Page 56 of Wizards & Weavers
Warren was the first to speak, tapping the butt of his staff against the base of a frozen pillar. “I’ve never seen anything like this. The explosion must have unblocked the way to this cavern.”
“Are these adventurers?” Elyssandra held her hands just above the ice, as if standing at a shop window, afraid to smudge the glass. “Are they from Weathervale, somehow?”
Augustin shook his head. “The state of these bones, they couldn’t possibly be. These are old. Very old, indeed. A different time. A different place.”
Braiden couldn’t deduce anything helpful from the tattered clothing that still clung to the ancient skeletons. This might have been his one area of expertise, but these poor things were only wearing moldering scraps. A few skeletons were still clad inarmor — warriors in life, perhaps — but even the metal had worn and rusted away.
“They weren’t buried this way,” Braiden muttered, thinking of the town cemetery far up above. They didn’t have unusual burial customs in Weathervale, mostly the same common practice of stuffing a body in a box and giving it to the earth for safekeeping.
Ah, and there it was: splinters of wood suspended in the ice, fragments of stone. These bodies had once been buried even deeper, but this explosion of unrelenting cold — the kaboom heard across Weathervale, that seemed to have summoned half of Aidun’s adventurers — had it truly been so powerful as to hurl these old skeletons upward from the depths?
“This dungeon goes far deeper than I thought,” Augustin said, all but confirming Braiden’s suspicions. “There is much to see here, so much to study, and yet the sheer force of the explosion concerns me deeply.”
Elyssandra folded her hands and studied the wizard’s face. “You’re thinking about it again, aren’t you? Sealing the dungeon.”
Warren’s ears stood at attention, a pair of exclamation points. “This is the last thing I wanted to report back to the Underborough, but the sooner, the better. The elders will refuse to leave the village. There has to be something else we can do.”
A knot twisted in Braiden’s stomach. Sealing the dungeon meant sealing away his greatest chance of saving the shop, but he knew it was selfish. It felt wrong to still think of the moongrass filament when there were burrowfolk lives at stake.
How could he deny the grave danger that a second blast would bring, seeing these corpses exhumed by an explosion from below? If only they could find its source.
“I know we’re all aching,” Augustin said, “and cold, and exhausted. But we must press on until we find the root of theproblem. Then we can regroup and assess what must be done to mitigate the danger. If sealing truly is the only option — ”
The wizard trailed off. Braiden met his gaze, but he said nothing, only folding his arms and sighing in resignation. He leaned back against the closest pillar of ice, but only after checking that this one didn’t contain a skeleton. It would feel disrespectful.
For whatever reason this particular pillar reached up far higher than the others, grown thick around like the trunk of an especially old tree. Braiden frowned when he spied a second enormous pillar situated mere feet away.
How strange that two of these icy spires would build up to an approximately similar thickness, and presumably an approximately similar height, too. Braiden tilted his head back, trying to trace exactly how high the pillars went.
He frowned even harder when he found both pillars converging in one spot, then continuing ever higher past the point where they fused. He scratched the top of his head, only now appreciating the bizarre knobbly patches that sprouted halfway up each pillar, almost perfect mirrors of each other.
He glanced down, again marveling at how both pillars terminated in large, lengthy bases attached to the ground, oblongs each tipped with five large icicles that resembled — that resembled —
Braiden shuddered. “Toes.”
“Did you say something, Braiden?” Augustin leaned closer. “What was that?”
These icicles on the ground were toes the way that the long rectangular bases were feet. And the knobbly patches halfway up the pillars — halfway up the legs — were supposed to be knees.
Perhaps it was a statue. Braiden gulped. Itwasonly a statue, wasn’t it? A very rudimentary and very crude ice sculpture of avery large and very jagged man. That was all it was. And yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that it was something more.
“I think we should leave,” Braiden said. “Right now.”
“Absolutely not,” Augustin replied. “Not until we identify the exact source — the exact source of — ”
The wizard trailed off again, but this time it wasn’t because he’d run out of words. An immense cracking noise had split the gloom of the cavern.
One foot. The great, frozen thing above them had just lifted its foot.
Chapter
Twenty-Two
The tangleof dread in Braiden’s stomach knotted and knotted again as he took in the sheer size of the frozen colossus. How tall was this thing, truly? Not as tall as the Lighthouse, but still big enough to cause serious damage.
What havoc could a creature like this inflict on the world above? What horrors had the explosion unleashed? For the first time, Braiden found himself agreeing with Augustin’s plan.
He backed away from the icy giant, his fingers tugging on the edge of Augustin’s cloak. Maybe the thing hadn’t noticed them yet. If they moved lightly, kept themselves small, they could still make an expeditious retreat.
