Page 68 of A Promise of Peridot
She had to.
We ran for the mouth of the cave, each step bringing another bird’s call, a waft of fresh air, a fragrant damp breeze, until we were spat out where we had entered.
I sucked in steadying gulps of humid, floral air as Griffin lowered Fedrik against the trunk of a palm and knelt to inspect his leg.
Not a minute later—when we had scarcely caught our ragged breaths—a deep, guttural roar erupted from the mouth of the cave. Hideous groaning rang through the trees, sending creatures rustling overhead and at my feet.
The cavern... it was closing.
Sealing shut—
I moved without thinking, faster than I’d ever moved in my life—
Thicker than the stone I had used nearly all my power to break through, a slab from the top of the cave’s open mouth crashed into the earth long before I could reach it. I slammed my fists against what just mere moments—seconds—ago had been the wide-open jaws of Reaper’s Cavern.
Against what was now a mountain of solid rock.
20
arwen
The next chunk of rock that crashed down sent my body sprawling over Mari’s. The force knocked my vertebrae against one other as I curved, prone on top of her, shielding her while she screamed, and that roar of shaking, crumbling, violent stone continued everywhere. The fragments, the dust that painted my tongue—it was all the tunnels, undulating and caving in. Burying us.
And the disorienting, insidious, leadendarknessthat we had been marinating in for minutes, or hours, I wasn’t sure.
I couldn’t hear myself beg Mari to quiet down. To stop screaming. To please, stop screaming.
“Holy Stones, we’re going to die.”
“No.” I heaved. I still couldn’t see. I couldn’tbreathe—
“I don’t know any spells for being entombed.” She thrashed underneath me, my body still bent over hers. My lighte didn’t sense any blood, any snapped bones, any internal bleeding—
I rolled off her and strained to breathe slowly. Like Kane said. To sip the air.
“We’re going to suffocate and die. Or be crushed to death. Or both.” Mari did not know how to talk to people who were deathly afraid of enclosed spaces. “We’re going to decay, and rot in here, and one day someone will find our skeletons along with all this treasure.”
“Mari,” I snapped at her, breathing slower than felt natural. “That is not going to happen.”
“Why did you lie to him? He was almost inside!”
“He wasn’t, and he was going to die trying to get to us. You and I just have to focus. There has to be another way out.”
“I need my grimoires.”
But I didn’t. I sucked in the stuffy air around me, pointed my hands where I thought Kane had been cutting through—a mere guess in the stifling blackness—and tried to summon my lighte. A spark, a beam of glittering power, a single ember, anything.
Come on, come on—
My hands cramped from flexing and I ignored the tendrils of dread that unfurled inside me. What had Dagan said back in Azurine? I couldn’t remember now. My mind had been filled with such silent roaring back then. I hadn’t listened. I couldn’tremember—
Earthly wind rattled thin metal and pages of ancient books around us.
“What spell are you doing?” I called in the darkness. She was on the other side of the room now.
“The luster!”
Good. The room was pitch-black without the candles. We’d need—
