Taking the others, he Slid deeper into the forest again, emerging back at the heart. Once here, the sense of energy struck him once more.
Daniel began to make his way from the heart of the forest, walking back slowly, focusing on the energy as he did. At the edge of the trees, the energy began to ease, the power that he’d felt flowing starting to abate.
Why would it change there?
He started forward again, back into the trees, and once he reached the boundary, he felt the same energy once again.
The boundary of energy seemed to be at the ring of trees, though why should that be?
Rayen was watching him, and she joined him. Power swirled around and away from her, questing toward the Elder Trees and then away from them. The frown on her face began to deepen. The shadows shifted, disappearing into the ground for a moment before she gasped.
“What is it?” Daniel asked.
“I feel it.”
“Where?”
“Beneath us.”
“How is it beneath us?”
“I’m not entirely certain.” Shadows swirled around Rayen, once again drifting toward the ground before returning to her. “All I can tell is that the power is there. I don’t understand where it could be concentrated beneath us.”
“There is a cavern deep beneath the ground,” Neran said, approaching them. He was frowning, and his mouth pressed into a tight line, as it seemed as if he were trying to try to understand what he was detecting. “The Forgers should not have been able to reach it.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s someplace that Rsiran knew about and he entrusted me with a key to finding it.”
“What sort of key?”
Neran studied them for a moment before turning away. As he headed back into the heart of the Aisl, Daniel paused for a moment before following. Rayen grabbed for his arm. “Are you certain this is the person you want to trust?”
“There’s no reason that Neran would have to betray us.”
“You’d be surprised at reasons people might have for betrayal, Daniel Elvraeth.”
He watched her for a moment before shaking his head. Neran wouldn’t do that. But he didn’t really understand what Neran was after or why he would hide something from others within the forest.
When he caught up to Neran, the other man was standing in front of the forge, pausing with his hand in front of the door. “Were it not for great need, I probably would not have revealed this to you.”
“You haven’t revealed anything,” Daniel said.
“I wasn’t prepared to show this to you. Rsiran did not want this known by anyone other than himself.”
“And what is it?”
“You will see.”
Neran stepped inside, waited for Daniel and Rayen to follow, and motioned for them to close the door. Once they were inside, he headed toward the anvil, standing in front of it. “Can the two of you help me move this?”
“Move the anvil?” Daniel asked.
Neran nodded.
Daniel glanced over at Rayen, who shrugged. Shadows stretched from her, and he grabbed on to one while Neran grabbed the other, with Rayen standing off to one side, shadows swirling from her and stretching into the anvil. As they worked, they managed to move the anvil, but only a little bit. It moved slowly, almost painfully slowly. When they pulled it away, a section of the ground looked different. There was a large plate of metal set into the ground. It wasn’t lorcith, though Daniel didn’t recognize what kind of metal it was.
Neran grabbed a prybar from his supplies and began to lever it beneath the piece of metal. When he was done, he nodded again to Daniel and Rayen, and the two of them helped him pull the plate off the ground.
When they lifted it away, a narrow stairway led deep into the earth.
“This has been here?” Daniel asked.
“Rsiran didn’t want to be the only one who had access to this place, but at the same time, he didn’t want it to be easy for others to reach.”
“Where does this go?”
“Down.”
“I see that, but where?”
“I’ve never been in it, so I can’t really answer that for you. All I know is that it leads down into the earth.”
And beneath the heart of the forest. This forge sat at the center of the forest, and Daniel suspected the anvil was at the center of that.
He glanced at Rayen, taking a deep breath, and then started down.
34
Daniel
The smell of earth surrounded him, filling his nostrils, almost an unpleasant odor. He barely had enough room to navigate down the rungs along the ladder built into the wall. The other side of the narrow tunnel pressed against his back, hard-packed earth lined with some metal that carried a strange aroma. Not lorcith, no more than the plate that Rsiran had used aboveground had been lorcith. With Rsiran’s connection to lorcith, it surprised Daniel that he would’ve chosen something else.
Then again, perhaps using something else made it less likely that anyone would detect what he had here.
The stairs continued to go deeper and deeper. Darkness surrounded him, but he had no fear of the overwhelming darkness. There was no point in fearing it as, though he couldn’t see anything, he didn’t feel as if he were in any danger of falling. The opening was far too narrow for him to lose control.
For a while, he tried to count the steps, but he lost track. There was a sense of movement above him, a vague and distant sense that came from Rayen over him, and he hurried down the stairs, trying not to get kicked in the head as she followed him.
And then the pressure on his back eased. Daniel squeezed the ladder, trying to hold on to it so that he didn’t lose track of where it was in the darkness. Maybe he had been unprepared. He should have grabbed a lantern or something before descending down here, but he’d been so focused on what he intended that he hadn’t really thought it through.
Reaching the last rung of the ladder, he hung suspended for a moment.
“Daniel?”
“Just a minute.”
