Page 119 of House of Embers
Unlike gray and black tendrille, the white crystal lit up from the inside out, and when it got close to a magical artifact, the crystal would begin to vibrate.
Unfortunately, Kerrigan couldn’t use it while she had her mother’s bracelet on. So she watched as Fordham concentrated in the oppressive room, digging out a bit of magic that felt like being dunked underwater and trying to breathe. But a small bit of magic filtered up, and he pressed it into the tendrille, where it glowed and began to vibrate, indicating a magical artifact was nearby.
Kerrigan held her wrist up. “Bracelet.”
“Right,” Fordham said, pointing the crystal elsewhere.
“Take it around the rest of the room, and see if you find anything else.”
Fordham was all the way to the back of the vault when a commotion sounded from the other side of the door. Kerrigan put her ear to it. Had the guards been found? Was it a shift change?
Then she heard it—a clicking noise.
“Quick,” she told Fordham. “They’re opening the vault door.”
“Almost done!” he called back as he continued around the room. “He must have already taken it. It’s only working for your bracelet.”
Kerrigan sighed. “Maybe the crown isn’t here. Maybe it never was.”
Fordham pocketed the crystal as he returned to her side. “Portal us out.”
Kerrigan clicked her mother’s bracelet around her wrist and felt for that place where she could access the portal magic. It was fuzzy around the edges. Still she reached for it, the door sparking to life for a moment before fizzling out.
“What’s happening?” Fordham asked.
She tried again. The portal barely materialized this time, as if she were looking through water at her door. Everything was hazy and shifting irregularly. She knew instinctively that if she stepped through that door, they would cease to exist.
It collapsed in on itself before she could even recall it.
Her last try was even worse than the others. Not only could she barely get a spark of a door to open, but it felt like her magic had drained out of her like sand in a sieve.
“Uh…it isn’t working,” she said.
“But it worked in Ravinia.”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s the iron. Maybe there’s more tendrille. Maybe it’s deeper. But it isn’t working.”
“Then I’ll jump us, and we’ll run.”
“Okay.” Kerrigan grasped him, shivering from the magic drain. “Let’s go.”
They entered the nothing, shadows closing over their heads, and then they both slammed into the vault door.
Kerrigan dropped to her knees. “Scales.”
Fordham ground his teeth together. “The shield is back up.”
“So we’re trapped?”
“It appears so.”
“What are we going to do?”
This had always been a possibility—a possibility that Dozan had argued most of all. They’d sat around their inner-circle war council explaining what the metal crown was, what it could do, and where they thought it was. Everyone had agreed that it was worth it to get it away from Bastian…except Dozan, who had adamantly argued that it was a trap buried at the bottom of the mountain with the highest chance of capture.
They’d done it anyway, and he’d been right.
“Damn it, Dozan,” she grumbled.
