Page 69 of A Promise of Peridot
My eye caught a sliver of light dancing across the mountains of golden treasure, still shaking with the tremors.
“Stop!” I cried. “There’s light, coming from somewhere. Overthere...” I traced my hand along the engraved walls, feeling around in the darkness. I could hear Mari doing the same. We had a wealth of knowledge and determination between the two of us. We didn’t need lighte or magic. We could find our way out the old-fashioned way.
“Wait, come here—” Mari called from the other side of the room.
I pawed my way to her voice, grasping at candlesticks and pointed crowns, banging my hip into a suit of armor and wincing as pain bloomed along my side.
“What is it?” I asked over the earsplitting noise.
“I think I feel...”
Knocking into her shoulder with my knee, I squeezed past her frame and reached my hand down over hers where the light was slipping through. My pulse thrummed with hope. “Hinges.”
“It’s some kind of false wall.”
I examined the crevice with my fingers until I felt a spiked knob at the base of the hidden door and rotated it with all my strength. As the rusted stakes slid through the flesh of my hand, the door groaned and shifted.
Despite the shrieking pain in my palm, I turned the knob, and then turned it again.
With a low reverberation, barely audible over the shaking and falling of sediment around us, the door opened enough that Mari and I could crawl through.
The corridor was chilling.
The roaring, silenced.
Preternaturally still, lit with iron candlesticks that glowed with that same abnormal fire, the kind that didn’t flicker with the wind. A dim, unwelcoming passage to our left, a slightly lighter passage toour right lit with more of those candles as far as my eye could see, and whittled stone at our feet that became stairs guiding us down, down,down—like the cave was inviting us to stay, a volatile and easily offended host.
“Which way?” Mari asked me.
We halted before that darkness, that deathly crypt below us—likely taking us so far beneath the jungle floor the air would become too heavy to breathe. Air that had probably been trapped down there since the Stones birthed the continent.
The thought made me sick. But the other paths again felt too easy. And the cave had the spirit of a trickster. A cheat. A fraud—
But if we descended those fatal, nightmarish stairs, would we spend eternity down here? Had the others—
I couldn’t let my mind drift to Kane or Griffin or Fedrik... if they, too, had been deceived by Reaper’s Cavern. Or simply crushed. If I would never see them again...
Mari loosed a sigh.
I tried to do the same. “I think we have to try. You wait here, and I’ll call for you if it—”
“Arwen!”
My eyes were still adjusting, but I heard it, too. The clunky, disjointed tremors. The earsplitting reverberation, like the roar before a wave pulls you under the sea. An avalanche of rocks tumbling toward us from the lefthand passage.
“Bleeding Stones,”I breathed.
Mari grabbed my hand and hurtled us down the musty, depthless stairs and into an even darker, danker corridor. We ran through the stone, like the old corn mazes of my youth, sliding and skittering against the dirt beneath our feet. Tearing through—left, right,right again, sharp left, dead end. Doubling back to go right,notleft, and then left again.
“Why the stairs?” I called, doubting our choice, ice sluicing through my blood with regret.
“It seemed so wrong... it had to be right?”
The avalanche grew louder, rumbling and reverberating through my ankles, my shins. I could hear Mari whispering behind me, trying to cast some kind of spell, but nothing materialized. It was slowing us down. We had to keep running, keep moving, despite the never-ending twists and turns the cave presented us with.
I was faster than her and was starting to drag her behind me like a rag doll. But we couldn’t stop. Didn’t dare to face the crush behind us. The way our bodies would be buried under the earth for centuries.
True fear—genuine and harrowing and poison black—assaulted me. Worse than the panic. Worse than the vacant nothing, the numbness.