“What is it?”
“Everything sort of ends here.”
“How does it end?”
“There’s no more of this ladder, and from here there is nothing but a drop of some sort.”
He didn’t know how far he’d have to fall. If Rsiran was responsible for this, it wouldn’t be so far as to be dangerous, but where was he going to end up?
There was nothing to do but let go and trust that he wouldn’t fall too far.
Daniel released his grip.
In the darkness, there was a moment of terror as he continued to fall, dropping farther and farther until his feet connected with hard-packed ground. There was no cushion, and he tried to absorb the blow, managing to catch himself and rolling forward so that he didn’t end up injured.
Getting to his feet, he turned as Rayen dropped, the sound of her much more coordinated fall coming to his ears.
“That was interesting,” she said.
“I’m not so sure interesting is how I would describe it.”
Daniel waited for Neran to drop down, and it took a moment for him to reach them. He appeared as little more than a shadow in the distance, difficult for them to make out, and when he landed, Rayen was there, helping him to his feet.
“Now what?” Daniel asked.
“Do you detect anything?” Rayen asked him.
Did he pick up on anything? He didn’t think so, but he’d been so focused on getting down here safely that he hadn’t turned his attention to anything else around them. He turned away from the presence of Rayen and the others, trying to envision the energy he’d felt before, and the sense of it came to him slowly. It was there, faint, but definitely present.
As he picked up on it, he realized that it was focused downward much as Rayen had suggested. Daniel continued to hone in on that sense of energy, trying to get a sense of whether it went anywhere else or was merely directed this way.
He couldn’t come up with anythi
ng.
Rayen approached. He felt her almost as much as he could See her, though the fact that he could See anything in this darkness surprised him. Normally in darkness this profound, all he would make out would be gradations of shadows. While he did have some awareness of those shadows, he could make her out much more easily than he would’ve expected.
“Can you detect anything?” he asked.
“It’s here, but I don’t know where the power is focused.”
“Why would Rsiran have this here?” he asked Neran.
The other man was there, just off to the side, near enough that he thought he could reach him if needed. Could he Slide out of here if it were necessary? Now that he’d been here, Daniel couldn’t see why he wouldn’t be able to, unless the metal used to line the tunnel made it too difficult.
He took a step, Sliding, emerging nearer to Neran. That answered the question of whether or not he’d be able to Slide.
“Rsiran had a reason for this place,” Neran said.
“I’m sure he did. What did he intend for it?”
“There is—”
“Daniel,” Rayen said, cutting off Neran before he could answer.
He turned and realized that Rayen was standing at the far end of the cavern. He could barely make her out, noticing little more than shadows, and Slid over to her. When he emerged, she touched him on the arm.
“Can you feel it?”
“What do you want me to feel.”
“A presence here.”
“As in someone else is here?”
“No, this is different. This is a different sense of power. I’m not entirely certain what it is.”
“I don’t see anything.”
“I suspect it’s on the other side of this wall.”
Daniel studied it. There wasn’t anything obvious here, and if she detected something, perhaps it was a doorway of sorts.
Daniel ran his hands along it, feeling for something that might trigger an opening. If this was someplace Rsiran had put here, it was possible there wasn’t even a doorway. With his ability to Slide, he wouldn’t need a door.
But then, hadn’t Neran said that Rsiran had wanted to ensure this wasn’t lost to their people? That didn’t sound like the sort of thing that suggested Rsiran wanted to hide whatever was here. If that was the case, then there would have to be some way of reaching the other side.
“Did he tell you whether there was some way to open this?” he asked Neran.
The other man approached. “I do not know how to access anything else. This is where he brought the sacred crystals.”
“He did what?” Daniel asked.
“That’s what I was trying to tell you. After the attack on the trees, Rsiran decided to move the sacred crystals. For a long time, the crystals had been within the trees, but after the attack on the city, he eventually moved them back to where they had always been.”
“Perhaps that’s all I detect,” Rayen said.
How could he have done that? What if no one had learned what happened to the crystals? “Wait here.”
Daniel Slid, emerging in the clearing above. The sudden change—the flash of brightness all around him—was almost too much. He shielded his eyes, looking around as he searched for Jessa. He Slid up to her home and emerged on the branch outside of the door, knocking quickly and waiting only a moment before it opened. When she stepped out, Daniel grabbed her, Slid, and emerged once again inside the darkened chamber.
Jessa gasped. “How did you know this was here?”
“Why did Rsiran hide this?” Daniel asked.
“Did you tell them?” she asked Neran.
“They have a right to know.”
“They don’t have a right to anything,” she said. “Rsiran brought the crystals here to protect them, not to risk exposing them again.”
“But by bringing them here, he prevents others from having the opportunity to reach them.”
“It was a temporary plan, just until he knew what the Forgers intended.”
“But he’s gone. What would have happened had we not come looking?”
“There are others who know of this,” Jessa said.
“How many others?”
