2.2 KiB
The stone door groaned closed behind them with a sound like a final breath. Darkness swallowed the world, broken only by Halven’s torch and the flickering lights held by the guards ahead. Cold rose from the stairs beneath their feet—ancient cold, untouched by sun or fire. It coiled around Telaryn’s throat like a noose.
She descended in silence. Ten steps. Twenty. Then stopped.
“Alisha,” she said softly, without turning.
The footsteps behind her paused. “Yes?”
“You shouldn’t have come.”
Alisha said nothing. Telaryn heard her shift the torch in her hand. Just behind her, Halven and the others moved onward, their shapes shrinking into the gloom. Soon it would be only the two of them, surrounded by silence and ancestral stone.
“You had time to stay. When the passage opened, I saw it on your face—you hesitated.”
“I didn’t,” Alisha whispered.
“You did.”
A pause. Then: “I wasn’t sure you'd want me to follow.”
Telaryn turned. The torchlight caught on Alisha’s face—smudged with soot, eyes rimmed with red, but unwavering. Her thin cloak was already soaked at the hem, and she carried nothing but a small blade at her belt and the dying flame in her hand.
“I don’t want you to die,” Telaryn said.
Alisha’s laugh came brittle and brief. “That makes two of us.”
“You don’t understand. Where I’m going...”
“I know exactly where you’re going,” Alisha interrupted. “I heard the stories, same as you. I’ve seen what they painted over. I know what they fear.”
The air between them shivered with more than cold.
“You were born to this, Ryn. But you weren’t meant to walk it alone.”
Telaryn looked away. The corridor loomed behind Alisha—silent, black, endless. Above them, war raged. Below, only ghosts and secrets waited. Her heart beat like a funeral drum.
“I need someone to remind me who I was,” she said, voice nearly breaking.
Alisha stepped closer. “Then let me be that someone.”
They stood for a moment in the dark, two women beneath the crumbling bones of a kingdom, holding between them the last spark of something unbroken.
Then Telaryn turned again and descended the stairs. Alisha followed, and the dark closed in behind them.