Elaria Silverstan's Arc

Chapter 6 of 22

The right tunnel climbed for a long time before it spilled Elaria out onto a high ice shelf. Wind hit her face. Below her stretched a valley she did not know, split into three pale basins that all looked the same. The fawn was gone. Without a landmark, she would walk into the wrong basin and lose the crystal's trail. She forced herself to look, not panic. Near the tunnel mouth stood a weathered wooden plaque bolted into the ice, its face carved with old coordinates and faint route lines. Beside it, half frosted over, a tall iron vane turned on a stiff pin. Its arrow was shaped like a thin bird's beak, and its tip pointed steady against the wind, refusing to drift. Elaria brushed the rime from the plaque and matched its marked bearing to the direction the vane insisted on. The arrow held toward the middle basin, where a thin blue thread of light pulsed under the snow. She fixed the line in her mind and started down the shelf. The valley was no longer all the same. She had a bearing now, and a place to aim.