Jorie’s cursing echoed downward, as she dangled from the slats far above Van.
The pack plunged to the bottom of the cavern.
Van gripped the plank tighter. She heard grunts from below. Her heart soared when she saw Brux hanging onto a frayed rope.
An angry stretching sound howled from the strained ropes that tethered the dangling bridge.
“Van, get rid of any extra weight!” Brux called from below. “Drop your backpack!” He climbed upward.
Van, paralyzed with fear, couldn’t move, let alone remove her backpack.
“It’s okay, Van,” Brux said, soothingly, close to her now. “Just start climbing.”
Sheer terror turned her to stone. “N-No . . . I-I can’t move.”
“I’m right behind you. I’m with you. I won’t let anything happen to you,” Brux coaxed in a strained voice. “I promise.”
Van had to get moving, or they’d both plummet to their deaths. She couldn’t do that to him. She unclasped her trembling hand and began to climb.
“There you go,” Brux said, relieved. “Just like that.”
Van looked upward and saw Jorie reach land.
Adrenaline, along with Brux’s coaxing, gave Van the will to make it to the top. Once there, she stumbled several shaky steps away from the cliff, dropped to her knees, and fell flat onto her stomach, weeping and exhausted. Someone removed her backpack and spoke to her, but the ringing in her ears blocked out their words. Van lay face-down, hugging the frost-coated ground, thankful she’d survived.
The near-death experience on the bridge bonded Van to her teammates, making her feel as if she were part of something bigger than herself. Brux and Jorie had risked their lives to save her. For that, Van couldn’t put her gratitude into words—even as Jorie screamed at her for putting the team in danger.
Paley and Elmot fussed over her, too. Their concern shined in their eyes. Van had never experienced such sincere caring before, from either her hypercritical stepmother or her emotionally distant father. Her heart welled at the thought of Brux. She hoped that he thought of her as more than a friend. He had turned out to be a great guy—and a great warrior.
Once back on their trek, Van and Paley seemed to get along after Van’s near death; however, Jorie declared that they had unresolved issues. She ordered them to “work it out” by sending them on a hunt for edible berries during their break, while the others tried to catch some wild game.
After a bit of polite conversation, Paley opened up and accused Van of wanting to keep her in “her place,” socially below Van.
“You can’t stand me be being treated as an equal to you,” claimed Paley. “Or boys being interested in me, instead of you. I’m no longer boosting your self-esteem!”
Van’s joy vanished over surviving her brush with death. Stunned that Paley felt that way about her, Van said in retaliation, “So? You just used me on the island for your own social survival! And because I bought you things! You were never a real friend to me!”
Before they had resolved their issues, Jorie called the team back. She, Elmot, and Brux hadn’t caught anything, so they had to eat the berries harvested by Van and Paley.
Jorie checked the berries before doling out portions. She scowled. “Don’t you idiots know how to tell edible berries from poisonous ones?”
“Yes,” Van retorted. “I learned the edible berry rule in school. White and yellow, kill a fellow. Purple and blue, good for you. Red, could be good, could be dead.”
Jorie picked through the berries and tossed several away. “Then why are yellow berries here?”
“Paley!” Van scolded.
Paley shrugged and said angrily, “I guess I wasn’t privileged enough to get that lesson in school!”
“Enough,” Jorie stated. “Let’s eat.” She handed out the berries to everyone.
They ate in silence, with Van and Paley glowering at each other.
Time was ticking, and Jorie moved them onward—with only three backpacks among them, limited supplies and food, and Van and Paley in the middle of the worst fight of their lives.
The team traveled without much conversation. Eventually, the setting sun cast a glow over the landscape, highlighting an enormous layer of granite slabs encasing a mountain. As they moved closer to the bordering heaps of granite, Elmot got more and more excited.
Finally, they were close enough for Elmot to jump onto a block.
“My fellow teammates, may I present,” he extended his arm toward a massive crevasse in the mound, “the Caves of Wolfenden!”
