Elliana Morris's Arc

Chapter 2 of 5

Elliana came back down the cellar stairs with the lantern her father had used for storm nights. The frame was rusted at the corners. The glass was cloudy with old soot. She shook it and heard oil slosh, then struck a match and lit the wick. The flame caught weak and yellow. She turned the knob higher. It did not get brighter. She stepped through the archway. Cobwebs dragged across her hair. The passage sloped down. The stone walls were cut, not natural. Her lantern lit maybe six feet ahead and then the dark closed again like water. She counted her steps out of habit. At twenty she looked back. The cellar opening was already a pale square the size of a coin. She stopped. If the flame went out she would not find the wall by touch alone. She thought about turning around. Then she saw the writing. Someone had scratched it into the stone at shoulder height, just past the entrance, where she had missed it going in. The letters were deep and old. TURN BACK. Under that, in the same hand, smaller: THE DEAD KEEP THE DOOR. Elliana held the lantern close. Her hand shook and the light shook with it. She read the words twice. She thought of the neat pile of bricks in her cellar. Someone had left this warning. Someone else had ignored it and opened the wall anyway. Ahead, deep in the tunnel, the faint glow she had seen from the cellar was still there. Steady. Warm-colored. Closer now than it had any right to be. She could go back up, brick the arch herself, and sleep above a sealed hole for the rest of her life. Or she could see what was burning down there. She walked toward the glow. She kept one hand on the wall so she would not lose the line. The lantern coughed once and held. The passage curved. The glow grew. It was not firelight. It was steadier than fire, the color of a low sunset held still. The tunnel opened. Elliana stopped at the edge of a wider chamber. The glow came from somewhere beyond it, past a second archway cut into the far wall. Two figures stood on either side of that archway. She lifted the lantern. They were skeletons. Armored. Tall helms with narrow slits. Spears held upright in bone hands, the tips level with each other. Their jaws hung open in fixed grins. One had a spark of orange light where an eye should have been. Then the other. Elliana did not move. She did not breathe. The lantern rattled in her grip and she clamped her other hand around it to make it stop. Neither skeleton turned its head. Neither lowered its spear. They only watched her, and waited.