“I don’t know about that, but this journey sure does seem determined to conquer my fear of heights.”
Laughing softly, he extended a hand to rest on her shoulder and squeezed the taut muscles there. “You done good, Princess.”
Tilting her head to grin at him, she asked, “Are you ever going to stop calling me that?”
“Probably not,” he shrugged and withdrew his hand just as Brendolowyn reappeared behind him.
“There is a hidden door up ahead,” he announced. “Marked by the same star rune at the bottom of the mountain. There is ancient runic writing carved around the door. It is so faded I barely found it, but I think it’s an incantation. Ancient Dvergr, it looks like.”
“Oh, please tell me it’s not a riddle,” Finn groaned, dropping his arm at his side. The sword belted there clanged with the movement; the cold sound echoed through the hollow, stone passageway. “Three in a basket and four in the bush, what color is the sky when the wind starts to push?”
Cocking a brow at him, he only shrugged.
“Um, no,” the mage shook his head. “Not a riddle. An incantation, it looks like.”
“Can you read it?” Lorelei asked, momentarily fretting they came all that way, only to be turned away by a door that wouldn’t open unless someone knew how to recite the lost language barring the mountain from the outside world.
Bren did not answer at first, which only served to intensify her anxiety over matters. He gestured for them to follow him. Hitching her heavy pack higher on her back, she fell into step beside Finn. The narrow passage seemed to widen as they walked further, expanding into a full platform wide enough to hold a thousand men, or rather dwarves. She highly doubted the place was been constructed with the intent of holding anyone other than the Dvergr.
“The passage is here.” Bren showed them the wide, flat wall of stone.
It was just as he said. The runes were nearly weathered away from the stone face by time and element, almost completely unrecognizable unless one was looking for them.
“I don’t see anything,” Finn confessed.
“It’s there though,” Lorelei told him, stepping up to the wall of stone. She stretched up onto the tips of her toes, raised her arm above her head and leaned inward to trace the tip of her finger across one of the runes.
“Impossible to read directly from the stone,” Brendolowyn lamented. “I can transcribe the words one by one onto a piece of parchment, fill in the blanks with logic if I have to, but it’s going to take some time.”
The drizzling rain began to pour, as if the gods themselves cued its ferocity to mock them, and she dropped back onto her heels beside Finn with a sigh.
“You won’t be able to transcribe anything with this rain,” she pointed out. “Charcoal and parchment don’t mix with water. It’ll be a mess.”
“I’ll raise a barrier around the wall,” he decided. “Just a small one to keep myself dry while I work.”
Lorelei nodded agreement, took several steps back and found a small slab of stone to make herself as comfortable as possible while the rain soaked her and Finn straight through to the bone. He dropped onto the slab beside her with a groan, leaned his shoulder into her and let loose a long, frustrated breath.
“You’d think something that’s supposed to be… I don’t know… necessary, would be easier.”
“Is anything necessary ever easy?”
Cold pellets pinged off their armor, but she could feel the warmth emanating from him as he rested against her. It gave her chills, a rising, otherworldly realization moving through her in that strange way Finn once told her was the equivalent of someone in the future walking over her grave. She shivered, her wet hair dripping across her cheek as she tilted her head downward to rest on his shoulder while they waited.
It was several hours before Brendolowyn finished transcribing the runes onto parchment. The rain didn’t stop, but it slowed enough he lowered the barrier and started toward them with the strip of parchment clutched in hand and a clever grin teasing at the corner of his mouth.
“I think I’ve got it,” he announced.
“Praise be to the gods!” Finn, who’d gotten so bored while sitting there he’d taken to teasing and annoying her just to pass the time, jumped up in a clatter of excitement.
Relieved by Bren’s good news, she agreed. “Yes, praise be to all the gods.”
As soon as she spoke the words, the rain became a wall again, making it difficult to see her own hand in front of her face even when she held it up.
Brendolowyn turned back toward the mountain, both of his companions crowding in behind him, and as he spoke the incantation of rough words that rolled across his tongue and scraped the back of his throat, Lorelei gasped as she felt the mountain begin to tremble beneath her feet.
The doorway rumbled to life, receding at first into the mountain and then rolling as if some invisible guardian moved it aside. Dust and pebbles trickled, the gaping entryway belching forth ages of stale air tinged with rot and decay. Black as pitch, it seemed little more than a gaping, endless hole until Brendolowyn summoned a small, wispy ball of white-blue light and sent it floating several feet into the cave. It bounced off the walls, casting an eerie glow that barely reached the mouth of the cavern as it beckoned them to follow.
“There will be no hiding from the drakoren now,” the mage lamented, following that ball of light inside the darkness. “Come out of the rain. I can’t promise it will be much better in here, but at least it’ll be dry.”
Hesitant to follow, Finn stood still beneath the wall of rain plunking and splattering across his drenched leather armor. Hair soaked in long black streams against his cheek, he stared into the darkness, dully illuminated by Brendolowyn’s magic and shuddered as he watched dusty cobwebs waver in the wind. Lorelei opened her mouth to ask if he was all right, but before the words came out he shrugged both shoulders and started into that dark, narrow passage.
