in that big cave in here, but more potent. Do you think it's feeding it? I don't get the teapot, though, that doesn't make any sense."
&nb
sp; "It's an ugly teapot, too."
"I don't think the aesthetics of the teapot actually matter, Bel."
"They matter to me. Maybe we're supposed to make tea, and the tea leaves will show us the way. Y'know, divination. Could be a real thing, why not?"
"That is the stupidest—"
"What if we pick it up?" Rhyss had been too wary to touch it before. Now, she didn't even care. If it caused a thousand spears to come out of the walls, she'd find a way to dodge them and then use them against whoever set up such a stupid room.
Bel and Heln got to their respective feet.
"I don't know if that's—" Bel started to say.
Rhyss ignored her and touched it, but before she could do any more than that, the entire room trembled.
The pale green panels glowed, brilliantly, and a construct stepped out of each one, made of the same stone, dragging threads of it like pulled taffy behind them. They stepped closer in unison, cutting off the only escape route.
Rhyss held up her knife, but she wasn't sure how much good that was going to do. The others had been dirt and rocks and they'd been hard enough to defeat; these were solid stone, glowing eerily in the suddenly dim cavern.
"Maybe they want to make tea." Bel's voice was faint.
"Good idea, Bel, let's just throw the teapot at them." Heln's sarcasm hadn't been at all affected by their current situation.
"Do it." Rhyss told them.
"What?"
"Do it," she repeated. They were getting closer and she was out of options. She glanced back in time to see Heln pick up the teapot. He made a noise and nearly dropped it. Apparently it was much heavier than it looked.
Heavy enough that when he lobbed it at the constructs it landed in front of Rhyss instead of anywhere near where he had been aiming.