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Day 18: Living World
“That’s the entrance?” Van asked, worried about squishing herself between tightly packed slabs of granite.
“I won’t fit through that fissure,” Jorie said. “Neither will Brux. Elmot! Find another way in!”
“Well,” Elmot hesitated. “I have good news and bad news.”
“Shoot,” Jorie barked.
“The bad news is that the details in my maps end here,” Elmot confessed. “Even the holographic map didn’t show beyond the outer granite part of the mountain.”
“Makes sense,” Brux said. “No one has made it to the Coin and back, so how could anyone map the Caves?”
“The good news,” Elmot continued, “is that I know enough about tunnels to navigate through here without a map.”
“Ho-yeah!” Jorie yelped.
“It’s late. I think we should rest before tackling the Caves,” Brux suggested.
Van couldn’t help but think he’d said it for her benefit. Her exhaustion from the drain of the Twin Gemstones must be obvious from her appearance.
“Elmot, do you know if there are any caves for shelter nearby?” Brux asked.
Elmot sulked. “I don’t recall any from the holographic map.”
“It’s not worth the risk to be scouting around,” Jorie said. She pointed to a natural granite lean-to jutting from the mountain of stone. “We can camp here for a few hours.”
Before it got too dark, Van and Paley hastened to collect dry sticks, without talking to each other. Elmot followed, scouting for a particular type of tree. Jorie and Brux searched the ground for “good rocks.”
Elmot found a birch tree and peeled some bark from its trunk. It had bulbous, reddish-brown blotches inside.
“Tinder for the fire,” Elmot said through chattering teeth. “The inside fungus easily catches a spark. We don’t want to get frostbite.”
Brux arranged the sticks into a pyramid. Jorie held a “handstone,” a small, flat stone, in one hand and a “striking quartz” in the other. She began banging the two rocks together on top of the birch peel.
Van reached into one of her pants pockets and gazed at Jorie quizzically. “Why don’t you just use my matches?”
Jorie looked as if she wanted to throttle Van. She grabbed the matches and grumbled, “Thanks.”
Paley tsked at Van. “Why didn’t you tell anyone you had matches?”
“Nobody asked!” snapped Van.
“Shut it!” Jorie barked. “Both of you.” Then she quickly lit the campfire.
Based on his knowledge of geology and speleology and the bit of information he had gained from his holographic map, Elmot conjectured that the Caves of Wolfenden made up a network of winding tunnels underneath a mountain, which was most likely the labyrinth Zane had mentioned at the Troll’s Foot Tavern.
“There’s probably a cavern in the deepest part of the underground cave network,” he said. “If there is, then it’s the most logical place for the Coin to be hidden.”
Van, Elmot, and Paley grabbed sleeping bags from inside their backpacks and inflated them. The count was three sleeping bags for five people.
“I’ll share one with Bruuux,” Paley cooed, jokingly.
Van knew it was no joke. It revealed that things were still not right between her and Paley.
No one wanted to share a sleeping bag.
At that moment, Van needed rest more than
she hated Paley. She volunteered to share a sleeping bag with Paley, so she could go to sleep while the others wasted their time squabbling. Paley, who must have been just as tired, agreed.
Brux and Elmot refused to sleep in one bag together, and Jorie refused to share a bag with either Brux or Elmot.
“Why don’t you rotate, while one takes watch?” Van said, yawning, as she crawled into her sleeping bag, trying her best not to touch Paley, which was impossible being wrapped together. She fell asleep before finding out how her teammates had solved their sleeping arrangement crisis.
Jorie woke at dawn and roused everyone. Van couldn’t tell who had slept where or whether anyone had kept watch. But Jorie, Brux, and Elmot had dark circles under their eyes, and they appeared cranky. To make matters worse, the temperature had dropped near freezing, they were starving, and Trey was no longer around to hunt for them. No one else in the group had hunting training, and with the land around the caves barren of animals and edible plant life, the group deemed the task of searching for food to be futile.
Jorie commanded all of them to search their pockets, so she could take inventory of their supplies.