“You’ll protect me from the spiders, right?”
“Oh, absolutely,” she snorted. “I’ll put the same amount of effort into protecting you from spiders as you did into helping me across the bridge.”
“Hey, I offered to carry you across on my back.”
“Well, when the spiders come, you can hide behind me.”
“That doesn’t comfort me at all,” he shuddered.
They followed where the light led them. The passage was tight, only wide enough for two bodies to move side by side while occasionally bumping and scraping into the walls. They walked in a slow, hesitant line, Bren in front of her and Finn bringing up the rear. She mercilessly teased him as they went, promising he’d be the first to know if she saw any eight-legged, creepy-crawlies.
Brendolowyn was not amused by their banter. He moved with the silent swiftness of a shadow, something Finn couldn’t have done even if he wanted to. His armor and weapons were loud, echoing hollowly ahead of them, as if to announce their arrival, before reverberating back to their ears. Lorelei listened for the stirring sounds of an enemy up ahead, but there was nothing. Only stale, heavy air and the occasional drip of rainwater leaking through cracks in the stone and blooping into puddles.
“It feels… I don’t know, weird in here,” Finn muttered over her shoulder. Lorelei glanced back at him, his face barely illuminated by the thin light of Bren’s wisp. “It’s making me really nervous.”
“I feel it as well,” Bren noted cautiously. “The drakoren may not have known about this passage, but it knows we are here now and it is trying to make sense of us.”
“Are you sure?”
“If you listen, you can hear it.”
All three of them stopped moving, Finn’s armor settling in around him until the only sound they heard was distant drops of falling water. Lorelei closed her eyes, not that it mattered much in the darkness, but as she turned her head downward she swore a series of whispers swept beside her tilted ear.
“I don’t hear any—”
“Shh!”
It seemed like a lifetime passed before the silence resumed, the hush of whispers curling and sweeping around them until the build-up made her feel like she would explode. And then it was gone. As quickly as it arrived to inspect them, it retreated, scuttling back to wherever it came from and filling the silence with fear and uncertainty again.
“Was that…”
“Yes,” Bren swallowed hard. “It was sizing us up, seeing what we are, what our purpose here is and no doubt it is already devising the many ways in which it will tear us apart long before we come face to face with it.”
Her whole body trembled involuntarily, knees weakening to a point near buckling, but she caught herself before she collapsed. Shaking the whirling terror from her mind, she stared ahead into the darkness, following the path their tiny light carved as far as it would go, all the while avoiding Brendolowyn’s expectant, violet eyes.
“We need to move on,” she declared, though the hitch in her voice suggested she would like nothing better than to back her way out of that cavern and never look back.
“Yes,” he agreed. “Forward.”
She lost all concept of time, winding through tight tunnels she couldn’t fret over because she could barely see her own hand in front of her face. The ball of light guiding them on their way began to wane, barely illuminating more than a single step ahead of them. The abruptness of their stopping caused Finn to stumble into her back and shove her into Brendolowyn, nearly pinning him to the wall.
Backing up to give them space to recover themselves, Finn coughed and attempted to the curb his cockiness rather poorly as he asked, “So, dead end, I take it?”
Straightening his robes, Brendolowyn attempted to empower the wisp with more energy, but it fizzled and buzzed like a bee that’d flown its last before winking out. The sound of his disgruntled breath echoed through the cavern.
“I don’t think so,” the mage said. “I didn’t get a chance to look at it, but I believe it is a last line of defense, in case the passage was discovered by someone who was not meant to find it.”
“Someone like, say, oh… I don’t know, us?”
Panic began to rise in her chest, the feeling of being trapped rising to overwhelm her. Her heartbeat sped up to accommodate her fear, but Finn reached out to her on instinct and lowered a hand onto her shoulder to calm her.
“I don’t think we are trapped. Just let me try to summon my light again and we can have a look around.”
She heard Brendolowyn shuffling in the dark, a quick mutter of breathy words followed and moments later the wisp nearly blinded them with its renewed brilliance. Flashes of green spots bled across her eyes as she squinted and looked away, waiting for them to readjust. Brendolowyn turned back toward the wall to survey it with careful scrutiny.
“Perhaps there is a hidden button in the stone, or some lever we missed on the wall.”
“If you think I’m going all the way back to the entrance to look for a lever on the wall…”
“It should be nearby,” the mage cut him off. “Here,” he cast a second ball of light, further illuminating the darkness as it whizzed through the air to hover over Finn’s left shoulder in the air. “Look around for something that seems out of place.”
“We seem out of place,” he mumbled, begrudging as he turned around and began scanning the walls for whatever it was they were meant to be looking for.
Lorelei lingered close to Finn, borrowing from his light as she felt her hands along the cold, damp stone to no avail. Finn muttered under his breath, a string of obscenities mixed with grumbling about it being the last time he embarked on anything with anyone unless they were fully prepared, with maps and everything, but Lorelei didn’t acknowledge his complaint.
