Page 53 of Inflamed By an Incubus

“Follow it.” Archer cast her another worried glance.

She scowled at him. She was fine. He didn’t need to coddle her. He arched an eyebrow at her and turned his cheek to her, locking his focus back on their surroundings as they entered a tunnel that led downwards. The path split into three where the air grew hotter, but thankfully smelled less disgusting.

“Follow the lights.” Archer pointed them out with the beam of his torch.

Evelyn hadn’t noticed them before, probably because she had been doing her best not to look at the mutilated bodies. There were no bodies here though, just rough rock walls and lights spaced at intervals. They were dead too. She figured the generators had run out of fuel a long time ago, or someone had switched them off.

When the path narrowed further, the rock protruding into the tunnel to make it harder to navigate, the men were forced to turn sideways. The three of them squeezed through the fissure in the black rock ahead of her and Archer moved behind her. She cast a look at him and he nodded, silently telling her to go ahead of him.

Protecting her again.

Evelyn holstered her weapon and inched through the gap, shuffling sideways and trying not to catch herself on the more jagged sections of the rockface.

It opened out into an enormous cavern and she lifted her flashlight and stared in stunned silence at one wall of it. Archer came out of the fissure behind her, almost colliding with her.

“What is it?” His deep voice echoed around the cavern.

And then the beam of his torch joined hers in roaming over the wall in front of her.

On it was a detailed carving around four metres wide by three metres in height, one that must have taken the artist years to create. The black stone had been chipped away to reveal an incredible amount of detail and two figures.

A dragon on the right and a female in human form on the left.

They stood on the precipice of a mountain, valleys stretching beyond her, and the sun rose above a lake in the distance, its rays filling the sky.

“The sun.” Lance pointed his flashlight at it and looked back over his shoulder at Archer. “That means this is based on our world, right?”

Archer nodded and eased a step forwards, his dark eyes fixed on the woman.

Her long robes flowed behind her together with her wavy hair as she held her hand out to the dragon looming above her. It stood with its huge wings spread and one paw lifted from the rock, and as Evelyn looked at it, she couldn’t shake the feeling that it was reaching for her too.

There was a strange sort of melancholy about the carving.

One that she guessed Archer felt too because he looked sad as he gazed at it.

Symbols ran beneath the relief, written in a language she didn’t recognise. Some kind of fae? The dragon tongue? They twined and flowed like a ribbon around the dragon and the woman too, as if they were linking them.

On the black sandy floor of the cavern, several drawing pads had been discarded. She squatted and touched one, turning it over. Had the researchers tossed them aside in the panicked rush that had seen them ending up in the cave where everyone had been killed?

She pulled another one towards her. On it was a sketch of the female. She checked the other three. They had drawings of the symbols and notes scrawled around them.

“It looks like the researchers were trying to decipher the language.” She glanced up at Archer.

He continued to stare at the woman as he drifted towards the carving, his gaze growing distant again.

“Archer?” She pushed to her feet.

The flashlight dropped from his right hand as his fingers relaxed and he reached his left hand out towards the figure of the woman. He brushed unsteady fingertips over the symbols that flowed beneath her bare feet, intricate swirls and spots, dashes and sharp angles.

She opened her mouth to say his name again in the hope he would shake himself out of whatever spell he was under.

“Aryanna,” he murmured quietly, his fingers pausing on one of the symbols, his eyes never straying from the woman.

Impossible.

“You can read that?” Evelyn took a step towards him and he shook his head. “Then how do you know it’s her?”

If it was Aryanna, did that make the dragon in the carving Brink? The message had said that Aryanna was Brink’s fated one and that Archangel had her.

---