Elaria Silverstan's Arc

Chapter 19 of 22

The crystal road ended at a wall of light. Elaria stopped hard, her boots skidding on the smooth floor. A fence of quartz shards rose from the road to the ceiling, each spike taller than three men and thick as a barrel. The shards glowed from within, pale blue at the base, white at the tips. Warm air pressed through the gaps but no gap was wide enough for a hand, let alone a body. She walked the length of the wall twice. She found no door, no seam, no crack. The road simply stopped, and the wall simply stood. She knelt and checked Lia. The ice figure in the cradle had softened at the shoulders. Water beaded on the frostcloth and dripped between Elaria's fingers. When she stood, she saw what the drip had done to the road behind her. A shallow dip had formed in the crystal where she had been kneeling, its surface slushed and pitted, rimmed with grainy frost. Every step she had taken down the road left a fainter version of the same mark. Lia was melting the road as she failed. Elaria had minutes. Maybe less. She pressed her palms against the quartz and pushed cold from her blood into the wall. Nothing moved. She struck it with the flat of her axe. The blue light on the blade flared and died, and the wall did not chip. She stepped back and forced herself to look at the whole shape of it. At the center, low to the ground, one shard was rounder than the others. She crouched. Set into its face was a disc of dark metal, rings inside rings, notched with small teeth and marked with a single sun at the middle. A puzzle lock. She had walked past it twice because it sat below her knee. Elaria opened the cradle. She lifted the softening figure of Lia in her gloved hands, held her to the disc, and let the sprite's breath fog the metal. The outer ring turned. The next ring turned against it. One by one the rings clicked, matching the frost patterns to the teeth, until the sun at the center sank into the shard with a soft snap. A seam split the quartz from floor to ceiling. The shards drew apart on either side, and warm gold light poured through the gap. Elaria settled Lia back into the cradle. Water ran down her ribs. She stepped through the opening and the wall closed behind her, sealing the road and her only way back in a single silent motion.