In truth, she felt the same way. They weren’t prepared for what they were about to face in any way, shape or form; no one who believed they were supposed to take that journey seemed to think they needed preparations. Were they all mad? Relying on the fact that they had clearly done all this before, and so the outcome must be the same regardless of how well prepared they were?
And if they truly had done it all before, why wasn’t there some ingrained memory of how badly it all turned out urging them to better prepare?
Frustrations growing, she took a step back, knocking into Finn, who lingered too closely behind her. Hands shooting out to catch himself, she had no idea if he’d hit some hidden switch or if Brendolowyn was responsible. She only knew the cavern began to rumble, stone vibrating beneath her feet and a shower of tiny pebbles and dust raining down on them from above.
“What did you do?” Brendolowyn’s voice echoed through the cramped corridor.
“Blast if I know!”
“Well, whatever it was, it worked. The passage is open.”
Lorelei hurried back toward the end of the hall, arriving beside Brendolowyn several seconds before Finn and gasping in amazement as the dull light of Bren’s magic ate away at the darkness.
“Torches.” Finn edged between them, crossing first into the ancient Dvergr hall and wrenching a torch from a rusted wall mount with groaning effort. “Been a long time since these were used, I’d say.” Cobweb stuck to his hand, drawing in a long, dusty line between his palms as he transferred the wooden handle to the other hand.
“Hundreds of years. Here,” Brendolowyn offered, summoning a flicker of flame to the tips of his fingers. Finn held the torch out and the dusted oil caught quickly, pluming dirty orange smoke that blocked the spread of light until it finally stopped sputtering.
The chasm yawned into a great hall with vaulted ceilings so high it took forever for the light to reach them. Even after Bren lit a second torch from Finn’s and passed it to her before lighting another for himself, the growing light nibbled away at a darkness that hadn’t seen light in so long, it nearly didn’t recognize it. Stretching her head back as she walked slowly forward, she could barely make out the carvings etched into the stone ceiling.
Every footstep, each whisper of breath echoed back to her, and when Finn whistled it startled her and she nearly tripped clumsily over her own feet.
High columns featuring delicately carved stories stretched toward those endless ceiling, arching across stone tiles with similar designs etched into each corner as they crawled across the dusty floors. In the center of each peaked vault, great round lanterns dangled from old chains, unlit for centuries and draped in curtains of yellowed and dusty cobweb.
For a moment she tried to imagine that place in all its glory, but there were no words.
“That’s…” Finn started, shaking his head. “Wow.”
“And to think,” Brendolowyn began, “we are probably the first eyes to see this hall in ages.”
She shivered again, holding her torch toward the retreating darkness and lifting her head once more toward the never ending ceiling. She wondered silently if the ghosts of Dvergen’s children walked those halls, lingering in spirit, moaning at the memory of glories long forgotten by the rest of the world. She really hoped not. She wasn’t afraid of ghosts and spirits, but she didn’t exactly want to come face to face with any in a place she couldn’t escape them.
Row after row of tables lined the hall, stone chairs pushed close to the lip, as if simply waiting to be drawn out for a meal. Platters, turned over pitchers, plates with what she could only assume contained the rotted dust and remnants of uneaten food littered the tabletops, adding to the illusion that the Dvergr might walk into the hall any moment to take a meal together.
“How many do you think lived here?” Finn wondered aloud.
“Thousands,” Bren said. “Enough to work the mines and the forges, to keep this place running.”
“All of them just… gone,” Lorelei murmured, lament rippling through her in a series of chills she had a feeling she’d never
be able to shake.
“They had no choice but to abandon their home.”
“It makes me sad. I don’t think I ever really thought about it much before, but they were people just like us, and now all that remains of them are these places so few will ever see.”
“At least they had these places.” There was a hard seriousness in Finn’s tone she’d never heard before. “When the U’lfer are gone from this world, there won’t be anything to remember us at all.”
Reaching over, she gripped his forearm in her hand and squeezed the muscle. “Don’t say that, Finn. We won’t let that happen.”
The look in his eyes told her he didn’t believe her, but he didn’t say anything else for a long time after that.
They lingered in the hall, walking past those tables, inspecting the remains of a life forgotten and shaking their heads at the tragedy of it all. She studied some of the relief sculptures carved into the stone pillars stretching toward impossibly high ceilings, but with little more than a torch to shed light on them, it was hard to make out the details.
“Do you think our fathers made it this far?” she finally asked.
“I doubt it,” Finn said. “I think if they had, we wouldn’t even be here now. I doubt they made it into the mountain.”
“Things would have been different if they had, I guess.”
“Very different…”
They were not alone in the great hall. Brendolowyn wandered ahead, his torchlight carving into the pitch around him and allowing her to keep track of his movement. From time to time, she swore she saw dark things moving all around them, the glint of hollow, ghastly eyes staring out from the darkness. The whispers, not unlike those that came to probe them in the passageway, were subtler, tentative—as if they knew the intruders were onto them and didn’t want to make themselves known.
Part of her wanted to call out a challenge, let the master of those whispers know they’d come to kill it, but her lips clamped tightly shut and her throat was so dry she knew no words would come if she dared.
Sorrow's Peak (Serpent of Time Book 2) Page 49