Van patted her cargo pants and felt a lump in one of her many pockets: the stash of salted auroch sticks she had swiped from Roguey. Without hesitation, she offered the auroch sticks.
“Sorry,” she said. “I forgot that Roguey had given me these.” She didn’t want to admit that she had kept food from the group.
Paley opened her mouth to comment.
Jorie cut her off. “Just be grateful we have food.” She portioned out small shares to each of them.
As Van nibbled, her anxiety reared its ugly head. They would soon go deep underground—a place with no exits and no turning back. “Elmot, are you sure you’ll be able to get us out?”
“Absolutely.” He tapped his head. “Got all the information we need stored up here.”
Although it was daylight, to conserve their matches Jorie and Brux lit makeshift torches from the campfire before putting it out and carried some extra unlit torches for later. Jorie cast a simple spell on the torches to extend their burning time. Then Elmot led them over mounds of enormous granite blocks, uphill and slippery, and into a cave made from a large fissure. Their torches threw light inside the tunnel.
At every bend, Elmot formed a pile of stones, indicating the direction back to their original point of entry. The tunnels grew narrower the deeper they went underground. The walls and the ceilings had a thin, sooty coating. The temperature got cooler, and the smell of damp stone stuffed up Van’s nose. She felt apprehensive.
“Elmot,” she said, “how do you know where we’re going?”
“I’m checking the floor for an incline and mapping our path in my head,” he replied. “I have a talent for recognizing the various compositions of the rocks. I see designs in the stratified gravel—”
“Like how I can read ice crystals?” Van interjected.
Paley tsked. “It’s not always about you,” she muttered.
Elmot cut in before Van could retort. “Not quite the same thing,” he said kindly. “I’m memorizing the shapes and the types of different minerals mixed with the clay and sand.”
To calm her nerves, Van asked Elmot to point out the various minerals and their patterns.
“Here, the sooty coating is manganese,” Elmot said and went on about the plates and chips in the walls and the ceiling, what he could see and hoped to see, “—the golden attapulgite here.” He pointed. “We should come across crystal celestite. There.” He pointed again. “That beautiful blue is azurite. Coming across some gypsum would be great—”
Van couldn’t grasp any of what Elmot said. Instead, she tried memorizing every twist and turn, so that if her anxiety became unbearable, she could flee back to the surface. Then she gave up. She was in too far now. The only way out was through.
To her relief, the tunnel opened into an expansive chamber. Their torches lit up the cavity, exposing soot-striped pillars, a dusty mosaic-tiled floor, and a cracked reflecting pool empty of water. A fountain stood intact, and a trickle filled its base with fresh mountain water. The dilapidated condition and the layers of dust suggested the once-beautiful temple had been abandoned for centuries. The high, smooth walls were engraved with the writings of a long-forgotten civilization.
Van craned her neck and studied the ancient script, hoping she could read it. She couldn’t.
“Whoa. Who used to live here?” Brux asked Jorie, the team’s cultures expert.
“I-I don’t know,” Jorie said. “You’re the language expert. Can’t you read it?”
“It’s not one I’ve seen before,” Brux said, intently peering at the writing. “It looks like a derivative of the Language of the Ancients. I think I can figure it out.”
“I need to rest for a minute,” Van said. She threw her butt down on a cracked stone bench.
“They were the Ming I,” Brux said. He wrinkled his brow. “They’re telling a story about . . . their end.”
“What does it say?” Van slipped off her hiking boots and rubbed her feet.
Paley sat on another bench, nowhere near Van, and did the same.
“Do they say why no one ever mapped this place before?” Elmot asked, taking in the sights of the temple.
“They were a peaceful, Light-worshipping tribe,” Brux said. “Then came a time when Darkness reigned in the external world.”
“Humph,” Jorie said. “Sounds familiar.”
