Elaria Silverstan's Arc

Chapter 10 of 22

Twenty paces past the open arch, the corridor split. Elaria stopped and lifted her axe. Three passages opened in front of her, each lit by a different color of rune cut into the stone — blue on the left, green in the middle, red on the right. The runes pulsed slow, like breathing. She could not read any of them. The cradle at her chest swayed as she leaned in to look closer, and the sprite inside stirred. Something pale lay at the mouth of the green corridor. Elaria stepped closer and crouched. A traveler's pack sat half-buried in old snow, its straps frayed, its tether lines cut clean. She turned it over with the haft of her axe. The canvas was stiff with frost. Inside she found a tin cup, a broken compass, and nothing else. Whoever had set the pack down here had not come back for it. She set the pack against the wall and stood. The green corridor was a dead one. That left two. A tall pillar of layered ice stood at the entrance of the red corridor, its channels catching the rune light and throwing it back in warm streaks. Pretty. She did not trust pretty. She tapped its base with her axe and the sound came back hollow. She stepped back and looked at the blue corridor. Plain stone. No marker. No warning. "I can't read these," she said, low. The sprite climbed to the lip of the cradle and gripped the wire. Elaria held still. The sprite drew a slow breath and exhaled toward the red corridor. A drift of mist left her mouth — pale at first, then bleeding into bands of color, rose and gold and green and blue. The mist drifted into the red corridor and broke against something Elaria could not see. It scattered. It did not come back. The sprite turned her head and breathed again, this time toward the blue corridor. The same rainbow mist slid forward along the wall. It traced the stone in a long, even line and kept going. Where it touched, thin veins of frost spread across a granite slab set into the wall — clean cracks of ice running through the rock in a pattern that held. The mist did not scatter. It pulled her forward like a thread. Elaria lowered her axe. "Blue, then." She set one hand on the cradle's edge, careful of the cloth between them, and stepped into the blue corridor. The rune light washed over her face. Behind her, the red corridor's pillar gave a soft crack as the air in it shifted. She did not look back. The mist drifted ahead at the height of her shoulder, and she followed it deeper into the ruin, the sprite warm-cold against her ribs, the next turn already waiting.