“Enough that we don’t have to fear the crystals disappearing altogether.”
Daniel glanced over to Rayen. His eyesight had adjusted once more, but he still wondered why Rsiran would have done this. “What’s the key to getting to the crystal chamber?”
“There is no key,” Jessa said.
“There has to be something. Otherwise, how would we be able to reach it?”
“Rsiran ensured that the crystals would be safe. He didn’t want anyone else being able to reach them before he managed to do so.”
“Why?”
“He didn’t know who to trust.”
The words hung in the air for a moment. “That’s not quite true. If he trusted you, then he knew someone he could trust. And I imagine he told others who had the ability to Slide here. Even if he didn’t tell others who could Slide, he would have had to have alerted someone who could reach here.”
“Sliding isn’t the key to finding the crystals.”
“Then what is?”
Jessa studied him for a moment. As she did, Daniel wondered again how it was that he was able to see her quite so clearly. He shouldn’t be able to See her that well with the dim light, but she was more than just gradations of gray as he would have expected.
“Why are you doing this?”
“Because I’m convinced that the Forgers”—it was difficult for him to refer to them as Forgers anymore, having come to believe that the better term was Ai’thol, but those of Elaeavn still didn’t understand it quite as well—“are using the power of the Elder Trees. That energy is funneled downward. We followed it. And there has to be some way that we could intervene.”
Jessa watched him for a long moment before pushing past him, and when she reached the wall, she pressed her hands on either side of it. At first, Daniel wasn’t aware of anything, but the longer she held her hands upon the surface of the door, the more he felt a strange surging. It wasn’t anything he would’ve expected.
The wall clicked and began to slide open.
“Rsiran did this?”
“It’s keyed to something I possess. Others have something similar.”
“What is it?”
Jessa shook her head. “I’m not going to share that with you. I’ve shared more than I intended to begin with, so be thankful that I did, but I am not going to tell you all of the secrets.”
“Why does there need to be so many secrets?” Daniel asked.
“You travel with one of the Binders, and you question why there needs to be secrets?”
“What’s a Binder?” Neran asked.
“She is a Binder,” Jessa said, nodding to Rayen. “They accumulate information, acting as a spy.”
“Some of our Binders are spies, but the rest merely consolidate information. At first we did it to combat the Hjan, something that I think you should be thankful for. Over time, that purpose has evolved, much like Carth has evolved.”
“You have evolved to become even more spies,” Jessa said.
“As I said, we aren’t—”
“Is this necessary?” Daniel said.
He touched Rayen on the arm and took a step forward, into the opening in the wall that Jessa had created. Once through, everything began to change. The energy he’d been feeling swirled around him, far more potent than it had been before. That surprised him, but not nearly as much as the energy concentrated here. A haze obscured his Sight, making it so that he couldn’t See anything easily.
Underneath the haze, there was something more, and it took a moment for his eyesight to clear for him to be able to make out a faint glow.
He’d been around that glowing light before.
The sacred crystals.
If they were here, then what was the haze that surrounded everything?
That haze seemed to be the ke
y to all of it, but why? What exactly was it?
“Jessa?”
“I can’t see anything very well,” she said.
“Neither can I.”
“This is troubling,” Jessa said.
“When was the last time you were here?”
“I came with Rsiran when he moved the crystals. I haven’t been here since.”
How long had it been? Months since the attack, long enough that whatever the Forgers had been after had had an opportunity to take hold.
He stepped forward into the haze, feeling the power as it swirled around him. It was a sizzling energy along his skin, an electrical sense that left everything tingling. Daniel pressed forward, determined to power through it, and once he did, he stepped out into a bright, glowing blue clearing.
The five sacred crystals were arranged on pedestals, and the circle of crystals seemed to push back the energy that swirled around them. He didn’t know if that was intentional or whether there was something else he needed to be concerned by, but standing here, he didn’t feel the same sense of energy as he did on the other side.
There was still some connection, though it was different.
Rayen followed him, shadows swirling around her, protecting her, isolating her from the energy. Maybe he should’ve waited for her to have gone with him, and he could have used those shadows to defend against that energy, but at the same time, there shouldn’t be any reason for him to need to protect himself against it. The energy wasn’t harmful to him—at least, it shouldn’t be harmful to him. It was a part of him and his people. It might have been channeled in an unusual direction, but it didn’t change the fact that this was still their energy.
“These are the crystals?”
Daniel nodded. “These are the sacred crystals of Elaeavn. They are our Elder Stones.”
“You have more than one Elder Stone,” she said.
“I suppose we do. Why do you think that is?”
Rayen shook her head. “I don’t know. I’m not sure that Carth knows. It’s unusual for one land to have more than one Elder Stone, and in your case, the Elder Stones are different. They grant a variety of abilities, not just a single one.”
“And yet they are all similar,” Daniel said.
The Elder Stones Saga Boxset: Books 1-3 Page 143