“The only Light remaining was inside themselves . . . they were directed to quietly nourish themselves from within, to nurture their Light. If they reacted to their lack of progress with anger and negativity, they would extinguish their inner Light and block the aid of the Creator.” Brux silently perused the words, then continued. “They didn't listen. Instead of finding grace, they fought against Darkness, which gave it power . . . they shined their inner Light, rather than concealing it. The Dark forces consumed them, and they suffered great misfortune.”
“What does all that mean?” Paley asked, stretching out her legs and wiggling her toes.
Brux shrugged.
“It means what it means,” Jorie said. She walked over to the fountain, more interested in inspecting the chamber. “This is a good place to rest. The fountain has fresh mountain water, and there’s a fire pit we can use.”
Elmot held up his hand. “I feel a slight breeze. They must have worked out a ventilation system. Still, I recommend keeping the fire to a minimum.”
“Too bad we don't have any real food!” Paley complained.
“Maybe . . . , ” Elmot said. He walked to the far end of the temple and peered into an aqueduct in the floor. “Does anyone have a hook or a compass?”
“A compass won’t work, Elmot. You should know that,” Jorie said, concerned. “The earth in this area is full of iron ore.”
“I have a compass,” Van said. She rifled through her backpack. “What do you need it for, if it won’t work?”
“This is a stream,” said Elmot, pointing to the flowing water in the duct. “Fresh water means fish.”
She handed Elmot the compass, confused.
He took apart the compass and removed its needles. “Since none of us has a hook.” He bent the arrow needle into a U-shape, then unraveled a string from a ball of twine he had packed. He attached the string to the needle and made a fishing line. He put a tiny piece of dried meat on the hook and lowered it into the stream.
Within an hour, the team had settled around a small fire, with the aroma of roasting fish filling the air.
Brux sat on the crumbling stone bench next to Van, where she quietly ate from stoneware they’d found in the temple. He had watched her all evening—if it was evening. They couldn’t tell time in the caves. She knew he had something on his mind.
“Van, I’m worried about you,” he said. “Are you ready to face the challenges of the Elemental?”
“Not really,” Van said honestly. “I still can’t believ
e I’m—” She couldn’t bring herself to say Anchoress.
“I want you to know . . . I read something in Manik’s text.”
Van lost her appetite. She placed her bowl on the floor next to the bench.
“The Elemental will challenge your strength against what the text described as the first plague—the Plague of Evil.”
“Yeah, we know that from Ildiss,” Van said. Despite the chill in the temple, she felt sweaty and warm from stress.
“No, well, what I’m trying to tell you—” Brux fidgeted. “What the text described guarding the labyrinth, it’s . . . a Minotaur.”
“You mean like a Tarc?” Van asked.
“No,” Jorie said from across the room, listening to their conversation. “The Tarcs are mostly human. The Minotaur is all beast. Be prepared. The Minotaur’s appearance will shock you. It looks nothing like a Tarc.”
“Great,” Van said, throwing her hands in the air. “Just great. Wonderful!” She wiped her sweaty forehead with the back of her hand. “So, the Tarcs were just a warm-up act!”
Brux narrowed his eyes at her.
“Why can’t it be a bunfy?” Van said. “Why’s it have to be a monster?”
“I’m not letting you do this alone.” He stared at her. “Van. Are the Gemstones making you sick?”
“Just tired.” She rose with effort, dragging her weary body to one of the sleeping bags. “And I’m not sharing a sleeping bag tonight! Stupid Minotaur . . . , ” she mumbled. Without another word, she tucked in and pulled the sleeping bag over her head.
Just before she drifted off, her mind filled with a soft amaranthine glow. The blurry outline of a figure emerged.
Jacynthia! Van called out in her dream state.
“Greetings, my little warrior,” Jacynthia said. Her mouth tipped into a soft smile, creasing her face.
Jacynthia, why am I the Anchoress, if I have no power?
“I cannot answer your question.”
Why not?
“I do not understand it.”
Van sighed in frustration. She changed the question. How can I defeat the Minotaur that roams the labyrinths and protects the Elemental guarding the Coin?
Shock of Fate: A Young Adult Fantasy Adventure (Anchoress Series Book 1) Page 34
