Sylvara Spellweaver's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Sylvara stepped out of the tavern into a narrow street. The map was warm inside her sleeve. The cracked crystal pulsed against her hip. Behind her, boots hit the tavern threshold. She did not look back. She walked fast, then faster. The faerie dragon clung to her shoulder and dug small claws through the silk of her dress. The boots stayed with her. When she turned a corner, they turned. When she stopped at a stall, they stopped a few paces off. She could not see the face under the hood, only a gloved hand resting near a knife. If he caught her in the open with the map on her, he would take it, and probably her throat too. Her pendant went cold, then hot, then cold again. It always did that near strong magic. She followed the pull. Two streets down, the pendant burned so hard she almost gasped. She stopped in front of a plain wall between a cobbler's and a shuttered bakery. Nothing there. Just old stone. The faerie dragon leapt from her shoulder and pressed its nose to a seam in the mortar. The stone lit up under its snout. Runes bloomed across the wall in cold blue lines, the same runes marked on the map in her sleeve. Sylvara pulled the map out. She held it to the wall. The runes on the paper and the runes on the stone matched at one point: a small tower drawn in the map's upper corner, ringed with spires. The map was not just a route. It was a key. The boots turned onto her street. She pressed her palm flat against the runes. The pendant screamed heat. The wall folded inward like cloth pulled through a ring. She stepped through with the dragon at her heels. The stone sealed behind her without a sound. She stood in a hall she had not known existed. The ceiling climbed higher than any room in the city. Stained glass in a dozen colors threw light across a stone floor. Doors lined the walls, each carved with a different rune. The air hummed against her teeth. Every door leaked a spell she had never heard before. Dozens of them. Maybe hundreds. Her grimoire pressed heavy in her satchel. She had come looking for a lead. She had walked into a library of them. Outside, the pursuer would find a blank wall. Inside, Sylvara was alone with more magic than she could copy in a year, and no way to know how long the door would stay shut behind her, or what already lived in the halls ahead. The little dragon growled at a door on the far end. Something on the other side growled back.