Page 55 of Soulbound Shadows: Part 1

“She might be stronger, too,” Evangeline said. “C’mon, this is the spot.”

She’d stopped at a manhole cover. I braced myself and bent to pull it open.

“Ladies first?” I joked.

Evangeline snorted. “Such a gentleman,” she quipped as she climbed down the ladder.

I followed her down, sliding the manhole cover closed after me.

The smell wasn’t as bad as I had been expecting. It was far from pleasant, but to a human nose it might have just seemed mildly pungent. For me, it was hard to ignore. The air was cool and sulfurous.

Evangeline lit up a ball of magic and sent it floating above our heads. We were in a large tunnel, round and tiled. A few feet of grayish water flowed sluggishly along the bottom, but we were standing on one of the ledges that ran along each wall. The sound of water droplets plinking down into a puddle off in the distance echoed toward us.

“It’s not far,” Evangeline said. “This part of the sewer system is pretty close to the old caves.”

“I’ve read about those,” I said. Our footsteps reverberated in the dark tunnel, bouncing back at us over and over again from the curved walls. “Apparently, a pair of naiad siblings had a competition to see who could use their water to make the most elaborate tunnels and impressive carvings.”

“I didn’t know that,” Evangeline said. “But I sort of figured it was something like that. The first time I explored that area, I found this huge cave with a big carving on one wall. It looked super serious and important, so I copied down all of the runes and translated them when I got back home.”

“What did it say?” I asked.

“Faaredvalis is the superior twin, and the other guy—I can’t remember the name now— but apparently his strongest power is farting in his sleep.” Evangeline shook her head. “I spent hours trying to find reliable naiad translations.”

“Sometimes I’m quite glad that I’m an only child.”

Evangeline laughed. “You and me both.”

The tunnels met and parted in intersection after intersection. I was completely turned around, but Evangeline seemed to know exactly where we were going. Soon, we reached a tunnel walled off by a locked grate. The tiles of the walls in front were plastered with warning signs, and DO NOT ENTER appeared at least a dozen times.

Evangeline stepped forward, reaching out to the lock, but I put a hand on her arm.

“Let me,” I said. “There’s no point in you wasting your magic this early.”

I twisted the padlock apart with one sharp tug, and the door swung open, creaking loudly on its heavily-rusted hinges.

“You’re gonna want to watch your step,” Evangeline said. “Like, even more than you usually would in a sewer.”

“Noted.” I could feel a mass of dark magic nearby, but the sheer amount of it was clouding my senses. Trying to pick out individual magical traps would be like trying to identify a faint perfume in the middle of a spice market. I felt a bit like I’d been blindfolded and then asked to navigate a maze.

Luckily, Evangeline seemed to know what she was doing. We picked our way slowly down the tunnel, stepping over suspicious patches of sludgy gray-blue moss with tendrils that reached out to try to grab at our shoes. The sulfur smell was getting stronger now, more and more pungent with every step we took.

Abruptly, the nature of the tunnel changed. The smooth tile walls gave way to rough weathered limestone worn down by year after year of water flowing along it. It looked as though the walls had once had patterns carved into them, but now they were battered away, half-hidden behind stalactites.

A rat skittered along the ground of the tunnel in front of us. It got too close to one of the moss patches and was yanked in by sticky strings. The rat let out a few pitiful squeaks as the moss began to cover its plump gray body. Almost immediately, the moss completely enveloped the rat, and the squeaking stopped. The moss settled down, lying perfectly smoothly against the ground as if there had never been an animal trapped in it at all.

“I hate this place,” Evangeline muttered. “I hate it so, so much.”

“If you feel the need for a break, I’d love to get a sample of that moss to inspect later,” I said. She shot me a look. “Or we could keep moving,” I added hastily.

We kept moving.

There was light ahead of us, faint but growing stronger. It gleamed wetly off the pale stalactites, turning them the yellow-gray color of old bone. A few shreds of orange fabric were caught on one. The remnants of a high-visibility vest? I wondered what had happened to whoever had been wearing it.

We stepped out to the lip of the tunnel, and my breath caught in my throat. In front of us was a massive cave. The limestone walls and high arched ceiling were pale, standing out starkly against the pools of black water on the ground. Glowing mushrooms clung to the walls and the few dry spots on the surface, and small glimmering shapes flitted through the water. The formations of the stone made the place feel vaulted, as though the naiads who had started the place had once seen the inside of a cathedral and decided to recreate it from memory. Numerous tunnels let out into the space, their dark mouths seeming to leer at us.

A small cottage stood in the middle of the clearing. It was simply built, squat with a slanting roof. The wood had gone pitch black with age. With its cutesy, simplistic proportions and its coloring, it looked like a children’s toy that had been charred in a fire. Its roof was speckled with more of the glowing mushrooms, its windows grimy and small.

The ground around the hut was covered with runes. Some were carved into the stone. Some were drawn onto stolen KEEP OUT signs. A few had been splashed onto the ground in what looked a lot like spray paint.

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