2.3 KiB
The tunnel narrowed.
Dust choked the air, and the walls pressed in—cut not by mason’s chisel, but older tools that left gouges like claw marks. Their torchlight barely touched the curve of the passage ahead. Footsteps echoed, but never quite in rhythm. Ryn slowed. So did Alisha.
Halven had gone ahead with the others, scouting the breach they’d said led to a frozen aqueduct. Ryn had insisted on hanging back, needing the quiet, or perhaps just space to breathe.
“They carved these tunnels during the Age of Clans,” Alisha murmured, brushing her fingers along the black stone. “Before even the first kings.”
“Older,” Ryn said. Her voice felt too loud here.
As the corridor widened again, the walls changed. The rough-cut stone gave way to reliefs—low and weather-worn, coated in dust. Ryn raised her torch.
Figures stood etched in profile. Women in cloaks of fur and antler. Men crowned in thorns and wielding axes. Spirits, half-human, half-smoke. Time had blunted their forms, but there was still strength in the lines. Still reverence.
Then came the final carving.
A crowned woman.
Her face had been clawed away—not worn by time, but deliberately defaced. But her posture remained proud, arms spread. In her hands: a sword darker than the stone around it, rendered in obsidian inlay now cracked with age. Flames curled along the blade's length. The only color was a flake of dried red where the hilt met her hand.
Alisha took a step back. “Ryn.”
“I see it.”
“She’s not in any of the royal murals.”
“No,” Ryn said. “She isn’t.”
A cold gust whispered through the tunnel—not from behind, but ahead. The torch guttered in Ryn’s hand.
For a moment, she thought she heard something beneath the rustle of flame: a murmur of breath not her own. A hiss of syllables unspoken.
She turned, quickly. No one was there.
“Did you hear—”
Alisha shook her head. But her hand was on the hilt of her dagger.
“They don’t come this deep,” she whispered.
Ryn looked back at the carving. Something about the blade unsettled her—not its design, but the intent behind it. The way it was drawn to catch the eye. To remember.
Or to warn.
"Let's move," Ryn said.
They walked in silence after that, the flame low and the air heavier with each step.
Behind them, in the dark, the dust of ages shifted. Only slightly.